TEXT: Reflection on Mark 6:56
Let us pray:
We give praise and thanks to you, O God!
In Jesus Christ, you have given us life;
brought ministry, forgiveness, healing and peace;
commanded the disciples to heal the sick;
and continued the healing ministry among us to this day. Amen.
That is part of a prayer from the Book of Worship of my own denomination: the United Church of Christ, many of whom, like me, are old Congregationalists. Mind you, this not the 1938 version, not the 1962 version, but the 1986 Book of Worship in which (surprising for so-called “liberal” church) there are two services of healing: both aimed at mental and physical healing. But Such services were more likely to be reintroduced in ’86 than '38 or '62. In those earlier year, healing prayers would have been embarrassing. With Elmer Gantry and Oral Roberts in mind (famous American faith healers with dubious reputations), Congregationalists wouldn't be caught dead at a service of healing.
But things change, even for old preachers -- and perhaps for the better. With the wonderful welcome I have received here, at beginning of this week I was set to preach on Ephesians. It begins with appreciation of the faithful in that early church. Here are powerful opening verses about our reliance on and gratitude for the grace of God. That’s what I was feeling about you. But as I worked a bit with that text, a voice kept saying, "Thomas Gregory, you've preached on this topic a hundred times. Put down the Epistle and look at the Gospel lesson for today. You are avoiding something!" (The Holy Spirit, like my mother, always uses my full Christian name in moments of needed correction: "Thomas Gregory!")
But there is a connection right to you with the healing stories too. The last year I was in Europe was 1986, a very important time for me. The insights I gained then helped lead me to this place; namely, that there is a lot more to his ministry business than ministry business. It is also about feelings, embracing the hurts of others, transparency of your own vulnerability and fear. Somehow, in the quest for “success” – whatever that means – I’d lost sight of that. And then, in 1986, Carole Carlson, a dear friend and wise leader, drew me aside. She told me she had found herself in a service of healing one Sunday evening, by mistake. She felt uncomfortable and out of place at first, only to have a strange peace descend on her in a setting she could not have thought possible. With Carole saying that, I listened.
So we come to today’s gospel lesson from Mark. When you look at this whole section in Mark, chapters 5 and 6, even the murder of John the Baptist can be understood as the response of a royal power with deep spiritual sickness to the threat John’s call to spiritual healing had become. It looks at first as if Mark inserted the story of Herod’s brutal act here in the wrong place. But I don’t think so. When crowds are responding by turning their lives around, someone in high places will soon catch on that the “brood of vipers” John is talking about looks familiar.
When I was growing up, I learned that medical people and spiritual people didn’t talk the same language, at least in the West. We thought shamans and healers were useful only in Africa and Asia. Then one day a physician in a church I served observed that in his experience, by and large people tend to get well if they want to, and that one's attitude is as important to a good surgical outcome as anything else.
Now it is commonplace to hear such comments. Nine years ago, Bill Moyers, the American journalist, offered a six-part public television special on healing and the power of the mind. But even though the Christian Scientists have been preaching it for a century, even though you can hardly turn any place these days without seeing studies and articles proving the point, still one cannot be certain – at least in West – that we have yet embraced the idea that mind and body are two parts of the same spiritual endowment.
Moyers is an ordained minister. Yet he stepped gingerly around the religious questions. Shamans are still thought of as witch doctors, and Christian Scientists have always been a bit suspect; so we think. Much work has been done, but the unity of medical science and spiritual experience still has serious mental and institutional hurdles to jump. Someone once said to a Christian Science practitioner, "health depends more on the number of years that have passed over your head than the number of colds that have passed through it.” To which the man responded that it depends as even more on the thoughts entertained by it. I now believe he was right.
What helped tip the scales toward a better balance for me was an obscure passage from Luke. Most church people have wondered from time to time about that eighteen-year gap between Jesus' encounter with the scholars at the temple when he was twelve and the beginning of his ministry at age 30. All we have these words at the end of the second chapter of Luke: "And Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and in favor with man." That's it. But it is a provocative "it." We have always valued growth in mind, in wisdom, but in stature, physical growth, bodily growth? No, we have kept body and spirit well segregated. But here it is: wisdom and stature.
