Matthew 9.18-26                                                                                         25 October 2009

“SHIFTING HORIZONS OF HEALING”

Have you noticed that every other TV commercial these days is a drug ad from a pharmaceutical company?  There’s one with four guys ranging on the open road in a convertible. Like Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, right? Not exactly. It’s about their various degrees of happiness after their too frequent trips to the rest room. What a comment on the robust satisfactions of middle-aged men. “Free on the open road, the wind in our hair, and we hit all of the best freeway rest stops!” 

Another ad has a middle-aged couple, hands playfully entwined, watching a red sunset from the edge of a cliff, sitting in separate bathtubs. I am sure you wives hear this from your husbands all the time, “C’mon honey, help me move our twin claw-footed bathtubs out to the ridge; looks like a humdinger of a sunset tonight.”

Maybe craziest is how after touting the wondrous benefits of whatever new drug, the announcer finally goes into frenzied rapid-speak: “…restless brain syndrome should always be treated by a doctor. Prozatene may cause skin irritation, drow-siness, dizziness, constipation, consternation, and constant procrastination. Your knees may explode, you may have uncontrollable outbursts of cursing, and a troll head may grow out of your shoulder. If these symptoms occur, discontinue use of Prozatene.   Ask if Prozatene is right for you!”  Yeah, like I want all that in my life.

We had better laugh at least a little.  Because the state of health care in the land today is enough to make us cry. It is expensive, fragmented, awkward, and wildly irregular in the benefits it delivers.  Some are over-served by billions of dollars with drugs we never needed or even used.  Others are under-served and might wish for the basic treatments available to most anybody in a place like Namibia.
Today I preach mostly on what health is.  And how our views have changed here. 

Matthew tells of how central Jesus’ ministry of healing was. For he not only heals the sick, he even raises the dead.   As Jesus hears the tearful plea of a Jewish synagogue leader on his knees, he heads out to visit his daughter who has died.  En route to help the first, another lady lunges at Jesus for help. A hemorrhaging woman, suffering for 12 years, trails him to touch the hem of his garment.  She sensed his healing power and wanted a chance for something better for her life.

But notice something.  Where Jesus was generally concerned with the healing of the whole person—body, mind, spirit, and soul—we have become obsessed with physical cures.  Cures are different than healings. Cures are physical, factual, biological events. Cures are I-want-it-fixed-now.  Healings are more mysterious. They play out over time, bringing transformation to our days and living, not just symptoms alleviated. For example, after being blinded on the road to Damascus, Saul waited for days, fasting alone.  That waiting was essential to his healing. For God led a man named Ananias to Saul. He laid his hands on him, and the scales fell from Saul’s eyes. Not only could he see now, Saul had become Paul. He was a completely different man.  Could we go with Jesus beyond curing to healing? Healing is about the whole man. Healing involves inner and outer transformation. And healing assumes God works and speaks even through disease and disorder.  

It has been hard for the Church to resist the temptation to reduce the Gospel’s broad concerns with healing into society’s narrower concerns with physical cures.  But one phenomenon indicates how we have succumbed.  Have you ever seen church people become indignant if someone from the church hasn’t visited them when they become ill? In a sense, I can’t blame them.  John, the Caring Visitors, and I always want to know. We’re eager to phone or visit everyone who is unwell. But linger with me on this for a moment.  Isn’t it curious that sickness is the only occasion when our presence is deemed essential and an outrage if we miss you? 

Why isn’t the absolutely essential time to see a pastor, say, when your grandchild drops out of school, confused, despairing and lost? Why not when it seems like you are losing all of your friends and your world feels empty? Why not when you become morally indignant, outraged at how a few people have so much and how many people have little? Are the infirmities of the flesh truly more significant or spiritually essential than these concerns? As one who gets ill, as you do, I don’t think so.  Maybe we pastors should wear white lab coats instead of pulpit gowns. 

Prayer is also a revealing microcosm on our obsession with physical well-being.  Have you ever noticed the only time we pray for others is when they get sick? Now, I believe prayer can heal. I have seen miraculous healings as a result of it. But Jesus’ horizons of prayer are broader than our maladies. He prayed for daily bread.  He prayed over our debts or sins.  But he didn’t mention discomfort or infection in the Lord’s Prayer.  Elsewhere, when Jesus bid us to pray, it was for our enemies, not our gall bladders. How often do we pray with the same urgency for our enemies? Not often enough to please Jesus, I suspect.  Physical well-be-ing outshines everything else we pray about, as though it’s our greatest dilemma.

