March 3, 2013
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
It’s no secret that we are becoming a nation full of unhealthy people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third (35.7%) of Americans are obese. Carrying an unhealthy weight leads to all kinds of related conditions like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer—in other words, most of the leading causes of death. In 2008, the medical costs related to obesity in the Unites States were estimated at $147 billion, or $1,492 more per person than a person of normal weight.
And yet, despite the constant warnings in the media and the pleading of doctors, obesity rates continue to rise. In 2000, no state had an obesity prevalence over 30%, while in 2010, ten years later, 12 states exceeded that threshold. It’s fairly clear that people aren’t generally good at doing what’s best for their own health regardless of all the debate about healthcare and insurance costs in the recent elections.
Now I want to be clear that what I have to say is not in any way trying to be insensitive to any of you who may have ongoing health concerns. While I know that I have been blessed with a fast metabolism that permits me to enjoy desserts, I am also keenly aware of how challenging it is for others to keep their weight at normal levels. But then this is the 3rd Sunday in Lent when it is the season when I meddle in your life to challenge all of us to becoming more disciplined and focused on God.
Some of you know that our son, Greg is the frozen-food master on the internet. He does a show reviewing frozen food, which is probably not the ideal way of eating food. When I visited him a couple of weeks ago, he has dropped from 215 pounds to 175 pounds. He’s eating better and running regularly as his form of fitness. He has re-launched his show, Freezerburns as Freezerburns +1 taking healthier frozen food and showing how you can add a fresh ingredient like broccoli or peppers to make it an even better dish. Greg is trying to influence others to eat better leading to better health.
Some health insurance companies have decided to take a more active approach to reduce health costs associated with obesity. They are partnering with nurses and doctors to help people manage their health, not only through massive doses of information, but also through the personal attention of a “health coach.” Do any of you have a “health coach?”
How a health coach works is that a health insurance company has patients complete an online health assessment based on an annual physical. The company provides an incentive for people to get the exam and fill out the assessment by lowering deductibles for those who do so. The patient fills out the online form and when a red flag comes up, it’s brought to the attention of the patient and he or she is offered the services of a “health coach” who will be in contact with the patient by phone to help the patient manage the problem and make changes.
The health coach talks with the patient to understand his or her condition and then helps the patient set goals for living a healthier lifestyle and/or managing a chronic disease like asthma or diabetes or a host of other conditions. The health coach checks in with the patient on a regular basis, offering tips and encouragement for maintaining better health through things like nutrition counseling, weight-loss strategies, how to take medication effectively, and advising about appropriate exercises.
Health Coach
The truth is, of course, that it’s hard for most of us to make changes in our lives strictly by our own will power. The spirit may be willing, after all, but the flesh is weak. Twinkies taste better than tofu, and sometimes we need a partner to tell us that tofu is better than Twinkies.
Now I’m not talking about those football coaches that are screaming at you to do more pushups but rather, we need someone to remind us that we don’t have to live this way, and that better and healthier lives are ahead if we’re willing to put in the hard work of taking charge of our own health.
As we are going to see, that someone is God.
Having a partner on the way is always better, since, as the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help”(4:9-10).
The presence of a health coach, even if he or she is only on the other end of the phone line, can make a huge difference in the life of someone who’s struggling physically. One recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that patients with health coaches were able to lose five times more weight than those who tried to lose it on their own.
What’s true for our bodies also seems to hold true for our spiritual lives, which makes sense, because, as the Bible teaches us, the two are inexorably linked. Health coaching for the soul is as helpful and necessary as health coaching for the body, except in the case of spiritual coaching we’re not trying to cut down, but rather trying to fill up on God’s spirit and provision for our lives.
Drink Water
In our text for today, God speaks to the exiled people of Judah through the prophet Isaiah in a way that sounds a lot like a health coach calling a suffering patient. God is advising them on strategies that will restore their spiritual health and relationships with God as he prepares to lead them back from exile in Babylon. The people have long been dehydrated and starving as the consequence of their sin and banishment to a foreign land. Now God gives them some nutrition counseling about how to be nourished again.
