Healed

Mark 5:24b-34; John 21:1-8

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

28 April 2024

               “Healing doesn’t happen passively. Often you have to seek out healing . . . to receive it.”  So writes Marcia MacFee in her comments on this story from the Gospel of Mark.  She continues, “Having the hope of healing may be as important as medicine . . . .  And clinging to that hope can be hard when things feel impossible.”

               This Gospel story is about a woman who suffered for twelve long years with a flow of blood—we can presume a menstrual illness.  Not only did she have to deal with the physical pain and discomfort, but also the social stigma, because such an illness was viewed by her contemporaries as “unclean.”  Robbing her of some of the essential supports a sick person requires.  Not fully embraced by her community.  Obstacles placed before her attempts to practice her faith. 

               Can’t you imagine, if you were her, being weary and sinking into despair and hopelessness?  Yet, she didn’t.  This is her story—of the actions she took, the risks she bore, the faith and hope she expressed—that day when she reached out and touched Jesus.

               This Easter season we are examining Resurrection Stories.  And how these ancient stories give us spiritual insight to the obstacles we encounter in our lives.  Whatever tries to hold you back or keep you down or lock you up—the power of the Risen Christ exists to set you free, so that you too might rise up in power to live the life of fullness God has dreamed for you. 

               Our adult ed this morning was presented by my colleague Molley Phinney Baskette, co-senior pastor of the First Church UCC in Berkeley, California.  She talked about the renaissance in scientific research around psychedelics, their therapeutic effects, and links to spirituality and mysticism. 

               Recently I finished reading her latest book, which connects perfectly with today’s worship theme.  A nice synchronicity, though a coincidence, that I’ll share some of Molly’s story on the same day we’ve already encountered her.

               The book is entitled How to Begin When Your World Is Ending: A Spiritual Field Guide to Joy Despite Everything.  At the heart of the book is her battle with cancer.  An exploration of how a pastor dealt with life-threatening illness and all the changes it wrought.  I’ve already recommended the book to half-a-dozen folks, dealing with their own fraught diagnoses.

               In essence, the book is about how we find healing.  When healing isn’t understood as waving a magic wand and the illness suddenly disappears. 

               And Molly understands her story as a resurrection story.  The universe made that even more explicit in that she was diagnosed right before Easter and returned to the pulpit from her disability leave for chemo treatment on the next Easter Sunday.  Her experience taught her that all of us, in our lifetimes, will have a chance for a resurrection story.  Here’s how she expresses it:

Every one of us gets an invitation to resurrection.  It comes in a little ivory envelope, delivered directly to our souls, right after the disaster happens.  Sometimes, we miss it.  Sometimes, we open it much later.  Sometimes, we tear it open with eager hands.  You don’t have to be an optimist to accept this invitation.  But you do have to be curious about what will happen next, if it will be different from the pain of right now, and if you will be different.  Curiosity and longing will take you pretty far in life, no matter how bad things are in the moment.

               Earlier we participated in the responsive reading of the story from John’s Gospel.  We can imagine those grief-stricken, traumatized disciples retreating back to Galilee to what was familiar.  To fishing, to the quiet beach, to the solitude on the water.  Trying to make sense of what had happened in Jerusalem.  Trying to figure out what the last few years had meant.  Trying to figure out what to do next. 

               It seems that one of the takeaways from this beautiful story is that Jesus appears to them again to disrupt their return to what was familiar and to strengthen them for the new life, new risks, new adventures, that God’s mission is calling them to.

               In the same way, our all-to-human, and unavoidable, vulnerability to illness, can create a situation for us, in which we can either sink into the grief and despair that our old life may have ended or we can move on through the experience of illness to what is new.  For the healing probably won’t return us to what was comfortable in the past.  Healing will probably move us forward into something new and different.

               Here’s how Molly preached about it in her Easter sermon when she was first diagnosed, “Easter people, when something gets broken, look for Jesus immediately.  Look behind the breaking to see what’s being blessed, and look ahead to what God will give you.”

