Sermon for Norton Lees, 28 June 2009

Lamentations 3:23-33
2 Cor 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

I would like to thank you for asking me to preach here this morning. I know I find it helpful to know a little about the person preaching, so I will just fill you in a bit .I originally trained in medicine, and worked as a doctor until I started training for ordination. I am now assistant curate at Holy Trinity, Millhouses. I must say I find the two roles – doctor and priest – not too dissimilar at times! I am originally from South Africa, and grew up in Northern Ireland – from apartheid SA to the troubles in NI –out of the frying pan into the fire comes to mind!

I spent an afternoon a while ago in the Northern General Hospital.. Four of my parishioners were ill, and as I walked the corridors between wards, I had time to reflect on what I was doing there, and on what I used to do there when I was a Doctor. Vivid memories of running down corridors as a House officer to emergencies; of long ward rounds; of eating toast with the nurses in the middle of the night on-call came flooding back.

One of the people I went to see that day was very ill. An elderly lady .She has had lots of medical intervention, and it might well save her life. But when I saw her, what she wanted was to feel better. To be made whole again. To be healed. I sat with her for a while, she asked me for a blessing and I gave her one. Nothing dramatic happened. She may not get better from her illness. But when I left her, her husband thanked me for bringing her God’s healing presence. What we are talking about today – from our gospel reading - healing – is in my experience, not usually dramatic, and people may or may not get better.

So what is healing? And if it doesn’t necessarily lead to people getting better, then why do it? And is it medical, or spiritual?

The words used in the New Testament to describe health are derived from the meaning of the Hebrew word; shalom (totality), sometimes translated as well being, prosperity, and wholeness.  These words point to the meaning of health    as one which involves wholeness, and healing as a restoration back to life and salvation. Healing is a restoration to a 'right relationship 'with God.
So, both in medicine and theology we see that health and healing are to do with more than the absence of illness.

When I qualified as a doctor, I recited the Hippocratic Oath along with my peers. We promised to do no harm, to treat our patients with dignity, to keep confidentiality. And we recited, ‘With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art.’ Medical schools today are increasingly likely to include a course on spirituality, on healing and wholeness. Doctors are encouraged to treat the ‘whole patient’.  The view that healing is a return to wholeness is thus being embraced more and more by the medical profession, which is interesting given the huge advances in medical technology, the bias towards only using evidence from randomly controlled scientific  trials.

So what do we in the Church take from this? Scripture is surely the place we must start.., and then  to bear our intellect, our own and others experience of the world, and centuries of tradition to help us make sense of what we read in the bible today.  So what does scripture say about healing? You will be pleased to know that I am not going to take you on a trawl through the whole bible.. But since we have readings set for the day, let’s look at what they reveal.

Our gospel reading for today contains healing stories.And our reading from Lamentations allows us some hope in  God when all else seems to be lost.

So how do these readings help us think about healing? ….about faith…what is faith..forgiveness, trust, both stories – Jairus daughter and woman haemorrhaging…both believed Jesus could help…but of course, not to say that if we don’t get better we do not have faith. Someone said to me once ‘How can a Christian be depressed?’ not understanding that God is with us through everything, , not just here to make us just feel good all the time..being well is about being on a journey towards health, on a journey with Jesus walking alongside us..on a journey towards the grace and love of God, which is there for us all.

How can we touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak? We need to take this simple step to be healed. We only need to reach out to Christ, to discover life and healing. It is often only when we recognise our need, that we are bleeding, like the woman, that we actually turn to Christ for healing. Only then do we really know that we are part of God’s community, the body of Christ.

When we work for peace and reconciliation we touch Jesus’ cloak. When we serve the community around us, our families, our neighbours, our church community, then we touch Jesus’ cloak.

In the sacrament of the Eucharist, forgiveness, reconciliation and healing go hand in hand. In this sacrament, just now, when we receive the bread and wine, then we touch Jesus’ cloak.  It is not surprising then, that in the sacrament of healing, forgiveness may play a crucial role. This is of course not to say that ill health is a result of sin, but that the journey towards being reconciled with God is vital to our well being. One medical study looking at the process of recovery from post traumatic stress disorder showed that blood flow to a particular part of the brain increased when the patient forgave their assailant, after which recovery occurred. So forgiveness has been shown, in this study at least, to have a physical effect which can be validated on brain scans and bring about healing.  Jesus, in healing the paralysed man, and many other egs in the gospels, shows us that forgiveness, or at least, the journey towards forgiveness, is often a crucial part of being healed.

So healing. Looking at healing from this view…inclusive of medicine and the Church…allows us to hold together both the grace of God’s healing, and the ongoing reality of suffering. The sacrament of healing acknowledges that it is in Christ’s wounded-ness that we can be healed..in a world which, lets face it, is not in a state of health.

I will finish by sharing with you my experience of healing in South Africa. I worked for a while at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu was based during the apartheid era. During the Sunday Eucharist, several of us, priests and lay people, would go into the lady chapel during communion, and people would come to be anointed, for healing. It was a normal part of the service, done without any fuss. Queues of people, black and white, came to kneel at the rail. Sometimes they told us what they wanted healing for, sometimes they were silent. All sorts of illnesses, problems, relationship difficulties, bereavements, pain and confusions were brought.  We moved along them, anointing and praying the words of healing. Nothing dramatic happened. People may or may not have got better. All we were doing was bringing them into God’s healing presence. Like my elderly parishioner in hospital . And surely that is what living the gospel is about –to provide the sacrament of healing is to bring people into God’s healing presence, and to allow ourselves and others to receive God’s grace.

Amen.