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DonateJuly 2, 2006 |
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2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O God. God, hear my voice!” The Psalmist sets the stage for today’s lectionary readings and provides one possibility for the process-relational preacher’s homiletical reflections. Sadly, lamentation and grief seldom provoke, what Katie Day calls, “difficult conversations” in the church. In fact, the Psalms of lament are notable by their absence in hymnals and lectionary texts, despite the fact that lament is an unavoidable part of life.
The story is told of a woman who came to Gautama Buddha, carrying her deceased child. She asked the Buddha to restore her child to life. Gautama replied that he would bring her child back to life, provided that she bring him a mustard seed that had come from household in which neither a parent nor grandparent, child nor brother, husband nor wife, or favorite pet had died. The woman returned later that day, without her child’s body, requesting to enter the monastic life, for she had received an unexpected healing, the realization that death and grief are universal.
Yet, despite the fact that the mortality rate remains 100%, we still seek as a culture to deny aging, death, and bereavement. Nevertheless, “good grief,” as Granger Westberg noted, is essential to healing body, mind, and spirit.
In the Hebraic scriptures, the reality and expression of loss is recognized as essential to a full life. David has lost his beloved friend Jonathan. He also mourns the death of King Saul. Though his relationship to Saul was ambiguous at best, they were connected not only by the love of Jonathan and their people, but by their common role as leaders. “Weep,” David charges the community, “for the mighty have fallen.” The capacity to grieve is essential to institutional and personal health. We grieve what we most dearly love, and, thus, there is a celebrative aspect to mourning.
The Hebraic scriptures invite the pastor to reflect on the nature of healthy grief and to ask the congregation to reflect on places of grief in persons’ lives today. As a nation, we still grieve September 11, 2001 and our inability to grieve as a nation has, no doubt, been a factor in reckless and poorly thought-out foreign policy, as well as polarization of the “good” and “evil ones” by our national leaders. We grieve the loss of life in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the soldiers returning broken in spirit, mind, and body. Mainline Christians and individual congregations grieve the loss their influence in national policies and the loss of congregational membership, and long for the way things used to be.
As process preachers, we recognize that the experience grief is a metaphysical necessity, built into the nature of reality. Each moment of experience arises from its immediate environment, uniquely synthesizes its experience of the universe, and then perishes in its immediacy. The process is the reality, and creative transformation requires letting go of the past. Life is a perpetual perishing. Process spirituality does not minimize the reality of loss, but challenges us to embrace the fleeting nature of life. All things must pass, and in holding on to the past, we turn our backs on the next adventure God has planned for us.
Still, we must claim our grief, shed our tears, and find a safe place to mourn. Grief is, as C.S. Lewis notes in his A Grief Observed, a long valley with many unexpected turns. In the midst of our grief, there is no clear sense of when relief will eventually come. But, David’s lament reminds us that grief finds healing in the interdependence of life and in a nurturing and supportive community of faith and friends. We celebrate what has been lost through stories, song, laughter, and tears. Individually and as communities, sometimes we simply have to pause and experience our loss, before we immerse ourselves fully in life again. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in God’s word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord, more than those who watch for the morning.” We wait, hoping for new life, for a vision of possibility, for God’s comfort.
Process preachers remember that God is with us in our grief. God laments with us the loss we experience, the tears we cry, and the anger that we vent. God truly feels our loss and God is large enough to embrace all our emotions, even our anger at God. But, God is also at work within our grief, gently providing openings for healing and wholeness, pushing us to face our loss, providing a vision of life beyond loss. Creative transformation arises out of the rubble of the past and transforms what has been into something new. This is our hope as our “soul waits upon the Lord.”
Grief and healing are connected in the readings from Mark 5. The twin healings point to the importance of embracing both loss and hope as we face the calamities of life.
The possible or actual death of a child is devastating to most parents. It upsets the natural order and goes against our hope for immortality through the lives of our sons and daughters and their children. Jairus and his wife face the real possibility that their daughter will never awaken. Pushed to their limits, Jairus humbles himself before Jesus. No doubt, in the past, Jairus, as an orthodox religious leader, may have critiqued Jesus’ openness to outsiders, his companionship with sinners, and his concrete application of Jewish law. But, those differences now no longer mattered. When we are pushed to our limits, we will do anything to find relief for ourselves and those we love.
Within the story of Jairus’ and his family, there is another story, the narrative of the woman with the flow of blood. She, too, is living with loss – the loss of health, the loss of social standing and place in the community, the loss of respect, and the loss of religious community and a place to worship. Her unexpected bleeding rendered her unclean, morally suspect, and religiously ostracized.
The woman with the flow of blood knew the reality of chronic illness that confronts many persons today. While we often think of her as an older woman, scripture gives no indication of her age. She may have been only in her mid-twenties, possibly the victim of a gynecological ailment from the first moments of her reproductive life. Like many today, her illness became the center of her life, emotionally, relationally, and financially. As many of us seek to respond to illness, we can identify with Mark’s brief description, “She had endured much under many physicians, and she had spent all she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse.”
Still, this courageous woman seeks Jesus. For one moment, she places Jesus, rather than her illness, at the center of her life. “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Forgetting religious mores, social ostracism, and the place of women in the social order, she pushes her way through the crowd and touches Jesus, and a power is released that transforms her life.
