Sermons from the Pulpit

     At evening, they bring all sorts of the sick and the demon-possessed to him to be healed. There is a mother, pushing in a wheelchair her son dying of AIDS, his IV pole clanking every time it goes over a bump. The parents of an alcoholic bring their grown child forward, all three of them just too worn down to care any more about what other people might think. A father carries a feverish daughter in his arms. Two street people, shrieking nonsense and wearing clothes that do not fit or match, push themselves through and reach out to touch his cloak. A little boy, with one leg shorter than the other, falls behind, and is afraid he won't be noticed, much less healed.

     The whole city is at his door, and he heals many who are gathered there. And then the next morning he goes off to a deserted place, so he can pray.

     They hunt him down, saying, "Everyone is looking for you!" But he won't stay there to heal more of them - he says he must move on, so he can preach the Good News, which is what he says he came to do.

     Heal us! They asked it then, we ask it now. Maybe we, like them, want his healing more than his preaching. But the gospels say they go together.

     What is this healing? The word - therapeuo - is where our word "therapy" comes from. Maybe good therapy and the "Good News" have a lot in common.

     So, what is the healing? First of all, it is human contact. But more than that, it is respect. In Jesus' day, sickness was understood to be caused by sin. If you were sick, or somehow impaired, you were suffering punishment. And you were ostracized, cut off, dis-membered from the community and all the personal and social and spiritual benefits that "belonging" entails.

     So the healing Jesus brings is beyond the simple straightening of a limb or the banishing of a demon. Jesus shows love and profound respect for the broken - whether that brokenness is bodily, mental, intellectual, social, moral, or spiritual. Nothing human is alien to him. And his uncanny way of being with people so that they no longer feel cut off from God or the human family or themselves - that kind of healing hearkens back to the Hebrew prophets, Isaiah especially. God will bring you in, God will bring you back, you who are scattered and lost and sick and outcast. God will embrace you and carry you home.

     Isaiah spoke to a traumatized people who were asking where their deliverance was. They had been badly hurt by life, and did not know what was reliable anymore. Notice in today's reading that Isaiah's comforting doesn't give them any false assurances. He doesn't tell them that terrible stuff won't happen. He doesn't urge them to forget the past and "reach for the stars." What he says is: "Don't you know that God is sovereign, and that God is aware of you? God knows of your exile, and by God's creative power, newness will come."

     In other words: you will be delivered, but not from the human condition. You will still be mortal, finite, and subject to many things over which you have no control. But you will be freed from being anxious in the face of all that. You will be given strength. And you will be freed enough from what binds you so that you may start to choose life in the face of death.

     What kind of healing do we expect? Harry Stack Sullivan defined psychotherapy as: A situation in which two people meet together, one of whom is less anxious than the other. I like that! I think that's helpful. It reminds me of Jesus' words: "Do not be anxious; Do not be afraid!"

     Our human condition in all its complicated, mortal messiness is frightening and appalling. No question about that. And naturally, we want to be relieved of this burden. One of our best strategies is denial: if we don't talk about it or look at it or think about it, maybe we can live as if it didn't exist.

     We just rented the movie "Pleasantville." It's a parable about people who are profoundly disconnected from their full humanity. The inhabitants of Pleasantville live in a black and white universe, a 50's sit-com, where life always goes according to plan and during basketball practice, every shot goes in. There is perfect weather and no one ever gets depressed. There are no double beds, and no one even goes to the bathroom.

     And into this perfect world are transported two 90's teenagers whose parents are divorced. They wind up introducing truth and passion to Pleasantville, and as that happens, the town and its people begin to take on color. Color is shameful, and not only because the "colored" are different. Color signifies that each one is deep, richly textured, full of contradictions, flawed, mortal. In short, fully human. In one scene, a newly-blossomed mother is mortified by her rosy skin, and so her son, with infinite compassion, gently covers up her face and arms and hands with green-gray makeup. She is not yet able to understand that her true self is the blessing.

     Maybe this is where healing is: to come home to our true selves, to be saved not from our creaturehood, but for our creaturehood, the joys and burdens of it, the truth of it, and, yes, the brokenness of it. The food and drink we take at this table is not to make us immortal; it is to restore us and reconcile us to the precious and unrepeatable lives we are living in this time and in this place.

     The final scene in "Pleasantville" shows the teenage son back home in the real world with his real mother, who, face to face with the sorry mess she's made of her life, is crying at the dining room table, mascara running down her face. Her son, in the reverse of an earlier action, is gently wiping her eyes, taking the makeup off. "It's not supposed to be this way," she says. "It's not supposed to be any way," he answers.

     In other words, our lives are what they are. This world is what it is. Let's start there. And by God's grace, we shall.

     Amen.