The Blessing of Healing

      When I had my brain tumor a few years ago, I was very much in need of healing.  The tumor was a menengioma,  about the size of an orange on the left frontal lobe of my brain.  I had been depressed for quite a while, I had no emotion and was living without any ability to feel much of anything.  Our family doctor tried some anti-depressants, but none of them worked.  He finally suggested that I get an MRI, which was when they discovered the tumor.

I was fortunate in having an excellent surgeon and a team of neurologists who shepherded me through the whole thing and a good community around me.  I was visited by people from my parish, my bishop and clergy in the diocese.   My family was there every day and did their utmost for my benefit.  Rosie was a star who took my healing on as her primary project.  My daughters all brought their talents to my bedside.  Melanie, the nurse practitioner,  Jennifer, the caring professor and Heather my spiritual guide.  They all had a part in my healing.  I am so grateful to all of them for what they were able to do for me.  I also had my own faith.  If you had asked me what my faith was for before my tumor, I don’t think I could have given you much of an answer beyond the kind of thing that we have all learned, and that bring us to this place.  In the middle of this experience, I had a much different answer.  I think of the words of Psalm 130:

Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;
LORD, hear my voice;  
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.

  It took me a year and a half to recover and it wasn’t easy going.  I’m not a particularly good patient.  I thought I could just get up out of my bed and do everything that I had done before.  When I got home from the hospital, the story that my family tells, the first thing that I wanted to do was to take the dog for a walk.  That might seem silly, and it certainly was, but it was my way of asserting my control over my life.  Fortunately, I had a team of people around me who didn’t let that get too far.  Rosie raised her voice, and the kids all teamed up to keep me contained, more or less.   Their first priority was my healing, not the expression of my control.  They kept their focus and it helped me greatly to regaining my hold on my life.

How does healing happen?  My family doctor told me that he can heal about a fourth of the people who come into his office for help, the rest simply get help with their symptoms to alleviate their pain or whatever it is that is tormenting them.  I’m not at all surprised at this.  Medical science has made great strides, and continues to improve all of the time, but still everything isn’t curable.  We all die eventually and we get through our lives with a certain amount of discomfort.  The older that we get, the more discomfort there is, and we spend a lot of time talking to each other about our ailments.  That is one of the primary ways that we seem to relate to each other.

Jesus spent a lot of time healing people.  In the fifth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is confronted by a man named Jairus, one of the leaders of the synagogue who begged him to come and heal his daughter, who was on the verge of death.  On his way with Jairus, a woman who was hemorrhaging pressed close and touched his outer garment and was healed of her hemorrhage.  When he got to Jairus’ house, there was a crowd there who told Jairus that his daughter was dead and that it was useless to trouble the teacher any further.  Jesus ignored them, saying that the girl was just sleeping.  They laughed at him for this.  But Jesus went in, took the young girl’s hand, said the words Talitha cum, which means “little girl get up,” and she arose and started walking about.  Everyone was amazed.

Everyone was also amazed at my healing.  I always got a reaction from people when I told them that I had had a brain tumor.  That it was a past event and that I had been cured of it always produced wonder.  Thank God for that.  It certainly was a wonder that I reflect on from time to time and realize how lucky and blessed that I am to have gone through it, and how wonderful it is to know that all of those people did so much for me to get me through it.  That is the part of it that always amazes me.  God’s blessing surrounds me.  I have seen it in the faces of the people who were a part of my healing, and I know that whatever I do from this moment on is supported by that blessing.  God’s healing is a blessing for all of us.  It is one of the products of faith and prayer.  I looks like a miracle and it is.  Be a part of God’s healing for yourself and for others.  That’s why we have our prayer list and it is one of the primary reasons that we are together as a community

Politics and the Poor

      In this rabid political season, I sometimes am in wonder of people who make great claims of being Christian and yet offer policies that grossly contradict the commandments of Jesus.  I am thinking of the way that the poor and the outcast are minimized in the strategies that are offered as what our government ought to do to reduce our deficit and make the economy work better for all of us.  I don’t remember Jesus doing much talking about how the economy ought to be maintained so that it provides for those who have much and leaves those who are poor in the lurch.  What I believe that Jesus emphasized in his preaching was that the rich need to take care of the poor.  Those who have great benefit should provide for those with little benefit.

