Sermon from 25th February 2007

Today our Youth Worker, Phil Brooks, preaches on the reading from John 5:1-18

Good morning everybody!It’s good to be back… in church that is, not up here! I’ve missed our gatherings the last couple of Sundays. And I’m just about all better now, and I’ve been feeling a lot more energetic for a couple of days. Which I found a bit frustrating because my doctor told me I had to stay in and rest, even though I was feeling better.So I didn’t really want to obey the rules, but I had to. And it got me thinking. If I’d got out and ran around after being poorly, I might have had fun by breaking the rules, but I’d have completely missed the point of getting better.I wonder how many rules we all obey every day, maybe without even paying attention to them. We’re surrounded by a whole heap of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that make it possible for us to live together in peace.Some rules, however, are just plain silly. So I got digging around on the internet and managed to find some rules so silly that you are going to have a hard time believing them. And I’m going to need 3 volunteers this morning to come and help me with a challenge I have for the congregation. I’d like to have volunteers of secondary school age or over… and there’s no upper age limit!I’m going to ask each of my volunteers to read out a rule from the envelope. Two of these rules are genuine rules that people will be in trouble if they don’t follow. One of them I’ve made up for this morning.So which one of these rules is made up? Which means, scarily… that two of them are actually true!And the answer… rule number….Just as an aside, when I was searching around on the internet I found an English law from a long time ago: All English males over the age 14 are to carry out 2 or so hours of longbow practice a week as supervised by the local clergy.There is a suggestion box at the back of the church…I wonder which of the rules that we have to obey we’d most like to do without. Which ones we consider really important, and which ones we think we could do without. What are the sort of things that make us decide a rule is or isn’t worth following?So this morning I’m up here so we can take a closer look at the story we just read together, and what It might have to say about rules, and why we may or may not follow them. If you’ve closed your Bible already and want to find the passage again, we’re in the fifth chapter of John. It’ll be page 122 of your green bibles. There are a few things I’d like to have a look at as we get stuck in with this really confusing story….If we look at the beginning of the story, we notice that Jesus, like a normal Jewish Rabbi, goes up to Jerusalem for a festival. So Jesus wanders around the centre of town, taking in the sights. Like the rest of His people, coming to Jerusalem would have been a special occasion for Jesus.And he comes across a pool, where people with disabilities would lie and wait. Back in those days, people with disabilities, the blind, those unable to walk, or move, wouldn’t have been looked after well. They wouldn’t have had the chance to work for a living. They’d have sat around all day, hoping somebody might throw them a bit of food or some coins… or perhaps, been healed in the pool.If you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll notice a detail that didn’t make it into the final cut of the text, which seems a shame to me. I don’t know if it’s true or not… apparently the reason why this pool was so special for ill and disabled people is that ‘every now and then’ an angel would touch the water. What a great way to fit that detail in… imagine speaking to someone who told you that ‘every now and then’ they’d seen an angel at Brockwell Park Lido. So even if that bit isn’t true, then at least we can tell that this place was special to the people around it. Whoever got in the water first, after it had been stirred, would have been healed. Can you imagine the rush?And, for 38 years, a man waits for somebody to help him into the water. Is anybody here 38? That’s a LOT older than me. The really heartbreaking thing about this man is that nobody will help him into the pool. He realizes that he can’t manage on his own steam, yet nobody cares enough to give him a chance.So surely, after 38 years of sitting paralyzed, You would have begun to lose hope in your life getting any better. So maybe Jesus’ question to the man at the end of verse 6 wasn’t as stupid as it first looks. ‘Do you want to be healed?’ To ask a paralysed man, who has been waiting by a healing pool, if he wants to get well.. maybe this guy had given up on ever being well again. Maybe he’d not only forgotten what it felt like to be well, but he’d forgotten what it was like to want to be well.So Jesus says to him ‘Get up! Pick up your mat and walk’.If that was the whole story this morning, that in itself is pretty incredible. But the plot was about to thicken…This is where the Gospel writer mentions that the story is taking place on a Saturday.So Jesus asks this man, who is using his legs for the first time in 38 years, to carry his mat away with him. To not leave his rubbish lying around., Now God had told the Jews to make Saturday a special day, And their interpretation of that was that they were allowed to do no work at all, under any circumstances, Not even carrying something that belongs to them.So by healing somebody, and then asking that same person to carry his mat, Jesus not only broke that rule himself, but encouraged somebody else to…So the Pharisees, the legal experts of the day, pounce on this. We can read in verse 10… be careful to note the wording of this… ‘This is a Sabbath, it is against OUR law for you to carry your mat’.Can we see what the Pharisees have done here? They have completely missed the point. Jesus has turned this broken man’s life upside-down and all these religious people can see is red tape.And yet there is more. Later on in the story, Jesus winds these guys up even more says to the authorities- ‘My Father is working and so am I’ in other words… I am doing God’s work, so you can’t stop me. This man will be made well, whether you like it or not, however inconvenient it may be for your religious system. No matter how many rules you put there, you can’t stop me from doing what I am here to do.’So which rule was really broken that Saturday morning?I wonder if the real rulebreaking that took part was Jesus reaching out to this man on his mat. This man who had all but given up on getting better. And Jesus’ power to help this man was so much more offensive than ‘just’ healing someone on the Sabbath. This was about life-changing healing.. not limited to just making him walk again. Because Jesus knew that wasn’t the point.When Jesus sees this man in the temple again, he invites him to take part in the new kingdom that Jesus is creating. ‘So stop sinning!’ or else you will miss out.The point of this meeting was Jesus breaking the ‘rule’ that certain people are excluded from God’s Kingdom. So no matter how sinful, weak, helpless and broken this man was, he was invited to be a part of God’s new world.And so I ask that God would help me to see the point of his rules, and that I’d want to obey them, to hold his will deeper and deeper within me.. but also to see the point of them.So let’s pray…