Reverend Jimmy Moore, preaching
Luke 10: 1-6 and Galatians 6: 17-18
That’s Gonna Leave a Mark
“Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark.” Most of us have said this, or something similar to it, when we experienced a painful bruising. Our bodies bear a visual witness to many of the hurtful things we have experienced. And those bruises and wounds and scars are part of the story of our lives, both in terms of what caused the pain and how we have healed from them. And as everyone knows, there are scars and bruises that are not visible to sight, because they have happened in our personal hearts and in the souls of our community. What wounds do you carry today? How will much of what we are experiencing today, including the coronavirus phenomenon, mark us for a very long time to come. How do we respond?
This question arises as we move through the season of Lent at St. Mark’s, a time we are calling “Holy Curiosity”. During Lent, the sermons are shaped by responses to questions from our congregants. In this sermon, the question came, “Could a Christian of very great spirituality & devotion to Jesus, such as St. Francis of Assisi, be actually afflicted by with the stigmata?” Francis was the first, but other devout Christians have claimed that when the contemplated deeply the suffering of Jesus, that they too would develop wounds in their bodies that mirrored his. As theologian Ivan Illich would have it, “Compassion with Christ... is faith so strong and so deeply incarnate that it leads to the individual embodiment of the contemplated pain.”
Whether one believes that kind of thing is even possible, it is true that we all carry various kinds marks of our experience, and in some cases, of our devotion. For example, we’ve seen pictures of marks left by masks worn by health care professionals to keep them safe in treating COVID-19 patients. Those wounds are part of our story, and our stories are shaped by and shape our faith. We’ll explore this in our Live Stream worship on Sunday. The sermon is titled “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark,” rising from Luke 10: 1-6 and Galatians 6: 17-18. We will sing, pray, have a children’s moment, read scripture and have a sermon. We look forward to our online time together at 10:30 on Sunday morning.