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Minister's Sermon
Healing Hands
(Text: Mark 1:40-45)
Heather Fraser
Fairview United Church
12 February 2012
Let us pray: God, we thank you for the passion we see in the Christ and for the compassion to which that brings us. As we try to find the source of our own passion and compassion, help us to keep living out the faith of the gospel. Amen.
(from Seasons Fusion, A/C/E 2011-12, p. 162)
It occurs to me that it’s a little bit ironic, maybe in the Alanis Morissette sense, that I had planned to preach this week about healing, and this week I was the sickest I’ve been since last Easter. I spent most of the week away from the office this week, hoping that I wouldn’t infect anyone else, and trying to get enough rest to make up for several nights of coughing. I am better now, but I had lots of time to think this week about being sick.
This may be a really short sermon, because what does a sick person have to say about healing?
And I’ve had lots of time to think about other kinds of healing that are in short supply. While I’ve been not getting all that much work done and therefore without much to distract me, I’ve found myself face first into all the other ways that I am not healed. I am still anxious about the things I was anxious about in university. I still procrastinate instead of dealing directly with difficult issues. I still blame myself for everything that goes wrong in my world and obsess about how to fix everything so that no one is unhappy, which I know from many years of experience doesn’t work. I still struggle every week to get the words out for a sermon, and worry how my words will be received. Why am I still living out these old patterns even though I know better? Why am I not healed?
Healing is a tricky question for Christians. Our evangelical brothers and sisters spend most of their energy trying to save souls, and spend the rest of their energy puzzling over why the saved souls still aren’t perfect. After all, we know Jesus now as our personal Lord and Saviour, isn’t that all we need? How is it that we keep sliding back into our old lives? It’s a big problem for most of the thoughtful evangelicals that I know. Even if you don’t accept that Jesus is the answer to all life’s problems, there is still the PR problem that I referred to last week, that we Christians so obviously aren’t perfect, it’s a stumbling block when we want to tell other people why they should also come and follow Jesus.
Is this why there are so many stories of healing in the Gospel of Mark, because Christians are so badly in need of healing? There are days I sure feel that way, trying to fake wellness in a society that creates lepers out of its own people who can’t keep up to the pace. In Jesus’ time, lepers had to live away from the rest of society and cry, “Unclean, unclean,” any time anyone came anywhere near them. These days, we shut down Occupy camps so we don’t have to think too hard about why so many young people today can’t get a well-paying job, or we stigmatize and silence those who struggle with one degree or another of mental illness, as Olympian Clara Hughes has been so eloquently pointing out these past few weeks, just to name two recent examples from the news. One of the ironies I have always been aware of in my work with young ministers is that we tell them they have to take care of themselves, and then we pile the work on them and criticize them when it isn’t done to our satisfaction, and David, I can tell you that doesn’t get better once you get a church of your own.
If you feel like you aren’t coping with everything that life is throwing at you, if you are overwhelmed or maybe even found yourself in a doctor’s office in the past little while looking for help, let me assure you, you are not alone. All of us sitting here today are broken to one degree or another, at a different stage of healing, or maybe even on the healing journey, but still struggling to keep it all together from time to time. That’s what it means to be human, because we all fall short of the glory of God, some days more than others.
One of my firm beliefs about the church today is that until we all admit that we are all broken and in need of healing, we will never be able to find our way. The church was never, ever meant to be a place where perfect people gathered to congratulate each other on their perfection. It was always supposed to be a place where broken people came together to look for healing together. Like we used to say, the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. And to be fully that, we have to learn to be open about the ways we are hurting, the burdens we are carrying from the past, the newly painful situations of body and spirit that we find ourselves in now. No pretending that we are together when we are not, because that’s how we build walls between people when we so desperately need bridges.
So to answer my question from a few minutes ago, what a sick person has to tell you about healing is that I need it, and I know I need it. I’m never sure if that’s enough to qualify me to be a leader in this place, but God has called me with all my warts, just like God has called you with all yours, so we’re just going to have to go with it.
And the other thing I can tell you about healing is that we are never fully healed. The things that break us open leave scars on our souls that will never fully fade. I know when I find myself falling back into bad old habits, my cry always is, “But I thought I’d be better by now! Why aren’t I fixed?” In fact, learning to deal with the places we are broken is less about fixing ourselves and more about learning to manage our reactions to situations. The more we can bring ourselves to think about how we behave, the faster we can recognize our bad old patterns, and the faster we can come up with a different way of reacting. That’s where the real healing takes place.
A church that is open to letting people be truly open about where they need healing is a church that can heal. Jesus isn’t here with his healing hands, but we can be Jesus for each other, if we are willing to let others be Jesus for us. If we can choose to be that open to each other, we too can choose to heal each other. May that healing spirit take root in this broken soil. Amen.
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