“Jesus, The Healer”

Mark 1:21-2:12

A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley

September 15, 2002

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            Sometimes, late at night when I’m surfing through what drivel might lull me to sleep, the remote stops on one of those faith healers.  And I have to stop.  I look at the spectacle, the hype, the perfectly fitting suit and the really bad hairdo and I just have to watch.  Something draws me in.  Part of it’s the drama.  People telling of their sorry tale of this infirmity or that and then thrown to the ground by the power of the preacher.  And sure enough everyone is healed.  It must be true.  I mean, it’s on TV and everything.

            Many people believe it’s true.  It’s a huge industry.  But let’s pause to think of the implicit messages in these healing shows.   If you believe in Jesus enough and go to the right evangelist, you will be healed of all of your diseases.  But not everyone gets healed, do they.  Many good Christians get sick and die.  If one person is healed, does that mean that person is a better Christian, a true believer, a more moral or just person?  If that were the case, why aren’t more good people being healed?  Why is there so much disease?  Where’s the right evangelist who can heal us all?

            Well, you know as well as I do that to look at the healing stories in the Gospel and transporting them to present time is always a leap.  The key for us in reading any scripture is to find its meaning in the context of the gospel story and then see how that meaning intersects with our own lives.  Because let’s face it, we are individuals, a people, a society, a world in need of healing.

            There is not a whole lot of preaching in the gospel of Mark, but there is a whole lot of action.  The gospel of John is just the opposite.  Jesus will preach on for three or four chapters, explaining this symbol and that.  In Mark, Jesus practices more than he preaches. Therefore, it is no accident that Jesus begins his ministry by healing people.

            I don’t want to get so caught up in a discussion about what healing meant and whether faith healing works these days or not.  It is really a contemporary question.  In antiquity, healing stories were part of the culture, part of the genre, part of any good story.  But the essence of this gospel is who gets healed.  That is where we find out what Jesus is all about.

            Look at the first people he healed, Jesus healed a person with an unclean spirit—we might these days call that a dual personality, or someone bi-polar.  He then healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, a leper, a paralytic, a man with a withered hand, a crazy possessed man living amongst the tombs in shackles, and a woman with a flow of blood, people possessed with demons.  All of these people needed healing.  And none of these people had been healed or had been deemed worthy of healing by the synagogue leadership.  Jesus really was about turning over the tables.  He showed that God is in charge and that the first shall be last and that the last shall be first—that the priorities of this world and especially of organized religion are pretty messed up.

 

 

 

All of the people Jesus healed had conditions which were listed in the book of Leviticus as unclean.  And when you are unclean you are a non-person in the eyes of the religious community.   You had to walk around with a sign around your neck and yell “Unclean, unclean”, so that other people wouldn’t get poisoned by their contact with you.  It wasn’t merely that you became physically unclean because when you brushed the skin of another unclean one, although that was part of it, it was a way of keeping the poor and the outcast on the margins of society.  Jesus came to bring the outcast back in to the society.  Jesus came to bring those whom religion has called unclean, back to the table, back to the family of God.  And as soon as Jesus started doing this, the people knew a new day had come.  They said of Jesus, “He speaks as one with authority, not like the scribes.”  Ched Myers in his book, Say to this Mountain wrote,

“Gospel healings challenge the ordering of power.  Because Jesus seeks the root causes of why people are marginalized, there is no case of healing and exorcism in Mark that does not raise a larger question of social oppression.”(p.14)

It is interesting to look at what happens to the people whom Jesus heals.  Some are simply healed, but Mark goes out of his way to explain that Jesus is interested in restoring the people to full status in the religious community. That’s another kind of healing.  One is of the body, the other is of the community.

When Jesus heals the person with leprosy for instance, Jesus made him clean.  This is more than healing him, it is making him a full citizen in the household of God.  It is something usually only a priest has the authority to do, but when Jesus started teaching and healing, the people recognized Jesus as having real authority, not the authority like those of the scribes.  Not the authority which had kept people as second class citizens, but God’s authority.

Jesus goes into the synagogue, on the scribes’ turf.  He is there on the Sabbath and he is teaching with a different kind of authority, something the scribes don’t seem to have—something that the community has been longing for.   Immediately he meets with opposition which he swiftly defeats.  The unclean spirits who know him are exorcised. 

It seems clear that these unclean spirits in the context of the story are in cahoots with the scribes, the synagogue leadership.  They declare “what have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, the Holy one of Israel.” (Mark 1:24).  Jesus came to declare that in its attempt to keep itself clean, religion has instead kept poor people poor, sick people sick, people in positions of domination, and others subjugated.  Jesus had to expose organized religion for what it was.  It was only after he did this that he went to the highways and byways to heal people and make them clean without the benefit of the priests.  And immediately the scribes and the religious leadership sought ways to destroy him.

Think about the pure religious community these days.  Who is deemed by our society as unclean? 

