Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.

My name is Bobbie, if we haven't met. And this week, my niece Emery asked me what my favorite color is. And I said it's red. And then she asked me what my second favorite color is. And I was like, I think it's green.

And by the time she asked me what my third favorite color is, I was on to her. She was fishing for a very particular response. I said, well, I don't know what my third favorite color is. Wink. And she said, if you don't know, it can be purple.

She just wants me to love what she loves, and I am here for that as it's very seasonally appropriate. The liturgical color of Lent is purple as seen here on our clerical stole stole and meant to represent humility and repentance. Lent is like spring cleaning for your soul. Sometimes it gets a little bit dingy in there. I know what mine does.

So we open wide the windows and let the fresh air in. It is lent, y'all. Lent is an old English word which means springtime. But through the lens of our Christian tradition, it is a season where we take stock of what holds us back from experiencing signs of new life. So let's do a little Lent check-in, shall we?

In the spirit of Lent, can you call to mind what you reach for instead of feeling your feelings? Maybe your phone, all those social media apps, maybe snacks, not the healthy ones, maybe Netflix, not the documentaries. I mean, there is a place for all that, but it is really good to be aware of what we are soothing. Now here's your next Lent reflection. Where did you practice generosity this week?

Maybe with your time, maybe with your money, maybe with just a little extra attention. And your final Lent reflection is how did you experience prayer this week? It's a gentle invitation to go inward, to pay attention to your breath, to say thank you, or I could really use some help right now. Lent's three primary spiritual practices are fasting, giving, and praying, and they can be very simple as much as we can manage. So this year, our Lent series is called signs of things to come, and it's about seven signs in the gospel of John that point to Jesus' divine likeness, even and especially as Jesus gets closer and closer to his death.

In the first week of the series, we looked at the sign of water turned to wine at a wedding. And Jeremy threw down some sick apothic red burns, which honestly, I'm here for. But the miracle of water to wine is a glimpse of the joy at the heart of God. A God full of surprises inviting you to dance. And in the second week, we looked at the sign of a healed Roman official's son.

And as Jeremy argued, the sign of things to come is as much about healing our bodies as it is healing our expectations. Today, we look at a sign that takes place for a man stuck with a severe illness by a pool in Bethesda. And we're gonna talk about divine wellness, angelic footnotes, sign number three, and Sabbath aftermath. But first, let us pray. Loving God, we pause and we pay attention to what's going on around us right now.

We notice the presence of others, maybe literally sitting beside us or behind us in a pew, maybe the imagined presence of someone that we carry with us in our hearts today, maybe the presence of a relationship that is just not going how we want it to right now. And we just notice that we are not alone. We notice that these connections around us and within us bring our lives such meaning. We notice that we know ourselves in relationships with those around us. So Jesus, open our hearts to the presence of others, to hear their stories, their anxieties, the love and companionship that bring life.

We have so much to be thankful for. So spirit teach us to love. Amen. So we are in John five verse one and you're going to hear details about a setting so listen for that and I'll use person first language when referring to people with disabilities here. Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.

Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here, a great number of people with disabilities used to lie, the people who were blind, the people who were lame, the people who were paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, do you want to be well? Now my partner Jonathan and I were driving to a party this week.

Remember parties? I guess they're back. Sorry about that, introverts. Anyway, Jonathan and I were driving to a friend's fortieth, and I was telling him about today's sermon text. This is what happens when you're married to a pastor.

So I hit the main beats of the story and said, remember that one? What do you think it's about? And he took a beat himself because he is a thoughtful introvert and said, I always feel like I'm missing some context here. There's gotta be something else going on. And once again, Jonathan Bateman is not wrong.

It's helpful to remember that the stories of Jesus are never just doing one thing. I mean, sure, the writer of the Gospel of John is making an argument that Jesus is the Messiah who opens up the fullness of life. And that's the thesis that we find in John 20 verse 31. But the story is also confronting the beliefs from the world in which it comes. So why don't we pull up a little pool chair and look around Bethesda to see what the setting conveys?

Bethesda means house of kindness, and it was a pool in Jerusalem that bubbled up from time to time. There is archaeological evidence that long before Jesus walked around Jerusalem, the site of the pool was associated with the healing shrine for the god Asclepius. There are over 300 of these sites across the Mediterranean. Asclepius was a very popular god and for good reason. In Greek mythology, Asclepius is one of the good gods.

