“Holy Healing”
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Abingdon Church – August 21, 2016 – The Rev. Torrence Harman
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
Let us pray in the words of the Psalmist this morning:
“In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge. Deliver me and set me free;incline your ear to me and save me. Be my strongrock, a castle to keep me safe;you are my crag and my stronghold. Deliver me, my God, for you are my hope.I am sustained by you.” (Portions of Psalm 7:1-6 – adapted)
Twenty years ago Barbara Brown Taylor offered the following in her new book titled Gospel Medicine:
“We need gospel balm. Smearing it over the skin of our days, we may begin to warm to the stories that still describe us, stories that know us better than we know ourselves. Their strength mends our weakness. Their truth thaws our falseness. Their life disinfects our death. Hearing them and telling them, we surrender ourselves to the (Great) Physician who heals us with words, dressing our wounds by stitching the raw edges of our lives to his.”
Nearly two thousand years ago Jesus touched a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. Bent her over so deeply that she constantly faced only the ground beneath her feet. She stood up, healed, facing a horizon she had only imagined for most of her life.
This morning, we are offered Gospel balm, whatever our condition. Whatever may have blocked our horizon in the past, or maybe blocks it even now. Whatever our condition, from time to time, aren’t we sometimes blind, sometimes deaf, sometimes crippled, sometimes paralyzed, sometimes seized by some negative spirit that can limit us, separate us from the whole health that our Creator has in mind for us?
There are approximately thirty healing stories in the Gospel. There are more of them in the Gospel of Luke than in Matthew, Mark and John. Maybe because the Gospel of Luke is ascribed to “Luke, the Physician.” Whoever compiled the Gospel of Luke, it seems that author specially promoted a way of seeing Jesus as a healer, not just of physical or mental conditions, but a healer of the whole self – body, mind, and spirit.
We call these stories, “miracle” stories, probably because in some way they seem to defy human logic. The fact is there were many so-called miracle workers wandering around Palestine in Jesus’ time. But there is something different about Jesus and what he offers. The names and stories of those other miracle workers have faded away over time, ignored, forgotten, like dust in the wind. Maybe because those miracle workers just treated the obvious, the observable problem, while Jesus’ healing power reaches deeper – working on the systematic issues that can dis-figure, dis-ease, deplete, diminishnot only our health, but our whole life.
Jesus’way is different; his way has staying power. His actions offer a deeper, sustaining healing – healing that goes beyond treatment of the dis-eased condition others see. The real miracle of Jesus’ way is that he gets beneath the surface issue. His eyes and heart take in, see our whole system, see us in our entirety (mind, body and spirit) as well as the conditions in which we live. When he reaches out to touch, to heal, he reaches into the whole of us. And by his touch we become connected to the Divine, creative, transformational power of God.
The story this morning of the woman bent over, unable to stand straight, touches something very personal for me. The contemporary medical community, if pressed to make a diagnosis, probably interprets this woman’s condition as scoliosis, a curvature of the spine – it can happen to a young person, but mostly appears in older age. It is a deteriorating condition. It doesn’t get better over time. I have it. Not just like the woman bent over by it in our Gospel story today, (mine twists my spine sideways, not up and down) but like her it throws my body out of alignment.
Of course my condition and even hers which is much further advanced than mine, pales in comparison to the issues, physical and mental, other characters in long ago Gospel stories face, as well as those who face much more drastic health conditions today as their lives are being dramatically and tragically altered by health conditions many of which are even terminal. But I interweave my story with this long ago woman by way of illustration of how Jesus’ ways of bringing healing power into any life can alter the way any of us, whatever our condition, may live life. And, by sharing my story of living the message I found, encourage you to do the same with whatever condition you or those you love may face.
This Gospel story has been a gift for me, a lens through which I have searched for clues for my life, despite my condition. I have tried to press every ounce of grace and wisdom out of it that I can.
Would I like Jesus to touch my back and straighten it out – just by a touch. Oh, yes! Yes! Would that the chronic pain that comes and goes with it could stop – forever. I would like to be able to play sports again without pain, be able to walk for miles, run around with the grandchildren, hold plump babies in my arms for longer than a few minutes, sit comfortably without constantly trying to adjust myself to find peace of body. I have wanted this relief and release.It hasn’t happened. The curvature remains and grows more twisted. As I age I become physically more and more “off center.”
