Sometimes It Hurts; a Sermon on Healing 9SEP12

FROM Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber, a beautiful sermon on healing and salvation for all of us. Do yourself a favor and listen to the sermon because the words are much more powerful spoken than read....

Nadia Bolz Weber 

NBW sermon 9-9-12 <——-click here to listen along.  Sermons are a spoken act.

³¹Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. ³²They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. ³³He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. ³⁴Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” ³⁵And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.³⁶Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. ³⁷They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” -Mark 7:31-37

(My thanks to Richard Russeth and Jody and Stephanie Olson for their willingness to talk to me this week about their experiences with Jesus and deafness and this particular text.)
Given our Gospel reading, I thought it might be fun to start tonight with a little American history lesson. So here we go:  For most of the 18^th and 19^th century, long before it was a vacation spot, Martha’s Vineyard was a bi-lingual community.  It was a bi-lingual community because everyone spoke both English and, interestingly enough, not French, or Spanish…but sign language.  See, deafness was a recessive hereditary trait and Martha’s Vineyard was a pretty isolated genetic population which meant that any given person on the island could have both hearing and deaf siblings.  As a matter of fact, in the mid 1800’s there were areas of Martha’s Vineyard where 25% of the population was deaf.  So deafness was just a trait some people had, like blondness or tallness. And everyone spoke sign language.
But everyone didn’t speak sign language in the region of Decapolis where the healing of the deaf man takes place and so “THEY” whoever THEY is…THEY brought to Jesus a deaf man with a speech impediment and BEGGED Jesus to lay his hand on him.  The text doesn’t say a word about what the deaf guy wanted.
So this week I started wondering if Jesus showed up in Martha’s Vineyard 150 years ago when deafness was just a trait and not a disease would the collective “THEY” have brought him a deaf man to heal.  Because it would kind of be like them bringing him a man born blonde and BEGGING Jesus to fix him.
And I get that there was not a whole lot of talk about psychology and identity politics and disability rights in Biblical times…but I couldn’t help thinking that THEY were using this man’s deafness to be what a family systems expert would call their “identified problem”.
Hey Jesus – we, the people who are just fine brought you the broken guy so you can fix him.
I can’t help feeling like it would have been more realistic if all of the THEYs who brought the deaf man to Jesus also would have also sought healing for themselves.
But that’s not how we operate.  We let the obviously broken people carry all the brokenness for us.  It’s quite the convenient system really.  Like when someone is obviously an active alcoholic, we are thrilled not to have to look at our own drinking.
This system we have where we all agree on who the real drunk is and who the real liar is and who the real emotionally needy person is and who is obviously disabled person works really well for us.  That is, until Jesus shows up and ruins it.
Because when Jesus showed up I think it’s interesting that he took that deaf man away from the THEY. He removes him from that system. He sticks his fingers in his ears and spits and touched his tongue and looks to heaven and the text says he sighed. He looked to heaven and sighed. And the thing is, Jesus didn’t then rebuke the man or his deafness…he didn’t say I cast out the demon of deafness.  He just touched him, looked to heaven, sighed and said “BE OPEN”.
It’s a wonderful statement for healing isn’t it? be open.
It’s an image that’s stuck with me all week.  This might sound weird but all week I kept picturing Jesus sticking his fingers in each of your ears and saying “BE OPENED”.  And then in the same daydream, before I could stop it, I pictured Jesus’ Holy and unwashed fingers in my own ears. He sighed he looked to heaven and he said Be Opened.  To which I said “no thanks”.
See, It’s painful to be open.  There’s no control in it. No self-determination.  But Jesus is like that, taking us away from whatever the THEY thinks about us, getting all up in our business and insisting on our wholeness.
Be opened he says.
Be opened to a life where you aren’t the broken one anymore.
Be opened to the possibility that there is healing in the world and it might not look like you think it should.