After decades of neglect, concern for healing and wholeness is making a resurgence in progressive and mainstream congregations through the initiation of congregational health ministries, healing services, and dialogue with complementary health care. No longer limited by the confines of supernatural understandings of divine activity, we can imagine the healing of this woman in more naturalistic, but just as amazing, ways. If God the lively force working for creative transformation in our lives, we can not only expect miracles, acts of divine power in our lives, we can also accept miracles, God’s transformation of our lives through the interplay of faith and divine presence. These acts of divine energetic transformation are not violations of the laws of nature, but reflections of the interdependent matrix of relatedness that joins God, ourselves, our religious communities, and complementary and Western health care practitioners.
The healing of this woman is no simple faith healing. Indeed, her faith alone cannot heal here. This is good news. For taken solely as a faith healing, scriptures such as this one imply that health and illness are entirely in our hands. Whether spoken by conservative Christians, televangelists, or new age followers, the sole identification of faith and unfaith with health and illness can be abusive to persons with chronic illness, disabilities, or life-threatening illness. We hear it in the words “if you only have more faith, you [or your child] will recover,” “your illness is the result of your negativity,” “what lesson is your illness trying to teach you.” These platitudes are bad news for those who exhausted every personal, medical, and spiritual effort in their quest for wholeness.
Process preachers recognize that this narrative describes a healing environment that embraces not only the woman, but also Jesus and God. Illness and health are the result of many causes, not just one. While one source may predominate, we must also factor in environment, genetics, family of origin, economics and education, accessibility to health care, along with personal faith, the faith of friends, and the activity of God. Taken simply, in today’s medical language, her healing was partially the result of the “placebo effect.” Here faith made her whole! Her beliefs transformed her biology! While we can affirm that her faith in Jesus awakened to God’s healing presence in her mind, body, and spirit, we must also remember that divine healing power flowed from Jesus. Her faith was necessary, in this case, but not sufficient to transform her life. Divine energy is ubiquitous – pneuma, chi, prana – and in its variability can bring about surprising changes in our every aspect of our lives.
Our faith may open the door to dramatic releases of God’s energy that can heal body, mind, and spirit. Still, we must also affirm the wholeness of those “who never get well.” They are not lesser mortals, or faithless persons. God is still working in their lives, nurturing their faith and seeking the highest possibilities for personal transformation. As the Hebraic scriptures remind us, all of us will eventually confront a situation that cannot be cured by our faith or prayers, the fact of our mortality and the mortality of all things. Every one whom Jesus healed eventually died!
Again, the focus of the gospel narrative moves to Jairus’ family. When Jesus arrives, the bystanders assume she is dead. They laugh when Jesus, perhaps accurately, suggests that “the child is not dead but sleeping.”
The significance of this story does not depend on the girl being dead, and then miraculously resuscitated. Had Jesus succumbed to the “realistic” assessment of the crowd, the girl would surely have died. But, Jesus saw something more. His world was not limited by medical diagnoses, economic limitations, religious and social judgments. He saw God at work, even in the most hopeless situations.
Jesus creates a “healing community” and the girl is restored to life. Mainstream and progressive Christianity is often plagued by “realism” that limits our vision of what God can do. We limit God to the bottom line or the membership list, when God is always offering us new possibilities for growth, adventure, and new life. Process preachers are called to awaken their congregations to God’s surprising presence. While the initial aim is “the best for the impasse,” and thus contextual, God’s passionate aim for persons and communities of faith may lead us into adventures that we cannot imagine. God can do more with us, and in partnership with ourselves and our communities, than we can imagine! After the naysayers (and mainstream and progressive Christianity is filled with naysayers!) have had their day, we must awaken ourselves to God’s dream for us and dream along with God. Healing, like the prophetic imagination described by Walter Brueggemann, envisages an alternative to the present state of affairs and in that envisagement, new things come into being. Resurrection happens! There is no formula for healing, but our attentiveness to the divine imagination makes a way when there is no way! We need “healing and imaginative communities” in our congregations – intentional prayer and action groups, who expect great things from God and equally great things from ourselves!
In light of gospel healing narrative and Hebraic scriptures’ focus on lamentation, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians reminds us of the profound interdependence of life in which there are ultimately no boundaries between “givers” and “receivers.” Generosity is essential to life. In the dynamic interdependence of giving and receiving, divine energy flows through us and we discover new possibilities for growth and healing. While generosity cannot be defined legalistically, it is clear that even in our illness, poverty, and grief, we can be intentional recipients of graces we can share with others. In sharing with others, our spirits grow in stature and wholeness, and our world becomes larger and less self-oriented. The pastor can remind the congregation that the God who is with us in grief and illness, providing possibilities for transformation in the “worst of times,” calls us to be grateful and generous in the “best of times.” Generosity is the virtue that connects us creatively with the lively interdependence of the universe and the lively companionship of God.
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For more on the themes of this week’s lectionary, I invite you to look at the following texts:
Bruce Epperly, Healing Worship: Purpose and Practice (Pilgrim, October 2006)
Bruce Epperly, God’s Touch: Faith, Wholeness, and the Healing Miracles of Jesus (Westminster John Knox, 2002)
Bruce Epperly, The Power of Affirmative Faith (Chalice, 2002)
Bruce Epperly, Reiki Healing Touch and the Way of Jesus (Northstone, 2005)
Bruce Epperly is director of continuing education and professor of practical theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of God’s Touch: Faith, Wholeness, the Healing Miracles of Jesus and The Power of Affirmative Faith; and co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World. These titles are available from the Process & Fatih bookstore.
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