December 16, 2007 - Healing - Frank Alton

Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:2-11



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We continue looking at the signs of God’s coming – justice and peace last week; healing this week. I surprised myself at how theological I got last week as I spoke about peace & justice. I find the same thing happening this week as I approach the subject of healing. I’m not sure people are always ready for a heavy dose of theology on Sunday morning. But what I’m noticing is that the theology many of us learned growing up – or even as adults – actually blocks us from recognizing God’s coming rather than helping us to notice God’s presence. We need to rework our theology in order to open ourselves to what God brings to us.

I see Isaiah and Mathew’s Jesus making some new and challenging connections with healing. They connect healing and salvation in new ways. They relate healing and holiness differently. And Isaiah includes the healing of creation is a necessary part of the enterprise of redemption. First, there is a new connection between healing and salvation.

I spent yesterday morning listening to people who are preparing for ordained ministry in the Presbyterian Church share their statements of faith, motivation & service. I was impressed by the quality of the candidates in this particular group. They were people who seemed deeply centered & who had strong relational skills. They gave me hope for the future of the church. At the same time I was disturbed by a discrepancy that I noticed between their statements of faith and their understanding of ministry. One preached a sermon with some moving stories of ministries of compassion. He spoke eloquently about an experience of visiting a very poor community in Africa where people were dying of AIDS, and where many children were being orphaned. He seemed to understand that serving in such contexts was a necessary and natural outgrowth of the Gospel. But when a committee member asked how he understood the ministry he had witnessed in Africa, he could only see the compassionate part of the ministry as motivation for people finding eternal spiritual salvation. His theology placed a hierarchy over the difference between eternal salvation and temporal healing.

Over the years I have come to see a more central place for healing – in the world, in other people, and mostly in my own life. That, in turn, has led me to explore the role of healing in the Scriptures. I have discovered that over the centuries the church lost touch with major parts of Jesus’ ministry by focusing too much on one part. Almost everything else was shoved aside in favor of an emphasis on humanity’s need for legal salvation in which God the judge sends Jesus to die so that people can avoid the punishment of eternal damnation for their sins and be granted eternal life. We miss so much of the beauty of what God is about in the world by insisting that everything pass through that filter.

Let me offer a different view – one that emerges clearly from the two texts we read this morning. Remember that Advent is the season in which we prepare for God’s coming. We have said that God keeps coming to us, and that a major part of preparing is learning to notice what it’s like when God is around. Isaiah and Jesus offer the same list of signs of God’s coming – though Isaiah offers some important additional ones. Isaiah writes: “Here is your God… God will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” Later, when John asks if Jesus is really the one who is to come and reveal God, Jesus answered: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” The only difference is the verb tense. For Isaiah everything is future. For Jesus everything is present.

In the Gospel, healing is the major sign of God’s coming. It is as if the Gospel is saying, “When you see a lot of healing going on, be aware that God is present in that place.” It’s no accident that we have missed that insight. A theologian named Martin Kähler years ago described Matthew’s Gospel as a Passion story with an extended introduction. In other words, the main part of the story is the part about Jesus dying; the healing stories are just filler. That view held sway for many years. The real Gospel story is Jesus’ sacrificial death for our sin. But Jesus spoke very negatively about sacrifice.

When the religious leaders criticized Jesus for eating with sinners, he used healing imagery to contrast sacrifice: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” (9:13) Later he was criticized for allowing his disciples to satisfy their hunger by plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath he responded, “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” (12:7) Isn’t it odd, then, that the Gospel would be summarized as Jesus’ self sacrifice when Jesus himself spoke so negatively about sacrifice? Today some are coming to see now that the healing stories are actually a central part of the overall story. I have mentioned that sozo, the Greek word for salvation, also means healing. Sometimes it is translated salvation, and sometimes healing. That ambiguity has to elevate the importance of healing against the backdrop of a view of salvation that is only legal: Jesus died for our sins to pay the price that would satisfy the demands of God, the judge.

Who wouldn’t want healing? Well, it turns out that not everyone does. That brings us to the second new connection that Isaiah and Jesus brought to the picture: the connection between healing and holiness. Jesus did not fare well for healing all kinds of people of their diseases. The great offense that led to his death was that he bucked the system by offering healing and forgiveness to those whom the system kept safely on the margins of “decent society.” They called it blasphemy, and concluded that it was “better that one man die for the sake of the people” (John 11:49) than the whole national system of achieving salvation be destroyed.

Again, both Isaiah and Jesus introduced a different relationship between healing and holiness. Isaiah uses the image of “The Holy Way.” In the orthodoxy of his day the holy way was reserved for those who were ritually clean. Isaiah writes that the unclean shall not pass it by; it shall be for them. (35:8 footnote NRSV) Whether that means that the unclean shall be cleansed, or that the definition of holiness no longer requires separation from those who are ritually unclean, Isaiah is speaking Gospel into a very oppressive situation.

Jesus was more implicit in his treatment of holiness but the message is the same. He knew that the religious leaders would take offense at his inclusiveness toward the infirm. So he said, “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Then he went on to talk about John the Baptist as one who offended many because he didn’t follow the rules of the system about where holy people hang out and what they look like.

We still wrestle with the relationship between healing and holiness. At Immanuel I have seen this over and over. People are attracted to something different about the way people relate at Immanuel. It is different from other churches. And it is different from what they experience at work, in their neighborhoods, in school and other settings of their lives. There is an acceptance of people just as they are – especially people who don’t find broad acceptance elsewhere. Even people who are generally accepted socially are attracted to a community like that, because all of us have parts of ourselves that we don’t find acceptable. To find a community that might accept that part of me meets a very deep longing.

But sometimes the belief system we learned in church growing up doesn’t match that acceptance. I can’t believe it’s true that God accepts those parts of me or of another that I don’t find acceptable to myself. So Immanuel must be wrong to be so inclusive, even though I wish it were right. Now I also know that there are things about the way people relate at Immanuel that are very unattractive. When we blame, shame and attack each other it makes people want to flee from us. For me, however, that just proves the point. We respond to others by blaming, shaming and attacking because that is how adults responded to the parts of us that were unattractive or unacceptable. We are a community of wounded human beings, so we will never be fully consistent in the way we treat each other. But in the midst of our imperfections, there is something beautiful that comes from a view of God that is rooted in grace and compassion rather than judgment and punishment. As we discover that we will treat each other more and more with that same grace and compassion rather than blame, shame and attack. It turns out that the Gospel offers good news about how holy a person has to be in order to be healed.

Finally, the Gospel offers a new connection between healing and creation. Isaiah helps us see that the healing isn’t just human healing. Creation itself is healed: “Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.” Our generation needs this dimension of healing like never before. This past week the United Nations Conference on Global Warming taking place in Bali, Indonesia was front and center in the news. The crisis of global warming forces us to face the truth that it is impossible to save some without saving all. The Africans have known this all along. It is the meaning of their word “Ubuntu.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: “A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” We need to say the same about entire societies and about all of creation. The United States cannot save its economy at the expense of the global environment. Even though it is expected that developing countries will suffer the effects of global warming first and worst, every nation will be severely impacted by it.

At one level we are already experiencing in our personal lives the impact of failing to attend to the healing of the planet. The other night a few of us were talking about all the new things to be concerned about with little babies. From lead in toys to pesticides in food, it would be easy to say, “We grew up with them and it didn’t kill us.” But what we realized is that many of us grew up in a world where those may have been the only contaminants we consumed. Today we all breathe, drink, eat, touch, and are simply exposed to, pollution on every front. The Gospel offers healing to a polluted creation, not just to the people who are poisoned by the very elements they have poisoned.