Fool's gold

In the 1984 movie Splash, a man played by Tom Hanks falls in love with a mermaid played by Daryl Hannah. There’s one scene where Tom Hanks gives her a present. As a mermaid, she’s never received a present before, so she doesn’t understand that the present is inside the gift-wrapped box. She thinks the present is the gift-wrapped box.

And if you’ve ever wrapped a present for a cat, you’ll find out that the cat enjoys the box and the wrappings more than the present.

It’s kind of adorable, but this week I’m taking it as a kind of metaphor. Last week we talked about cults and the dangerous qualities of religious groups. I think the pretty box with the ribbon is a metaphor for the way some people think that the religious organization, the structure and the rules, are more precious than the gold inside, the treasure inside. And the treasure inside is loving and caring relationships that religion espouses: relationships with the divine, and with each other.

It’s always a danger, I think, that religion becomes more important than the divine itself; that the religion which espouses divine love sometimes gets caught up in its rules and regulations, and is less than loving. And that’s why I entitled the sermon “Fool’s gold.”

Fool’s gold, also known as iron pyrite, is composed primarily of iron and sulphur. It has a metallic lustre and a brassy yellow hue, so it looks a bit like gold, and sometimes people dig it up and think they’ve found gold, but they’ve just found pyrite. It isn’t actually useless. Pyrite comes from the Greek word meaning fire, because you could strike it with something like steel and make sparks to light a fire. Today you can actually find pyrite in Energizer batteries.

But the point I’m trying to make is that sometimes we think something is important, and it isn’t as important as we think it is, and we miss the real importance of something. And that is true in religion at times.

In our epistle lesson, we have Paul writing something that, maybe when you first hear it, sounds a little crazy:

To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel.

1 Corinthians 9:20–23

It kind of sounds like Paul is a used-car salesman, or some kind of spy going undercover. When he’s with Jews, he acts like a Jew; when he’s with legalists, he’s legalistic; when he’s with those who are anti-law, he’s anti-law. And maybe when you first hear it, you say, “Well, this kind of chameleon performance is not befitting the world’s greatest missionary.” Isn’t that what you’d expect from a salesperson, who will basically tell you anything, be anything, say anything, just to make the sale?

But I think Paul is getting at something. And I’m going to quote from Marcus Rempel, a blogger, a philosopher, a farmer, a pastor and a counsellor from Manitoba:

All the religious and cultural packaging and baggage people are carrying around is just that: packaging and baggage. It’s a container that can be filled with clutter and bullshit, or it can be filled with gold. Paul is after the gold. He’s done fretting over non-essentials. He has caught hold of something essential that he wants to share with everyone he meets.

And what is the essential thing he wants to share with everyone he meets? It’s the gospel: what we Christians call the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s the good news that whoever you are, wherever you are, however you are, you are loved by God, and invited to love God and love one another.

It’s the essential fact that when two people created in the image of God encounter one another, and treat each other as the image of God, and love one another, then God is alive in that moment. That’s what we Christians call Jesus, and that’s what Jesus died to show us: unconditional love for one another.

Now, Marcus Rempel, in his blog, shared about the time he listened to a conversation between Rabbi Sharon Brous and Imam Abdullah Antepli. So I listened to that conversation too. It was taken from the podcast On Being, in an episode about “holy envy,” which is the acknowledgment that sometimes we can actually envy the spiritual practices of others in other religions — envy their devotion or their commitment.

In this interview there was an acknowledgment that while the world is full of bad news, there’s actually some good news taking place in religion, in particular how many Muslims and Jews, in many places in the world and in North America, are dialoguing and building friendships. We often just hear the bad stories about Jews and Muslims. But this was a good news story.

The imam talked about his holy envy of Jews. He said what he liked about the Jews is their ability to question God, to doubt God, to say, “Why, God? Why did you do that?” He said that in his tradition it’s really a bad thing to question God; you just do what you’re told. But he said it’s something he envied in the Jewish tradition. Then the rabbi talked about something she envied in the Christian tradition. She said forgiveness is woven into so much of the Christian fabric, and yet in the Jewish religion “we just leave forgiveness to one day of the year,” the Day of Atonement.

As I listened to the dialogue, I saw what Marcus saw: two people of different faiths laughing, sharing deep thoughts, affectionate towards each other, respectful of each other, learning from each other. They didn’t have to give up their own faith in order to acknowledge the other’s faith, and to love one another. It was a genuine encounter of care between two people who believe in God and are children of God: an example of the gold of each tradition.

