Sunday, September 22, 2013

Changed For Good: A Sermon on Healing


Does God Heal?
John 11:17-44
September 22, 2013, The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
First Baptist Church, West Jefferson

            The 2003 musical Wicked captivated the heart of Broadway. The stories goes that the green ‘wicked witch’ that we saw on the screen of the 1939 motion picture classic The Wizard of Oz wasn’t always bad, ultimately she received a bad reputation throughout her life, when in fact, people often treated her less than kindly. Towards the end of the musical there is a song that has become iconic with the play. The Wicked Witch or Elphaba and Glenda actually become friends and you see the fruition of their friendship in the song, ‘For Good.’
            The song has lyrics such as these: “I've heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason bringing something we must learn and we are led to those who help us most to grow if we let them and we help them in return. Well, I don't know if I believe that's true but I know I'm who I am today because I knew you... Like a comet pulled from orbit as it passes a sun like a stream that meets a boulder halfway through the wood. Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But because I knew you, I have been changed for good.” These deeply redemptive lyrics are incredibly spiritual in light of what we know about the Wicked Witch, but we’ll get back to that.
            Does God Heal? I am almost certain that if I took an anonymous poll with you all gathered here today I would get as many answers as people here, if not more. The question I just posed is a question that cannot and should not be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ there are always caveats. We always have to say, ‘Yes, God heals, but how long isn’t certain.’ Or maybe its, ‘No, God didn’t heal my loved one or me in this situation.’ Whatever the case, we are afraid to talk about healing.
            I wonder if Jesus in the Gospel text today was just as scared. I think I can almost hear the quaking in his voice, “Where have they laid him?” Jesus of Nazareth had lost a friend, a friend who many people had wondered openly if Jesus could have prevented his death. “If he can cure the blind, could he have kept this man from dying?” Jesus finds the place where Lazarus had been laid and we hear something fascinating, especially in the lens of Jewish culture. Martha tells Jesus as he commands that the stone be rolled away, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” In the King James Version they used the words, “He stinketh.” Nevertheless the four days is something important to note here.
            Jews believed it took a while to die. Three days in fact. When a person died, they were immediately taken to the tomb and the stone was rolled in front of the tomb. Three days later, the stone was rolled away for a moment as the family anointed the body with spices and herbs. Myrrh was one of those for those of you keeping tabs with what the Magi presented to Jesus. After the body was anointed for the journey to whatever laid ahead the tomb was sealed for one year. After the year had passed the tomb was opened and the clean white bones were considered pure in Jewish culture. The bones were then taken off to the side and piled up so that Aunt Susie and Uncle Jim’s bodies could hang out together for posterity.
            So this story, full of Biblical allusions from the nativity story to Jesus’ crucifixion and death account is one of certainty. Lazarus was dead. When Jesus called out to the dead man and told the people to unbind him and let him go, he was removing the carpet from under the people’s feet by raising a dead man and asking the people to touch something that was incredibly unclean to their sensibilities.
            This text to me, is peculiar at best. As far as I know, no one is running around saying that they are Lazarus from 1st century Palestine. Lazarus died, again, in certainty. This story reminds me of my great grandmother who told her family as she was dying that we shouldn’t ‘pray her back.’ For my grandmother and for all of us, death seems like something we’d only like to go through once. Perhaps Lazarus went on to write ‘The five people you meet in Paradise’ or ‘3 days in Heaven’ that topped the bestselling list in Bethany, I don’t know. Perhaps, Lazarus was none too happy with Jesus for waking him from his eternal slumber. However Lazarus’ life played out, an account that we are not privy to, it was one that was never the same again. How would you react if you had buried someone dear only to find him or her back in action? What if you had gone to a funeral only to see the person walking around the local Wal-Mart or Starbucks? Talk about an emotional roller coaster.
            Does God heal? We’ve done a fairly good job in 21st century America of defining healing. Healing for us is things going back to the way they once were. We want normalcy, we want the familiar touch of love, and we stand aghast if God doesn’t do that for us. We curse God when the Alzheimer’s patient doesn’t get better, we grit our teeth when we hear Jesus say he is the resurrection and the life because the cancer survivor is facing a recurrence of their disease, we don’t want healing, we want our pasts relived in ways that don’t require much work. We want things to return, to go back. We want healing to be restorative; however the question we should be asking is do we want healing to be redemptive?
            Let me ponder if but for this sermon that we receive restorative healing as part of the wonders of medicine or the grace of more time, and you find yourself without the redemptive love in that healing, have you missed the point? What we want and don’t always receive is restorative healing. What we need and always receive is redemptive healing; a healing that completes God’s work in you. Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest and mystic said this, “The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.” Redemptive healing brings us to a better understanding of restorative healing if we are to receive it.
            Think about it this way, as Nouwen continues to write, “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Who have been those agents of God’s love for you? Who are those people who reminded you that though sorrow might last for a night, joy comes in the morning?
