Grace and Peace to you from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
In my very first parish, in North Central Pennsylvania, I met a lovely World War II generation couple named Davey and Grace. Grace was in her mid-seventies, Davey early eighties. She was the church organist twice a month. Grace succumbed to illness, a fast growing form of cancer and died within a few months. Davey fell apart, as the saying goes. He had all kinds of support in the church and the tiny community called “Dry Valley”, but he went to live in the nursing home. He essentially stopped eating and followed Grace in a few months time.
I had heard from my parents who had lived longer than I, that this was often the case. We say people “lose their will to live’, or they “died of grief or a broken heart”. It simply reinforced for me what I had learned at Seminary and doing chaplaincy at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring that we are whole beings, we are a fundamental unity. We don’t have a body, we are a body. Our emotions, our spirits, our minds and intellects and our bodies are one integrated unity. We are a whole. What happens to us at one level, happens also at all other aspects of being.
I love this story that we have read tonight. The leader of a synagogue, named Jairus comes to Jesus desperate to have him heal his little daughter who is sick and appears to be dying. He prostrates himself at Jesus’ feet and begs him to heal her. He says “Come lay your hands on her”. He has great faith in Jesus’ power to heal. A woman who is never named has such amazing faith in Jesus that she reaches out to him to be healed. She believes that simply by touching him her hemorrhaging will stop. She touches him and it does.
These stories teach us that Jesus has God’s unique power to rearrange reality at will. We see in the Genesis stories God creating by a mere word. God speaks and there is light, and there is rain and water, and there is solid ground, the sun and moon, and cattle and elephants and whales, and white birch trees and us. We are all created by the uncanny power of the voice and word of God. This same voice, this same word is present in Jesus. What I find so amazing about his story of the hemorrhaging is that Jesus feels the power leaving him as it heals her.
Touch can be amazingly powerful though can’t it? One of my seminary professors was one of those gifted pastors who could preach with compelling power. I used to feel that I could hear Christ use his word and voice to reach us. I was troubled once. Things weren’t going so well for me. Debbie and I had two toddlers and between us we were working five part time jobs to keep body and soul together. Out of the blue, my old boss called from Africa to offer me a job working for USAID. I was tempted to go and accept the job. Working in development would be God’s work too and I would be getting really good money – more than enough to take care of my family without so much struggle.
My Professor put his arm over my shoulder and said, “Stop worrying. The Lord will tell you what to do. Hasn’t he seen to all your bills so far”? He has called you here. Won’t he continue to provide for you? Listen with your heart!” I can’t explain what the feel of his arm around my shoulders was like. All my fear and doubts vanished instantly and I actually felt a warmth, like heat on my shoulders. The power of his faith and conviction were transferred into me somehow. I’m sure I would have listened carefully to his words by themselves, but somehow that touch communicated God’s presence with a force and an energy that lifted me up out of my dark space. There’s a passage in Isaiah that goes “those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, thy shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint”.
The women in our gospel story had never lost her faith. The story says that she had been suffering for 12 years. She had gone to every doctor, every specialist and instead of getting better she got worse. She had spent all her income. This is the picture of someone who is exhausted in every sense of the word but still she believes that God answers prayers. She hears somehow of this prophet for that is one of the things they called Jesus and she reaches out to him in belief, in faith. “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well”. At the end of this story, Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well, go in peace, and be healed of your disease”.
What do these words mean? Was faith her medicine, her therapy, her surgery? Did she heal herself simply by believing? I don’t believe that. But I do believe that her faith was an element in her well being.
When I was sitting in the doctor’s office Tuesday – I go once a month to get the heavy pain meds for my back pain, I picked up a copy of Time. There was an article in Time about “How beliefs affect the body and its state of well being”. During WWII nurses in field hospitals often ran out of morphine. They learned that they could give soldiers an injection of saline, that is salt water, and tell them it was a high dose of morphine. In the vast number of cases, this placebo, and it is called a placebo, worked often until more morphine could be brought in. The nurses weren’t mocking the men, or deceiving them. They had learned form experience that administering a placebo could work, could in fact trigger a response in the men just like the response to the morphine.
Later research has shown that the opposite effect is also true. In an article in the research journal Pain, scientists reported that patients who were told that a drug would cause side effects had those side effects. Even the ones who were in the control group and who were given not the real drug but a neutral substance like a sugar pill exhibited the expected side effects. The conclusion was that this phenomenon called “Nocebo” triggered a physiological reaction because of what people believed.
What does this say to us?
We are talking about healing during Lent. Our theme is “the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations”. We are a whole, integrated, multifaceted system we human beings. We aren’t just physical, bio-chemical entities that we dump chemical meds into or perform surgical procedures upon. We are people, God’s creatures made in God’s image and what we think, what we feel and what we believe have a tremendous impact on our healing.
Tonight we are going to adorn this wreath with colorful fans which will become flowers of thanksgiving. As you come forward, think of a time when God had healed you. Perhaps that healing was something in your body, high blood pressure, neck pain, or a wound that refused to heal. Or maybe, that healing was the release from the toxins of an old injustice, grievance or betrayal. God gives us so many opportunities to know God’s peace.
In Jesus’ name Amen.
Who We Are