May 28, 2006
Text: John 5:2-9
Prayers of the
People
We are grateful for fertile soil, O God – black, rich soil the likes of which gives rise to corn and beans and food and feed and fuel and flowers and all manner of benefits for our living. We are grateful for stimulating and gratifying soils, the likes of which give rise to graduations and treasured relationships and accomplishments and more.
And we are also grateful for deep, evocative soils like solitude in the garden and prayers in the morning, like scripture study, compassionate and prophetic service and praise alongside others – soils the likes of which give rise to vibrance of the soul and the illumination of your face among us. Planting such fields, dear God, help us to be patient in waiting for the growth. But let us not simply wait. Knowing that you, finally, are the one who gives the growth, prod us, as well, to do our part – to tend and cultivate and then utilize what grows. Bless us with courage and initiative, and use our gifts and opportunities, our relationships and energies, our conversations and our conflicts as seeds of your kingdom emerging among us. These things we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Instead of Waiting
The Gospel as Opposed to Rapunzel
As with so many such stories, the
Grimm’s Fairy Tale of Rapunzel is rooted in promises made and promises broken;
deceit and punishment; longing and love.
I won’t bore you with all the background details. It is enough to recall that a lovely girl
named Rapunzel is a gift child born to a couple who thought they could not
conceive. But as such stories go, the
girl who, as always, grew into the most beautiful child under the sun, is
whisked away to a dark forest by a wronged enchantress and locked away in a
tower which had neither stairs nor door; only a window at the very top. Whenever the…
enchantress wanted to go in, she
placed herself beneath it and cried, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair to
me.”
Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard
the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them
round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty yards
down, and the enchantress climbed up by it. After a year or two, it came to
pass that the king's son rode through the forest and passed by the tower.
You can probably guess what happens
from here. Hearing the lovely singing
emanating from the tower window, the Prince became enchanted. He searched for a way up the tower, but found
none. Discouraged, he rode home, but the
singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every day he went out into the
forest and listened to it.
Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that an enchantress
came there, and he heard how she cried, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your
hair.” Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress
climbed up to her. “If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try
my fortune,” said he, and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to
the tower and cried, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” Immediately the
hair fell down and the king's son climbed up.
At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes
had never yet beheld, came to her. But the king's son began to talk to her
quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it
had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her. Then Rapunzel lost
her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she
saw that he was young and handsome, she thought, “he will love me more than the
old Enchantress does.” And she said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said, “I
will willingly go away with you, but I do not know how to get down.
“Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you come, and I will
weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend, and you will
take me on your horse.” They agreed that until that time he should come to her
every evening, for the old woman came by day. [1]
For our purposes, that’s enough of
the story. The subsequent chapters lead
through all manner of terror, tragedy, exile and testing. But rest assured, it all culminates as it is
supposed to, in a blissful life lived happily ever after. So what are we to make of poor, dear, melodic
Rapunzel, and her tragic, complacent imprisonment?
First of all,
it might be useful to get acquainted with a man I might describe as the
biblical Rapunzel. We meet him in the
story from John’s Gospel we heard read earlier, and while he doesn’t have long
tresses of hair, he is a prisoner of sorts, crippled and lying helplessly by
the pool of Bethzatha – or
Well, among
those gathered was our Mr. Rapunzel who had been trying to make it into the
water first for 38 years. Jesus asked
the obvious question: “Do you want to be
made well?” Thirty-eight years, after
all, is a long time to try. Perhaps
there was some ulterior motive for the man’s consistent and stupendous success
at failure.
“Well of
course I want to be well,” the man insists.
“It’s just that I’m helpless.
I’ve got no one to help me. And
more than that, everybody else is faster.
All these people with junior varsity afflictions – pimples and rashes
and hiccups and the like – are faster and keep knocking people like me, people with
real problems, out of the way. It’s
really not fair. There ought to be a
separate pool for people with really bad problems like me.”
Ah! So there it is: the problem is “out there.” “It’s not fair.” “I’m helpless.” Perhaps so, but 38 years is a long time to
pout.
Pastoral
counselor and Episcopal priest Jean Clift was once upon a time watching the PBS
show “Mystery” and stumbled upon a comic realization and insight while watching
the program’s opening credits. “As the
credits roll, a cartoon-animated woman whose ankles are tied waves her hands in
the air and cries, ‘Ohhh! ‘Ohhh!’ waiting for someone to come untie her.
‘I watched
that show for a long while before it occurred to me that the woman’s hands
aren’t tied,’ Clift observed. ‘She
could, if she were so inclined, bend down and untie her own ankles.’”[3]
And Rapunzel
always had her hair. It was the very
same hair that both the Enchantress and Prince used to ladder themselves up to
the tower window, and the very same hair that, once cut off and tied to a
chair, was the means by which the Enchantress later entrapped the Prince. The means to Rapunzel’s escape was always
with her, but she was convinced that she was helpless, and resigned herself to
a life of imprisonment, or later, invested all her hopes of rescue on the
handsome prince. It is, for both the
paralytic and the pretty Rapunzel, a breath-taking lack of initiative. Here are two people, drowning in
helplessness, for whom the problem and the solution are both “out there.”
Last week we
spent some time getting reacquainted with the Little Red Hen, that diligent
soul who mistakenly believed that she was responsible for everything – for playing every base on the diamond. Here we have the Hen’s alter ego – one who
can’t imagine how she could be responsible for anything.
Why had it
never occurred to Rapunzel to cut off her own hair and manage her own
escape? Why had the man beside the pool
contented himself over 38 years of waiting with no conceived alternative
solution? We do live in community, and
it is important to draw from that community’s wealth of strength.
“It’s important to be able to ask for
help, but not Rapunzel’s way. She chose
to forego the contemplative experience of tapping her soul-strength, to bury
her problem-solving potential and project it onto others. Struggling with the difficulties of life, we
may adopt the idea that we’re too weak, too dumb, too busy, or too incompetent
to take care of ourselves and extricate ourselves from pain and problems.” [4]
One of my
touchstones in scripture – a passage as challenging for me as it is comforting;
as emboldening as it is reassuring – is in Paul’s second letter to Timothy
where the mentor reminds his protégé, “…rekindle the gift of God that is within
you…; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of
power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:6-7).
As the Little
Red Hen needed to learn, we can’t do everything, but as Rapunzel needs to
learn, we can do something. We have gifts within us that we are called to
use, not in a spirit of fear or timidity, but with a spirit of power, and love,
and self-discipline. Do we want to be
healed – of our various imprisonments…
Ø as individuals separated too often
from the best of ourselves – our living practiced in isolation from our souls;
Ø as employees trapped in corporate
systems that suffocate rather than encourage life;
Ø as neighbors isolated from the
community that surrounds us;
Ø as urban and suburban citizens implicated
in and affected by bureaucratic decisions preferring some and neglecting
others, but whose processes have turned to nudge us out?
Do we want to be healed? We were not made for timidity. The Spirit of God that fills our lungs and
enlivens our wills calls us to something more.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, rekindle the gift that is within you. Instead of waiting, let down your hair, that,
taking responsibility for your own circumstances and employing your own
resources, as well as those gifts of others, you – and us – might, ourselves,
climb down…
…and live.
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[2] Gerard Sloyan, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, “John” (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988) p. 78.
[3] As told by Sue Monk Kidd in When the Heart Waits, p. 63.
[4] Kidd, p. 63