John 9:1-23
February 20, 2011
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.
The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.” The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
I want to tell you about one of our members who died about seven years ago. He was a man whose life, and especially whose death, reflected much that is in our passage. You may remember Bob Burek. Bob was the husband of one our elders, Kathy Burek, who has since moved to Milwaukee. Bob wasn’t a member for most of the time Kathy was a member, mainly because Bob was a self-confessed agnostic flirting with atheism. Even so, I still considered Bob to be a friend. We used to talk a lot about some of our favorite topics, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings. Sometime around 2001 he was diagnosed with colon cancer. When he was first diagnosed, we talked about faith and healing, but Bob pretty much believed that “these things happen,” and that he would get better. And he was right,… for a while. He did get better, and after a round of chemotherapy, his cancer seemed to go away. For another year he did well, but then another tumor was detected in his colon. His cancer came back with a vengeance, and the prognosis wasn’t good. The doctor said that basically he had only 2-3 months to live.
Bob and I spoke again about faith and healing. I told him that I would be willing to pray with him, even if he didn’t believe. Bob had a curious response. He told me a story. At the time, Bob was driving tour buses for Anderson Coach Company. He loved to take people to places like Toronto, Atlantic City, and New York. He said that on one of those trips he thought he got a message from God. He was driving from Pittsburgh to Ohio, or vice versa, and he started to run out of gas. He did the calculation in his head: he could stop at an exit coming up and just get gas, or he could keep going for another 25 miles and stop at a station that also had restaurants for people to get lunch. He figured he could make it. He was wrong. He ran out of gas, and was incredibly embarrassed. This was soon after he had been diagnosed again with cancer. He said that he thought God had been telling him something, which was that he was always determined to do things his own way, but that he needed to do things the right way. He saw the gas a metaphor for his cancer. God had been trying to tell him something the first time he got it, but he was determined that he could heal on his own. He recognized now that God was tapping him on the shoulder, and he needed to pay attention. Quite a change for an atheist.
Bob wanted me to pray with him for healing, and for our prayer ministers to do the same. We prayed for him and taught him to pray for himself. For a while Bob seemed to get better, and in fact in the midst of it all he had a spiritual awakening. He began to experience God in his life through his relationship with Kathy, through his friendships in the church, through his daily prayers, through the prayers of the healing ministers, and through worship. Bob decided to join the church, and for a while we were hopeful that he would get better. Then he took a turn for the worse.
The cancer was just too strong. His life was ebbing away. It took several more months for Bob to die. About a month before he died, I asked Bob if he was disappointed that the prayers for healing didn’t seem to be working. Bob paused, and then told me that he wasn’t disappointed at all. He said that before he got cancer he believed that God was just an idea, a crutch, that weak people used to prop themselves up in bad times. But that had all changed because ever since he had gotten cancer he was now experiencing God every single day of his life. And he wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. He said that he hadn’t had a physical healing, but he had had spiritual healing. He then told me that he was completely ready to die and come face-to-face with God. Bob had been transformed.
To me, Bob’s experience with healing exemplifies both the way God’s healing works, and how easy it is for us to misunderstand it. Bob was healed, but his healing was primarily spiritual, and only temporarily physical. You see, the problem among many of us is that when we think about the connection between healing and prayer, we only think of it in physical terms, not spiritual. When we pray to God to heal us, if we do pray, we want God to heal our bodies, but leave our minds and spirits alone. But what if God is saying to us, “Okay, I’ll heal you, but we’re going to start with your spirit and work outwards”?
We have a hard time bringing the idea of healing into Christian faith. The reason is medicine and charlatans. What do I mean by that? Most people don’t know the history of healing in Christianity, but up until Medieval times, praying for healing was part of the responsibility of the church. Christian faith was seen as part of healing. But then as the science of medicine grew, Christianity emphasized less and less our role in healing through prayer. Today we see healing as the territory of the medical field. We don’t really see Christianity or the church as playing much of a role in healing. What has really helped solidify the divide between prayer and healing has been the second problem, which is the proliferation of charlatans who prey on people who are sick, injured, or disabled. There is a long history of false faith healers who have set up shop to pray for healing, manufactured fake healings, all with the intent of bilking people out of their money.
What also keeps us from bringing healing back into Christianity is either/or thinking, rather than both/and thinking. In other words, we tend to think of healing as the territory of either medicine or religion, but not both medicine and religion. So you get medical people who dismiss the role of prayer in healing, but you also get religious sects, such as Seventh Day Adventists or Christian Scientists who say that we should only use prayer for healing, never medicine. They see the use of medical procedures for healing as a sign of lacking faith.
What either/or thinkers fail to see is how both medicine and religion can and do work together. For instance, in the past twenty years there has been an explosion of research on the impact of prayer on healing when it comes to people who have had medical procedures. They have found that heart patients who are prayed for after surgery heal faster and better than those who aren’t prayed for. They have found that people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, gout, chronic heart or lung problems, all do better when they are prayed for, in comparison to those who aren’t prayed for. They still have the problems, but they do better.
