Sermon – May 25, 2025 “Do You Want to Be Made Whole?”

A beach accessibility path with a wheelchair symbol leads across the sand to the shoreline.

A wheelchair-accessible path leads across the sand to the water’s edge, affirming that all belong — wherever the journey leads.

Do You Want to Be Made Whole? – May 25, 2025

Bulletin-05-25-2025

Gospel Lesson: John 5:1 – 9

In this week’s stirring sermon, Pastor Chris invited us into the deep waters of John 5—a story of a man at the pool of Bethesda, waiting not just for healing, but for wholeness. With compassion and clarity, we were asked to reconsider what it means to be made well—not merely fixed, but fully seen.

Drawing on voices of disability theologians and advocates, Pastor Chris dismantled the false equation of healing with worth. “Do you want to be made whole?” is not a question of bodily perfection—it is a divine invitation into belovedness, dignity, and community. Wholeness, we were reminded, is not the absence of pain or difference, but the presence of justice, equity, and radical belonging.

Through the lens of Judith Heumann’s call for equity, Nancy Eiesland’s image of the resurrected body, and Eli Clare’s affirmation of self-worth, we were challenged to embrace a theology that honors all bodies and all minds. In Christ, every body is blessed, every mind is beloved, every spirit is embraced.

To be made whole, Pastor Chris proclaimed, is not to be changed into someone else—it is to be gathered up in love and called into new ways of being community together. Wholeness is not a miracle reserved for the pure—it is the everyday grace of God who makes no exceptions and holds no conditions. He closed his sermon with a powerful call to action to Get Up! Get up and Rise because we are needed in the healing of this world! “Holy Covenant, the Spirit is already moving within Us…Get Up!”

Thanks be to God, who makes us whole. Amen.