A Fourth Church Sermon by Sarah A. Johnson

February 8, 2009 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

The Healing Power of God

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
Mark 1:29–39

Healing is just not something that we talk about very often in the Presbyterian church. We tend to expend most of our energies on the intellectual faculties of the faith. Ideas and creeds that can be written, argued, expounded upon, and turned into long dissertations or thick theological volumes tend to be more of our specialty. Seminaries often give their students special opportunities to learn this during their first year of study. During my first year at Princeton I was introduced to Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who among other things, has written a twelve-volume series, Church Dogmatics, on the “essentials” of the faith. One look at the hundreds of thousands of pages that make up these volumes and one begins to wonderif you picked the wrong tradition. For better or for worse, when it comes to the unwritten core principles of the Reformed faith, we often find ourselves locked into the thinking that if you cannot write a dissertation about it, then it probably is not worth mentioning.

Besides, stories about healing seem a little too primitive, a little too pre-Enlightenment, for our modern sensibilities. They are stories that appear better suited for the genres of science fiction and fantasy rather than real life; something that happens to Harry Potter or in the latest volume of the Twilight series, but not to you and me. Our faith lives are too practical, too commonsense, to entertain such “out of this world” ideas.

What’s more is that you and I both know that when it comes to things such as the diseases and illnesses that plague our lives, they are a complex combination of medicine, physical chemistry, environment, and circumstance and usually aren’t best addressed by faith alone. And so when we come across a story like the one in the Gospel text from Mark, our instinct is to skip right past it, hoping that the preacher will find a topic a little more applicable to our everyday lives.

But the Gospel of Mark has a bold message, namely that healing is a central part of Jesus’ ministry and thus the presence of the kingdom of God.

In fact, when we take a look at the Gospel of Mark as a whole, we realize that thirteen of the eighteen miracle stories found throughout the Gospel narrative are stories of healing. Of the hundreds of verses present in Mark’s Gospel, roughly one-third of them are about healing.

Even our story from this evening is one of five successive stories about healing found in the first six chapters alone. For Mark, Jesus’ ability to confront and heal the broken powers of this world and to transform all parts of our lives—physical and spiritual and emotional—in unexpected ways is an essential part of God’s kingdom message.

And one in which context is important.

At the point in which we encounter Jesus in our story for this evening, we find him at the very beginning of his ministry. Baptized, tempted, and with the newly minted disciples in tow, Jesus has just performed his first act of ministry.

Entering the very public synagogue on the sabbath, Jesus teaches and heals a man suffering from the spiritual distress of an unclean spirit. It is only once having completed this task that Jesus then moves to the private home of Simon’s mother-in-law, where he heals her from the physical pain of fever. It is a strange and quick series of events that seem to form a complete circle, providing wholeness between the two stories, each story reflecting the other, a mirror image of the other.

In the course of one day, sunup at the synagogue to sundown at home, Jesus has moved from the loud and public environment of community life to the now quiet and more private location of the home; he has healed one man and one woman, one suffering from emotional and spiritual distress and one suffering from physical pain. Side by side these two seemingly mundane stories demonstrate Jesus’ ability to provide healing for all kinds of people, suffering from all sorts of diseases regardless of their status, or circumstances. That the healing care found God’s providence, no matter how much it seems to defy commonsense, encompasses all.

This week as I thought about this text, I came across a book entitled, God Stories: Inspirational Encounters with the Divine. It is a small Reader’s Digest-size book that recounts the surprising stories of divine work in the midst of human reality. One of the sections of the book is devoted specifically to stories about faith and physical healing. In one story a man writes,

The doctor told me that my wife had suffered irreversible damage to her brain and other organs and that she had only a couple of hours to live. . . . While preparing for the inevitable, my mother-in-law nevertheless spread the word around to every church, synagogue, and mosque in the state, asking for prayers. As my wife lay unconscious in the hospital room set aside for “terminals,” she refused to die. Ten days later she was discharged from the hospital. Her organs have all recovered and there is no brain damage.”