The story of the rich man and Lazarus in the 19th chapter of Luke stands out for me.  The poverty stricken Lazarus sat at the rich man’s door, simply asking for a drink of water.  The rich man passed him daily as he went about his business.  When the time came for the rich man to die, he found himself in Hades in the midst of torment.  He saw Lazarus far off across a great divide in the arms of Abraham.  He asked Abraham to send Lazarus to him to give him simply a sip of water (which was what Lazarus sought in his life from the rich man).  Abraham told him that there was a great gulf between them that could not be crossed.  Then, when the rich man asked him to send Lazarus to his brothers to warn them, Abraham said that it wouldn’t do any good because they hadn’t believed Moses and the prophets, so neither would they believe one who had risen from the dead.

It’s hard to avoid thinking of Jesus and his resurrection here.  Often we don’t believe what he said either.  I think that is part of the problem with those self proclaimed Christians who preach economics instead of Jesus in their political campaigns.

I am impressed by the words of Psalm 20:

The LORD is known by his acts of justice;  
                                  the wicked are trapped in the works of their own hands.


The wicked shall be given over to the grave,  
and also all the peoples that forget God.
 
For the needy shall not always be forgotten,  
and the hope of the poor shall not perish for ever.


                               Rise up, O LORD, let not the ungodly have the upper hand
                               let them be judged before you.

 Put fear upon them, O LORD;  
                               let the ungodly know they are but mortal.
                                                                                                --Psalm 20: 16-20

I know above all things that the welfare of the poor and the outcast is the foremost mission of Christianity.  It is the first thing that Jesus preached and it was the first thing that he did in his ministry.  He constantly reached out to those who had nothing and gave of himself for all of us in our abject poverty. Poverty of spirit as well as our lack of goods.  His crucifixion was for us all, for the forgiveness of our sinfulness and the certainty of our reception by our loving God.  That is the essence of what Jesus taught to us all.  To see these things minimized or forgotten in the pursuit of political gain is to my mind heretical.  It flies in the face of the profession of the belief in Jesus as our savior.  How can we forget his teaching when we claim Christianity as our faith?

Myth and Truth

     The word myth is often used as a synonym for something false.  Sometimes it is used as the opposite of truth.  I’ve seen articles that claim to reveal the “myths” that surround one thing or another and to then tell the truth.  That is both irritating to me and also confusing.  I have always thought of myth as a way of telling truth.  Certainly the Greek myths did that and the bible is full of mythological statements that are not intended to be taken literally.

One of the great difficulties of religion is the tendency to read the myths literally and to expect them to be true in the detail that they offer.  I think of the early stories in Genesis about the creation, how Adam and Eve dwelled in the Garden of Eden, disobeyed God by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and were then banned from the Garden.  We are led to believe that we are all stained by the “original” sin of that first couple.  There is a truth to that, of course that the mythological story relates well.  The difficulty comes when people take that story so very seriously that they insist on placing it in a particular time and space.  Archbishop Usher, the seventeenth century scholar wrote that the earth was created in the year 4006 BC, using the scriptural details of the story of the Garden of Eden.   That belief persists to this day in the denial of scientific findings that put the creation of the earth millions of years ago and the insistence that teaching the Darwinian concepts of evolution ought to be stricken from the curricula of our schools.  This is beyond ignorance and it endangers human intellectual understanding in the worst way.  That there is even controversy over this is beyond my understanding.

