February 15, 2009
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Whenever you ask me to pray for a loved one or a friend, you believe that God still heals. In moments of good health, this subject of healing is relegated to the Sermon Talkback Class. But in moments of a health crisis, this subject is real and no longer hypothetical. Both the Old Testament and the Gospel lessons today focus on God’s power to heal.
In our first lesson, Naaman the Syrian, commander of the King of Aram’s army, has been stricken with a dreaded and isolating disease, and is desperate for relief. Relief that his wife’s slave girl tells him is available through the prophet Elisha in Samaria. But when Naaman arrives, he is gravely disappointed. Elisha does not even bother to leave his tent to greet the great soldier. Rather Elisha sends his servant out to Naaman with this prescription—”Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.”
At first Naaman is enraged. Not only has the prophet failed to give him an audience worthy of his esteemed status, he hasn’t done a thing. Fortunately, his servant intervenes reminding Naaman that if Elisha’s prescription had been difficult, Naaman would have followed it to the T. “What’s to be lost in this simple task of dipping seven times in the Jordan?” asks the servant. The answer, of course, is his leprosy! Returning to Elisha to give thanks and a gift or two, this time the prophet emerges from his tent to greet Naaman. But Elisha will take no reward nor any form of thanks. He did not heal Naaman, God did.
In the gospel lesson, we hear of another leper being healed. This comes immediately after the series of healings and exorcisms we have listened to for the last several weeks—the unclean spirit was cast out of the man in Capernaum, the fever left Simon’s mother-in-law, the demonic that crippled life in the whole city was cast out, and people’s lives were reversed and restored to life.
This leper came to Jesus begging, getting down on his knees and saying to Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched this man and made him clean.
Evil in Illnesses
Though we no longer attribute every illness to demon possession, we still consider illness a fundamental evil. This illness may prevent us from working and making a living. This illness may stop us from being active and traveling far from home. This illness may instill in us fear and uncertainty that causes us to live a life only a day at a time.
Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck tells of a breakfast conversation with his wife during a time Peck was working on his book dealing with evil. Suddenly their young son spoke up saying, “I know what evil is.” The renowned psychiatrist writes that though mildly amused at his child’s naiveté he decided to indulge him for a moment, so asked, “What is evil?” “Evil,” responded the boy, “is live spelled backwards.” Evil gets life backwards. Without having to label something demon possessed, our illnesses prevent us from living life fully. And we think that what keeps us sick is evil.
Today we turn to medical science when things in our bodies get themselves backwards. But this too is nothing less than God’s gift of healing. While we live in an increasingly secular world, we are again open to hearing about who it is that lies behind the phenomenon of life. Life is always struggling to return to live again once it has been turned backwards by the power of evil.
Notice that when you have a wound, it’s natural impetus is to heal rather than grow gangrenous—that is a miracle in and of itself. The genius of creation in its order, its wondrous and awesome nature of predictability is itself foundational not just in medicine but in the entire scientific method. We know ourselves as being wonderfully made by God—this miracle is far greater than ourselves.
In the thirty-four years that I have been doing ministry, I have yet to meet a physician or a nurse that does not share this wonder, and understand his or her gifts to be precisely that—a gift. Whenever I am visiting one of you in the hospital, I always ask if I can offer prayer before leaving. And in that prayer, I never fail to give God thanks for the gifts of the physicians, nurses, the technicians and other staff who all work so hard to spell evil backwards, servants through whom God continues to heal.
And then there are the times when I have had the privilege of sitting with you in the hospital and the physician, who having done all that medicine has at its disposal, turns to me and said, “You now have more influence over this than I do.” It is then that I feel a bit like Elisha, wanting to hide in the tent. But like Elisha I too invoke the power of God to drive out the infection, to shrink the tumor, to cure the fever, to reverse the evil that is trying to take away life. And when healing occurs, all of us are clear in our own minds as to who did it. The medical team practiced their disciplines, with all the discipline and art they could muster. We invoked God’s power with all the confidence of faith that is our own gift and discipline. But we all know who did the healing.
God Always Heals
But evil still has its grip on human life. We see it when the initial good news of a biopsy gives way to word that it is time for more tests. It causes us to be just a bit cautious when we hear, “We think we got it all.” We become depressed when old medicine has lost their effect and new medicine has yet to be found. Evil still has its grip on our lives when we are still hoping and waiting for a suitable organ donor. What do we say then? Does God still heal?
When these moments are with us, we believe that God always heals. God always answers our prayers for healing. Sometimes it is a recovery so dramatic and marvelous that we call it what all healing is, a miracle, and the person returns to live more days, months or years. But at other times, God’s gift of healing is so complete and so profound that they are no longer equipped to live in this world. They have been given a greater miracle still, the gift of resurrection, new and eternal life.