In another miraculous telling a new mother writes, “The surgeon called us into his office for the news. . . . [Our baby] would need open heart surgery for a valvotomy, and because of the critical nature of the problem, plus the added complication of the damaged left ventricle, she had only a 10 percent chance of survival.” In a state of utter desperation for the survival of their new baby, the mother and father began a massive prayer chain that circled the globe. “Twelve hours later, after major surgery, the baby was out of the woods, much to the amazement of all the doctors in the intensive care unit.”

And these weren’t the only two stories. There were dozens more, each telling a different and yet equally beautiful tale about the unexpected healing power of God. These are powerful stories, surprising stories. Powerful and surprising because they indeed defy logic and commonsense and sometimes even medicine, making it hard to discern what combination of love and prayer, happenstance, technology, and good doctors were involved. They push our own boundaries of comfort on the places where the possibility of divine intervention meets the challenges of human frailty.

But these beautiful and surprising stories are also dangerous ones as well. They are dangerous because, well, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “The problem with miracles is that they are hard to witness without wanting one of your own.”

And they are also dangerous because we all know that people who want, who pray for, and who desperately deserve these types of miracles often do not get them.

And maybe that is why we find a wholeness to Mark’s story: the presence of both healings in different circumstances, to different people, one physical and emotional, one incomplete without the other. The wholeness of the story itself affirms the bold promise that God indeed brings healing in the face of human frailty and brokenness and that sometimes the healing is physical and sometimes it is not. And even when it is not, the promise of healing still remains.

Her first few years in ministry, a dear friend of mine was the youth pastor at a church whose youth group experienced in four years the death of two youth and four parents. One of those deaths was that of a ninth-grade boy named Hunter. When he was fifteen years old, a blood vessel ruptured in Hunter’s brain, leaving him unconscious and in a matter of hours taking his life. My friend describes Hunter’s death, and the deaths of those that followed, as one of the darkest and most difficult times in the life of her ministry and in the life of the congregation she was serving. But in the midst of that overwhelming period of loss and darkness, my friend also experienced unexpected healing.

For you see as Hunter lay in his hospital bed, with monitors and needles and tubes sticking out in every direction, there poured into the hospital—unsolicited and without invitation—five of Hunter’s closest friends. Then three more. Then eight. They just kept on coming. As they flowed into the hospital and caught sight of Hunter’s parents, they ran to them in tears, gasping for breath, “When can we go in and see him? What’s going on? Is he going to be alright?”

Eventually Hunter’s mother gathered the growing mob of them together and told them that if they wanted, they could go in to Hunter’s room to say good-bye. So two by two and three by three, Hunter’s friends—most of them youth from the church—filed in to hold Hunter’s hand, to read him poetry, to sing, even to laugh with one another about old times, and to pray with him, Bibles in hand.

And then, two days later those same friends gathered to help plan and lead Hunter’s memorial service. Just as in pain as any one else—perhaps more so—Hunter’s friends got down to business, and with the help of the church staff and youth advisors, they started to decide just the right scripture passages to be read, prayers to be offered, who would speak the homily, and which hymns would be best to sing. For three hours they planned, collaborating and care giving, making sure that every last detail of that service would go over just right.

And it did. On the day of Hunter’s funeral, that church was bursting at the seams, and Hunter’s friends led one of the most moving and beautiful and challenging worship services that my friend says she has ever been to.

Hunter’s friends understood something about the healing power of God. Their suffering no less real than anybody else’s, yet somehow they were able to pause and listen for the voice of Jesus, who promises to show up even in the midst of darkness, in all times and all circumstances, to offer hope and healing. I think they must have heard Jesus saying something like this, “Go! Plan this service for your friend. Care for Hunter’s family. Lead our church. Bear my light, and let it shine!”

Their friend had died, a mother and father had lost their son, yet somehow, even there, the faint glimmer of hope and life could be seen in the faithful actions and loving kindness of that church’s young people. It is an extraordinary story about God’s power to heal even in the darkest of times.