Jesus constantly taught in parables.  Are we to argue that there was an actual Prodigal Son and an actual Good Samaritan, or are these simply excellent illustrations of the points that he was trying to make about how we all live and are related to each other and our God?   In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of the small mustard seed that grows to be the largest of shrubs:

                                       With what can we compare the kingdom 
of God, or what parable will we use for it?
It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown 
upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds
                                   on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and
 becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts 
forth large branches, so that the birds of the air 
can make nests in its shade.
                                                                                      --Mark 4: 30-32

That makes the Kingdom of Heaven wonderfully clear as a very small thing that grows in the world to be the largest of things that can enable and help from within everything that there is on this earth.  We don’t need to know “which” mustard seed or mustard shrub Jesus was talking about, the illustration stands by itself.  That might seem to be obvious, but it is far from obvious to those who want to make everything in the bible literal.

As a preacher, I love illustrations.  Hardly a sermon goes by that I don’t fill it with stories that demonstrate the points that I am trying to make.  I don’t expect people to take all of those stories absolutely literally.  They are there to illustrate the points that I am trying to make.  That’s all.  To give the stories the additional burden of being literally true in every point is to endow them with too much and to not allow them to be what they are, simply illustrations that reach back to the point that I am trying to make.  That is what mythology is trying to do.  To let the myths stand for a central truth that helps us all to get the point that God is trying to make.  The fall of human kind, the “original” sin, is certainly obvious for all of us to see if we just look around.  Isn’t the knowledge of good and evil central to our problems with each other?  That is the point of the tale of Adam and Eve.  It ought not bear the burden of all of creation also.

Faith and Certainty

     I believe that faith and certainty are opposites.  When we become certain, we don’t need any faith.  We have all of the answers.  Sometimes this spirit of certainty invades the church and we believe that we have the answers and that the people outside have nothing at all.  In our recent past, the Charismatic movement was an example of this.  There were many wonderful people connected with this movement, they brought joy and a powerful religion to a great number of people; but there was a subtext to all of it that tried to make the movement the whole.  I see this reflected sometimes in the songs that the charismatics loved such as the hymn I am the bread of life.  There is a verse in that hymn that speaks of the certainty of  everlasting life.  It goes:

Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man
      And drink of his blood,
You cannot live forever,
You cannot live forever.

The certainty of that verse and the arrogance of its contention infuriates me every time that I hear it.  I simply cannot sing it, and as a result, I don’t like the hymn at all.  Also , when it is sung, it is frequently accompanied by people standing up and raising their arms in the air to emphasize the lyrics that go:  And I will raise them up, and I will raise them up on the last day!

Our faith teaches us that by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are all forgiven of our sins and assured of eternal life.  There is no physical, scientific proof of that, it is a matter of our faith.  We can never prove it with certainty.  The only proof that we have is contained in our scriptures, such as the words in Second Corinthians:

                                 Just as we have the same spirit of faith that is
                             in accordance with scripture-- "I believed, and
                             so I spoke" -- we also believe, and so we speak,
                             because we know that the one who raised the 
                             Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will
                             bring us with you into his presence. 
                                                                   --2 Corinthians 4: 13-14

That is what I rely on for my faith.  The only certainty included in that passage is the certainty of the effect of Jesus’ resurrection on my salvation and my eternal life.  That the God in whom I trust will raise me from the dead, just as he raised Jesus in his resurrection.   Beyond that, I need not worry at all.  The evangelical work of that text will be seen in the life that I live, not in the hymns that I sing.

Certainty has infected the church often.  The crusades were an example of this when we sent armies to “liberate” Jerusalem from the Muslims and the Inquisition when we burned Jews and supposedly heretic Christians at the stake because their religious beliefs were different from the powerful church.  It continues today with the persecution of Muslims in the wake of the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

As Christians, we need to understand that God has spoken eloquently and differently to many human beings and that God’s work can be seen throughout the world in different and powerful ways.   Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus and followers of the Tao all live lives that echo the desires of God.  We are foolish when we believe that only Christianity is the preferred religion of God.  God is larger than that.  I know it from what I have seen in the lives of people such as the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, Confucius, Martin Buber and others who represent divergent faiths.  Thank God for all of them and for their work.  Let’s join with them in their celebration of the goodness of humankind and their obvious love of God.