SERMON Healing Wholeness
Pentecost 4(B) proper 8, Lectionary 13:
Lamentations 3:22-33; Psalm 130; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5: 21-43
We live in a time of amazing medical breakthroughs.
DNA mapping and RNA research has been amazing. Not too long ago, it led to the identification a breast cancer gene -- BRCA -- something that first explained the unbroken chain of breast cancers in our son-in-law's mother's family. This past week, The New England Journal of Medicine reported the early findings of a small but remarkable study employing a new class of drug called a PARP inhibitor that targets cancer cells but leaves healthy cells alone. It specifically targets the genetic mutations that can cause breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers without the side effects of conventional chemotherapy. An amazing breakthrough.
And, even now because of research, many types of cancers that only a few years ago would have required radical surgery can now be treated with drugs and radiation. All quite hard to believe.
Of course not all cancers can be treated (as we well know), and people die. And there still are the microbes — the viruses and bacteria. The HIV virus goes untreated for millions around the world, but especially in Africa. And over two million people are dying every year. There is the ebola microbe that literally eats its victims. And Mad Cow disease that attacks and destroys brains. And even old plagues are making a come back. Tuberculosis now kills 1.5 million persons a year. Malaria still infects 275 million individuals yearly, resulting in a million deaths. No, we do not lack for plagues, new or old. Or diseases. Or death.
Even so, as medically and scientifically grounded individuals, we approach what we hear about Jesus this morning with a certain amount of skepticism and superiority and perhaps even a touch of amusement.
Here we have Jesus, simply walking through the crowds, and a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years merely touches his clothes. Jesus, we are told, feels the power leave him. When he asks who has touched him, the woman comes forward to confess that she is the one. Jesus then tells her that her faith has made her well and that she will be healed. Were that not miracle enough, Jesus goes on to raise a twelve year old girl whom every one thinks has died (we are not sure, by the way, that Jesus shares that view or that she is dead in Mark's gospel -- she may have been in a coma; in Matthew and Luke, she is dead). To do this, he gets rid of the crowds, and takes Peter, James, and John and the girl's mother and father into her room. There, Mark quotes Jesus in Aramaic (which was the language that Jesus always spoke). To emphasize the power of Jesus' original words, Mark has Jesus say, "Talitha cum"-- which means, "Little girl, get up." Which she does. And then, to prove she is alive, Jesus orders her to eat.
Our first reaction is to think of this as faith healing -- faith healing like the Oral Roberts faith healing on Sunday morning television in the 1950s. Or like the faith healing of Benny Hinn who was in India when we were a few years ago. Oral Roberts would grab and hold the ill person, or the part of the person that was ill or deformed, and yell -- and here we have the power of the original word—"HEAL!" And the person would say, "Praise God," drop the crutches, and tell everyone that he or she was healed.
I am not exactly sure how Benny Hinn goes about healing but I do know that the claimed 7.3 million mostly Hindu persons who attended the Festival when we were there came because they wished to see Benny Hinn's healing powers. For the most part they were disappointed. Not because Benny Hinn didn't claim to heal but because his claims did not hold up (the Indian press made sure the public knew they didn't!).
Reading the news reports of Benny Hinn's remarkably few Bangalore cures, I wondered, as I did as a child watching Oral Roberts, about the people healed. Were they really cured of their illnesses? Would they stop seeking medical treatment and simply get sicker. But then I would worry about my skepticism. After all isn't faith healing what Jesus is all about? Furthermore, doesn't Mark say that the woman had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and that she had gotten no better, but rather grew worse"?
Mark did take that dig at physicians (the other gospel writers left it out even though they used Mark as a source). But physicians were not physicians as we know physicians. For one thing, they took great risks in actually treating patients since they could be put to death if a patient died. As a result, physicians were more like philosophers than healers. And because they hesitated to do anything and mostly did nothing, their patients frequently did get worse. By contrast, non-physician folk healers were willing to use their hands and to risk failure. They were plentiful and had great followings. Jesus was not alone in first century Palestine in curing people.
So is that what Jesus was about? Faith healing and curing people?
He wasn't. If he were into faith healing and curing people, he wouldn't be waiting for someone to touch his clothes. He would not be caught by surprise when he suddenly feels his power leaving him. Instead, he would be looking for every opportunity to exercise that power and would not be caught unaware. Nor would he banished spectators from the event. Or tell people not to tell anyone. Like Oral Roberts in the 1950s and Benny Hinn in Bangalore, he would make sure that his acts of healing were deliberate and public and made known by others. No Jesus is about something else.
