# Sermon for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost November 21, 2023 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By Melissa Wood Bartholomew Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and Lecturer on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Harvard Divinity School* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Nov. 19, 2023)* ![Melissa Wood Bartholomew](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/thememorialchurch/files/09122023-melissawoodbartholomew-220_1.png?itok=4AmhmoiI) Good morning. I greet you in the name of Jesus the Christ. It is in him that I live and move and have my very being. I want to first thank Reverend Potts, the shepherd of this house, for inviting me to share a message today and all of the clergy staff of this church for their support and preparation for this morning. I must thank my family and my son and my husband, who are here, for their love and support. It is a privilege to stand before you here today with a word from the Lord. I do not take this for granted. I want to start by rereading the passage from the Gospel of John that was read earlier, and I'll be reading through verse 14. I will incorporate in it a moment of prayer and meditation. I invite you to pray with me, please. You may close your eyes if that's comfortable for you. I invite you to draw your attention to your breath. First, let us pause and hold a moment of focused silence to acknowledge the thousands of people who have died in Gaza and Israel. As you continue to breathe with attention to your breath, tune into the rhythm of your heartbeat and gently guide your mind to your open heart-space to access your heart's wisdom as you listen again to the words from the Gospel of John chapter five, the New International Version. The author writes, "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 disabled people used to lie. The blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for 38 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 get well?' 'Sir,' the invalid replied, 'I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I'm trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.' Then Jesus said to him, 'Get up, pick up your mat and walk.' At once, the man was cured. He picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leader said to the man who had been healed, 'It is a Sabbath day. The law forbid you to carry your mat.' But he replied, 'The man who made me well said to me, 'Pick up your mat and walk.' They asked him, 'Who is this fellow who told you to pick up the mat and walk?' The man who was healed had no idea it was Jesus. Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, 'See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.'" Father, let the words in my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight. Oh Lord, you are my strength and my redeemer. In the name of Jesus the Christ, amen. In her 1980 novel, the Salt Eaters, the late writer and activist, Toni Cade Bambara, tells a story of a black woman named Velma Henry, who has suffered a nervous breakdown resulting from her struggle to navigate her community and political activism, her job at a local chemical plant and her rocky marriage and home life. She had reached such a point of despair that she tried to end her own life. The novel opens with Velma in the community infirmary, which she helped to establish. She's in the care of a spiritual healer named Minnie Ransom, a local healer who draws on the healing wisdom from African diasporic religion and her ancestors. Minnie guides Velma through a deep spiritual healing journey that helps her to turn within and excavate the inner barriers that are in the way of her healing. The story begins with Minnie's question to Velma. "Are you sure, Sweetheart, that you want to be well?" Questioning whether Velma understood the cost of wellness and what it required. A little later, Minnie asked her, "Just so you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed because wholeness is no trifling matter, a lot of weight when you're well." This is the question that Jesus asked the man at the gate. He had been invalid for 38 years and was at the gate by the pool where people went to be submerged in the water with the hopes of being healed when the water was stirred. What is Jesus telling us through the story? How is it relevant for us right now? The horrific war in the Middle East is just one of many examples of places where our world is trapped in a cycle of violence and despair. In moments like we are in now when pain and violence are particularly acute or when we think about the significance of a Thanksgiving holiday next week and the painful history of genocide, colonialism and lamb theft that is overshadowed by the false narrative of a happy dinner between pilgrims and the indigenous people. Messages about healing, particularly self-healing, can seem to fall short or be insufficient. But there is medicine in the story that we need right now. There is a connection between the healing, our own healing wholeness and the process of transformation and the transformation of systems and nations. Minnie's question and commentary help illuminate the healing dimensions of the story. "Do you want to be well? Do you want to be healed?" This question is asking about readiness. –– Embed [Harvard Memorial Church](https://soundcloud.com/memorial-church "Harvard Memorial Church") · [Melissa Wood Bartholomew - Nov. 19, 2023 | Sunday Sermon](https://soundcloud.com/memorial-church/melissa-wood-bartholomew-nov-19-2023-sunday-sermon "Melissa Wood Bartholomew - Nov. 19, 2023 | Sunday Sermon") –– Some scholars suggest that Jesus' question may have been designed to reinvigorate the man at the pool about the possibility of being healed as he had been in that state for so long. We don't know what the man had been doing to get ready, we just know he wasn't able to get into the pool. Perhaps Jesus is highlighting the work required to prepare for one's healer, underscoring the notion that when you are ready to be healed, your healer will come, but there are certain conditions that must be present for your healer to emerge. Perhaps the man of the gate had been working through some things for all those years, and unbeknownst to him, it was in preparation for his encounter with Jesus. The question could be interpreted as do you want to be healed of the amnesia that caused you to forget the truth of who you are, your divine self, a reflection of God? Jesus spoke an activation at the pool. He healed the man energetically. He spoke to and connected to the divinity within this man and woke him up. Maybe his readiness was that he had finally surrendered. Many came to Velma at the infirmary, maybe that was Velma's posture too. What do you need to prepare for your healing? What conditions in your life need to be changed? Are there barriers in the way of you being able to access your healing? Is fear in the way of your ability to fully trust and surrender to God? Are there old traumas, church hurt or unforgiveness in the way of you receiving your healing? Minnie told Velma, "I can feel sweetheart that you're not quite ready to let it go. You got to give it all up," she said, "the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full." "Do you want to be healed," Jesus said, or as it says in the King James version, "Will vow be made whole? Well then, get up. Pick up your mat and walk," Jesus declared. Here, he was letting the man know that there is going to be work required following the activation. He had healed him, he woke him up. But as Minnie Ransom said, "Wholeness is no trifling matter." He still had work to do. The journey to wholeness never ends. You have to walk out your salvation, walk with the Lord daily. Jesus healed him and made him well, but his journey of transformation into a life that reflected his oneness with God and intimacy with God was ongoing. We have to walk with the Lord daily so that we can be united with the Lord and live in the way that reflects we possess divine consciousness and move in the world in a way that reflects our intimate connection, rooted in love. Even when it's painful. Jesus' directed to pick up the mat, perhaps, was also highlighting the man's role in his own healing. Do you create space for God? Spend time with God between Sundays? Do you engage in spiritual practices and disciplines that cultivate intimacy with God? I walk out my wholeness by actively engaging in the practice of cultivating my connection to the divine through daily prayer and meditation and other practices designed to keep me attuned and aligned and connected with God and my ancestors and nature through the Holy Spirit. I take walks by the river. I write in my gratitude journal daily. I have a therapist. I share all of this only to share what it takes for me to remain rooted in love and sane in this world, in the hard work of advancing racial justice and healing in the world replete with ongoing violence and pain. These are life-affirming, sustaining practices that help keep me rooted in divine consciousness and able to affirm and believe, as Paul says, "That I have the mind of Christ, the mind of God that was in Christ Jesus," and as he says, "To be able to die daily," at least try to die daily to the self so that I can create space for God and increase my capacity to love and hold onto hope. This is required, particularly during times like these when we are witnessing such horrific realities such as the killing of children in Gaza and Israel and here in this country and cities all throughout the nation. The grief that we are carrying is enormous. The impact of being exposed to violence through the various news and social media outlets, and for those who sadly have to navigate it in their personal lives and communities every day, the weight is overwhelming. We have to actively shield ourselves from despair. Intimacy with God is an antidote to despair. I know this through the example of my ancestors. Many of my enslaved ancestors walked with God and knew how to, as a poet, Nayyirah Waheed, says, "Keep the rage tender and not to let despair overtake them." That's how I know I'm able to stand here today and preach from this pulpit at an institution and in a country that enslaved African indigenous people as a descendant of African enslaved people. My ancestors survived through their capacity to cultivate their intimacy with God, root themselves in love, hold onto hope and not succumb to despair. This is not to suggest that all of the enslaved were able to hold onto hope, but our nation emerged post-slavery the way it did because of the capacity of so many of them to cultivate a divine consciousness that allow them to remain rooted in love, anchored by Christ, Allah, through their ancient African religions that affirm their interconnectedness to all human beings, even their enemies. We need to heeded their medicine. The strength to love ran through their veins and was passed down through generations. The spiritual wisdom of enslaved