            For Lazarus, healing was redemptive and restorative. I feel like the song from Wicked could have easily been sung by Lazarus, as it goes, “It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime so let me say before we part so much of me is made from what I learned from you, you'll be with me like a handprint on my heart and now whatever way our stories end I know you have re-written mine by being my friend...” God interjected grace in a restorative tangible and redemptive spiritual way. When we leave the mindset that healing means a cure or restoring to our pasts, and move to the hope that healing could be redemptive even if a cure or restoration doesn’t happen, and if God brings the work to completion in your life without the cure you earnestly pray for, if God redeems your life to the point where you are lost in wonder, love and praise in spite of everything, then has not healing and redemption already been brought to fruition? We cannot simply sit by and wonder why God didn’t heal, God healed. The question is whether we will accept that healing.
            Or one could process it this way, if you were estranged from a parent for years and in time you find yourself in relationship again with people who you have not known for years but know in spite of that. You will never recover the missed time, restorative healing of a relationship cannot happen to bring things back to where they once were. But redemptive healing gives permission for the broken relationship to be made whole, the redemptive healing allows you to forgive and live into something old yet new. That is redemption.
            In our time and place, our lack of redemptive healing has been brought to the forefront of culture. If I go to Barnes and Noble, my parents and close friends know to look for me in the religion section, I can really geek out and find a good book. Statesville and Boone just don’t have good bookstores so it’s always nice to have a chance to see what’s new in the world of books. However the other day while I was there my heart sank when I saw that beside the section for Bibles was a section entitled, ‘warfare.’ Is it any wonder to us, that redemptive healing doesn’t take place when bombs are more valuable than education? Is it any mystery to humanity that redemptive healing doesn’t take place when in a weeks span more than 50 people die in mass shootings from Washington DC to Nairobi, and our society sits idly in a daze as if nothing happened?
            Friends we need Jesus to speak words to us, commanding and begging us to unbind each other and let each other go. If you notice Lazarus was in a bind as unclean as he was, he needed people to give him permission and assistance for his healing to be complete and full. For us, we must give each other permission to affirm the brokenness in our own lives and work towards redeeming it.
            Last night, a friend and I went to see the Banff Mountain Film Festival. This is the perfect film festival to be screened at Appalachian, it’s a celebration of all things outdoors. These short films document people who kayak, backpack, mountain bike, if it can be done outside, you best believe people are documenting it. One of the films that struck me was the story of three people bound together by fate. The pair of men from Australia set out to traverse the south pole, now this is no easy task, but complicate matters, they wanted to do something never done before. The men wanted to walk without the assistance of dogs or motors to the South Pole and back, a distance of over 2000 kilometers, all while hauling 350 pounds of gear. As they journeyed they realized there was a man from Norway named Alexander who was able to start a day before them, and was well ahead of them on the trek. They met him along the way and continued to talk through satellite phone as they all journeyed. The two men faced enormous challenges and were counted out by everyone, all the people watching assumed that the Norwegian Alexander would win the coveted fame of being the first person to complete the arduous trek.
            However something incredible happened as the two men reached the edge of base camp on their return trip, right before the finish line a tent stood, and in that that tent was Alex, who wanted to wait for the people he had journeyed in front of to cross the finish line and create history together. Two men and a stranger found redemptive friendship and made history in the process.
            That’s what healing is all about, the community of saints helping each other cross the finish line, a group of people helping each other complete redemptive work. You see in that reality things don’t go back the way they used to be, we move forward together as healing agents and redemptive examples of grace. We unbind each other and send ourselves forward.
            As you are all aware, I have not been here for the past two weeks. Now this sermon was scheduled to be this text and this sermon title long before two weeks ago. Part of me wanted to not address all that has gone on, or address it in a roundabout way that didn’t let you know what happened was about me. However as I sat and wrote this sermon, as I pondered the text I realized that Jesus’ call to come out of the tomb was one he gives to all of us. You see we discovered that an illness I have been facing for some time is a symptom of a deeper problem; we had been treating the symptom, not the disease. I remember someone asking me how I felt knowing that what I faced could be considered worse, and I realized in writing this sermon that my answer was working towards God’s redeeming work in my own life. I responded that while some might consider what I am dealing with worse, I was happy to know it had a name and a face and that with the help of friends and families and doctors I could beat it to the ground. What my friend considered to be a worse outlook was a saving, redemptive outcome for me.
People of God, we are called to have resiliency, we are called to redemption, and we are called to healing. God invites us and loves us into redemption in life, in death, and in life beyond death. God continually and presently redeems even a situation where the outcome is bleak, or the situation grim. God heals. So the next time we are facing the question whether the God of all existence heals, our answer is there. The question will be whether we have enough awareness to realize redemption even in the face of immense trial. For you, for me, for everyone on God’s earth the answer to the question, ‘Does God Heal?’ is, ‘Always, always, always, yes.’ And if you need help articulating that, if in those moments you find yourself speechless, do what I did this week and simply remember that Broadway hit, “Like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the sea like a seed dropped by a bird in the wood, because I knew God, I have been changed for good.” Amen.