“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters,” the Coach begins. In Chapter 8, God tells Isaiah that one of the reasons that the people’s health is so bad is that they refused to drink “the waters of Shiloath” (8:5)—a reference to a canal along the eastern slope of Jerusalem that some scholars have connected to the Pool of Siloam (John 9:7) where Jesus heals a blind man from birth with mud and told him to wash his eyes in the Pool of Siloam. These waters seem to represent the sustaining strength of God for his people, but they rejected it and chose to run thirsty. As the result, all they would receive is the “mighty flood” of foreign invasion instead. God now invites his thirsty people to “come to the waters’ and drink deeply, once again, of God’s love for them.
It’s like when we are exercising and don’t take time to hydrate, we would get sick. Spiritual dryness can become a chronic condition for the people of God if they do not come to the “living water” and drink deeply on a regular basis. As any health coach will tell you, drinking at least eight, 8-ounce glasses of water a day will benefit you a great deal. Regular and sustained discipline of prayer and Bible study will also sustain the thirsty soul. God invites us, as he invited the people of Judah, to come and drink deeply and be refreshed by his love and his promises.
Eat Well
God our Health Coach then goes on to talk about the food we eat. Obesity is most prevalent among the poor because unhealthy, processed foods are cheaper and easier to prepare. God urges people to get off the fast, cheap, and easy spiritual diet and instead come to the free and abundant banquet he offers through his grace. This isn’t food you have to work to be able to afford, but rather the gift of a gracious host. “Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”
The Health Coach identifies the problem with the people’s health is that they are spending their money on cheap, undernourished alternatives and working hard to sustain a spiritual diet that won’t satisfy them. He said, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” (55:2).
Spiritually speaking, the people were starving on the diet of slavery in Babylon when the Health Coach says to them, “Listen carefully to me and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food”(55:2). That food is the richness of God’s own word and promise based on God’s covenant with David (55:3). As rain comes to the earth and brings forth seeds that lead to bread, so God’s words goes out and sustains his people if only they will come and eat. It’s a word that is never “empty” but always accomplishes God’s purpose (55:10-11).
Eat Bread of Life
Both physically and spiritually, our food comes packaged as sugary-sweet and enticing empty calories whether it is in the super market or from Amazon. We grow fatter, dumber, and sadder the more we consume the junk of our culture. God our Health Coach, urges us instead to fill up on bread that sustains—the Bread of Life, as Jesus called himself in John 6, the manna from God that is there to nourish us daily. That bread enables us not only to be healthy, but to help others as well as assistant spiritual health coaches. Jesus once said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work (John 4:34). We should embrace Jesus’ diet.
Brian and Craig Wansik are researchers who looked at paintings of the Last Supper over the last thousand years and noticed that the portions of the food depicted on the table have become bigger with every generation. According to their research, the entrees and plates depicted in the paintings have grown 66%, while the size of the bread has grown 23% over the last thousand years. Apparently, artists in every generation have been painting food the way it appeared on their plates, with increasing volume as prosperity and obesity have become more prevalent.
When we share the Lord’s Supper, we’re sharing in the body of Christ and remembering that meal and all for which it stood. While the artists have made the portions bigger, most churches have made the communion elements even smaller and, in some traditions, almost tasteless in the form of cardboard wafers. Our church is the only one I know that uses oyster crackers!
What we miss is the idea that if this meal representing a very powerful way God’s grace offered through the brokenness of Christ, then a crumb or an oyster cracker doesn’t seem to cut it. Sure, we can afford to eat less, but when it comes to the Lord’s Table we should be sharing in a feast, not replicating a famine. So in a few minutes, when we have communion, it’s not just a sampling of the body of Christ, but an ample portion to nourish us to be the body of Christ in the world.
Get Started
Are you ready to change your life and to make the change for a healthier spiritual life? We know we will do better if we don’t try to make it on our own. We need our fellow Christians and friends to help us in community, and we need to embrace God’s offer to coach us through prayer as we make the change: “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near…” (55:6).
God is, after all, the expert whose “thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are our ways his ways” (55:8). If we’re going to be healthy Christians, we need a Coach who knows the best way to make us whole!
And if we may have some continuing physical problems, I pray that you will also take some first steps to get back to a healthier life.
Let us pray.
God of grace, you have shown us as our coach to a better way. And that way is to believe in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Coach us to be both physically and spiritually healthier as we follow the Bread of Life in our daily life. Give us the openness to your guidance and spirit as we strive to follow your ways and your thoughts. In Christ, we pray. Amen.