His voice was almost a miracle, the perfection of his pitch and his little-girl breathiness winding up to impossible heights, when he was a little boy His body did dance moves that made no sense, seeming to float almost impervious to gravity. He invented moves that no one could do like he could. He made the greatest music video of all time and the best-selling album of all time – and yet his life was a tragedy. Andrew Sullivan says, on theatlantic.com:
Of course, Michael Jackson bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end….He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone….I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours, and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.
My heart breaks for a world that values all the wrong things, and destroys people – if not as obviously as Michael Jackson was destroyed, then slowly and invidiously, by making people believe that the false gods of money, appearance, celebrity, power, are the only ones worth worshiping.
"Jesus came to raise the dead,” says Robert Capon. “The only qualification for the gift of the Gospel is to be dead. You do not have to be smart. You do not have to be good. You do not have to be wise. You do not have to be wonderful. You do not have to be anything...you just have to be dead. That's it."
Death comes in many ways in our world – physical, emotional, and spiritual. Death comes to a child with a voice like an angel, who was deprived of a true childhood and spent the rest of his 50 years trying to get it back. Death comes to those who are ill, to those who are hopeless, to those who have no money to survive, to those who have lost connection to the God who made them and loves them.
And into a culture of death, Jesus shines the light of the gospel, defying death as Michael Jackson defied gravity, demonstrating in every way he knows how that the power of the gospel brings life and hope.
Our scriptures today show us three different ways the power of God challenges the powers of death and destruction, three ways the gospel brings life into the world. The Old Testament reading tells us that even before the time of Jesus, the Jews were aware that God’s will for the world was life, not death. The epistle demonstrates one result of our trust in God’s power to bring life: Paul approaches the Corinthian Christians with a plea for them to donate money to support the Christians in Jerusalem, who are suffering from famine and persecution – appeals to Jesus’ generosity in giving everything for us as an example for our own generosity to others. And Paul makes it clear that in Christ, we all become responsible for each other, as Jesus took responsibility for each one of us on the cross. He says that as Christians, our own task is to continue Jesus’ ministry.
And to understand what Jesus’ ministry was, Mark’s gospel is a good place to start. Today we hear about two intertwined healing stories, where Jesus calls healing out of illness and life out of death. He feels power drain out of him and turns to find that a woman has been healed by touching the hem of his robe. And he continues to the house of a young girl whose father has turned to an itinerant preacher in despair for her illness. Jesus reaches out a hand to her and calls her from death into life. And as he calls to the girl, he calls to us too, in Frederick Buechner’s words:
You who believe, and you who sometimes believe and sometimes don't believe much of anything, and you who would give almost anything to believe if only you could.... 'Get up,' he says, all of you--all of you!" Jesus gives life not only to the dead, but to those of us who are "only partly alive...who much of the time live with our lives closed to the wild beauty and the miracle of things, including the wild beauty and miracle of every day we live and even of ourselves.
To a world full of people who know nothing better than the power of money, celebrity, appearance, Jesus calls, get up! It’s time to live! God’s will for us is true life, life of the spirit, life that calls others into life.
There’s something odd about the healing and resurrection stories in the Bible, and that is this: that in real life today, God doesn’t always heal the people we pray for. And though Jesus healed many people, the main lesson Mark wants us to understand is not that God can heal (though that is true). The main thing Mark wants us to understand is that these healings tell us something about who Jesus is: Jesus is the one who brings the power of God into the world, Jesus is the one who calls the world from death into life.
Mark makes it clear throughout his gospel that the healings are signs that point the way to something else. They are signs to help people understand Jesus’ main purpose: to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of God is here – the kingdom of life that challenges all worldly kingdoms of death (physical, emotional, and spiritual).
And because that is Jesus’ main purpose, it becomes our main purpose too, because Jesus leaves us as his disciples, Body of Christ to carry on his mission. We are here to proclaim the good news that God’s will for us is true life, the life of the spirit, the life that does not allow people to die slow deaths as captives to the powers of this world. And, as Jesus did, to call people into new ways of life that affirm that we are citizens of God’s kingdom and agents of God’s life-transforming love. People do not have to live in self-destructive traps, like Michael Jackson did, or like anyone could who does not understand that God’s power of life is stronger than any of the false gods that claim our allegiance. God can change the world, bringing it from death into life, working in partnership with us, and this good news is the heart of evangelism (a word that simply means good news).
I believe that the Episcopal Church has too often lost sight of its mission to proclaim this good news to everyone who can hear it, in this death-dealing world. I believe that too often we have been complacent, sure that our innate attractiveness will help others find us, that they will somehow wander through our doors on their own, or that we don’t need to worry because “Everyone who is supposed to be an Episcopalian already is.”
This is simply not true: we have been given a treasure in God’s life-giving gospel, and a mission to share that gospel in as many ways as we can. This is the reason for adding a new service that speaks to different kinds of people through different kinds of music . Music like gospel, blues, jazz, Celtic, folk traditions speak to the American heart in different ways than our beautiful traditional Anglican music does. And it is up to us to use our amazing talents in this church to help God transform our community and our world.
If you want to see Michael Jackson at his best, a Michael Jackson we don’t often remember, go on YouTube and watch the video of “We Are the World.” The year was 1985, people were starving in Africa. 50 prominent rock musicians got together to record a single whose proceeds would be donated to feed the starving people. Look on the video and you will see a young Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Willie Nelson, and 30 others.
And you will see Michael Jackson, in his spangled jacket and famous glove, singing to feed the hungry. I didn’t realize at the time that Michael Jackson actually wrote and co-produced that song. But in this song you see Michael Jackson at his best: called out of himself, pouring his heart out to help others.
This is a picture of all of us at our best, a picture of what our world could be like if we allowed God to focus our priorities, if we became followers of life rather than disciples of death. This kind of transformation is what God calls us to bring to the world.
I mourn for Michael Jackson, a man just a few years older than me, who never really became a man – was stuck in fearful, vulnerable childhood all his life. And I mourn for many people who experience that kind of emptiness of life. To our neighbors who live in empty and meaningless worlds, I want to bring the good news that God is here, and God has been here all along. Loving each one of us, calling us into mission in Jesus’ name. Calling us to proclaim the incredible, wonderful news that God’s kingdom is at hand, and that we have been called from death into new life, new hope and new ways of being in this beautiful world that God has made.
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