               And, a year later, after chemo, in her Easter sermon she declared, “Resurrection has not been easy.”  She’s right, and we shouldn’t expect it to be—it wasn’t easy for Jesus either. 

I enjoy how she describes the Risen Christ:

When Jesus rises from the dead, it is not as an oiled, brawny superhero or some kind of gorgeous self-healing immortal vampire.  He rises with his wounds, the sign of what he has lost, of what the fullness of life and commitment to this Way has cost him.

               And, so, the same is true for us.  The healing of resurrection comes through loss, bearing wounds. 

               Part of what is so painful in serious illness is how it affects our sense of self.  That happened for Molly, no longer able to be the overworking, full-of-energy pastor with a mane of beautiful red hair, but instead a sick, tired, bald woman capable of accomplishing very little.  Of this experience she writes, “The loss of who we believe ourselves to be, which happens not once but over and over again, is extremely painful.”  But a key part in our healing is learning to let that go.  Of developing the serenity to understand and embrace that life is filled with change and loss and also chances to create our new selves.

               To develop that serenity and learn to let go and embrace our vulnerability, requires spending time in “the liminal place of holy uncertainty” (her great description).  But this holy place is “deeply uncomfortable.”  She says that it messes with your thinking in ways bad and good, useful and not useful.  This holy place of uncertainty rubs up against our human tendency to need reasons for everything.  But this human tendency to need reasons isn’t the path to healing.  Instead, it leads in the opposite direction.  Here is how Molly phrases it:

We are all amateur fundamentalists because we all want reasons.  Reasons mean rules, and rules mean we can avoid bad things happening to ourselves and those we love.  The wanting of reasons can lead us into magical thinking.

               And one of the ways many people seek reasons is to retreat into the bad, toxic theology that “God has a plan.”  I’ve despised that pop-theology idea since my Dad died 34 years ago, and so I deeply resonated with her rant against the notion. 

We’re tempted to look for simple answers when complicated things happen, and bad theologies provide them.  Consider the idea that God Has a Plan: who does that benefit, besides drugstore self-help book authors?  Not to mention, this fictitious “has-a-plan” business plays suspiciously well with the status quo of hypercapitalism, patriarchy, and structural racism.  It revokes our free will and our capacity to resist and change by saying that whatever is is the way things ought to be.

               Molly tells us, God doesn’t have a plan, but God does has a dream.  “God is a Dreamer” she writes, “amorphous, artistic, delighted, inclusive, and messy.”  Which is pretty different from a plan.  And what is God’s dream?  “A world where love rules, where everyone belongs, where we are more than the sum of our parts.” 

               God doesn’t cause the illnesses and the bad things that happen to us, but God can and will use them to change us, grow us, transform us.

               I love the wisdom that Molly proclaims near the end of her story:

The central question of our lives might be: How much can we heal from the hard things that happen to us?  And with it: How do we find meaning and purpose from our woundings? 

               She closes her book and her resurrection story with the advice that we dance more often.  In the churches she has served it has become common for worship to end with a dance party, usually led by the children.  A most exciting idea. 

               Why dance?  Because it is fun and so healing.  The movement, the joy, the laughter, the doing something silly and fun together, helps to get all the stress and negative energy out of our bodies and our souls and strengthens all those positive energies we need to heal.

               Molly also points out that “to dance is to laugh in the face of death and all its minions.  As long as we can dance, they have not won.”

               All of which, of course, made me think of our beloved Jennifer, for whom dance has been essential to her healing journey as she has battled cancer. 

               And, so, we should dance, right?  But instead of radically last minute changing up our worship—though I know Dorothy Hill used to do it—I’m inviting you to a dance party in coffee hour after the kids get down there from Children’s choir.

               I’ll close by repeating the charge that Molly gave her congregation when she returned from chemo: “Easter people, when something gets broken, look for Jesus immediately.  Look behind the breaking to see what’s being blessed, and look ahead to what God will give you.”

Found

Psalm 84; Luke 24:36-43

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

21 April 2024

               Have you read the beautiful children’s book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy?  It was published in 2019.  Our copy was given to us by Charlene Wozny, who often finds wonderful books she passes along to me and Sebastian.