What I think that most people, including Christians, don’t realize is how central the idea of healing is to Christianity. Go through the gospels and see how often Jesus heals and teaches others to heal. It’s constant. He’s always healing, even more than he forgives sin. In fact, often the two go together. He forgives and heals.
It’s the connection between healing and forgiving sin that causes me to emphasize so much the idea of salvation as healing, rather than rescue from sin. Jesus speaks to this in Mark 2, where he responds to criticism that he eats with sinners by saying, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." He sees himself as a healer, as did the original church. There’s a reason why they talk so much about salvation in connection to healing. As I’ve said many times, the word “salvation” comes from the Latin word, salvus, which means not only to rescue but “to heal.” It’s also the root for the word “salve,” which is ointment we put on our wounds to help them heal. The Greek word, which is the language of the original New Testament, for salvation is sozo, which means to both save and heal. The original Christians understood that when we are saved, it is a process of healing, not just of getting rid of sin. Today we tend to only think of it as a rescue from sin, not a deep healing.
Unfortunately, the church of the Dark Ages disconnected salvation from healing. The church was living in dark times when people died young because of malnutrition and plagues. The church changed its sacrament from unction, which was a sacrament of healing through prayer and anointing with oil, to extreme unction, or “last rites,” which was said over a person right before death in order to get the person into heaven.
The church of the Dark Ages changed Christianity, and that change has persisted by eking healing out of our understanding of faith. Despite this, Christian faith, at its core, is a faith of healing, wholeness, and holiness (and those words also have the same root, hal). Because we tear apart the physical from the spiritual, we have a hard time being whole, holy, and healed. But what I’ve noticed is that the people who manage to hold the spirit, mind, and body in balance seem to also be more whole and healthy in their lives.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing so many members of this church who lived this way, holding the spirit, mind, and body together in wholeness and holiness. The person who always comes to my mind when I think of this is Jo Jones. Jo Jones, and she was a woman of deep, deep faith. When I first came to Calvin Church in 1996, everyone kept telling me about Jo. She was spending the winter in Florida with her husband, Chuck, another wonderful person. Before she came back from Florida, Jo sent me a letter telling me how excited she was that I was the new pastor at Calvin Church, and that she couldn’t wait to meet me.
When Jo returned from Florida, we quickly became friends. She was a deep, deep woman of prayer and love. Unfortunately, very soon after she returned she was diagnosed with cancer. In typical Jo fashion, she remained upbeat and decided to treat her cancer with a combination of prayer, alternative medicine, and radiation. She was a both/and woman. Whenever you saw her, she had a little bottle by her side, filled with some sort of fruit juice concocted to treat her cancer. She had a deep belief in healing prayer, and had anyone willing to pray to come and pray with and over her. She also believed in traditional medicine. When she started radiation treatments on the tumors on her neck, the doctors told her that she could expect the tumors to begin shrinking within ten weeks after her six-week treatments. She astounded her doctors when her tumors disappeared three weeks into her treatments. She was cancer-free.
A year or two later, her doctors discovered tumors in her brain. Again, she treated her cancer with prayer, alternative treatments, and radiation, and again the cancer tumors were killed. One more time she got cancer, and one more time the tumors were killed. Then she developed complications from the dead tumors. The dead tissue in her brain put pressure on her brain that caused memory and thinking problems. Jo’s health declined. I visited Jo many times, yet I never heard her complain. Instead she simply reiterated that God was with her and that she could sense God everywhere.
As her memory faded, she never lost her sense of love. I remember one time visiting her, and I was bothered because she really didn’t know who I was. She couldn’t talk much or process much. She was putting some hand lotion on her hand, and I mentioned that the lotion must feel good. She couldn’t put words together, but she held out her two hands for mine. I placed my one hand in hers. She took the lotion and squirted a huge amount into my palm, and proceeded to rub lotion into my hands for the next fifteen minutes. She couldn’t speak, and her mind was going, but not her heart. In her heart she needed to love and serve God, and if the only way she could do that was to cover my hands with lotion, then that was what she would do. She was a woman of holiness and wholeness in body, mind, and spirit.
Remember that we were not created to live forever, but I know that Jo’s life was extended because she managed to not only balance spirit, mind, and body, but she also balanced holiness, health, and wholeness. And Jo is not the only one in this congregation to do so. We’ve had many people who’ve lived like Jo, such as Betty Alexander. Like Jo, Betty struggled with cancer for much of her last twenty years, but combining prayer and medicine, she seemed to over come it. Eventually, she also died, but that’s because death is a part of life, and it is a final healing.
I believe that healing is meant to be at core of the Christian life, but to experience the kind of healing we’re called to, it requires not just praying when we get sick, hurt, or in trouble. It requires actually living a constant prayerful life in which God’s Spirit becomes so much a part of our spirit that we radiate wholeness, holiness, and health
Amen.
