Pentecost 3 Selected Sermon

In the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, there is a painting hanging in a distant, back hallway. The painting commemorates the first use of ether as anesthesia during an operation, which occurred at Mass General near the turn of the century. As I recall it, there is a brief narrative on the wall near the painting, describing the event and the fact that this occasion marked a revolutionary change in medicine, freeing patients (and consequently their doctors) from the tyranny of pain in operating rooms.

This meant not only that patients suffered far less during an operation, but also far more survived the operations, as the surgeons could take more time and could operate more carefully, less hurriedly. More attention could be given to avoiding contamination, to keeping the wound sterile, thus decreasing the risk of infection, which had been the cause of so many deaths during the Civil War.

Ether is a relatively crude form of anesthesia, and we have come a long way since then, but its first use is rightly seen as a major breakthrough in the field of medicine. From our vantage point it is hard to imagine what it would be like to undergo something even as simple as an appendectomy if we had no anesthesia besides whiskey or no way to cope with the pain other than biting down on a towel or a rag.

It is equally hard to imagine that this new advance was not seen by everyone as a good thing, as an event to be welcomed and celebrated, but in fact many people opposed using ether, at least using ether in one particular way.

Many Christians, including the Roman Catholic church, believed that using either to ease a woman’s pain in childbirth was against the will of God and was therefore sinful, and their initial response was to forbid its use for this purpose. They were guided by the passage from Genesis that is included in our lesson for today, when God’s judgment on the woman after eating of the forbidden fruit is:

“I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children,” (Gen. 3:16).

It seemed obvious to these people that using anesthesia to lessen or remove pain during the process of childbirth was to defy God’s judgment, which is so clearly set forth in this passage, and so women were advised that if they were to be good Christians they would not use any anesthesia during labor. Pain for them was God’s will, and if they were to be faithful they needed to endure it, not lessen it.

This seems preposterous now, but the logic is evident. The Bible couldn’t be clearer or less ambiguous; women were supposed to suffer during childbirth as a consequence of the Fall.

While there are many people now who advocate “natural” childbirth, using breathing, meditation and other ways to manage pain during labor, no one imagines that a woman who receives an epidural during labor is committing a sin.

And yet the Bible hasn’t changed. The passage seems as clear now as it did back when people understood it as requiring that women suffer during labor.

Are we less faithful? Is this yet another indication that our society is losing our way, sliding down the slippery slope of secularity, moving away from God?

I don’t think so. When I consider the sins of our present generation, anesthesia isn’t one of them. The concern in our own century over its use does, however, seem like an important lesson, something we need to remember as we try to be faithful.

The fact is that we tend toward the idolatrous.

God is far more mysterious, powerful, unknowable and uncontrollable than we can imagine, but the history of our relationship with God, from the beginning, is to try and make God more knowable, less powerful, more controllable.

While Moses was contending with God on Sinai, receiving the tablets, the people were down below building a more manageable deity, a golden calf that they could see and feel and control. The psalmist captured it exactly:

They made a calf in Horeb
and worshipped a molten image.
They exchanged the glory of God
for the image of an ox that eats grass.
They forgot God, their Savior,
who had done great things in Egypt,
(Psalm 106:19-21)

There are even hints of this behavior in the gospel passage for today from Mark. Jesus’ friends, hearing what he is saying and doing at the start of his ministry, imagine that he is “beside himself” and come to get him, to “seize him.” Even Mary and his brothers come, wait outside and send in word for him. This passage leaves implied what is explicit in another passage, that they believe he has taken leave of his senses, and they have come to take him home where they can take care of him.

Jesus is confounding even those who know him best, and his behavior and teaching alarms them, makes them concerned for his sanity, his well-being. Their motivation is well-meaning and sincere, but the dynamic is unmistakable: Jesus has a power that surprises them and they have come to control it.

When Jesus hears that his mother and brothers are outside, asking for him, he asks those who have gathered around him, to hear his teaching and experience his power, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” He goes on to answer his own question, “Here are my mother and my brother! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

In other words, people who are attentive of God’s will, to God’s power, are connected to Jesus even more than those with whom he shares bloodlines.

In our attempts to do God’s will we often end up acting like Jesus’ well-meaning family and friends, trying to control God, define God, muzzle God.

Faithful Christians have argued, even in our own church, that it is not God’s will that women be ordained, citing both scriptural passages from Paul and the long history of a male only priesthood. Scholars have pointed out the historical record is not so clear and women have been a part of the leadership of the church from the beginning, but that sidesteps an even more basic issue: God cannot be limited, controlled.

The fact that something seems to have no precedent, that something has never happened before, does not mean that it is not God’s will for it to happen now. New practices and understandings of our faith do not automatically constitute apostasy, but may well be a faithful response to the Holy Spirit, even if these new practices apparently change or contradict scripture.

This is not a carte blanche to do whatever we feel like doing, nor is it an attempt to jettison one of the foundations of our faith and understanding of God, our Holy Scripture. But we need to remember that God is more powerful and surprising than we can ever imagine, and that even the record of God’s actions and relationship with humankind is not a complete description of God or God’s will for us. The God we worship is alive, ever leading us forward, and is not the solid, unmoving golden calf that was forged at the foot of Sinai. God cannot and will not be boxed in, even by the Bible. God is always moving in new ways, beckoning us to new places.

Before God made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah there were no chosen people. Before God led the people of Israel out of Egypt there had never been an exodus to a Promised Land. Before God selected Mary there had never been this kind of intimacy between the Almighty and humanity, and of course before Bethlehem there had never been God incarnate.

Why is it so hard for us to imagine that what has been true in the past may no longer be true? Why do we cling so compulsively to our past, as though God can never change and never wants us to change?

When we gather and talk and argue about where God might be leading us, what we imagine God’s will to be, we might do well to remember this painting in the back hallway in a hospital in Boston, celebrating pain-free surgery, and recall that this was initially seen by some as a dangerous attack on our faith.

It is a good reminder of our propensity toward idolatry, toward control, toward “exchanging the Glory of God for the image of an ox that feeds on grass.” Amen.