September 9, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Hazardous Healing

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 125
Mark 7:24−37

“Now the woman was a Gentile.”

Mark 7:26 (NRSV)

Healing in the Gospels was a sign of the advent of the kingdom and the realization and authentication of salvation.

Stephen Pattison
Alive and Kicking: Towards a Practical Theology of Illness and Healing

It seems fitting that I should say welcome back to you on this first Sunday after Labor Day, the beginning of the church’s programming year. I know many of you have been here during the summer as well, and I am grateful for that. I also know there are some who during the summer find God in lakes and forests rather than church, but I’m glad for those of you who have continued to be here during the summer.

There are real feelings of thresholds being crossed and new things happening on a day like today. John Buchanan would refer to this, somewhat tongue in cheek, as the church’s opening day. If you want to follow that metaphor, let’s hope for a better season for us than for the Cubs this year. But there is a sense of new opportunities, of new things happening.

Sunday School has started for our younger children; the youth programs kick off today with junior high and senior high programming. As Joyce mentioned, we are looking forward to the completion of the Gratz Center, our new facility behind us here. As that gets closer, we look forward to the Cornerstone Laying next Sunday and then the dedication on November 18. The Pastor Nominating Committee has been working hard during the summer on your behalf as they continue to receive and sift through names of potential candidates for the position of Pastor here at Fourth Church. And the Transition Planning Team, which helped me so much and put in place this transition time, are now thinking towards a preaching calendar for the first few months of 2013, inviting some more guest preachers, certainly using your Associate Pastors in preaching, and keeping the pulpit strong until we know the name of the person who will be the next Pastor.

It was great to welcome Edwin this morning—another new beginning for us as his pastoral residency starts. We enter into stewardship season soon; next Sunday we will kick off the annual appeal for the operating funds for the church, and you’ll hear more about that in the coming weeks. We really want to see people engaged in giving as a real part of their commitment to Christian discipleship and to being a part of this community and supporting all the many missions and ministries that we undertake here.

So I have been reflecting this week on these ideas of threshold, but I’ve been doing it not in my office here in Chicago. Rather I happened to be in, of all places, Montana from Wednesday until Saturday. I’ve never been to Montana before, but I’d always been interested in finding an opportunity to go, partly because of my interest in fishing—and fly-fishing, in particular. Missy had a conference for her work, and I went out with her and attended part of that and then did some sermon preparation and writing out there. We happened to run into some friends from Chicago who have a home in Big Sky just outside Bozeman. Some of you will know Sara and Chris Pfaff, very active members of this congregation. Sara is the Deputy Session Clerk, and Sara herself is a very keen fly fisher, and much to my delight, she shared with me that she had arranged for the two of us to have a morning’s fly-fishing on one of the rivers close to their home. Now any kind of fishing really, but fly-fishing in particular, is one of those things that I absolutely love to do but do not get to do often enough. This might sound to you as kind of an ordinary thing—to go off and do a morning’s fishing—but it was extraordinary how the experience became almost like a pilgrimage for me.

You see the guide who was helping us took us to fish on the banks of a stretch of the Gallatin River. The Gallatin is one of the rivers that was used in the filming of that minor classic movie about fly-fishing, A River Runs through It. So there I was standing in the exact river where that movie that I love so much had been filmed. It went deeper than that for me, because, you see, many years ago my mother gave me as a gift the book of A River Runs through It, on which the movie is based. It is really a semi-autobiographical novel written by a man called Norman Maclean, who was for many years professor of English here at the University of Chicago. He was born in Nova Scotia, and his family moved to Missoula, Montana, where his father was the Presbyterian minister. My mom was very interested in this whole story, because her maiden name was also Maclean and, in fact, Norman Maclean’s father’s forebears came from the same island that my grandfather was born on, the island of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland.

The book begins, “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.” There I was then catching trout (and I did catch) on a fly in the Gallatin River in the breathtakingly beautiful landscape of Big Sky, Montana, thinking about my mom and about Norman Maclean and about his father and about my father, who is a much better fisherman than I am and who would have loved to have been standing there with me fishing that river.

And then something extraordinary happened. We fished for two-and-a-half hours or so, and we took a break to have a snack. As we were standing at the side of the river having our snack, I noticed in the river a rainbow trout that was floating by, kind of turned on its side. I assumed that it was a dead fish. So I pointed the guide to the fish, and he stepped into the river and put his hands underneath and took the trout in his hands, still under water. He said the trout was still alive. He looked at it. There were no marks on it, there were no injuries, and yet it seemed like it was almost comatose. I asked him what he thought had happened, and he suggested that perhaps the trout had been caught further upstream by an angler who then, as you always do, had released the fish, but it might have given a good fight in being caught and it might have become exhausted and then unable to swim upstream. It was extraordinary as this man with the most amazing tenderness and love for this creature held it for ten to fifteen minutes and moved it up and down so that the gills would begin working again. And he kept at this until the trout had a spark of life. He flicked his tail and moved a little bit ahead, but he kept with it, holding it until it was absolutely strong enough to swim off and swim upstream.

