This Sunday we get to talk about the healing of the paralytic man at the Pool of Bethesda. This is a rich, rich story. It is a great example, as one of you wrote on your response card a few weeks back, of Jesus being a “cheeky bugger.” It is a story about choice and languishing and personal responsibility and the inner light that Jesus points out in the most impossible moments that can get you up and heal you.

“Get up,” Jesus basically says. “Get up and walk.”

This is about Jesus breaking with the establishment, which in this story is equated with healing. Can we know ourselves outside of all the social constructs that define us — race, religion, culture, family, job, class? Can we know ourselves beyond these and move beyond them?

So as I see it, this story is about choice, fatih, and the courage to look within. Religion (part of the establishment) is so often used as a tool to divide, but Jesus was about making whole. What would you do if you allow yourself to get up and walk? Can we walk toward the world we want to create? Tony Kushner, in an essay aptly names “Despair is a Lie we Tell Ourselves,” wrote:

Not any single one of us has to or possibly can save the world, but together, in some sort of concert, in even not-especially-coordinate concerts, with all of us working where we see work to be done, the world will change…Maintain the world by changing it.

But first choose…choose wether you will get up and take one feeble step forward and be part of the cacophonous, beautiful concert, even when it get hard. Especially when it gets hard. We’ve got a beloved community willing to hold us up should we fall.

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Two resources referenced: A movie on Netflix called “Don’t Look Up” & a stand up comic routine by Roy Wood Jr. called “Imperfect Messenger.”