On Healing

"On Healing"

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
June 8, 2008

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and
he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in
the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his
disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your
teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those
who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what
this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but
sinners.”

While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in
and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand
on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then
suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up
behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch
his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart,
daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well. When
Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a
commotion, he said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed
at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand,
and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.

Whenever I read healings passages in the Gospels texts, I have to admit that sometime
I cringe a bit, mostly because these texts seem so foreign to me. Not foreign in the
literal sense, as in a foreign country, but more metaphorically, as if they were taking
place in a foreign place in the mind, a different universe where such things take place,
where the simple touching of the Lord’s coat heals the one doing the surreptitious
touching. And I don’t cringe because I don’t think God can physically heal us—I just
have all these stereotypes of faith healers dancing in my head, being from the deep
south and all. Of course, we have those kinds of folks right here in southwest
Michigan, people for whom the belief that God can and should heal us of all our
physical and even emotional ailments, is still central to their understanding of authentic
faith. When the Catherine Kuhlman and the healing movement sort of exploded in the
60’s and 70’s, it sort of captivated much of Christianity, to the point that people often
divided up into different camps around what they believed about God’s healing power
the modern era. And this explosion of Christian healers also gave way to those who
abused this phenomenon for money, people who preyed on the desperation of those
seeking a miracle in their lives. Stadiums would and still do fill up with thousands of
people looking for a way out of their cancer, their pain, their hopelessness. I just
visualize the wild-eyed preacher with the funky suit and the pompadour of a hairdo,
screaming at us to believe, believe, and telling those who weren’t healed, those who
didn’t receive their miracle from God, that they didn’t have the faith to move mountains,
the faith to receive to receive their healing. You just didn’t believe deeply enough, you
didn’t have the faith, so God didn’t heal you. I wonder if there is a red line on faith pole
in heaven for each of us where when we go over the line, we get those sorts of things,
the healings we want, the healings we need. But of course, I don’t think that’s the case,
though I have thought that if this whole parish ministry thing didn’t work out for me, I
could always begin some sort of healing television ministry—buy me a white suit, get a
toupee (because this balding head wouldn’t do—if God couldn’t heal my growing
baldness, how could God heal other deficits!), and then get myself in front of a
television camera, and start sell healing handkerchiefs for a small donation.

However, aside from that, I do want to point out something, something else that has
been on my mind the last few weeks, and that really crystallized for me in reading and
researching this text before us this morning. I do believe that there is a role for healing
in our Christian tradition—clearly there is, because its all over our New Testament. You
have Jesus healing, you have the apostles and disciples healing, and you have
mention of people in the early church having the gift of healing strewn throughout the
letters of the New Testament. In our passage today, after Jesus has called Matthew, he
is asked to raise someone from the dead, the daughter of a leader of a synagogue,
and on his way a woman reaches out to touch his coat, thinking that he mere touching
of those garments will heal her, will give her a second chance. This women has been
hemorrhaging, has been bleeding for twelve years, and because this physical disease
includes human blood, includes that which Jewish law says makes a woman spiritually
unclean, she has become an untouchable, an outsider to human touch —   to touch
her is to make yourself ritually unclean, it is to dirty yourself spiritually, so it was
believed, and so you would spend much time and effort having to go through a ritual
cleansing procedure in order to make yourself acceptable to polite society. These
rules around blood so often hurt women the most, excluded women the most and she
has borne the brunt of this idea more than even most women because her bleeding
never stopped, never ceased, as it would have for a woman who simply menstruated
normally.

And so she has spent her past 12 years living with a disease that not only hurts her
physically, but excludes her spiritually and emotionally from the world around her—can
you imagine living without any touch, any human touch for 12 years? And yet, she is
determined to be healed, and so she gambles on this charismatic rabbi who is passing
through town, and like a thief, she steals a touch herself, a touch of Jesus’ garment, his
prayer shawl. And the passage says that she was healed and Jesus turns and greets
her, saying “take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” Somehow, her belief
that life included her, that God had chosen her as well, even as a woman and as
someone suffering from a disease that excludes her from the rest of life, somehow her
trust, her faith that the divine story about the table of life being open to all, was a story
that included her as well, it transformed her, and it healed her. It’s not the magic
promised by the faith healers I spoke of earlier—you see, the faith that has made her
well is her tenacious belief that the good news is for her as well, a nobody in her
society, an outsider even to her own faith community.

And that is fine and great, you know, but is that kind of healing available to us today?
Why did the church give up on healing so quickly? Can we be healers of others? M.
Scott Peck tells the story of a conference he was at with the Harvard theologian Harvey
Cox, who tells a similar story to the one we just heard in our reading, though it is from
the another part of the Gospels; it’s simply a variation of the story before us today.
Peck writes

After telling the story, Cox asked this audience of 600 mostly Christian professionals
whom they identified with. When he asked who identified with the bleeding woman,
about a hundred raised their hands. When he asked who identified with the anxious
Roman father, more of the rest raised their hands. When he asked who identified with
the curious crowd, most raised their hands. But when he asked who identified with
Jesus, only six people raised their hands.

Something is very wrong here. Of 600 more or less professional Christians, only one
out of a hundred identified with Jesus. Maybe more actually did but were afraid to raise
their hands lest that seem arrogant. But again, something is wrong with our concept of
Christianity if it seems arrogant to identify with Jesus. That is exactly what we are
supposed to do! We're supposed to identify with Jesus, act like Jesus, be like Jesus.
That is what Christianity is supposed to be about -- the imitation of Christ.--M. Scott
Peck, Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual
Growth (Simon & Schuster, 1993), 210.