Prayer in the church has become the remedy of last resort when other methods fail.  It’s as though God, unworthy of consultation over our most vital struggles of living, is reduced to the last link in the chain of health care delivery system. Yes, Jesus healed. But he was notoriously vague about what we were to make of that.  He didn’t heal every sick person in Judea, only some.  Why some, not others? I have no idea.  But I know that when Jesus did heal people, he usually told them to keep quiet about it. I also know Jesus approached healing others with broader horizons in mind than “this-physical-part-of-me-doesn’t-work-anymore-so-fix-it.”
After all, remember, every single one of the people Jesus healed eventually died.

Don’t get me wrong. Attention to health is a good thing. Prayer’s power for heal-ing is something I cherish. I’ve seen it and known it first hand. But our expecta-tions are out of control. William Willimon writes, “Somewhere we crossed a line. Health care became immortality management in service to our collective notion that physical deterioration is an injustice and mortality is an outrage.  Our finitude can be fixed if we put enough money into the project.  And we shall be like gods.”

”We are captive to a lie,” Willimon continues. “I got sick, I went to the doctor, the doctor fixed me, and now I’m well.  It’s a nice story, one in which we confidently invest billions, but it isn’t true.  Most of those who get sick in my church go to the doctor, are subjected to this and that (which may at best be analgesic) and then are sent home, sometimes for a lifetime of discomfort and decreased mobility. Health is always temporary.  Some get better. Some get worse; none is fixed. The Creator has decreed none of us get out of this alive.” Straight talk.  Yes? Maybe we are at a moment as a people for the church to contribute straight talk.

So let me cut through the lies and cut to the chase quoting the most direct person at DUC: Dr. Nancy, who doles out her diagnoses in the front office. Barbara Mabee entered that office after her Friday duties of folding our orders of worship. “How are you, Barbara?” I asked.  “Do you really want to know?” she teased me.  “Why not?” I countered.  “Well, my shoulder hurts, my hip hurts, and my knee hurts. That’s how I am.” Nancy volunteered, “I can explain all of that. I’m an ex-cellent diagnostician.” Then pointing at each of Barbara’s joints, in her inimitable charming and disarming fashion, she said, “You’re old, you’re old and you’re old.”

With black humor, I told Barbara, “You must feel so much better now after seeing Dr. Nancy.” But Nancy has a point.  Or at least I prefer Nancy’s truthful lack of sentimentality on health to the fictions leading us to astray.  Fictions like, “fix me right now with no risk or responsibility on my part, so I can go on living my life the same as before I got sick.”  It can work like that, in rare cases, but often it will not.
I don’t know how our doctors and nurses can put up with expectations like those.

So what’s the alternative?  How about if, instead of praying, “Cure me now, God, or else what kind of God are you really?” we prayed, “How then shall I live now that I am sick?  What are you trying to tell me that I wasn’t hearing before, God?  Where are you pointing me?” With a cross at the center of our life, and Jesus telling us to pick up ours and follow him, we shouldn’t forget that God isn’t above using our pain for our vocation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to call on others, thinking that I was the comforter, I was the healer, I was the consoler, only to have the person in the sick bed turn the tables on me with winsome clear-eyed trust in God, and utter lack of self-pity.  It happens to me nearly every week.  Sometimes God must bring us to our knees before we are willing to trust like that.

I know that first hand. I have one final irony preaching to you today on healing.  I decided to preach this sermon months ago. But before I started writing, I pulled some muscles and my back went into spasm. I discovered a nuisance rash.  And I felt a tickle in my throat.  No, I am not making this up.  “So, Rosenberger, you would preach on health and healing?” God asked.  “Here let me help you get into character for that sermon, preacher!”  We worship a God with quite a sense of humor. What did Jesus say, “Physician, heal thyself?”  Or in my case, “Preacher, heal thyself.”  Anyway, it’s a great prayer any moment, well or hurting: “what are you trying to tell me, God, that I refused to hear before this moment?” Slow down? Remember that you are mortal? Remember that we all need each other?

Maybe we can move beyond a ministry of visiting or curing the sick to one of healing the sick. How do I mean healing? How about helping each other find what it means to face a new status in the world; how God is present and at work in the midst of our changes; how God is strongest and most present to us as we are weakest; how the voice of God is speaking to us right now.   It is good to visit the sick.  I do it all the time. But there is more. We can help others discover new dimensions of being that transcend mere medical restoration. Thanks be to God. Amen.