Be opened to knowing that your own brokenness doesn’t need to be hidden behind someone else’s brokenness.
Be opened to the idea that you are stronger than you think.
Be opened to the idea that you aren’t as strong as you think.
Be opened to the fact that you may not ever get what you want and that you will actually be ok anyway.
Be opened to finally being happy.
Be opened to your own need for healing especially if you yourself are a healer.
Be opened to life and life abundant.
Maybe that’s what healing really is.
We think it’s about identifying what’s wrong with someone else or with ourselves and then having that thing cured, but I wonder if spiritual healing has more to do with being opened than being cured.
There’s a famous Evangelical Christian named Joni Erikson.  She became a quaraplegic as a teenager and went on to write a lovely memoir about that story and her relationship with God.  Having lost the use of her arms she eventually learned to paint by holding a brush in her teeth. She was a real hero of mine growing up.  Which is why when I was watching 24 consecutive hours of bad Christian television a few years ago for a book I was writing I was dismayed when Joni Erikson appeared as a guest on the 700 club…because even I can’t be snarky about this woman.  She is a lovely human being and what she said in that interview forever changed how I view the issue of healing. Not surprisingly,  a whole lot of well meaning and enthusiastic “prayer warriors” often offer to pray for Joni to be healed of her quadriplegia, and unlike me who would likely roll my eyes and say give me a break she never refuses prayer.  But from her wheelchair Joni Erikson says to them, Could you instead please pray for the times when I cherish inflated ideas of my own importance … the times when I fudge the truth … the times when I manipulate my husband to get things my own way…sin…’mam if you want to pray for me pray that I receive the power of  resurrection to put to death the things in my life that displease God.
The THEY she encounters might keep praying for a cure but Joni Erikson is opened.
My friend Sara this week told me about a friend of hers who that very day was just hours away from dying.  She told me that for 15 years her friend had dealt with different cancers and treatments and that he was completely at peace about his own death.  She then described this sick man as the most healed person she knew.  He was opened.
But it’s not easy. Healing can hurt.  It can feel like a loss as much as it can feel like a gain.
Because sometimes healing feels more like death and resurrection than getting a warm cookie and glass of milk.
Maybe you are someone who has for so long been the one who suffers depression or illness or dysfunction that you are simply more comfortable that way because frankly when you stay sick no one expects much from you. And that’s easier.
Maybe you are someone who deals so much with the brokenness and sickness of others in your work that you forget that you are in need of healing too.
Maybe you are someone who has experienced healing of hospitality here in this community and you have yet to be healed through offer the same thing to others.
Maybe you, like myself, would rather not admit to needing anything form anyone. Including Jesus.
And to all of this I picture Jesus sticking his fingers in our ears, looking to heaven, sighing and saying “be opened”. Be opened becasue there is more.
In the kingdom of God the kingdom innagurated by the crucified and risen one there is more, which is exactly why after these healings Jesus told people not to go and blab about it.  He knew that without knowing the end of the story, without the cross, they’d just get it wrong. Because when Jesus hung from the cross, he did so as the ultimate innocent victim, the world’s scapegoat as though to say This. Ends. Here.  You just can’t look at the cross and think “Wow, good thing Jesus did that for the people we’ve identified as being the problem around here.” The healing love of God poured out through the death and resurrection of Christ which opens us up, sometimes even against our will is for you and it’s for me and it’s for the redemption of all creation.
In a letter to a friend who was struggling with faith, Flannery O’Connor wrote What people don’t realize is how much religion costs.  They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.  It is much harder to believe than not to believe.  If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this:  keep an open mind.  Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and just leave the rest to God. amen
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/09/sometimes-it-hurts-a-sermon-on-healing/ 