After a bit of drama where his father, the god Apollo, kills his mortal mother, Asclepius takes after his mother and her love for mortals when he raises a man from the dead. And Apollo is angry and sends Asclepius to Hades. Later, Zeus brings Asclepius back from the underworld and makes Asclepius a god in his own right, a god known and loved for healing the sick and even raising the dead. And the site of the pool with its stirred water was sacred in both Greco Roman mythology and Christian worship for centuries. And archaeologists found evidence for both at the site.

And worlds crash into worlds here. Jesus, a rabbi, is in Jerusalem for a religious festival, and crowds of people who are sick drag their tattered bodies through towards miraculous water when it stirs. And every single person, whether they've been sick for thirty eight days or thirty eight years, is thinking the exact same thing. Maybe today. Maybe today, Asclepius will reach out and fix what is wrong with me.

Only in walks a rabbi who sets his dark brown eyes on a man as broken and ordinary as the next. And Jesus asks him a question. Do you want to be well? And the Greek word for well is the adjective hygias, and it means whole and healthy. Lock that in.

As a mystical world crashes into a world with bodies and bruises, Jesus initiates a conversation about wellness. So is Jesus any better than Asclepius, leaving the sick to wait for their healing? Guess we'll have to see. After Jesus asks, do you want to be well? The man responds, sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.

While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me. Now before moving on any further, we need to talk about the missing verse from earlier. Maybe that slipped right by you. There is a place for verse four in your bible, but for verse four has been demoted to the bottom of the page in a footnote. And for a while, the text supplied an interesting detail.

It read, from time to time, an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first person into the pool after each to such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had. Only thanks to textual criticism, we know that this verse was a later addition. The most reliable and the oldest manuscripts do not have verse four, which is fine. I get it.

I even appreciate it, except there's still something for us to learn from the angelic footnote. We tend to rush in and fill up mystery with explanation. Mystery makes us uncomfortable, so we prefer Snap Finger God. You know that guy. Right?

Snap finger god sends an angel to heal in a lottery. Snap finger god finds you a parking spot every time. Snap finger god heals your hurt without any other human needing to get involved. Snap finger god dominates with power over and hardly needs any of us at all. But the divine is doing something different here.

I mean, sure, Jesus is going to heal this guy. You know that's coming. But that's not the point of the story. Healing is fun, but it is not the point. The point is that this man has been sick for a long, long time.

And Jesus shows us what God is like when he heals him. This is healing that comes when you look another person in the eye, healing that comes when you ask a question before assuming you know the whole story, healing that flows through you when you say how a bad situation makes you feel. The mystery of God we see in Jesus does not dominate the scene, force healing on the vulnerable, or use power over others to make a point. Jesus works with this guy. And frankly, the guy is bummed out.

No one has helped me. I've been here for years. I hate my life. True words from rock bottom. And now that we're down there with the man and his pain, we're ready for the buoyancy of sign number three.

Jesus listens and then says to the man, get up. Pick up your mat and walk. At once, the man is cured. He picks up his mat and walks. Then we turn to bigger drama here.

We read in verse nine. All of this took place on a Sabbath. So the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, it is the Sabbath. The law forbids you to carry your mat. And the man replies, look, the man who healed me told me to do it.

He said, pick up your mat and walk. So I did. Ironically, the man who is healed has no idea who heals him. We're told in verse 13 that Jesus slips away into the crowd that was there. So what's the deal with the mat?

Canadian literary critic and biblical scholar, Adele Reinhart, points out that it's here in the detail of the man's mat that we go from a healing story to a story of Sabbath conflict. The rules for keeping the Sabbath stated that carrying objects on this day of rest was prohibited. So there's a provocation when Jesus tells the man to pick up his mat and to go, which turns the conflict back on Jesus. It's not the man's fault that he carries his mat. He was just doing what he was told.

And for that matter, the problem Jesus stirs is not that he heals on the Sabbath. There is room for that. If you can save a life on the Sabbath, you should. The problem Jesus stirs up is that he's made himself the judge by deciding whose life is in danger. And by healing someone who wasn't close to death, he's made himself a giver of life indiscriminately.

As if Jesus were God, and that offends rule followers. So the everyday object of a mat is a sign of things to come. There's a palpable sense here that God is always working, but not according to the rules that we keep. The divine empowers Jesus, and Jesus empowers the man to not be afraid but to get up and to walk toward a future that he's been dreaming of for thirty eight years. The historian Timothy Snyder, specializing in Central And Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, was on a podcast this week, and I heard him say something about the future that I cannot shake.

Snyder said that the future is not inevitable. A Serbia, a nine eleven, a Russia can come along, and things won't be what you expect. He said the future is unknown and depends a great deal upon us. Or to put it theologically, we dynamically participate in the mystery of God and it is still unfolding. The transgressive work of God that we see in Jesus came to empower you, not take away your agency or do everything for you.