            The book is about friendship and learning how to live well despite all that happens in life.  The book is filled with wise tidbits accompanied by beautiful art.

            Near the end the boy whispers to his animal friends, “I’ve realized why we are here.”  To which the mole responds, “for cake?”  Cake has been a running theme of the book, particularly for mole, and how cake can help many situations.

            But that isn’t the boy’s answer.  He says, “To love.”  To which the horse adds, “And be loved.” 

            Then the boy asks, “What do we do when our hearts hurt?”  The horse answers, “We wrap them with friendship, shared tears and time, till they wake hopeful and happy again.”

            And then, very near the end of the book, the boy declares, “Home isn’t always a place is it?”

            This beautiful book is about being found—being found in our relationships with others, particularly our friends.

            And being found is a vital human need, one of the keys to a flourishing life.  Last year the Surgeon General declared that our nation is facing an epidemic of loneliness, that had risen to be a national emergency, requiring that “rebuilding social connection must be a top public health priority for our nation.” 

            Dr. Murthy wrote,

At any moment, about one out of every two Americans is experiencing measurable levels of loneliness. This includes introverts and extroverts, rich and poor, and younger and older Americans. Sometimes loneliness is set off by the loss of a loved one or a job, a move to a new city, or health or financial difficulties — or a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Other times, it’s hard to know how it arose but it’s simply there. One thing is clear: Nearly everyone experiences it at some point. But its invisibility is part of what makes it so insidious. We need to acknowledge the loneliness and isolation that millions are experiencing and the grave consequences for our mental health, physical health and collective well-being.

            And those consequences are well documented.  Back in 2020 the Nobel-prize-winning economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton released their book on the epidemic of what they termed “deaths of despair.”  How in American culture in this century there has actually been a lowering of life expectancy because of a sharp rise in deaths, largely among middle-aged people, from suicide, drug and alcohol addictions, and other illnesses that their research revealed were all a result of despair.  Despair brought on by social isolation, loss of job, lack of meaningful relationships, and an increase in physical pain.

            Surgeon General Murthy’s emergency declaration last year pointed out how loneliness increases a person’s risks for anxiety, depression, heart disease, dementia, and stroke.  The effects are not just individual, loneliness has social effects, harming our institutions, rending our social fabric, making our lives together more difficult.  So the response must be both individual and collective.  He was quite strong in the language he used to describe the situation and what we must do:

Every generation is called to take on challenges that threaten the underpinnings of society. Addressing the crisis of loneliness and isolation is one of our generation’s greatest challenges. By building more connected lives and more connected communities, we can strengthen the foundation of our individual and collective well-being and we can be better poised to respond to the threats we are facing as a nation.

            Now, in some ways, talking about this subject at a church is preaching to the choir.  For the evidence shows that church-goers are among the least lonely people in our nation.  And that the crisis of loneliness actually corresponds with the decline in church attendance in the last quarter century.  So, that you are here on a Sunday morning means that you are among the people who are taking steps to build social connection.

            But given that, my guess is, even all of us have had our periods of loneliness, especially four years ago when we were locked down at home.  And those effects are still with us, still shaping so much of our thinking and interacting.

            Surgeon General Murthy wrote about his own struggles with loneliness.   During his first term as Surgeon General during the Obama administration he said that he let most of his personal friendships suffer, replacing his time, energy, and focus with his job.  But when that job ended, he suddenly lacked friendships, began to feel lonely, and ultimately experienced depression.  He wrote that it took a year of hard work and intentionally reconnecting with folks to return to health and well-being.

            Fortunately, there are some simple steps we can take.  Dr. Murthy said the medical evidence shows that even taking just fifteen minutes each day to connect with another person can have a significant impact.  That’s as simple as one phone call or one visit with a neighbor.

            And even if we church-goers are among the folks already prioritizing social connection, we need to be aware of the epidemic of loneliness all around us, and look for the people in our lives—family, friends, neighbors, co-workers—who might be suffering and in need of a little extra connection.  Take a moment and think of one person you know who could benefit from your contacting them this week to check in and see how they are doing.