I was reminded this week, in a far more routine manner, of one of the ways that this kind of healing power happens in the life and work of this congregation. On Saturday morning, the elders and deacons and other leaders of this church gathered together for a prayer workshop. It was a workshop designed as a practical opportunity for members to talk about, to study, and to support one another in the practice of prayer.

For an hour and a half we practiced praying, rotating from one table to another, swapping helpful hints, encouragement, embarrassing stories. It is the kind of crazy thing that only church people get together to do—like potlucks or Sunday socials. I can only imagine the hilarity of someone who stumbled upon this energetic group of people who all gave up a part of their Saturday morning to gather with others over coffee and prayer practice. And yet as we worked our way through the morning, it was clear that the prayers of encouragement, blessing, hope, reconciliation, and longing are all a part of God’s work of healing here at Fourth Church, seeking and offering presence when human strength seems absent.

As we closed our workshop, we joined together in a litany prayer, in which each person was given the opportunity to offer a word or a phrase or a simple blessing into the open silence. Little by little words trickled out as we prayed for our families and our friends, our nation, the world. The words filled the silence for several minutes:

“for my daughter. . .”
“for my mother, who was diagnosed with cancer . . .”
“for my brother, who lost his job . . .”
“for my friend, who is suffering from homelessness . . .”
“for those places in the world that are without food and clean water . . .”
“for peace . . .”

It was another reminder of God’s promise to heal, even in the midst of darkness and loss, unanswered questions, to restore us to wholeness again.

Maybe you wouldn’t articulate it exactly this way, but perhaps you can recall a time in your life where you experienced the healing power of God, the power of God to heal and to restore our souls and our lives. Perhaps this healing came as a prayer offered, a presence given, a hand extended in welcome, a place of acceptance found, an undeserved grace, or the encouragement and love of those around you.

You see, that’s the other thing about this healing power of God. It is never an act of isolation that is left stagnant, some magic or absolute power demonstrated for the sake of the power itself. Having once suffered and been healed, Simon Peter’s mother-in-law does something perhaps even more surprising and unexpected than the healing itself. Having been healed by Jesus, she rises and begins to serve. While on the surface it might be possible to read this action as something that simply recognizes her cultural place as a woman in the home, it would be a mistake to write her off so quickly, to fold her too easily into the patriarchal fabric of the text. After all, she didn’t come up with this idea all on her own.

Simon’s mother-in-law’s response of service echoes the model of the one who first served her, the model put forth by Jesus himself, who to the dismay of many came not to be served but to serve and to model the utterly strange fact that the healing power of God is servant power. Having received a measure of God’s healing, we too are invited to rise and serve, bearing God’s power to heal ourselves and others in this broken and fragile world.

The promise of God’s power to heal is strange indeed, and it certainly doesn’t give us any method for manipulating the powers of providence to the service of our own desires. And it doesn’t rid life of the hard and often unanswered questions of why? Why the illness? Why the broken heart? Why the disappointment? Why this pain? It doesn’t give us a simple roadmap from which we can just jump right in and say, “OK, God, I am ready to be healed” and then all the hurt simply stops dead in its tracks and everything goes right back to the place it used to be. It is just not that simple, because a changed heart isn’t the same thing as a brand new one, and healing doesn’t clear away our memories.

But despite all this, Jesus does invite us into that strange world, where the promise of God’s power to heal in all places and in all circumstances for all people is ever constant. It is a strange world, in which we are invited to expect the unexpected and dare to hope and pray and to receive strength beyond our own.

I don’t know why God chooses to heal one way in some circumstances and another way in others, why things happen the way that they do. But I do know this: the power of God’s Holy Spirit to heal and to bring life even in the darkest of moments is alive and well in this world.

As he leaves the synagogue, passes through the house, and goes out into the crowds of people in need of all kinds of healing, Jesus says, “This is why I have come.”

All thanks be to God. Amen.