A Palm Sunday Sermon on Why We Don’t Go Straight From Hosanna! to He is Risen! from REV NADIA BOLZ-WEBER 1APR12

WHAT a beautiful sermon, a beautiful way to start Holy Week! 

(On Palm Sunday I had the honor of preaching at Highland’s Church in denver.  Highlands is an open and affirming Evangelical church and I’m good friends with their incredible pastors)
Palm Sunday Sermon at Highlands Church <——- Click here to listen along!
Well, here we go.  It’s Palm Sunday. And so Holy Week begins.
Palm Sunday used to be just Palm Sunday in Lutheran churches.  But now it’s Palm slash Passion Sunday.  We felt we had to do that because people weren’t showing up for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services.  It was kind of sneaky. They were going from the triumphant “Hosanna” of Palm Sunday to the glorious “He is Risen” of Easter Sunday without going through the horrifying “Crucify him!” of Good Friday.
So Lutheran churches started making today into Palm –slash- Passion Sunday so that we were sure people would hear the scriptures readings of the Passion of our Lord otherwise known as the betrayal, denial, insulting, spitting, beating, suffering death of Jesus of Nazareth.
And hey, I understand the impulse.  Who doesn’t want to go from glory to glory and just skip the messy embarrassing condemning stuff in the middle.
It seems reasonable to me that people choose to go from the Big Parade to the Empty Tomb and skip the stuff that makes them uncomfortable: stuff like how Jesus ate his last meal with the people he loved most, all of whom (perhaps like me) would betray abandon or deny him, that these friends (perhaps like me) couldn’t even stay awake while he prayed in the garden, that the crowd (perhaps like me) would strike and taunt him for not living up to their expectations, that the people would (perhaps like me) shout crucify him! And twist him a crown of thorns, that passersby would (perhaps like me) shout “for God’s sake, save yourself”.  Because we would save ourselves.  And the fact that Jesus got himself killed in a totally preventable way never once showing enough self-respect to fight back or get himself off that damned cross…well maybe he had it coming.
So if we can just go from the Palms of the parade to the lilies of Easter we can avoid feeling bad about ourselves, and avoid feeling more than a little embarrassed for Jesus.
That’s the problem with the cross it feels either senseless or condemning and sometimes both.
I know for myself that at the fundamentalist church I was raised in I was taught that the cross was about the fact that, because I was bad God had to send his little boy…and he only had one,  and God had to send him to suffer and die a horrible death because – well,  someone had to pay for the fact that I’m bad.  And therefore being a Christian meant feeling bad enough about all of this that you would then try much, much harder to be good.
So almost every Sunday growing up we’d hear readings about the crucifixion and my 12 year old self would be tortured by how the sins I’d committed that week were why God was angry enough to kill his own son. Sins which generally involved things like, you know: using swear words and eating the banana my sister was saving for her breakfast.
I’m not sure which is worse about what I was taught: the fact that we had somehow made God out to be a divine child abuser or that we had made God out to be an angry loan shark demanding his pound of flesh.
Either way, I don’t think that’s really who God really is.  But I do think that whole mess is what we get when we think the cross is about us and not about God.
No wonder people want to go from glory to glory and skip the cross.
But when we think the cross is about us, the only view we can have of God is of God standing in heaven with folded arms looking down at the cross in judgment. Judging us, and punishing Jesus.
But the thing is, God isn’t standing above the cross.  God is hanging from the cross.
The problem starts when we think we can know who God is by just looking at who we are and then projecting that up really big.  We’re vengeful so God is vengeful.  We are power-hungry so God is power hungry.  We want to smite our enemies so God wants to smite our enemies. That’s why it’s hard to imagine that God would willingly choose to be poured out for us on the cross because, well, we’d never do a thing like that.
Yet in the end, it’s like that quote from Einstein “the same thinking that created a problem cannot solve the problem.” We cannot be saved by a God who is just like us but bigger.  A bigger badder version of the worst parts of us or a bigger better version of the best parts of us can’t save us.
But the good news is that there is a reliable way to legitimately know about the nature of God. And it’s never to look at ourselves.  And it’s always to look at Jesus.  Jesus is God’s self-revelation.  Jesus is like God saying This is how I want to be known. It’s like God is telling us: will you stop your projections already and just listen to Jesus, watch Jesus, follow Jesus so that you can really know who I am.  The way to know the Father is through the son, anything else ends us being about us and not about God. And what’s wild is that we most notably can see who God is in how God chose to reveal God’s self in a humble cradle and on a human cross.
Because on the cross we don’t see a legal transaction where Jesus pays our debt.  We see God. The Word made flesh hangs from the cross as though God is saying “I would rather die than be in your sin accounting business anymore”.
From his rough hewn throne of a cross Christ the King looks at the world and no one escapes his judgment…those who betray him, those who execute him, those who love him, and those who ignore him. He judges us all. From the cross the pronouncement is made and the judgment is ….forgiveness. Forgive them Father for they know not what they are doing is an eternally valid statement. From his cross Christ loves the betrayer, the violent, the God killer in all of us and despite our protests he will not even lift a finger to condemn those who put him up there.  Because it is finally only a God unlike us- a God who enters our human existence and suffers our insults with only love and forgiveness who can save us from ourselves.  It is only a self-emptying God walking among us as Christ Jesus, who, in the words of St Paul, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself,  humbled himself to the point of death— even death on a cross – only this one can save us.
And, I would contend that it is only through the cross that we know that God isn’t standing smugly at a distance but that God’s abundant grace is hiding in, with, and under all this broken stuff in the world around us.
Because while the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross is not about you.  It is certainly FOR you.
In fact, God is so for you that there is no place God will not go to be with you.  Nothing separates you from the love of God in Jesus….not insults, not betrayal, not suffering, and as we will see at Easter – not even death itself.
So don’t go from glory to glory and skip the cross, because as Christ’s broken and blessed body you move into this week with only one certainty:
that as you enter it, you do so in the company of a self-emptying God who pursues you and saves you with relentless, terrifying love and who ultimately will enter the grave and the very stench of death in order to say even here, even here I will not be without you. Hosanna in the highest indeed. Welcome to Holy Week.  Amen.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/04/a-palm-sunday-sermon-on-why-we-dont-go-straight-from-hosanna-to-he-is-risen/ 

THE VALLEY OF DEATH AND THE CROSS

"Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff -- they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long." - Psalm 23:4-6

"Why dost thou then dread to take this cross since it is the very way to the kingdom of heaven, and none but that? In the cross is health, in the cross is life, in the cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness; in the cross is the strength of mind, the joy of spirit, the highness of virtue, and the full perfection of holiness; and there is no health of soul nor hope of everlasting life but through virtue of the cross." -  Thomas à Kempis, from The Imitation of Christ