Sunday, February 5, 2012

Epiphany 5: An Uplifted Life

A lot of people come seeking something from Jesus.

In one community, there was a revival tent. Signs and healing were advertised on large posters on the highway outside the town. The preacher, a tattooed ex-convict, was a foul-mouthed spokesman, but he promised results.

And results there were. As word spread, the little town experienced massive crowds of people. The local hotel was full. The local restaurant – full. The gas station ran out of gas and the liquor store went out of business under mysterious circumstances.

People stayed in homes. In RVs. In tents, and on the grass. And still, they came. The churches in town found their pews empty, but pastor’s offices full: people who came asking for food, for gas money, for medical care. People who had come to experience revival and healing, but still needed compassion received it. But the small churches remained empty.

One day the revival tent moved out, moved on to a bigger city in a bigger centre where even more people could be reached. And the small town was small again. The small churches remained small. But they remained busy: people came asking for food, for gas money, for medical care. And, they received it.

There were also new people, too: people who’d asked for healing and hadn’t received it; people who had been told they were too sinful, too unfaithful, or too tested to be healed. While there was lots of explanation for those who were healed – there was no explanation for those who were not.

While those who had gotten what they came for left, those who were still seeking remained – still broken, still waiting, still seeking the promise of this ‘Jesus’ who would heal them.
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I think that one of the most talked about topics – when it comes to Christianity – is healing. What is it? How does it happen? Why are there so many stories in the bible (and especially the New Testament) that tell about healing?

It’s especially crucial when we or someone we love are ill. That lends an immediacy to our questions and queries that doesn’t soften any over time. When I was a chaplain at St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon, I cut my teeth on prayers for healing. In a hospital, everyone wants it. Everyone has heard the stories of last-minute recoveries from death’s door, and everyone wants a piece of it.

Almost everywhere we turn in our culture, we find signs and promises of healing. I opened my paper this week to an add promising a ‘healthier life’ if I visited a store and purchased their product. A billboard outside of Edmonton sells a product that promises to add years to someone’s life. There are millions of books that promise to give to you the ‘secret’ of healing through the power of God.

But they’re not new stories. They’re old, old stories. Stories of hope, of grief, of happiness, and heart-wrenching sorrow. They’re stories of life.

And the downside, the ugly side, is the way people are dealt with who don’t receive the healing they come to find.

Steven was a young man who was my own age when I met him. A self-described ‘enthusiastic’ Christian in his youth and his early university days, he’d become increasingly disillusioned with the faith of his tradition, especially when anything new he discovered to be excited about was deemed ‘dangerous’ or ‘of the devil’ by his family and church’s pastor. At the same time, he’d learned to read the bible not as a textbook, but as a story of relationship: God’s relationship to God’s people. He began to seek the God of relationship rather than the stern legalist of his youth.

But a short while later he was diagnosed with cancer. A brain tumour. His family’s pastor told him that God was punishing him for rejecting his church, and that if he repented, and gave up his evil ways, that God would heal him. Steven did just that. He burned his university textbooks at a church picnic (his family’s idea). Then they prayed over him – his entire church prayed over him. They prayed for the deliverance of his soul.

The next week, Steven woke up one morning to find he couldn’t walk. A few weeks later, his right hand became useless. He began radical treatments of radiation and chemotherapy to shrink the tumour, but his situation didn’t improve all that much. His church family, still very interested in him, helpfully explained that obviously he’d missed some ‘root cause’ of his sickness, and if he could pinpoint that, God would heal him. Steven was rapidly coming to the point where, as far as he was concerned, if God was the cause of his suffering, then he could offer suggestions as to what God could do with it.

The final straw for Steven came when, as he phrased it, he “lost his own plumbing.” Not the last indignity that he had to endure, but when he heard the pastor’s wife tell his mother in the hospital hallway that “God’s just breaking him down so he knows how much he needs him,” Steven asked that they not come around anymore.

I met Steven when I came around to visit the palliative care rooms at the hospital. His family had strongly resisted his move to palliative care, believing that he was giving in, or accepting the inevitable. For them, death was the enemy. For Steven, it was a reality. Through our conversations I heard his story, I brought him a few books on tape, and a cd of classical music – something he could listen to, that would soothe him through the nausea of his treatment. Almost blind as his tumour grew, he would ask me to read to him from the bible. The first chapter of Mark was one of the first I read – not because it opens with healing, but because Mark is the shortest gospel, and I thought he’d want to hear the whole story.

When we got to the bit Jesus healing the crowds, I got a bit more of his story. Fantastic healings in church. Cancer, tumours, arthritis, all things healed. He couldn’t, in fact, remember ever going to a funeral for one of his church’s members. Once I summoned my courage and asked him: ‘how do you feel about those stories now?’

He was silent for a bit. But he was smiling a little, and I didn’t know why. But he finally spoke.

“I think,” he said, “that the people who came to see Jesus when they were sick wanted to get better. But more than that, I think that they just wanted to be close to Jesus. I won’t get better; but I feel close to Jesus. And that lifts me up. When I die, when I’m the lowest that I can go, Jesus will lift me up again, out of this body, and out of this pain. And I’m sorry that I’ll miss my family. But through this, I know why people came to Jesus in their sickness.”

A few weeks later, I happened to be on shift when Steven finally closed his eyes, with his family gathered around him. My heart hurt for them, even more when someone said in the hall, I don’t know why he didn’t get better; that’s why we need to have more faith.”

I had – and have – no idea why someone would say that. But I will go to my grave saying that Steven got more than ‘got better’ – Steven found what it was like to live an uplifted life.

Beloved, Jesus does not come specifically to heal us. He does not come especially to deliver us from demons. Certainly, these are hallmarks – results – of his ministry. But these are things he does that shows his strength and power. He comes to do what he promises, and what he does for Simon’s mother-in-law: he lifts us up.

Those particular words are perhaps the best explanation of Jesus’ ministry in scripture, because they are the ones that Jesus himself uses to explain his purpose in the gospel of John: “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.”

The end result of Jesus’ ministry is not a mere temporary extension of life. If that was the point, then he was a terrible example, because he didn’t even live for much more than 30 years. Yet Christ comes to be lifted up, to lift us up, to a life that is lived in Christ. In our world suffering and death are normal – but in God’s world they are not. For us, they are a consequence of sin and evil, which we will never escape until God’s kingdom comes again. There is nothing that we can do to escape them.

But Christ does. It is Christ, lifted up on the cross, who tasted of suffering and death and rejected them utterly, in the face of his own utter rejection by his own people. When on the cross he cried, “it is finished,’ it was to death, and to hell, and to suffering that he issued his challenge: because it was through the cross that Christ turned defeat into victory, the final rejection of sin that makes its penalty the ultimate gateway into the kingdom of God: and that is the only true healing.

Like the eagles promised to Isaiah, the promise of Christ is that we are lifted up, out of the stink and stain of death and suffering, to live in the shelter of the One who dwelt among us.
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That small church in the small town is still standing. It is still a small church. Memories of the revival are still stirred, sometimes, but not very often. People still come to the church, asking for food, for money for gas, and for medical help – and they still receive it.

And in that small way, those people in that small place live out the promise of their Saviour – by lifting up those who are in need, as they themselves have been uplifted.

Your welcome into the uplifted life began when you rose out of the waters of your baptism. Lift up heads, lift up your hearts: for your God is with you.

Let the people of God say amen.