Look at who is healed.
Look at the woman who is cured of her twelve years of hemorrhaging. Under Jewish law she was ritually impure. Any place she sat or touched was considered unclean. She was not only prevented from entering the Temple, but was ostracized by the community and her family. The reason she was so contrite in confessing that she had touched Jesus is because, even by touching his clothes, she had made him ritually impure.
Look at the twelve year old girl. In the first century 60% of all live births died by their mid teens. Children and teens -- especially girls -- were marginal and expendable. Not worth healing. Yet Jesus heals her. And if she is dead, as everyone believes, he becomes ritually impure by touching her.
Why, then, does Jesus heal two females, one impure for twelve years, the other only twelve years old? The answer is in what he accomplishes. In both cases healing is a means to end. In both cases two female persons who would have been banished from the community, one by ritual law and the other by death, are restored to life in the community. And what Jesus is saying in healing them is: The Kingdom of God is coming, and when it comes it will include all those who have been excluded from the community because of disease or gender or social status or occupation. It will first of all be a restoration of God's people Israel -- those already part of the community but the ritually impure, the marginal, the tax collectors, and sinners as well. Then the gentiles. "Go in peace," Jesus tells the cured woman -- peace, "shalom" in Hebrew, God's wholeness. "Go in God's wholeness."
And he is also saying, the Kingdom of God is breaking in, even now, by the restoration of this woman and this girl to God's family. We are, he is saying, experiencing God's wholeness even now. And, because he is saying that as well, the healing that he is talking about is so much more than just curing the woman's hemorrhaging or restoring the twelve year old to life. It's about wholeness, individual and communal. It's about real healing.
And that's where it becomes impossible to feel superior about something that is so needed and so important in our lives. It is definitely reassuring to know that, because DNA has been mapped and the roles of RNA discovered, genetic cancers will be cured -- perhaps by the time our granddaughter is the age of the girl in today's gospel. But that, of course, says nothing about unimaginable microbes twelve years from now. There is nothing at all reassuring there. What is truly reassuring, however, as well as truly humbling, is to know that real healing, real wholeness is a reality of this community and this place, in word and sacrament, with and through one another.
I am a big fan of the writer Susan Howatch. In her novel, A Question of Integrity, she describes a weekday healing service in one of London's City churches from the point of view of a nonbeliever who, at the beginning of the novel, accidentally stumbles in on the service to get out of the rain. Her character describes those at the service. Most, she reports, "are onlookers,"
some obviously admiring, some reticent, but all unable to tear themselves away as the minority made their way slowly up toward the altar. The woman in the second will chair was a stroke victim like Aunt, and one side of her face was paralyzed. I watched her with growing incredulity. What did she think was going to happen? Did she imagine she was going to jump out of her chair and walk? I felt outraged. I also decided that this was the most embarrassing scene I had ever witnessed and that I wanted above all to leave.
Yet I stayed. . . . . [Later, after reflecting on her Aunt for whom she is caring, she says:]
I told myself that I had to leave before I started to scream in despair, but before I could move a muscle I saw [the priest] touch the gray bowed head of the stroke victim in her wheelchair. The voice in my head instantly cried: 'Oh let her get up and walk!' But of course she didn't and of course I'd been crazy to imagine such a thing was possible. The poor woman was quite unchanged - or so I thought - but when the wheel chair was steered back down the aisle I saw that she was very far from being unchanged. Her dark eyes were luminous with joy and her lopsided ugly old face was radiant. With her twisted mouth she had managed to smile.
I thought [Susan Howatch's character says]: bloody hell! And the next moment tears were not merely flowing but flooding down my checks . . . .
A cure? No. Wholeness and healing? Most definitely. And not only that of the stroke victim but of Susan Howatch's main character as well -- or at least the beginning of the healing process and her eventual restoration to the community of faith that she had rejected and shunned.
The wholeness and healing that we know in this community makes it possible for us to be wholeness and healing for others. In the words of the old hymn,
Grant that we all, made one in faith,
In your community may find
The wholeness that, enriching us,
Shall reach and prosper humankind.
Amen.
June 28, 2009
Ruth VanDemark, pastor . Wicker Park Lutheran Church . Chicago