To me, that puts the words of Paul in a new perspective, when he says, “To the Jew I’m a Jew; to the legalist I’m a legalist.” Maybe he would have said — even though there were no Muslims in his time — “To the Muslim I’m a Muslim.” In Paul’s terms, he says that whether one is circumcised or not circumcised is not the issue. Your religious tradition is not the issue. The new creation of love is everything to Paul. God is love; love is God; God loves you; you can love God; you can love one another. That’s the gold.

And sometimes the religious packaging and baggage and tradition can be fool’s gold. Sometimes religious tradition can be the nicely wrapped present, and you can miss the gold inside.

Now, I’m not against religious tradition, or even the rules of religious tradition. Sometimes it’s even hard to find gold at all if you don’t have a religious tradition. I’m a Presbyterian. I’m proud of parts of my tradition, which believes in the priesthood of all believers; which is a Reformed tradition that encourages us to continue to reform; which believes in a representative form of government; which acknowledges the authority of scripture, tradition, reason and the church — and all of these are subordinate to the Holy Spirit, to God, and to the person of Jesus Christ.

But my religious tradition, and your religious tradition, is all about leading you to the gold: to love, to God, and in our Christian tradition, leading you to Jesus, and Jesus’ way of love.

Some twenty-three years ago there was a movie that was a huge commercial success. It was called Armageddon, and the premise was that the earth was about to be destroyed by an asteroid. Not even firing nuclear weapons at the asteroid will work, because there’s a lot of mass in an asteroid. The answer is that you have to go up to the asteroid, send a drilling rig up there, and drill down to the middle of the asteroid to put a nuclear weapon inside.

The hero is a driller named Harry Stamper, who, along with his team, takes a space shuttle up, drills down and plants the bomb. But something goes wrong, and someone has to stay behind to detonate the bomb and sacrifice his life to save the world. Harry stays behind and sacrifices his life, and the bomb is detonated, and the asteroid splits in two and misses the earth. And he saves the world.

Another story of Harry saving the world.

And while it’s a great story, and saving the world from extinction is a pretty big thing, it is not the same thing as we understand Jesus Christ and Christ’s salvation. It’s not the salvation that Jesus was talking about; not what we espouse in Christian understanding when we talk about saving the world. And I want to use our gospel lesson this morning to get at the salvation Jesus is talking about.

It’s all about healing. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus starts his ministry and immediately gets right at it. Jesus is a person of action. He takes on evil and casts out an evil spirit. Then he starts healing. Listen to the way Mark tells it:

They brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons.

Mark 1:32–34

They brought all who were sick; the whole city was gathered; he cured many; he cast out many demons. If you hear Mark tell it, Jesus was a one-man emergency room and hospital all put together, going from miracle to miracle to miracle to miracle. It was like a hospital television show after a natural disaster: people come in by the scores to be healed, and Jesus is healing them all.

That’s not the way I remember church when I was a little boy. I attended a Methodist church in England, and the United Church of Canada in New Brunswick when I was young. I don’t remember healing services. I suppose those who were sick went to the doctor. It wasn’t that we didn’t pray for people who were sick, but the understanding, I think, was primarily that miracles happened in the Bible and didn’t really happen much today.

Then, as a teenager, I ended up in the Pentecostal church for a while. They believed that every supernatural thing in the Bible happens today, and should happen today: speaking in tongues, walking on water, axe heads that float, people who are paralyzed walking again by the healing power of the Holy Spirit. They took the scriptures very literally. And while at the time I believed in healing like that, I don’t think I could ever really say that I saw a supernatural miracle where I could have said, “Wow, that’s it. That’s proof.” I never saw a paralyzed person healed by prayer and faith, and people still died of cancer and car accidents and heart attacks. There was no parade of person after person getting supernaturally healed — at least, I didn’t see that, even though I believed it.

And so when I became a Presbyterian, harkening back to some of those mainstream roots — attracted in part, I was, by the education and rationality of the Presbyterian church — I kind of went back to the idea that miracles, at least supernatural miracles, don’t happen today, or at least very rarely. I mean, I was a person of science; I did a science degree at university. I ended up thinking of miracles more metaphorically. And I was, to be frank, skeptical of the Pentecostal tradition; I saw a lot of stuff that I thought was questionable.