For me, the theme of “alignment”has become a work in progress in my life. My life’s desire is “alignment” – to seek centeredness and to live from that location – a location that is much more than the line-up of my vertebrae – an alignment with the true source of my life – an alignment which parallels that which God has in mind and heart for me.
The desire to allow myself to be drawn by Christ into alignment with and centered in God’s love is much bigger than how my spine is shaped.
Our desire towards God is a much more valuable and expansive desire in the long run, although far too often that desire is hijacked by the push and pull of a world that doesn’t always seem to have our best interests in mind and tries to lure us away from our true center. God’s vision for each of us transcends, stretches out much further than our human perception that life is fatally interwoven with our physical life which by design appears to have finality.
So what have I discovered that helps? Not just physical exercises (something I don’t embrace easily), but also and more importantly what might be called exercises of the spirit, ways of the spirit that seem to bring me relief, because they not only impact me emotionally, mentally and soul-fully, but seem to help me physically.
What are some of these ways? Ways inward, searching and
finding God’s Spirit present and at work within me touching, healing, restoring, resourcing my recovery. These ways can even alleviate pain, bring me some degree of relaxation, calmness and peace. Ways such as contemplative prayer; the practice of mindfulness; an exercise in which I focus on the rhythm of my breath as if God’s life- giving essence is reaching every fiber of me; taking “time-out” of life’s busy-ness; letting go of stress, even lovingly instructing my mind to “take a hike” – to be quiet and stop trying to control me; using the gift of imagination – imagining a warm glowing light surrounding the place of pain, softening, melting the pain and healing that place; sitting quietly in nature letting the creation around me soothe my mind and soul; the practice of just being as I let go of expectations of what I want and just rest, relaxing into what the Divine wants for me, feeling held in the being-ness of that which I call God.
Other times, the path to this alignment with God’s love, the path to this peace, is outward. God calls us into outward actions that God uses to bring about a healthier more abundant life for each of us who respond to that call as we are gathered with those God places in our path. Divine healing, divine love cycles through and restores those gathered in an awareness of Christ’s presence and power and so being “out there” in the midst of this Divine action is also a critical path in my life.
At the heart, at the core of both these inward and outward pathways is connection – connection with and immersion in a Divine healing current flowing with love. Whether or not our physical condition is “cured” this connection seems to bring about degrees of “healing” – a way of healing that offers some serenity, some hope, some relief as we come to recognize that we are more than the condition that plagues us.
We need to see the gifts these Gospel stories offer us. They are not limited to the recited “facts” of the stories, but also explore the conditions treated by Jesus as symbolic of deeper issues.
There are ways we are deaf, even if the ENT doctor can’t diagnose it. There are ways our sight is diminished, even though the optometrist or ophthamologist doesn’t see any problem. There are ways our lives are paralyzed even though we are walking to and fro in daily life with a smile on our lips, or a mask on our face to hide our pain, our distress. Maybe we are crippled in ways that don’t show up on the radiologist’s screen: by holding on too long to fear, anger, rage, jealousy, resentment. The radiologist may not pick up on them but they disturb the emotional radar of those around us and certainly appear on God’s screen.
The Gospel balm as Barbara Brown Taylor dubs it is here, embedded in the stories of Jesus’ healing power – touching all dimensions of life.
With ears to hear, with eyes to see and with our lives, as well as our lips, touched and called to proclaim the good news, may we experience and show forth in our lives the Gospel news, the good news that there is a divine resource, reaching out to us. A Source that is greater than we can even or ever imagine. One that connects with us deep in our very souls and in the soul of all life. One that can transform our limitations, that can transcend the physical body and the ego of the mind. One that calls us to life far beyond what we consider chronic and terminal.
And when that happens to us, when we are connected with this Source deep within the soul of us, as it wells up within us and spreads throughout our being, then we find true well-ness and wholeness. We find, like the psalmist, our “go to” refuge, a place of hope, our stronghold, our safe place, and ultimately our deliverance.
When we find and connect with the One who restores, redeems and sustains life within us, we know it, after all, as a Miracle.
By God’s amazing grace, may it be so!
Thanks be to God!