In A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean speaks about the concept of grace. He was very influenced by his father, as you can tell in reading the book and in seeing the movie. He describes grace in this way: “What I see is that in my life there have been a number of moments which appear almost as if an artist had made them.” He goes on: “Wordsworth had this theory about what he calls spots of time that seem almost divinely shaped.” Divinely shaped spots of time. Many of you will recall how I have spoken before from this pulpit about the concept in Celtic Christianity of thin places, where there seems only a tissue between heaven and earth and as if that heaven could break in at any time. Divinely shaped spots of time. I think in watching this act of healing that the guide undertook to heal the fish, I must have been particularly attuned to it, because I had been last week reflecting on these two healing stories in Mark’s Gospel, as I knew they were the text for this morning. And I reflected about how for Jesus these are what I am calling hazardous healings.

Jesus is away from his community, from his group of people. He’s in an area of the country that is not Jewish; it is Gentile. So Jesus himself has crossed thresholds here, gone into new territory in many ways. There are elements of riskiness in the stories. It can be somewhat upsetting, or even shocking, as we read the story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman who has come to beg for help for her daughter. It seems to be an unfamiliar Jesus who responds with language in which he compares non-Jewish people to dogs. It is hard when we think of the Jesus that Mark portrays, to think of Jesus responding in this harsh manner. It clashes in many ways with how Mark has up to now portrayed Jesus as someone willing to break down barriers, willing to challenge the conventions of the religious authorities of the day. Indeed, in the previous story Jesus has just declared that there are no foods that are unclean.

So why would Jesus respond to the woman in this way? There are lots of scholars who have struggled and wrestled with this text. I came across an interesting reading of this passage by a New Testament scholar called Holly Caray, and she interprets this passage in a way that she sees Jesus acting as kind of a devil’s advocate. Jesus’ role as devil’s advocate allows the woman to utter the very truth to which he holds. Holly Caray argues in this reading that Jesus is allowing the woman to express the thing that Jesus himself believes; it is almost like he sets it up for her. If we read it that way, she says, the story is a prime example of Jesus’ subversion of exclusive boundaries. The new community that is brought in the kingdom is an inclusive one. Hazardous healing.

I went to my files yesterday because I wanted to find a story to share with you this morning. It’s about a couple who were married in this church, are members of this congregation, Jeremy and Shannon Smith. I did their wedding a number of years ago, ten, eleven years ago. They’ve now got a lovely family. They live and practice medicine in Madison, Wisconsin. Jeremy and Shannon were completing their medical studies at Northwestern just at the time they were getting married. Rather than go to Hawaii on honeymoon or something like that, they chose to take their first six months of married life together and go to Malawi to volunteer in a hospital in a rural part of that very poor, East African country, which was at the time, and still is, dealing with the epidemic of HIV and AIDS.

I’ll never forget Jeremy writing an email to me, some weeks after they’d arrived, to say that they were fine and to share a little of what they were doing. It’s a story that has always stuck in my mind as I reflect on this great truth that one of the things we know about Jesus is that he was a healer. Jeremy, writing for him and Shannon, explained how they get to the hospital and discover the doctor in charge is a little Presbyterian doctor from Ireland, Dr. Brownlie.

In his mid-sixties, looks older but energetic. His bifocals perched on his nose, tie and white coat, and open-toe sandals. In the midst of all this congestion, the only white face among all these sick Africans yet looking very much at home sitting casually on one of the beds (containing a patient), writing a note on the chart with a pen that was tied by a cord to his own coat so he wouldn’t lose it. He was thrilled to meet us, and we joined him on rounds for the rest of the morning. He had an incredible manner with patients, and it was easy to see why he is so loved by the local people. After so many years Dr. Brownlie is totally fluent in their language, and each time he entered a new area of patients he would greet them with their language, Monire mose, in this very pleasing tone of voice, and the patients would answer Yawo as one. He understands the power of touch and greeted one aged patient who had been there for weeks by stroking her gray hair and introducing her: “This is my old friend.”

Then we got to this woman sitting in bed, newly diagnosed as HIV positive, but obviously dying with advanced AIDS, complaining of abdominal pain that no one could figure out, utterly miserable. There seemed nothing to be done. As Shannon and I ran through differential diagnoses in our heads, he stroked her leg and spoke soothingly to her in her own language, indecipherable to us, but obviously meaningful to her. He finished and turned to walk to the next patient, but we asked him what he had just told her. He said, “Oh, just that God loves you and he is with you.”

Hazardous healing.

On this opening day for us at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, it is my deep hope and prayer that we will live together into this coming year as a community committed to acts of healing, of wholeness, of love. Not just within our community but willing to take hazards and go outside to bring that wholeness to the wider community and the wider world. And as we do so, that together we will look for those “divinely shaped spots of time” on our journey together. Amen.