Healing in Many Forms

Acts 3:1-10

Mark 10:17-31

            What things did Jesus do in his ministry?  Teaching, preaching and healing.  Why healing? 

            Jesus, and then as we hear in today’s story from Acts, the disciples, spent a lot of time touching, caring for, listening to, and engaging people that other people rejected.  Those with leprosy were outcasts.  They couldn’t live with their families and it was assumed that someone in their family or the person themself, must have done something wrong and that is why this person was sick.  Disease was seen as punishment.  Some people still have this thinking but they call it Karma.  While some have a different understanding of what Karma is (so I’m not knocking the idea itself), others believe that while it may not be clear why some suffer and others don’t, they must have done something to deserve it, either in this life or in a past life.  But Jesus first confronted it with words like “the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.” and “He replied, “Do you think the suffering of these … proves that they were more sinful than all the others?  No, I tell you!”  But he went much further than just declaring that it wasn’t their fault that they were afflicted.

            He touched, he talked to and he healed any who were in need – the rejected, the outcast, the condemned, the judged, the dismissed.  He made contact with them, included them, treated them as the incredible and beautiful people that they were, regardless of how others treated them.

            I have a ten dollar bill here.  If I mangle it and squish it and stomp on it, if I make it dirty or even filthy, what is it then worth?  It is still worth ten dollars.  The appearance, the condition, the outward attributes of this money don’t change it’s worth.  Well, Jesus was able to see that this is the same with people.  He saw beyond the outside of the bill.  He saw beyond the dirt, the scrounge, the disease.  He saw beyond the vocations, the judgments, the rejections.  He saw beyond their mistakes, their sins, their choices.  He saw beyond all of that to who they WERE.  And who they were is the same as who you are – you are a child of God.  Worthy of infinite value. 

            But just as we still look at the monetary numbers stamped on this bill to know its value, people get very confused about what is really important.  We are not worth whatever monetary value we might be given.  We are not worth whatever value someone else assigns us.  We get confused about what things determine value, about what really matters, about what value is…until those we love or ourselves are threatened in our bodies, threatened in our health.  We think that silver and gold – money, is what is important and we think that our money, and having “enough” money is more important than healing, more important than living.  We think success is more important than connections and community and fellowship.  We think fame, or fortune or what we have are more important than relationship and kindness.  We think that having a “good time” and even being happy are more important than finding wholeness and well-being, finding peace.

But sometimes even in the midst of physical or other kinds of crisis, we think it’s easier to throw money at a problem rather than addressing it.  In the story from Acts that we heard today, the crippled man expected to be handed money to deal with his problems.  That is not what Peter chose to do.  He gave the greater gift of healing.  As my Ohio lectionary group was discussing this passage this month, we were talking about the fact that when someone asks for help, whether they come to the church or approach us as individuals, in many ways it is the EASY thing to do to give them money.  Sometimes they really do need money.  But we are also and primarily called to give the harder thing, the more needed thing - to offer healing.  One of our group said, “Well, I’m not a healer!”  This is a woman who has worked tirelessly with the disenfranchised in our communities.  She has been an advocate for people struggling with addictions, with abandonment by family because of their sexual orientations, for the homeless and the poor.  She builds relationships with these people, she helps them get their stuff together, to land on their feet, to know they are LOVED, and to heal their families rejections.  She gives them a home, a church, awareness of God’s deep caring, food and true community.  And while she could not see it, it was obvious to me that she IS a healer.  She does the same kind of healing that Jesus did again and again.  We are called to this as well.  When we do the laundry program, one of the big pieces of our work that our mission chair David emphasizes is the importance of conversation with the folk who come in.  Just paying for their laundry is not enough.  It is a start, but what is much more important, much more valuable is forming relationships, is talking with them, is creating a place where they know they are valued.  What they really need is healing. 

We have some choices to be made as a country right now.  In some ways the choice is between healing and money.  Of course it is not that simple.  People with the most money are the ones most likely to be healed, so when jobs disappear, healing disappears too.  But there is a bigger issue.  The ones pushing for reopening of everything are the ones least likely to be impacted, hit, to have the disease and especially to die from it.  They can afford to reopen, just as they can afford to stay closed.  Once again the ones suffering the most are those who are poor.  And if anything this disease is shining a light on the much much deeper disease of greed.  That, too, is a disease we are called to strive to heal: and not through paying the rich more money or taking what little the poor have away from them. 

In the New Testament story for today, Jesus’ healing looks like freeing the rich man from his money, from his greed.  This was not a healing that the rich man wanted.  But it was the healing the Jesus was offering: a much more complete healing.  The healing of his soul.

            I was watching a MASH episode with my son last Sunday.  The episode is called Blood Brothers and in it, one of the patients is trying to help and support his friend who is very ill and needs blood.  In testing to see if he could donate blood to his friend who is ill, the doctors discover that the patient who is trying to help actually has Leukemia.  When the patient is told, he makes the choice to stay at the MASH unit to be with the friend who needed his support in the first place.  Hawkeye wants him to go to Tokyo for treatment.  But he insists on staying behind.  As he says, “My being here is helping Dan.  Seems to me I have a right to do what I want with the time I have left.”

