8 February 2009

Epiphany 5B

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

The story of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is today’s gospel, and it brings us fact to face with the phenomenon of Christian healing. And, that is not a particularly comfortable place for us to be, because, so much of Christian healing has become the realm of the religious charlatan. And that is embarrassing to us.

But, there are deeper problems with the matter of Christian healing. Misunderstood, it can create a picture of a capricious, quirky and biased God who turns out to be no kind of God at all. This si what I mean: say, someone is sick, and he comes to church regularly, and says his prayers and makes a pledge, and works on the Valentine’s Day Dance, and help’s out on Quiet Days and all the rest of community life. And he is sick. So he asks the prayers of the church and comes for anointing. Suppose he dies. Hm. So, that means that — what? Prayer does not work? He didn’t pray hard enough? His faith was weak? Maybe, but maybe not. Or suppose you have a friend who is sick, and you pray as hard as you know how and lo and behold, she is cured. What does that mean? That you are on the intercessory all-stars? Maybe, maybe not. The problem becomes deeper when you consider someone who did not have anyone to pray for him. What does that mean? Is God up there in heaven with some kind of a hand counter clicking off the number of prayers that come in for your sick friend. “98, 99, 100 — Bingo! That does it, here comes the cure” says God. And that other guy over there, “16, 17, — is that all you’ve got? — Zap — not enough, out you go.”

A fairly arbitrary, capricious view of God, but if we don’t develop a mature understanding of healing, that is about where we end up, I think.

In light of this tendency for our thinking about healing to go intellectually awry, how do we recover an authentic sense of what it means to be called to heal. We need to think about what it means to heal.

First, healing is an act of community and it involves community. In today’s gospel, Peter’s mother-in-law was healed and brought back into community. The gospel gets at this point rather subtly by suggesting that she took her place at table with the disciples and served them a little lunch. She came back into relationship with her family. Sickness can be so isolating in modern experience — we send people home and tell them to stay away from others, we send them to hospital, we put them in parts of the hospital which are aptly called “Isolation.” Healing involves overcoming isolation; it involves being with those who are sick, showing them our love and our steadfast caring.

Sometimes, secondly, healing involves forgiveness. Particularly in the realm of mental health, illness can be a function of some unresolved crisis or tragedy or sin in one’s past. An unforgiven fault, an unexpressed regret, an unacknowledged loss – all of these can stymie one’s forward movements and stall one’s life process. Healing sometimes involves confession, absolution and forgiveness extended to others.

Sometimes, and we don’t like to think of this, healing involves dying. We get well by being reconciled to death and accepting our mortality. John Macquarie, the great English theologian, reminds us that “death belongs to the finitude of our existence.” It is part of our limits as creatures; it is part of our humanity. But, for Christians, we live with a difference: For us, death is real, but it is not the final word, it is the next to last word, for the final word is life, life in Jesus who by his resurrection overcomes death.

When we pray for healing it always works. Sometimes it leads to physical healing, for there is more that is unknown than known about physical or mental healing. But always it leads to god. You may ask for health for yourself and your suffering friends. And your prayer will always be answered. You may not get what you want, but you will always get God. And it is a characteristic activity of God that you will be called back into community, you will forgive and be forgiven, and you will always be called to eternal life.