Sermons

 Healing

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
February 15, 2009	Mark 1:40-45

We have been at that same place on a late winter’s evening – boarding a plane at Newark or LaGuardia or JFK, heading home, perhaps to Rochester, or Buffalo if we can get a better ticket. And we have been on the other end – waiting for a loved one to land. So whatever else has happened, a tremendously sad thing has happened, close enough to home that that we feel the reverberations a little more closely, and we grieve a little more intently. We’ve driven by that Clarence exit, wondered about ice on the wings, heard the Chuck Mangione band. So as we read the individual stories, and ponder the big story, let us pause for a moment…In life and in death we belong to you, O eternal God. We mourn with the news of the crash of flight 3407. We remember all those who have died and give you thanks for their lives. And we gather in solidarity with all who mourn the loss of those they love. Comfort them and bind up their wounds, allowing them to know your deep love for them, and our deep connection in the human family. And now open your word to us, and transform us by its power. For the sake of Christ, the great physician and healer of us all. Amen.

***

I do not know what was in the water in Akron, Ohio, the home town of my parents. Two famous evangelists, television evangelists before the word became popular, had their home base in Akron. You might remember them. Rex Humbard, who died at the age of 88 just a year or so ago – Rex Humbard and his Cathedral of Tomorrow, a large architectural presence in Akron. And Ernest Angley, still going strong in his mid-80’s, and his Grace Cathedral. Rex Humbard sang, with a soft Oklahoma drawl. Ernest Angley healed – becoming a frequent target for parodists who mimicked his voice and manner, even his hair, and questioned his results.

I was thinking about those memories, and the themes raised by this morning’s gospel passage, when on cue, Time magazine (February 23, 2009) arrived in our mailbox yesterday. Perhaps you saw the cover article: “How Faith Can Heal.” It is worth reading, and perhaps it is worth our reading together, maybe even discussing on our Facebook page or something like that.

Time is market-driven enough so that a cover story like this must be connecting somehow, perhaps to us. A series of articles. One reported that people who attend religious services have a lower risk of dying in any one year; that people who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis than people who believe in a punitive God. Gail Ironson, a psychologist and psychiatrist who studies HIV and religions belief reports that “spirituality predicts for better disease control.”

Richard Sloan, medical professor, questions that connection – “Science doesn’t deal in supernatural explanations,” he says. “Religion and science address different concerns.” I am not smart enough to disagree with or challenge scientific conclusions. But I do know that to read lists of books on the shelves at Barnes and Noble is to discover that faith is on the mind of science – whether it is physical science or astronomy or medicine.

The more we ponder big things, how the universe is formed, how the brain works, the more we realize a deep connection between how we think and how we behave and what we believe, or even whether we believe. Scientists and theologians are now debating whether we are “hardwired” for religion. That debate will take awhile.

But something is going on. And we know it. Psychologist Jean Kristeller conducted a survey of oncologists and found that a large proportion of them did feel that it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients, and even to offer a referral as needed. (Page 72)

Something is going on. I am not a scientist. But my embrace of John Calvin and the Reformed theological tradition would insist on a deeper connection with all of this – politics and economics and faith, to be sure, but also science and medicine and faith. Why would a sovereign God not be involved somehow, somehow, with questions of medical science?

Something is going on. That something is not magic, nor superstition, nor a desperate search for easy answers in the face of a tough reality. But something. Several years ago we visited a shrine near Santa Fe – Santuario de Chimayo. Holy dirt, pilgrims have insisted for centuries, and if loved ones are too sick to make it there, they rub the dirt on photographs.

Something is going on. We visit hospitals a lot, and every time I go I am impressed, overwhelmed, by what goes on. And I am taken by how much progress medical science is making. I remember when I started this, something as simple as a gall bladder surgery or hip replacement were major events. Now a gall bladder surgery leaves three little pinprick holes on your stomach. And it seems that it won’t be long before all of us get a new set of hips at age 50 and perhaps a new set of knees at 60 – like a new set of tires after 30,000 miles. But it goes deeper than that. Cancer. Heart. Dementia.

What we knew each day is more than what we knew the day before.

* Still – there is something about a compassionate physician who works hard not only to deliver the medical goods, but works hard to establish a relationship with a concerned patient and an anxious family.
* And still – there is something about a nurse who checks in, who asks questions, who answers questions.
* And still – there is something about a hospital visit, from a friend, family member, church deacon, minister, even, that seems to make a difference, and a simple prayer uttered at the side of the bed.

Something is going on. Something was going on. We don’t know his name. We do not know how long he had been afflicted with leprosy, the social ostracism, the religious rejection, the physical pain. We do not know. We do not know how hard it was for him to muster the courage to come to Jesus, to confront him. In many of the gospels’ healing stories, Jesus would spit in his hands and rub some dirt into the salvia and use that earth mixture as a kind of healing poultice. It is simpler this time – simpler and somehow more profound. It is an odd interchange, once they meet. The unnamed leper says to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” And Jesus is moved. And he stretches out his hand – those same hands that have done so many mundane and extraordinary things – and touches him. “I do choose,” he says. “Be made clean!”

And the man is healed, and though Jesus advised him to keep this all a secret, he does not. And his popularity grows, popularity that will get him into deeper and deeper trouble.

Given the earlier conversation about faith and healing, we 21st century followers don’t know quite what to make of all of this. Beverly Gaventa reminds us that what we want to know – the details about the disease and what actually happened – are absent in this account. (Texts for Preaching, Year B, page 149 ff.) Rather, Gaventa reminds us, the point is not medical. “Given that the leper was probably understood to be a sinner and an outcast,” she writes, “…his approach to Jesus is more than polite. He knows that many would not heal him even if they could.”

And Jesus’ response is twofold. He responds with pity, with “more than a superficial kind of sympathy.”

And then he touches the man. Gaventa writes: "Healing often involves touching, of course, but touching a person with a skin disease identifies Jesus with that person, making his outcast as well.” That is where the miracles is for me – not in the healing, but in the touch, and in Jesus’ willingness to risk, to identify with one whom religion and society had cast out.

Iona leader Kathy Galloway writes that “The New Testament evidence is that both Jesus and the Christian community prayed for the sick and laid hands on them when they prayed. We know in our daily lives that it is often touch, the hand on the shoulder, the hug of a friend, the cuddle of a child, that lets us know that we are loved. Touch, often more than words, is way of giving physical expression to our prayers and concerns for each other.” (The Pattern of Our Days, p. 47)

I often think about Jesus’ hands. The hands that wrote in the dirt. The hands that welcomed the children. The hands that broke bread. The hands that overturned the table in the temple. The hands that carried the cross, the same hands that were so wounded so soon thereafter. I often think about those hands – the hands that held deep sympathy, and reached out, and touched.

And I often think about our hands, these hands. The skilled hands that perform surgery, that replace joints or valves, that remove tumors, that place IV lines. The loving hands that bake casseroles. The tender hands that caress a loved one in hospice, or cradle a new born. The compassionate hands joined in prayer. Those hands. These hands.

( Portion of Bruce Springsteen’s “My City of Ruins,” focusing on repeating chorus… “with these hands…”)

What is the deep connection – medically, theologically – between faith and healing? I do know that long ago, a hurting man came to Jesus, and Jesus had pity, and touched him, touched him with his hands. And it made all the difference. Amen.