So let me warn you or delight you. When it feels like the world is falling apart, God may be slipping in and out of the crowd, stirring up a bit of trouble and waiting for you to get involved. And that's an invitation to get involved by bearing witness to human suffering and survival, to get involved by giving what you can to meet a need that moves your heart, to get involved by pumping the brakes a bit on your distraction so that you can feel what it is like to be alive right now, and do not let up. Get involved by putting love in the world wherever you can deposit it. Get involved by telling your story of how Jesus came out of nowhere and healed your hurt.

Get involved by waiting beside someone until Jesus sneaks up on them and heals their hurt. And spoiler, Jesus heals through you. Don't let up. And I know in the face of human pain that does not feel like enough. But remember, out of a big crowd of people waiting by a pool in Bethesda, Jesus heals one.

Just one? I don't know why he doesn't heal all of them. So let that be some of the mystery you take with you today. In the final section of the story, the third sign of things to come, we get some Sabbath aftermath. Verses fourteen and fifteen.

Later, Jesus found the man he had healed at the temple and said to him, see, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you. The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well. What a little snitch. If you're looking for total transformation here, that is not what we get.

And at first pass, you could understand Jesus' words, stop sinning or else is a threat, or even a superstitious warning like karma's gonna get you if you don't shape up. But we read this because we assume sin is all about the individual. Zoom out a little and see something broader. On one side of the man, we have a structure built with myth. And there's no civic responsibility if you're all waiting for the gods to heal the sick.

Good luck with your bum knee. Hope Asclepius does something about that real soon. And on the other side, we have a structure built on rules. Over time, the powerful can use rules to keep a few people up and a lot of other people down. It's his fault that life has been so hard for him.

If only he had played by the rules. Good luck climbing out of poverty, bro. And our man, with his mat tucked under his arm, seems to bounce from one structure of oppression to another. I imagine because he's afraid. The temple leaders are on to Jesus.

Soon enough, they'll consort with Rome to have him killed. So maybe our man with his mat simply doesn't want the same fate. Can you blame him? And you know what I love the most about this not so happy ending? I love that Jesus forces nothing.

Maybe the man is a snitch for now, but I think he'll catch on to love. I really do. His own body is a sign of things to come, a reminder that the divine is always working, bringing life to lame limbs, renewal to tired out rules, resistance to all oppression, love in the face of hate, patience when we're just not there yet. A brand new idea that comes out of nowhere. But God doesn't seem panicked over any of this.

If we aren't ready, Jesus will just swing back around with a reminder. Hey, there is a way that leads to life. Are you in? So Lent is a time to check-in with our sin. And in the context of our story, sin is the opposite of wellness.

To put it in the words of John five fifteen from the First Nations version, Jesus says to the man, do not use your freedom to walk a path that leads to broken ways. Sometimes sin is just not paying attention to the fullness of the life that you're already living. And Jesus has zero interest in punishing you for that. He just wants you to notice. So every year, I enter Lent with two simple practices.

I choose a very simple fast and a simple task. I give something up, and I take something on. And I'm going tell you about one of them. I've called this practice greet the day. It's my simple Lenten task.

Every morning, before I pick up my phone or I make my coffee, I put on my jacket, I slip on some shoes, and I stand outside on my east facing front porch. And all I do is look around. I breathe in and out more deeply. I feel the cool but warming air against my skin. Here's what I'm noticing.

I don't know when the birdsong starts. I have no idea. I had never counted how many trees I can see from standing on my front step. Probably, like, 37. And no sunrise is ever the same, ever.

But the sun always rises, Always. You don't need this practice. I made it up, but, of course, I'm happy to share it. My greet the day practice is helping me to see what the story points out, that God is always working Outside the rules of man or the myths of gods, despite our ability to notice or trust or obey, God is always working. And oh, the joy.

When we slow down a little bit, crack open the door, and step out to see a world so strange and beautiful, and to sense the invitation to be well in wholeness and health and to heal. Let us pray. Loving God, to whom all hearts are open and all desires known, Many of us have lived within an imagination of you that says that we are nothing without you, that we deserve nothing, that we are but a wretch. And I think this story of Jesus and the man waiting by a pool is here to tell us that you don't need us to see ourselves like this. You don't need us to do anything but to be honest, honest about what we need, honest about what we love, honest about who we are.

So I remember the words of Henry Nouwen who taught us to live into our belovedness hour by hour. We are loved. Spirit of the living God, present with us now. Enter the places of our fragmentation, our disconnection, and our pain, and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.