Is it the person with AIDS,

the Gay or Lesbian or bisexual or transgender person?,

the Liberal, or perhaps in our church the fundamentalist? 

The Muslim or the Jew?

The person of the book who used that book to inspire him or her to do acts of terrorism?  Dare we even think about the crusades or the Holocaust, let alone 9/11?

The poor person? 

The person who is not clean enough or who disrupts our calmness with their demeanor? 

The homeless? 

The drug addict? 

The divorcee? 

The church body which is led by a woman? 

The abuser? 

The feminist who speaks the uncomfortable truth to power?

Jesus’ message was that the religious community is broken.  The religious community is messed up when it excludes God’s people in need.  The religious community is messed up when it gets into bed with government. 

What we are called to create is a new kind of community—a new kind of family where all are welcome and all are honored and all are offered healing.   That’s what “love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you” means.  It means restore the household of God.  Make your enemies in to your friends.  A good way to do that might just be to stop killing them or preparing to kill them.

            When Jesus plays the healer, he is also turning over the tables.  What Jesus is interested in exorcising is religion gone wrong.  He wants to restore community and family with everyone.

            There are plenty of people here in the Twin Cities who have been burned by the organized church.  There are plenty of folk who are simply too bruised to ever trust the church again.  Mary Hammond an American Baptist pastor from Oberlin, Ohio recently wrote an award-winning book on this called The Church and the DeChurched: Mending a Damaged Faith.  The dechurched take many forms.  But by and large they are people who have been disillusioned or burned by organized religion.  They have either voluntarily left or have been kicked out of church.  Many of us might find ourselves in one of these categories.  She writes that ‘the dechurched must begin an often long and challenging process of reexamining biblical interpretation and, literally, detoxifying the messages they have received from the Bible.”(Hammond, 2001:112).  That’s precisely why we’re looking so closely at Mark this year.  I want us to be able to embrace this gospel of hope, resistance and justice.  Maybe through it all, we might find some healing, too.

            Jesus opened his ministry by healing as a way to say that organized religion has messed up.  And we need to be healed from that.

            Years ago, early in the AIDS epidemic, I was part of a group that organized monthly interfaith AIDS healing services.  Even though I have had trouble with faith healing, I nonetheless participated in these services when I was serving my first church in Hartford, CT.  I stood up front with a few other clergy and lay people and had people come up to me, we would lay hands upon them, pray for them and welcome them into the family of God, where there is no judgement, no burden too heavy for God to handle through us.

            When we lay hands on people, there actually is life force, energy that is transferred from one person to another.  When this is channeled intensely, people do experience a sense of relief, a sense of power, a sense of healing.

 

 

A member of my church in Hartford, Pierre came forward to pray at my station at one of those services.  It was not until a few weeks later that he told me that he had been diagnosed with AIDS.  He was a beloved gentle man from Haiti who loved his church.  And he loved it so much that he could not bear to let them know of his disease.  He could not trust them to still love him. 

Pretty soon, people began figuring it out, though they never talked about it much.  Some people would not see him.  They would avoid him during the passing of the peace.  There even arose a controversy about sanitation and communion glasses. 

When he was at death’s door and confined to the hospital, he got a pass to come to church.  He wanted to be present in the community that loved him. And on that Easter Sunday, Pierre was there passing the peace and being hugged by many people. 

A number of us stayed with him through it all, making sure we touched him, making sure he knew that he was loved by us and loved by God.  This person who had felt de-churched and an outcast as an immigrant with poor command of the english language, was loved and restored into a community of faith.   That’s what Jesus’ ministry was all about. 

The church needs to be a place for healing, not only physically, but also healing of our shattered hopes, our dissatisfaction with organized religion, our distaste for easy answers full of platitudes, a place where we can find ways and power to speak truth to systems of domination, confident that we have the power of God on our sides. 

For God wants healing. 

God wants the marginalized to have a voice. 

God wants the human family restored. 

That’s the essence of the Gospel. 

Maybe it can be our ministry as we follow Jesus, the healer.

Remember, Jesus healed on the Sabbath, against all of the rules and in the face of the scribes and Pharisees.  It’s probably what got him killed.  And it’s also probably what saved the lives and souls of many.

             If you feel that you are in need of healing, I invite you to remember that we follow one who taught us that healing is not just of the body, it is of the soul, and it is of the community.  When this healing happens, then a new power is unleashed on God’s people to do amazing things.

            I invite you to take a few moments of silence following this sermon to prayerfully reflect upon those places in your life that need healing.  I then invite you to ask God to take that divine healing power and transfer a portion of it into your hands, so that we might all participate in the healing ministry which Jesus began. 

And through it all, may we see God more clearly,

See our neighbors and even our enemies as people who are in need of healing,

And perhaps even find the wisdom and power to unleash God’s healing might to a world and a people in need.

Sisters and brothers, let’s participate in that healing ministry as we follow the one who calls us to abundant life and who set us all free.

Amen.