Advent III: healing as a spiritual practice
Okay, well – recap and report-back! In the season of Advent, we join ourselves with Mary and Joseph as they await the birth of Jesus – we are, as it were, in a “pregnant time,” awaiting a holy birth. Do you feel that? Do you feel a sense that God is about to enter our lives in a new way?
We also join ourselves with John the Baptist, as we prepare the way for the Messiah. And in our case, we are doing this by joining the 70 disciples of Jesus on their internship – sharing our faith, sharing God’s love as a way of preparing for God’s coming, and also as a way of opening our own eyes to see God’s grace in our real world.
The disciples’ first task was to bless – bless not judge. So we went out, with the prayer of lovingkindness in hand, to bless our neighbors in the first week of Advent.
The disciples’ second task was to eat – to eat with the people they were ministering to. Essentially, they are called to enter into relationship. Once again, no judgment was required (thank goodness!) – just sharing of food, time, and conversation. And our homework last week was to do just that – to pay attention to relationship, either by eating together, by engaging those people we meet who are sometimes invisible, or by paying particular attention to our contacts through the week. So, again… how is it going? Any stories to tell?
This week is probably the most daunting task we have. Jesus lays it out in a very few words: “cure the sick who are there.” Cure the sick. No problem, right? Start with warts and colds, and work your way up to broken bones and cancer. Hmmm.
It seems like Jesus is asking us to go out and perform miracles – and few if any of us consider ourselves miracle workers. Mind you, I think that was probably the case with the 70 as well. So what exactly is Jesus telling us to do?
Well, let me do some thinking out loud…
- Number one, we are mortal. Death is not optional for any of us. To me, that means that we can’t simply be talking here about a physical restoration of health. Eventually, that sort of healing will fail. It must! If we are mortal, then we are, to some extent, meant to grow old, meant to experience some fashion of failing health, meant to die. I mean, physical health is surely involved somewhere here, but there’s got to be more than that to healing. Does that make sense?
- The flip-side is also important. There’s more to disease than the physical. The Greek word for “the sick” here – the people we are asked to heal – is actually a word that means “weak” or “powerless.” It doesn’t simply refer to those whose bodies are diseased – it also conveys a sense of powerlessness – a loss of the ability to make one’s own choices, to direct one’s own life, to follow one’s own path. In one of those sexist passages in the New Testament, one writer notes that women are the “weaker” sex – using this same Greek word. That could be a matter of physical or moral strength. It could also be a matter of social standing – women are the “disempowered” sex. Because of the strictures of society, they are less able to make their own choices. Women, slaves, the poor, people who were considered “unclean” might all fall into this category. This call of Jesus could be read, I think, “heal the disempowered.” Does that add a dimension to the picture?
- Continuing on that line of thought, I am given to understand that our bodies and our souls, our minds, our emotions, are very closely tied together. A simple example. I suffer from a relatively mild form of irritable bowel syndrome. If I go through a period of significant stress, I can be pretty sure that something like a month into it, I will start having stomach problems. Stress raises the incidence of heart disease. Repressed anger leads into depression. On and on, right? Our mental/emotional/spiritual state has implications for our physical health, and vice versa. So if a doctor is treating my stomach complaints, he or she would do well to ask about my mental and spiritual health as well. Make sense? If it’s stress that’s wreaking havoc with my stomach, then the core illness is not in the stomach it’s in the soul. By the way, that’s what we mean when in our mission statement we say “wholeness.” We are “seeking wholeness in Christ.” Wholeness refers to the health of our whole system – body, mind, soul, emotions. I’m thinking that when Jesus sends us out to heal, he is sending us out to care for people’s souls and emotional lives, as well as their bodies. “Soul healing” seems a bit more up our alley, and may be for many a more foundational kind of healing.
- One more bullet point here: I think it was Oscar Wilde that defined medicine as “amusing the patient while the body heals itself.” For all the wonders of modern medicine, there is still a lot of mystery to bodily healing. From my very limited understanding of molecular physics and biology, for instance, I understand that we are not simply flesh and blood creatures, we are creatures of electromagnetic energy. We really are surrounded by an “aura” of energy. This is energy that you can actually feel. Okay, I can’t – so far. I seem to have, as far as healing touch goes, “cement hands.” But it is this energy that practitioners of healing touch – such as our own healing pathway people – work with as part of an overall healing program. I can’t put into words just exactly what this does, but it seems to have a significant overall effect on our bodies’ ability to heal. It’s significant enough that I believe our health system trains nurses to do this.
So what does all this mean? Here’s how I put it together in my own mind. The church’s ministry of healing has been, since the beginning, a very wide-ranging ministry. We help build hospitals, we have medical missionaries, doctors, nurses, that undertake the practice of medicine as a ministry of Christian healing. We practice ministries of psychological counseling and spiritual direction as a means of seeking wholeness and healing in our mental and emotional and spiritual lives. We practice ministries of healing touch as a means of aiding our bodies’ own healing powers. We seek to empower the disempowered by drawing people into supportive community and giving them back their dignity and self-worth and hope and vocation. Ministries like Alcoholics Anonymous gather people into community and undertake a healing practice in order to find wholeness in real life. All of this and more we do in order to follow Jesus’ call to heal the sick.
I often think that the Christmas story about the shepherds is a story of healing – the “empowerment” kind. Shepherds were low-class folk – poor, probably dirty, outdoors a lot, unable to keep the finer points of Sabbath and purity laws. But here they are, the first ones told of this holy birth. The angels heal them by giving them back their dignity and worth. God heals them, makes them whole, by sharing their world. By being born in a stable, Jesus is really born to them in particular. Jesus is born one of them.
Psalm 103 is a dialogue between the Psalmist and the psalmist’s own soul. It is our souls who are blessed and healed of all their diseases, that are forgiven and so brought back into wholeness and health. And that is what I look for in myself, as I get older, what I hope for – a soul and spirit that is strong enough, healthy and purposeful enough, to cope with an aging body in such a way that I remain vibrant and alive until the very end of my days – whatever struggles my body will face!
Does any of this make sense? Does anyone have a question?
Here, then, is the homework for the week. Continue to bless, continue to pay attention to your relationships. As you do this, I am betting that you will come face to face with some form of disempowerment, some form of illness or trouble or suffering. It may, in fact, be your own. On behalf of Jesus, I’m calling you to seek healing for that suffering or disempowerment. I don’t know what that might look like! A prayer, perhaps? Bringing that person with you to the Healing Pathway. Coming forward for prayer after this service, perhaps. You might be in a position to offer some reassurance, to give forgiveness, to give someone their dignity back. It may be a matter of including someone, or enabling them to stay connected, in spite of challenges. I don’t know – but I’m hoping you will know – that God’s Spirit will lead you into the appropriate action. Because the biggest surprise of all is that sometimes you can work a miracle (or God through you) – that sometimes your touch, or your listening ear, or your prayer, or your company, or your love – really can heal.
We are sent with a mission that is a privilege and a joy. Bless! Befriend! Heal.
