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February 5, 2006 - Epiphany 5, Year B

This season in the church's year, the season of Epiphany,
in our gospel readings, we hear about Jesus's ministry
between the time
of his birth
and his death.
But we focus especially on those first weeks and months
after his baptism
as Jesus explores
what his public earthly ministry
will look like.
So we hear story after story
of healings and teaching and his attempts to try to work out how to deal with all the people who want his help,
and the mission he has
to spread the good news of the kingdom of God.
Today is one of those times. We're still in the first chapter of Mark's gospel, right at the very beginning of Jesus' work, and he goes to the house of Simon and Andrew, his first 2 disciples. Simon's mother-in-law is there, and she's not well, and so Jesus takes her by the hand and makes her well.
And of course, within a couple of hours, everyone has heard the story,
and they're crowding in
with every possible illness and problem
to get healed.
And Jesus heals them.

Yesterday
Paige Howarth and Eddie Strudwick and I
went to the Diocesan Acolyte Festival
up at our Cathedral in Trenton.
To fill in part of the hour long journey up there
we read this gospel for today,
and spent some time
talking about it.

One of the questions one of them asked
was how does God
actually do it?
How is it
that God heals?

And so we talked for a while
about how after Jesus died,
he rose from the dead.
That shows
that God has the power of life, and has power over death. And we see the same thing
in that God created the world, and gave life to every living thing.
So if God has the power of life, then it makes sense that God can heal people.

And then we started to think about the different ways
that God can heal people.
In the bible, the way we hear most often
is a kind of magical healing.
Someone who is sick
comes to Jesus — or, in the Old Testament, to one of the prophets —
and they are healed.
Sometimes he touches them, sometimes he tells them to go do something, wash or see the priests, or something like that, sometimes all it takes
is to brush against his clothing.
But somehow
almost magically, miraculously,
they are healed.

Nowadays
we often pray to God for healing,
and sometimes, miraculously,
we are healed.
But it doesn't happen every often.

But there is another way
that God heals today.
And that is through the skills of doctors
and other medical practitioners.

We tend to take their skills for granted,
to see them as purely practical and professional.
We don't often think about their work
as being part of God's work
of healing.

And yet that's how God
most often works in our world, it's how God most often chooses to work.
Not by direct intervention,
but by faithful people
using their gifts
to serve others.
Every since
Jesus ascended back to heaven, after his death and resurrection,
we
have been the human face of God
and we do the work of God
everyday.
All of us,
in one way or another.
And one way
is when people in the medical field
use their skills and training
to do God's work of healing.

That's the whole point of that hymn, "Take my life and let it be":
we invite God to take our human gifts, and use them
however God wants to,
to let ourselves
do the work of God
in everything that we do.

And so we shouldn't be surprised
when instead of healing miraculously,
God uses doctors
to do that work.

But there's a problem. Not everyone gets healed.
Some people
suffer endlessly, pointlessly, in spite of the best medical care and all the prayers their friends and family can muster.
And there seems to be no answer to the question
of why one person gets healed
and another
does not,
why some treatments work
for some people
and for others
they don't.

All we can say
is
that evil is still present and active in our world
and sometime
it wins.

Yesterday
was the tenth anniversary
of my ordination as a deacon,
and every year
my mind turns back to one of the people
that I was ordained with.
I've told you about her before.
I'd known Meg for years, first as a volunteer at missions conferences,
and then as she came to seminary
and began to explore her call
to the vocational diaconate.
It was in our final year of seminary, I think, that Meg's cancer came back. She'd had breast cancer some years earlier, and been in remission for ages,
but when it came back it spread quickly to her bones. We prayed for her, we anointed her, we waited for God to do something. By the time of our ordination, she was in a wheelchair and on oxygen, though she managed to struggle out and kneel in front of the bishop to be ordained. Two months later, on Easter Day, Meg died.
But she spent those last two months
working in a nursing home
offering the last part of her life
to those who were, like her, heading towards death.

Meg was not healed physically.
But there is another kind of healing,
and it goes on in many of us
that have no physical problems, and
in many of those
whose physical ailments
are not healed.
It is the healing of the heart and soul, the healing of the spirit.
Meg was healed,
but rather than her body being healed
it was her spirit.

In those last months, as we prayed for her
she was given strength and courage and peace,
and was able in her turn
to help others to heal.

And I suspect
that it's this kind of healing
that most of us need
most of all.

And that reminds me of another conversation
that I had this week.
In my spare time, I'm working on a book, and I've been writing a chapter about hospitality. So I went to talk with the director of a conference center
about how she thinks about hospitality.
This conference center is wonderful. The rooms are gorgeous, the food is fabulous, it's a top class place, and they work hard to keep it that way.

But one of the things that this person told me
was that when she looks for staff,
while she wants people to be competent at their jobs, to be capable of doing the work that they are being paid to do, the thing she looks for most of all
is an openness of heart and soul. Because she sees the work of that place
as not just providing a nice physical location for a conference. She sees it
as a place
of healing.
People come to the conference center
with all sorts of stuff going on in their lives, all sorts of baggage. And when they arrive
what happens
is that all that stuff
spews out everywhere.
The center director sees the job of her staff
to absorb all that stuff,
to allow it to go somewhere,
so that when guests leave, they leave behind
the things that were burdening them,
they leave healed, and restored.
It doesn't matter whether the staff are on the front desk, or cleaning, or out in the kitchen, all of them
offer their hearts and souls
to do the work of healing.
It's an incredible gift.

And that is the calling
not just of the conference center
but of the whole church.
To be a place, a community
of healing.

And that's a way
that we can all become healers. We don't need years of training as doctors, and huge college bills;
we just need to pray that God will use us,
to be willing
to open our hearts and souls to one another.

So how do we do it?
By being willing
to listen to other people.
By being honest.
By not being content
with just superficial chats
but when we talk with one another
to share our own hopes and dreams and burdens.
By coming, each Sunday, to this place
to be filled and renewed
and by coming, not just because we need something
but because we can give something.

It might mean giving someone a hug.
On instead of glaring at someone who is doing something that is distracting us,
see if we can help,
or even just
sit and pray for them.
Perhaps writing a quick note of encouragement
or doing something practical for someone.
Or choosing to stay behind after church for coffee, even when we have other things we could be doing,
because we might be the person
that someone else
needs to talk with.
And when we do this,
we take part
in the incredible, grace-filled
work of God, the work of healing
in our broken
and struggling
world.

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2006