After reading this piece from Peck, I had to wonder whether I too had abandoned the
part of following after the Christ, that particular part of his ministry that makes me
uncomfortable, his healing ministry with others. I asked earlier why the early church
abandoned this ministry so early on, and I wonder if it was because they feared that
they couldn’t replicate the kinds of incredible healing miracles like you see in our text
today. If we don’t attempt to heal, or relegate healing to the past, then there won’t be
any chance of us failing and my faith won’t be challenged, right? And if I don’t ask for
healing, then I won’t have to fear that the all those faith healers might be right, that I
didn’t have the faith to make me or others well.

Now, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that Jesus said we had to get our faith over
some sort of hidden spiritual line and then we get our miracle, so to speak—faith is
ultimately trust, and trust means believing that God knows what kind of healing we may
need in this life. And to be frank with you, I think that we often we make the mistake of
thinking that the kind of healing we need most in this life has to do with our bodies, with
the various illnesses we struggle with. Don’t get me wrong—I have no doubt we want
and certainly need physical healing sometimes, but I think this story before us today,
this story of the hemorrhaging woman shows us that there are even more profound
moments of healing that happen to our souls, to our beings, that are greater than even
the healings we sometimes get with our bodies, through God’s direct hand, or God’s
hands through the help of medicine.

In Reynolds Price's story, "The Foreseeable Future," a man named Whit Wade returns
from World War II severely wounded. A spiritual healer named Juanita asks him, "Did
your brain get damaged, or any of your backbone?"

Whit said, "Not actual physical damage. What hurts is my soul."

"That WILL give you fits. Are you saved?" she asked.

He said, "Pretty surely. I'd rather drink lye than talk about it, but I accepted Christ when
I was 13."

"And you know he loves you?"

Whit said, "I do" - his eyes were still shut. And he braced for an oncoming missionary
spiel. If it came, he would thank her and fight his way out through whatever trouble
[Juanita's] dogs threw at him.

But Juanita kept up a long, breathing silence. Then, with a first little yip in her voice, as
if she might have waked herself up, she said, "Whitley Wade, you are now alive. Any
day you'll realize that you have been healed." (Reynolds Price, The Foreseeable
Future New York: Atheneum 1991, 84)

What I think this text from Scripture and from Price’s always profound fiction points us
to, is that healing is a lot more than just the fixing of our bodies, the mending of our
bones. What most of us need in our lives, even those of struggling with bodies that
could use a little mending, is what that woman thousands of years ago received—the
healing of our souls, souls like hers that needed to know how loved and included she
was in God’s kingdom. Bill Moyers, in his television series Healing And the Mind, said
that “Healing is possible ... even when a cure is not." (New York: Ambrose Video
Publishing, Inc., 1993). When Jesus heals he never just stops with the body—it’s the
hearts, the souls, of all people that needs healing the most in this world, and that is true
for us as well. Bodies get better, and sometimes they get worst, but that part of us that
stays with our healthy or sick bodies, that which is eternal in us, our souls, that is what
needs the most healing in this life. And whether the cure for our bodies comes or not,
the healing of our souls is always possible, always available, if we are alive in this life,
as Juanita says in the Price story, if we pay attention enough, if we reach out to touch
the garment of the God who passes us by all the time, in every moment of our lives.

Back in the early nineties Time Magazine told the story of Michael Weisser, the cantor
at his Lincoln, Nebraska, synagogue. Weisser found himself the target of interest of
the local Klan Grand Dragon, Larry Trapp. It seems Trapp took it upon himself to
harass, intimidate and threaten Weisser with the ultimate goal of driving him out of town.

When the chilling, late-night phone calls and the hate mail began to bombard Weisser,
he knew where it was coming from and he was afraid. Yet, his response spoke to the
[possibility of healing], not hate and fear. Weisser called his tormentor back and got his
answering machine. After listening to its pre-recorded anti-Semitic diatribe, he calmly
offered to take Trapp, who is confined to a wheel chair, out to the grocery store. For
weeks Weisser kept at it, leaving recorded messages of offered help for this Grand
Dragon.

Finally, Klansman Trapp called him back, complaining, "What do you want? You're
harassing me." But Trapp soon called Weisser with another question; he confessed, "I
want to get out of this and I don't know how." Weisser immediately responded, "I'll bring
dinner and we'll talk." His wife brought along a silver ring as a peace offering. When
they met face-to-face, the Klansman and the cantor, Larry Trapp burst into tears
(reported in Time, 2 February 1992).

A follow-up report on National Public Radio tells that Trapp eventually moved in with the
Weissers, who cared for him as his health declined. On June 5, 1992, Larry Trapp
converted to Judaism in ceremonies at B'nai Jeshurun, the very synagogue that he
previously had planned to blow up. Three months later, on September 6, 1992, he died
in the Weisser home, with Michael and Julie beside him, holding his hands.

Back in February 2002, a church I pastored in Oklahoma City had its own run-in with
the KKK of Oklahoma, but we didn’t respond as beautifully as Weisser did. We mostly
responded out of fear. Maybe if we had been more alive to this beautiful world, maybe
if we had believed that we too could heal others, like Jesus did, then we could have
done what Weisser did and become the means by which other people’s souls were
made whole, and healed. But we’ve got to pay attention to all the ways God heals in
this world, heals the body, certainly, but the soul as well, maybe especially the soul.
Amen.