Sixth Sunday of Easter: May 25, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Acts 16:9-15 | Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 | John 5:1-9 | Psalm 67

“Do you want to be made well?”

It seems like such an easy question to answer – of course I want to be well, but to be made well implies that there is something deficient, lacking, or broken in me that needs fixing. And this is perhaps a little harder to really face. If I’m honest, I much prefer the question, “Do you want the world to be made well?” Wars and threats of war; war crimes and humanitarian crises; deadly diseases; mass shootings; government corruption; legislation and budgets that leave millions without access to food, healthcare, and social support; billions of people living in inadequate housing across the globe; over 100 million people living unsheltered… And, today, on the anniversary of the death of George Floyd, we name especially the social, political, and economic disparities that lead to the disproportionate deaths of black and brown people in our nation. When I reflect on the litany of all the hurt, violence, and brokenness in the world, I want to emphatically answer – “YES! I want the world to be made well!”

This deflection is a common practice in dominant culture. “Things” like racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, are all thought to be systems in which we have the choice to participate, that they are “things” that infect the structures of the world but not our own hearts. For those of us in dominant culture, it is easy to keep our eyes trained on what’s wrong with the world rather than recognizing our own need to be made well because we have been trained and socialized to recognize ourselves as bearers of salvation and solutions to the world’s problems. We have been taught that we bear the secrets of success and civility,

that our gaze and our voice produce clear images and articulations of what counts as real, what counts as good, what counts as beautiful. We have been conditioned to see violence inflicted on communities of color, on LGBTQIA+ folks, on differently abled folks, on women, as wounding in the particularities of individual circumstances rather than recognizing violence as inherently part of the social waters in which we all swim.

“Do you want to be made well?”

When I was in seminary, I was forced to begin to deal with the anger that always seemed to simmer just under the surface. I had to begin to acknowledge the traumas of my childhood and early adulthood that created the wound in which anger could fester and grow:

constant microaggressions; broken relationships, mental illness and instability, and betrayal within our family; fear of not having enough money to sustain and feed our family; sexual assault; constant changing of schools and communities… each of these circumstances inflicted wounds on me as I grew and developed. But I was taught to just “put my head down and go,” to disregard and ignore the wounds. And because I was never taught to tend to my own healing, I learned only one response to pain – anger.

One day, I sat in a professor’s office, and we were talking about this anger. He wondered aloud whether I really wanted to let go of my anger; in his observation, anger had become such a part of my identity that to lose that part of me (regardless of how unhealthy it was) meant that I would lose part of myself as well.

Over the last ten years, I have had to learn how to disentangle myself from my wounds and from my anger. The hurts and traumas that I have experienced are certainly part of who I am – they are part of my story and part of the story of God’s intervention in my own life. And yet, those wounds and that anger didn’t (and don’t) define me. On my journey of being made well, I have learned to seek the healing of, rather than distancing from, my wounds. This has required not only an acknowledgment of how I have been hurt by people and systems in our world, but also has required me to acknowledge the ways that the privileges I do have are protected by the violence and oppression inflicted on marginalized communities. “Being made well” requires our honesty at the ways we have been wounded, even and especially in the ways that we are wounded by systems that seem invisible to us in the dominant culture.

“Do you want to be made well?”

I want the vision that John receives to be a reality in the here and now. I want the new creation, with gates thrown open wide, with provision and sustenance guaranteed for all, with life bursting forth and healing complete – I want this to describe our reality as we live it now. But I wonder if we would know what to do if we woke up tomorrow and all vestiges of patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and all the other “ism’s” that disrupt and annihilate true community simply vanished. How would our relationships change? What fears would be absent? What false hopes would be diminished? What power would we have to let go of? What new freedoms would we experience?

Yes, I want to be made well. Yes, I want the world to be made well. I don’t want to hurt any more; I don’t want others to hurt any more. I want every tear to be wiped away, every belly to be satisfied, every creature to be fully the creatures that God made us to be. The vision given to John on Patmos is a vision of a world that God is creating, and that God is inviting us to create with God. Over and over in Scripture, God elicits partnership and covenant with God’s creatures. God does not wave a magical wand as intervention in the challenges and problems and sin of the world. Rather, God calls us into new relationship, into a new reality, into a new life and way of life that is governed by love rather than hate, by compassion and mercy rather than privilege and power.

Friends, we are not called to “build the kingdom of God,” but we are called to cooperate with God’s activity and movement in bringing about that heavenly city in which all are welcome, all are fed and satisfied, all are healed. And it starts with the way that we demonstrate that kind of community in our own parish. God is calling us here and now to be a place of respite in the world, to be a place where security and safety are abundant, where relationship with one another is intentional and mutual care and support is the primary way we engage with one another, where God’s presence is both acknowledged and identified as a core component of the ways in which we love one another.

“Do you want to be made well?”

Dear people of St Peter’s, this is the question that Jesus is asking us today. Will we be a community whose flourishing is tied to God’s activity and work in our midst, whose identity is not tied up with our political leanings and our categories of identity, but in the healing and transformative presence of God? Will we accept Jesus’ invitation to “take up our mat and walk,” so that we might be examples of what healed life, new and transformed life, looks like in the context of a world that still seems so far away from John’s vision of the new creation? If so, let us begin with one another, with demonstrating the love of God for us by loving one another with abandon and care, with engaging in the disciplines and practices that build up rather than tear down community.

May God open our eyes to the wounds we bear and guide our feet into the way of love so that we, the people of St Peter’s, might become an example of the promises of God in Christ.