While all of this is happening, Father Mulcahy  is having his own crisis because the Cardinal is visiting and Father Mulcahy desperately wants to impress him.  He desperately wants this mans’ approval, but because of the timing of the Cardinal’s visit, Father Mulcahy doesn’t have a sermon ready, the whole camp is acting out with gambling and drinking and he has spent all night up with the boy who’s been diagnosed with Leukemia.  But he goes to give his sermon and says this, “Well, here we are.  It’s Sunday again.  I’m sure you’ve all come expecting to hear a sermon.  I have to admit I’m not as prepared as I’d like to be…. You see I was working on my sermon, which I’d hoped would be particularly inspirational in honor of the cardinal but I was called away and I never got back to it.  So, if you’ll just bear with me, I’d like to share the reason why.  I want to tell you about two men, each facing his own crisis. The first man you know well.  The second is a patient here.  Well, the first man thought he was facing a crisis, but what he was really doing was trying to impress someone.  He was looking for recognition, encouragement, a pat on the back.  And whenever that recognition seemed threatened, he acted rather childishly.  He blamed everyone for his problems accept for himself because he was only thinking of himself.  But the second man was confronted by the greatest crisis mortal man can face: the loss of his life.  I think you’ll agree the second man had every right to be selfish, but instead he chose to think not of himself but of a brother.  And when the first man saw the dignity and selflessness of the second man, he realized how petty and selfish he… I… I had been.  It made me see something more clearly than I’d ever seen before.  God didn’t put us here for that pat on the back.  He created us so he could be here himself , so that he could exist in the lives of those he created in his image.”

            I came across an article in Sojourner’s Magazine that was talking about Henri Nouwen.  Henri Nouwen was an amazingly gifted priest, professor and writer.  I love his books, I love the way he thinks.  He has a brilliant as well as deeply faithful and spiritual mind.  But after teaching for many years, he was invited to become pastor to a community of people with intellectual disabilities.  He soon discovered that they didn’t care how brilliant he was, and all the wonderful things he had written and taught just didn’t mean that much to them.  He told the story in one of his books, Life of the Beloved, of one particular woman, Janet, who one day asked Henri for a blessing.  When he tried to bless her with the sign of the cross on her forehead she became very upset and said, “No, I want a real blessing!”  He didn’t know what to do with that, but that evening at worship, he mentioned that Janet had asked for a real blessing and she marched up to the front and gave him a huge hug.  In that moment, he found the words that were needed.  “Janet, I want you to know that you are God’s beloved daughter.  You are precious in God’s eyes.  Your beautiful smile, your kindness to the people in your house, and all the good things you do show us what a beautiful human being you are.  I know you feel a little low these days and that there is some sadness in your heart, but I want you to remember who you are: a very special person, deeply loved by God and all the people who are here with you.”  She gave him a satisfied smile, but as Nouwen then turned away, he found himself bombarded with the others in the community also asking for blessings.  Henri gave each a hug and affirmation that they are loved as they are.  And Henri walked away a changed man.

            There is a praise song with these words, “This is what I’m sure of, I can only show love When I really know how loved I am. When it overtakes me, Then it animates me, Flowing from my heart into my hands.”

Frederick Buechner said this about healing:

The Gospels depict Jesus as having spent a surprising amount of time healing people… 

This is entirely compatible, of course, with the Hebrew view of man as a psychosomatic unity, an individual amalgam of body and soul whereby if either goes wrong, the other is affected.  It is significant also that the Greek verb sozo was used in Jesus’ day to mean both to save and to heal, and soter could signify either savior or physician. 

Ever since the time of Jesus, healing has been part of the Christian tradition.  In this century it has usually been associated with religious quackery or the lunatic fringe, but as the psychosomatic dimension of disease has come to be taken more and more seriously by medical science it has regained some of its former respectability.  How nice for God to have this support at last.

Jesus is reported to have made the blind see and the lame walk, and over the centuries countless miraculous healings have been claimed in his name…  You can always give it a try.  Pray for healing.  If it’s somebody else’s healing you’re praying for, you can try at the same time laying your hands on him as Jesus sometimes did.  If his sickness involves his body as well as his soul, then God may be able to use your inept hands as well as your inept faith to heal him.  If you feel like a fool as you are doing this, don’t let it throw you.  You are a fool of course, only not a damned fool for a change….If God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he’s giving you something else.”

            Jesus not only healed bodies of the outcast, of the oppressed, of the disadvantaged, of the physically broken.  He healed their souls by showing them, reminding them, acting in a way that said beyond a doubt that they were loved and valued, that they were worthy, that God still saw them as more important and beautiful than anything they could imagine.  We are invited to do the same.  As we are called to follow, we heal others by showing them how loved they are.  Go into the world, affirming, uplifting, and healing one another.  Amen.