            According to Marcia MacFee, whose worship materials we are using this Easter season, Psalm 84 is “for pilgrims who are far from the Temple.”  She writes that the Psalm “expresses the yearning of one who would give anything to just sit at the threshold of this sacred place.”  For “the temple is a home” and “God is in the Temple.”

She points out that when we are on a pilgrimage, we are often alone, but not really alone, as there are often many other pilgrims taking the same journey.  Melanie Naughtin some years ago walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain and shared all about it when she returned.  She was on the trip alone, but every day ran into other pilgrims, spent the nights in hostels with other pilgrims, and routinely relied upon the kindness of other people to ease her journey. 

Marcia MacFee writes, “I think a word of encouragement we can offer to the lonely and isolated is to look up and notice the other pilgrims around you and to recognize that loneliness and isolation are not what we are meant for. And also to remember that ultimately, God is with us always! We are not alone.”

This week Facebook reminded me of a Christian Wiman poem that I had posted four years ago during the Covid lockdowns (I read and posted A LOT of poetry that spring).  The poem ended:

Lord, suffer me to sing

these wounds by which I am made

and marred, savor this creature

whose aloneness you ease and are.

            Just last night I was talking with one of our youth who told me that she’s seen how God can fill a person’s need, giving them a sense of meaning.

            Of course, the way that God often comes to us, easing our loneliness, is in the flesh of another person doing the most ordinary of things.  For example, the story in the Luke’s Gospel is revealing.  Marcia MacFee writes,

Perhaps the most beautiful moment in this story is the simple question Jesus asks as they pepper him with questions, dumbfounded that he is alive and with them: “Have you anything here to eat?” Meals are one of the best ways to be with people. Something about sitting down together and eating just loosens up the things that might keep us from interacting and connecting with our neighbor.

            The theologian Wendy Farley, in her beautiful book Gathering Those Driven Away, connects this moment to the church’s teaching of the harrowing of hell that I spoke about in last week’s Resurrection Stories sermon.  Farley writes,

The Incarnate One, upon returning from the harrowing of hell, does not make a lot of moral demands or give another inspiring speech or tell confusing parables.  When Jesus wanders again among his friends after the upheaval of crucifixion, he asks: “Is there anything to eat?”

Let me pause here, because this is so simple and so profound at the same time, and I don’t think we actually draw attention to it.  After torture, crucifixion, spending a couple of days in hell, and then rising again, Jesus shows up and asks “Is there anything to eat.”

            Wendy Farley continues:

No great moralism here, no miraculous pyrotechnics, just the pleasure of food and friends, pleasure, admittedly, in the midst of terror and grief.  Eating and drinking is just the ordinary pleasure we take in one another.  Eating and drinking together, we look directly at Christ.  We see Christ in ordinary pleasures, in everything we do.

            This Easter Season we are exploring the ways that the power of the resurrected Christ is made present and available to us to help us rise again from all the things that would hold us back and keep us down.  Whatever has us locked up, the Risen Christ provides the keys.  And one of the simplest ways that divine power comes to us is in the daily, ordinary acts of connecting with one another. 

            This week may you experience resurrection.  And, in turn, be the power of the risen Christ for someone else, some lonely person in need of your connection.

Galore by Michael Crummey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Grateful for the church member who recommended this book (after I preached on Jonah last summer). What a fun use of magical realism to explore two centuries in a fishing village on the Newfoundland coast. So many memorable characters and enjoyable stories.

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The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not only is LeGuin one of our greatest writers, she was a profound thinker. Part of the genius of this story is the way it explores and comments upon various human socio-political arrangements and the flaws that creep into any system, but in a way that's not even remotely didactic and always in service to character and plot.

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God Is a Black Woman by Christena Cleveland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fascinating and creative exploration of the Sacred Black Feminine.

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Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really liked the book and would have given it a higher ranking, except the final chapter was just awful and really soured the whole reading experience.

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