Africans who harnessed divine power to elevate their consciousness and transcend trauma is underutilized as a resource for today's struggle for justice and healing. If you would like to learn how to resist hate and love in the face of evil, I encourage you to read narratives of enslaved Africans. For example, read the narrative of a formerly enslaved woman named Harriet A. Jacobs, who's buried right here in Cambridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery, and you will learn how she harnessed her spiritual power to commit to her wholeness and to navigate her way to freedom. She was confined to her grandmother's small attic where she could barely stretch her legs for seven years hiding from the slave master who haunted her. Yet she had the strength to love and resist hate even while she was enslaved. In her narrative, she writes, "Reader, did you ever hate? I hope not. I never did but once, and I trust I never shall again. Somebody has called it the atmosphere of hell, and I believe it's so." This state of consciousness reflects a clearing of the poisons that cause people to see certain people as less than human or is not reflecting the image of God. This sets you apart and places you in another dimension. Walking with God means more than prayer and meditation, it also means actively clearing biases and prejudices that contaminate our soul and that get in the way of us loving ourselves and each other. These are toxins that lead us to sin, the sin of separation. When Jesus saw the man at the temple gates, he said, "Stop sinning." When he saw the man at the temple again, excuse me, he said, "Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you." Perhaps Jesus is alerting this man that he must maintain his walk with God and stay in awareness of his oneness with God so that nothing worse will happen. Underscoring the weight of wholeness. As Minnie told Velma, "A lot of weight when you're well." The weight of maintaining your wholeness includes the requirements to help others, your community, the nation, the world. Once you have been healed and are on the journey, there is a greater burden and consequence of one's lack of care and responsibility for the needs of others. Because as scripture says, "To whom much is given, much is required." It's not enough to just care of ourselves and our own healing and wellbeing, we must do the work that impacts the healing of the planet in our own way through the gifts God has given us. So that own transformation is connected to the healing and transformation of the planet, to the work of eradicating racism and oppression of all forms, but in a way that reflects our wholeness, our divine consciousness that emerges from love at the intersection of spirituality and transcendence. People in the movement for civil and human rights, like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, carried this weight and demonstrated how walking closely with God enabled them to do justice through their divine consciousness that emerges from love at the intersection of spirituality and transcendence. In his sermon entitled, Loving Your Enemies, Dr. King channels Jesus and his enslaved ancestors when he says, "With every ounce of our energy, we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. We shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community," he says. "Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead and we shall still love you," he says. "But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall also appeal to your heart and conscious that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. Love is the most durable power in the world," he says. This justice that is rooted in love that King describes that follows Jesus' mandate and the Gospel of Luke to love your enemies and do good to those who hate you, is it justice that trusts God's ability to make things right, even if it takes time beyond our lifetime? It requires complete surrender to the God of love and mercy and grace to do the interior work behind the scenes. God changed the hearts and minds and spirits of those humans who once believed that was right to enslaved black and indigenous people and believed in segregation. The restoration work in humans isn't complete, but the elimination of chattel slavery and legal segregation, as well as my very presence here in this pulpit as descendant of formerly enslaved Africans, is evidence of what God has done so far and how far we have come. Jesus heals us so that we can contribute to the healing of a massive wound of separation in the world. The healing from all of the isms that are in the way of us accessing and loving our true selves and each other, including our enemies. Our healing and our healing work in the world has a ripple effect and can be part of the light that fosters peace in the places that need the durable power of God's love. Church, Jesus is asking, "Do you want to be well? Do you want to be healed? Will thou be made whole? Are you sure? Are you willing to do your own work?" Because wholeness is no trifling matter. Are you ready to pick up your mat and walk with the Lord carrying the weight of it all, actively abiding in God's presence so that God can enable you to walk out your wholeness, walk out your faith so you can work to advance justice and healing in the world through God's love and light, loving yourself and your enemies until everyone is free? This is our work, church, and it is no trifling matter. Amen. 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