Even with the "fitness craze" of the 70ies and since, we struggle to grasp the intimate relationship between what happens emotionally and what is going on with the rest of us. For example, one woman went to the doctor complaining that every morning for breakfast, as soon as she drinks her coffee, she gets a stabbing pain in her eye. The doctor suggested she take the spoon out of her cup. That throwaway joke is only to remind us that often we are more self-marred than self-made, that we see the body as a machine somehow immune from things of the spirit. Yet it was the touch of the spirit that mattered to those Jesus healed: his spirit, their spirit, the spirit of someone who cared for them. Whoever brings Her, we must be touched by that spirit. No, it does not mean the cancer will be cured or the marriage put back together, but in ways that matter even more than those, "All who touch it are healed."
Now if you doubt the connection, but also wonder why we live in such a stressful world, just eavesdrop on the language used by people of influecne. They marshal their resources, grab a bite, snag a client, attack a problem, invade a market, land a contract, engage a client, merge a business, run an office, erect a building, expand a territory, fend off a takeover. Sounds like war to me, the spirits of which grind under too many minds and bodies. Without a gentler spirituality to guide us, in such perpetual conflict, the body and the mind can only collapse and surrender.
Oh, I know our physical selves are not always what we hope they were. Hardly a day passes that I don't ask my mirror for a better view. Bob Hope said he got his exercise by taking a bath, pulling the plug and fighting against the current. Even when we are healthy, we’re still looking for improvement. Phyllis Diller, stand-up comedienne and nightclub performer, said she once spent seven hours in the beauty parlor, and that was just for the estimate.
Let’s move on, because it’s the unity of body and mind, flesh and spirit we’re after here. Over sixty years ago, Dr. Alexis Carrel wrote:
Important cases of spiritual healing have been recorded... And the only condition indispensable to the phenomenon is prayer. But there is no need for the patient himself to pray, or even to have any religious faith. It is sufficient that someone around him be in a state of prayer. Such facts...prove the objective importance of spiritual activities, which…physicians, educators, and sociologists have almost always neglected to study.
Almost always, Dr. Carrel, but things are changing fast. Responsible studies are proliferating, at least at some levels of awareness about the body-mind connection. The issue for us here is that, while we no longer deny the relationship between mind and body, we have yet to do the devotional work that rediscovers the faith by which to connect the undeniable physical and mental health an authentically spiritual environment offers to people.
That is, while we might accept intellectually the fact that spiritual healing is possible, we have not integrated that thought with our a faith – really with the spirit, a better word here than faith – that can deepen and sustain it. We know we must take care of the body to have a better state of mind. We know what we entertain in the mind will take up residence in our physical house, sometimes welcome, sometimes not. But how shall our spirituality understand, with only the resources it can provides, that spiritual contact is also a healing touch?
Clearly, to believe in the possibility of spiritual healing, one must believe that there is a realm of the spirit that not only influences the physical world but is also part of the same world. Am I talking about ghosts or evil demons? No. But I am saying, and challenging you to acknowledge, that there is in each one of us, and between each of us and all of us, and between all of us and God, an undeniable power that cannot be reduced to physical or mechanical descriptions. When exercised with love and justice, with wisdom and compassion, this power counsels and corrects us. It nurtures, guides and directs us. It embraces us and breathes life into us. And what this means, once and for all, is that there is no such thing as a spiritual world floating by itself out there somewhere, unconnected to the worlds of, say, business or family life, political decisions or economic considerations. Nor is there some private place, cut off from community (from genuine and sustained connection with other) where such healing occurs. Any authentic spirituality is always communal, and while it must be personal too, it can never be private. For God’s world is one, the spiritual and material meshed inseparably. Disconnect the spiritual from the material and you risk retreating into irrelevancy. Deny the spiritual content of your material life and you court disaster.