In the past ten years that I have been with you, I have known some of you lying on your backs on hospital beds. We began praying and we are happy that you are still with us today and you are growing stronger everyday. And I know of others who made initial recoveries, adding months, sometimes years to life, only to have hope shattered with a reoccurrence of the disease. But through the years I have seen confirmed the truth that God always heals. God always undoes the power of evil one way or another. The One who healed the leper Naaman, came among us in Jesus of Nazareth to bring us healing, to cast out evil, and to destroy its power over life once and for all.
Christ continues to work to reverse evil through the gifts of medicine and prayer, and more, he goes through the ordeal and suffering with us, to assure that we make it safely through the valley of the shadow of death.
Coming to Church
We put a lot of emphasis for you to come to church regularly. The reason is that a growing body of scientific evidence shows that Americans who attend religious services at least once a week enjoy better-than-average health and lower rates of illness, including depression. Perhaps most important, the studies show that weekly attendance confers a significant 25% reduction in mortality risk over a given period of time.
Religious services in churches, temples, and mosques boast various features that can be beneficial to health—meditation, social network, a set of values that discourage smoking, infidelity, and other unhealthy behaviors. Many of the studies have found that the health benefits of weekly attendance accrue more heavily to women than to men, perhaps because women make greater use of religious social networks. The conclusion from this study of 2676 Californians over a period of 30 years is religion is good for your health.
Some of you this morning are listening to my words from the position of strength and good health. The questions remain hypothetical for you. But others of you are listening with the anxiety of recent diagnoses for yourself, a loved one or a friend. Others are still listening with the skepticism of secularism thinking that what I have to say is simply nice thoughts.
Let me close with a story of a pastor in Pittsburgh who visited a man in his church who was hospitalized, fighting a losing battle with a rare blood disease, and knew it. It was an afternoon visit. As it drew to a close, the pastor asked if he might offer a prayer.
“Why?” responded his parishioner, an edge of anger in his voice. “What good can it do? I’ve tried to pray through all of this, and my words simply bounce off the ceiling and back into my face to mock me. No, please don’t pray. Thank you for coming.”
So the pastor didn’t pray. Instead he got up, took a pillow off the next bed, placed it in a chair where he had been sitting, and said, “You need to talk to someone who knows what you’re going through. Envision this pillow in this chair as Jesus. Tell him what is on your mind. He too knows what it means to suffer the threat of death and feel abandoned and mocked.” With that, the pastor left.
Later that night, after a meeting at the church, the pastor had one of those pastoral premonitions that told him he had better stop at the hospital on his way home. When he got to his parishioner’s room he found it empty and went looking for the nurse in charge. She told him his parishioner had died about seven o’clock that evening.
Then she paused for a moment. Looking at him she said, “The strangest thing happened late this afternoon. I heard arguing, and shouting, even some profanity coming from his room. Because I thought you were still with him, I didn’t interrupt. Later, I heard pleading then crying. Later still, a quiet conversation and even some laughter. By then I decided that you had stayed too long and must leave. But when I entered his room, I discovered it was not you—no one was there with him. Embarrassed, I fluffed his pillow and asked if there was anything I could do for him. He said, ‘Yes, move my friend’s chair closer to the bed.’ I did; the next time I checked on him, he was gone.”
The man’s anger had been healed, the fear had been eliminated and the disease, illness, the evil was gone once and for all. Jesus had walked with him through the valley of the shadow of death, and led him into the green pasture of eternity, just as he promises to do for each and everyone of us. God always heals, sometimes bringing us back to this life, sometimes with healing so profound we can only call it eternal life.
Live Life
We don’t treat people with leprosy or Hansen’s disease like we used to during the first century. They were not only physically sick but they were also excluded from society and forced to live outside of town, and also excluded from worship in the synagogue. When the leper approaches Jesus he is desperate and is perhaps unsure of what to expect. He was not sure that Jesus would want to heal him. Jesus, moved by pity for the man reaches out his hand to touch him and heal him. Jesus then instructs the man to see the priest so that he could be pronounced cured and be fully restored into his community.
Although the leper was instructed by Jesus to tell no one of what had happened, “he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and spread the word.” The man had gone from being untouchable to unstoppable. Evil was reversed and spelled backwards means to live again.
Would you like to live again? Every one of us here today can say that there’s an illness in us that we want to go away. We want that demon, that disease, that sickness, that worry to be cast out by Jesus Christ and to be made clean and be restored back into the community that we so cherish. We want to take that evil and spell it backward so that we can live once again because Christ has already taking upon himself all of the evil, all of the illness, all that imprison us to be afraid and depressed and cast them out.
Let us pray.
O God, source of all creativity and agent of healing for the world, we know that there are parts of our lives that still wait for your transforming care. We confess that, sometimes, we even keep these shadowy places as far as possible from ourselves and from you, choosing to leave them to die or bleed in silence, rather than bringing them to you for renewal and redemption. Forgive us when we failed to trust in your power of healing. Thank you, Lord for Christ who comes to heal us and restore us back to you. Amen.
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