But over the years I think that’s changed a bit. My skepticism has been tempered. My understanding of Jesus has changed. For instance, I believe healings happen all the time in this world — in fact, way more than they did in Jesus’ day. Now, mostly they happen in hospitals, with doctors and medicines. In fact, I bet there are quite a few people watching the service today who, if they’d been born five hundred years ago, or two thousand years ago when Jesus was alive, wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for medical interventions like operations or drugs.

I’m a diabetic. Medicine helps keep me going and keep me alive. Well, that’s not supernatural healing. But does it have to be a supernatural healing to count as a healing?

When I went to Knox College in 1979, one of the women who worked there was named Best. She was related to Dr. Charles Best, who along with Dr. Frederick Banting discovered usable insulin for diabetics. Was that not a miracle of some sort? And maybe just as much of a miracle is that they sold the patent for one dollar, so that diabetics would not have to be rich to afford treatment.

I believe that God works in many ways to bring healing to people today, and lots of healings happen. And I’m more and more convinced that the primary job of Jesus is to heal.

Remember when I talked about Harry saving the world in the movie Armageddon? So someone saves the world from an asteroid and from mass extinction. Are we any nicer? Would wars end? Would we practise justice? Would there be more equality? Would there be equal access to health care and education?

Sure, if Harry could save the world from extinction, that would be wonderful. But who can save it from hate, from prejudice, from oppression, from violence and greed? Jesus offers a way. It is a way to take up a cross and suffer, and die to selfishness and hate and prejudice and greed, and be born again to unconditional love, to radical grace and universal forgiveness.

And the salvation that Jesus offers is to heal us of every hurt we’ve ever sustained: every unkind word, every rejection, every name or evil slur or lie uttered against us; every hit, every blow, every act of violence done to our person; every shunning, every time we were excluded or isolated by others; every put-down, every abuse, every intolerance, every disrespect. Jesus heals us from that, to set us free to love, to care, to include, to forgive, and to be healers ourselves.

The salvation Jesus offers is not particularly to be rescued from physical annihilation, or even to escape this world to a better place — even though we believe that we will go to a better place. It is to be transformed by his love, to love. And that love, he promises, will never end or die. We will be loved in this life, and the next life, and forever.

In the healing we see in the gospels, Jesus healing all these different people, what I think is so interesting is how important the community was. When a leper was healed in Jesus’ day, the leper was now free to enter the community again: free to go to family again, free to go to worship again, free to go to work again. This person was healed not only physically, but of their isolation from others. When friends brought a paralyzed man, that man was raised to walk home arm in arm with his friends. When a woman touches Jesus’ garment and is healed, she’s called by Jesus a daughter of Abraham, a full member of the community, when women weren’t considered full members of the community.

Jesus’ healings were not just stories of individuals being healed. They were stories of human communities healed from brokenness and disease and unhealthy emotional attitudes. Jesus healed the wrappings of the present, so you could find the gold inside.

Joan of Arcadia was a TV series that lasted two seasons, playing from 2003 to 2005. The title alludes to Joan of Arc — and remember, Joan of Arc said she had visions, that she saw God. And so the title character, Joan, sees and speaks with God, who appears to her as many different people: small children, teenage boys, elderly ladies, transients, passers-by. God frequently asks her to do little things that seem to her trivial or silly, but they always seem to end up improving the larger situation.

It was quite highly rated, and had an Emmy nomination, but unfortunately it only lasted a couple of years. And it didn’t always solve the issues and questions about God; in fact, it often raised as many questions. Joan’s brother had been in a car accident and was a paraplegic, and one time Joan asks God to heal her brother. And God replies, “I don’t do that sort of thing.” If God healed her brother Kevin, then he’d have to heal everyone; he couldn’t just show favouritism and heal Kevin. And somehow, if he healed everybody, then we wouldn’t be human, would we?

One of the things I liked about the show is the way God appears in so many different people — not necessarily people you would expect — and that’s the way God works: God is in people. I find that for my theology, my understanding of God: I think God is in people, and works through people.

So I wonder: if God touched us, if God healed us, would the result be that we would see God more often, especially in the people we meet? That we would see the gold in people? And if God touched us, and if God healed us, maybe we would be working for God and loving people, and people would see God in us — see the gold in us, and not the fool’s gold we sometimes are.

Amen.