Now it’s obvious that spiritual power, like toxic religion or totalitarian politics, can also be employed carelessly or malevolently. But on its better days, it is a connecting, and thus a healing force. I believe that human minds and hands can diagnose and administer, cut and stitch, but only God can heal. And I believe that when we forget this truth, medical science and personal ambition join forces in an unhealthy axis of human pride.
So let us say we acknowledge this "realm of the spirit," that we understand every corner of the world around us in infused with spiritual power. For Christians that is good, but not sufficient. Having affirmed the primary power of God, another requirement of healing ministry is the commitment to our own role, our responsibility as partners in God's work. Believing in God is not enough when we then blame God for prayers not answered the way we had hoped. "Ah, it doesn't work," we say. "God's promises are a fantasy," we say. "God doesn't really care" -- we say.
This common complaint overlooks the heart of the Christian message: that God is incarnate, enfleshed in humanity -- in Jesus and then in us. That’s what the unity of the spiritual and the material is all about. We – you and I and communities we build and share – are part of God's healing process, God having no hands or hearts save ours. Human responsibility, graciously accepted, is among God's greatest gifts. Agnes Sanform put it this way:
If we try turning on an electric iron and it does not work, we look at the wiring of the iron, the cord, then the house. We do not stand in dismay before the iron and cry, "Oh, electricity, please come into my iron and make it work!" We realize that while the whole world is full of that mysterious power we call electricity, only the amount that flows through the wiring of the iron will make that iron work for us. The same principle is true of the creative energy of God. The whole universe is full of it, but only the amount that flows through our own beings will work for us.
To blame God for our misfortunes is a childish thing, an arrested spiritual consciousness. God does not will our sickness, but in love for us God allows it. Like any lover, the Great Lover insists we to respond to the realities of incarnate life of our own free will. Mary insists her boyfriend John, who says he loves her, must make a commitment. So too with God. That is, God's first move toward us will always be love. God is love. But to intervene in ways that render us puppet-like, that stunt our growth, deny our abilities and eliminate our responsibility, are not acts of love. Love comes first. The miraculous extension of this truth is that we are all so connected as a community in God’s eyes, that someone else, loving and caring for us, can be a healing force even when we are not.
I started today with my experience of the healing ministry that is often criticized negatively in our more liberal or modernist churches where I grew up. That tradition argues that spiritual healing tends to blunt or even cancel the concern we must show for social justice, for Christ's liberation. True, there is a line of personal piety that believes we first must get ourselves "right with God" and then we can help others. It is unbiblical view, of course, not to mention self-centered and ultimately unfaithful. Others are out there to help us when we ourselves are hopeless. And too often this view is exploited by the powerful seeking to make Christianity a palliative for personal pains. Still, with the wholeness of God’s world, our answer must avoid the opposite error that submerges the personal in the social.
Quoting Isaiah, Jesus proclaimed that his ministry was aimed at liberation for the oppressed, good news for the poor and sight for the blind -- both in body and in spirit. There is no suggestion that, well, the healing is over here and the social action is over there. Healing prayer is just as upsetting of the established order, just as risky with our smug assumptions, just as "prophetic" for our age as is working for social justice. Just ask John the Baptist. In fact, when health care is so much of matter of computer monitors and plastic tubing, a person-centered prayer may be downright revolutionary. You see, both prayerful presence and social action require us to let go of our preconceptions, let go our control, and let God shape us is a closer approximation of the divine image. Health care is a spiritual issue.
Let’s close with this. Healing prayer rightly understood, just as social action wisely undertaken, is not an attempt to play God or manipulate God or even speak for God. It is not an effort to change God's mind at all, but to transform ours. God's mind is firm: the unshakable promise made in Jesus Christ, that divine love wills health for all of God's creation. Love permeates the privacy of our own minds and bodies, the communion we must have with others and the community of nations by which to secure a more compassionate justice. Christ, in fact, pleads with us not to fracture life into mind/body, spiritual/material, reason/emotion, personal/social, us/them, but to understand – on this summer's holiday weekend, when all manner of folk assemble for the festivities – that God is in all and through all. Then, whatever our malady may be, to touch that Spirit is to be healed. Amen.
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