You Are Enough
Author: Pastor Heidi Eickstadt
One of the shows we’ve been watching at our house these days is “The Good Place,” a show about a woman named Eleanor who dies and finds herself in “the good place” in the afterlife. However, she realizes that there must be some mistake because they think she was an altruistic human rights lawyer in life but instead, Eleanor actually sold fraudulent supplements to the elderly and was cruel and selfish towards others.
Eleanor quickly realizes that if the truth comes out, she will be thrown out of the good place and sent to “the bad place” to be tortured for all eternity. So the show follows her misadventures as she tries her best to become a good person and fit into the good place with everyone else.
Eleanor is the outsider in paradise, the impure sinner who doesn’t belong. There are very strict boundary lines drawn between the people in the good place and those in the bad place that no one is allowed to cross. No one in the good place worries about those in the bad place, they just want to keep their distance and maintain their purity and good life.
It’s a lot like the ancient world of Jesus’ day, where you were either clean or unclean. Purity laws were meant to protect the sacred and holy from being polluted by that which is unclean. So people avoided things or people considered unclean for fear of being contaminated as well.
But as we see in our Gospel today, that didn’t apply to Jesus. Jesus encounters a man who is described as having an unclean spirit but instead of recoiling or keeping his distance, Jesus instead stays and heals the man. Jesus doesn’t stay holy by keeping away from the unholy and impure. Instead, Jesus meets them where they are and heals them, liberating them from their illnesses and from the powers of evil and death.
Jesus’ first lesson to those disciples He has just called is this act of healing, where He demonstrates what the Kingdom of God looks like: liberation, healing, and transformation for all people.
For it is all people who need liberation, healing and transformation, not just the man considered possessed by an evil spirit, not just those with leprosy that Jesus heals, not just those with diseases and infirmities. These were the people that were considered to be impure and farther away from God. The truth is that everyone, then and now, is oppressed and afflicted by evil, death, and the brokenness of sin.
Jesus’ actions revealed to people back then and to us today that there is no boundary between us and God’s love and grace…no one is beyond the reach of God’s power to make whole and redeem. This is Good News for all of us and for our world. In a world where lines are constantly being drawn as to who belongs and who doesn’t, Jesus invites us all to belong and follow him. In a world where we’re taught to believe we are never enough, that we are not successful enough, that we’re not wealthy enough, that we’re not good-looking enough, that we’re not smart enough…Jesus meets us with grace and says we are enough, we are worthy of His attention, His healing, and His redeeming power.
In the healing story for today, He doesn’t just offer the man with an unclean spirit liberation and belonging, He offers it to you and to me. And He offers liberation today, not just for someday in heaven, not just for someday in the good place. Jesus liberates us to follow Him and live in His Kingdom come near today, this day! He liberates us with His grace to confront our sin and to forgive ourselves and others.
He liberates us with faith to trust in Him and His way of love despite all the brokenness, evil and death that pervades our lives and world. He liberates us to place our hope in Him, to have faith that He will overpower all that separates our world from Him and His kingdom, to have faith that His love will win and redeem us all.
But He liberates us not just to have faith, hope, and love but to act in faith, hope, and love. Jesus’ teaching that day in the synagogue wouldn’t have meant anything if He preached about God’s power over evil but then turned His back on the man who was suffering.
Yet, we who follow Jesus, who have been called to reveal Him and His kingdom in this world, we often do that very thing, saying we believe in God’s power over evil, in God’s love, in God’s grace and Kingdom for all. Yet we turn our backs and ignore those who are suffering. We stay silent and fail to challenge the status quo, letting people be marginalized, oppressed, and treated as though they don’t belong.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned us against this kind of complacency that fails to act in love for our neighbor. In the last sermon of his life, King preached:
“It’s all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here! It’s all right to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.”
In the life of Jesus, we saw how God enters into our world and meets those who are marginalized, suffering, oppressed, and rejected. He doesn’t disregard them as impure or unworthy, even though that is what his culture says about those who have diseases, are possessed by evil, or who are Gentiles. In story after story, we see Jesus breaking boundaries, confronting evil, and showing God’s love is stronger than anything sin and death can muster in our world.
Do we do the same? Do our words and deeds reveal God’s Kingdom come near with all its liberating power? Or do our words and actions as individuals and as a church reinforce the systemic injustices of our communities and country?
Today, Jesus meets us in this gathering as He did the people in Capernaum in that synagogue long ago. He forgives and frees us from our sin to live in a loving relationship with God, our neighbor, and ourselves. We are invited to belong to Him and His Kingdom. May our words and actions, choice, and priorities invite others to belong too.