Healing and Wholeness
Scriptures: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Luke 17:11-19
As many of you know by now, I am a science-fiction buff. Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s there was a series of six novels written by Stephen R. Donaldson called “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”, which came to have quite a huge following among sci-fi fans as they almost re-defined the epic fantasy genre. Though a modern man and a successful novelist, Thomas Covenant mysteriously contracted leprosy – a disease practically unheard of in today’s world. As a result he loses his wife, who wants to protect their son from exposure, and he then continues to get blow after blow to his emotional stability. The people around him cast him in the traditional role of the leper: a pariah, outcast, unclean. He struggles to go on living, but increasingly he experiences prolonged episodes of unconsciousness during which he appears to have adventures in a magical realm known only as the Land.
In the Land physical and emotional health are tangible forces, as real as, say, size or color. Soon after he arrives there Thomas finds that his leprosy is cured by a magical means called Earthpower – and this he knows is impossible. So, he thinks that he is in some kind of dream or hallucination, and thus he comes to be called the Unbeliever.
While much of these Chronicles is the standard stuff of heroic, epic fantasy – good versus evil, finding and using magical talismans, the need to overthrow a dark Lord in order to save the Land and thus the Earth – the fact of Thomas Covenant’s unbelief in the face of the incredible fact of being healed from a disease that had absolutely devastated his life in the world he had come from make this fascinating fiction from a Christian perspective. I was reminded again of Thomas Covenant and his leprosy and his unbelief when I read the story from Luke that is our lectionary text for today. There are many elements in this story of Thomas Covenant that resonate with a spiritual sensibility – and I suspect this is a large part of what made it such a fan favorite over the past 30 years. It is a story about sickness and healing, about unbelief and discovering one’s way, about being torn apart and then finding wholeness, about overcoming all that the dark side has to throw at us with a power we can’t even begin to imagine.
For a Christian that power is the power of prayer, and I want to come back to look at what that means for us – for our lives today. But first, let’s take a look at what I imagine is a fairly familiar story to you: Jesus and the ten lepers.
Usually, when preachers deal with this scripture the focus is on the one who came back. One out of ten who is grateful and therefore through whom Jesus can affirm the value of faith in healing: “’Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’” But as chaplain Maggi Dawn points out, there’s an interesting undercurrent here that we often skip over. Why did Jesus send the lepers to the priests? Why not heal them on the spot? What does it mean that it was only as they were on their way to the priests that they were made clean?
Chaplain Dawn gives us this understanding:
“In first-century Israel, priests not only diagnosed leprosy, but also declared a leper ritually unclean. By sending the ten to the priests, Jesus raised the possibility that they would not only be healed but also declared pure, which was essential if they were to reintegrate into society. The twist in the tale is that this particular leper colony was near a village on the border between Galilee and Samaria, communities that were acrimoniously divided. Jews considered all Samaritans ritually unclean, and would travel miles out of their way to avoid having any contact with them…..
“Ten were healed, but only nine would be accepted; the tenth would always be unclean because he was a Samaritan. He knew that barriers to joining society on the Galilean side of the border ran far deeper than leprosy. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t bother with the priests but turned back to find Jesus.
“It was only to the Samaritan that Jesus said, ‘Your faith has made you well.’ Maybe Jesus was talking about a different kind of wellness. Maybe he meant that deep-seated human divisions are a much more serious malady than even leprosy – that our souls can be far sicker than our bodies and yet most of us do nothing to heal the breach. Maybe he wasn’t commenting on the attitude of the nine who didn’t return as much as on the system that would accept them and reject the Samaritan.”
In other words, Jesus wants us to focus on a larger picture here. When we think about illness – and especially such a devastating disease as leprosy – we tend to think about individual healing. That’s certainly what you and I think about when we’re sick, or when someone who is close to us is quite ill. When am I going to get better? What medicine can I take, or what operation do I need to have, to make myself all right again? How can I help my friend, my spouse, my child work through this ailment and become their old self once more?
And this is a very natural reaction. A sick person needs to focus on him- or herself in order to find the best ways to get better. But sometimes this focus can get too desperate, and that can lead to the negative consequences and excesses of the kind of faith-healing that we tend to view in a derogatory sense.
What Jesus is saying in this story of the ten lepers is that healing and wholeness are not just gifts for the individual. They also have consequences and responsibilities for society as a whole. Again Maggi Dawn: “Jesus healed with compassion and generosity, but he also drew people’s attention from their own problems to the bigger picture. We are healed not to stay the same, but to live differently, breaking down divisions in society that exclude people because of their nationality, gender, religion or education.” Or, indeed, for any reason. That’s what the idea of God’s extravagant welcome is all about.
So, our prayers for healing for ourselves or for others are intended, from Jesus’ standpoint, to help us in healing those places in the world and in our hearts where people are being excluded. Healing leads to wholeness – not just of our bodies and then of our spirits but also the kind of wholeness which means that Galileans and Samaritans can come together. You can translate that First Century reference into our own time yourselves, I’m sure – Christian and Muslim, American and Iraqi, gay and straight, those with homes and those who are homeless – the divisions go on and on, and our prayers for healing ultimately are intended to bind up the wounds that come from these divisions.
How is it that prayer can do this? What is the power that this spiritual force has to move us toward wholeness in mind, body, spirit – and in the body politic? You probably remember that a few years ago there was a scientific study done on the power of prayer which, rather surprisingly (though, not so surprising to Christians) found that prayer does affect healing – whether one’s own prayers for oneself, as well as prayer on behalf of others. People who were prayed for had a better chance at healing than those not prayed for. There is a connection between our spiritual lives and what goes on inside our bodies.
Franklin Ishida tells about how on the island of Madagascar, where our son and daughter-in-law, Bruce and Lisa, will be going this spring, there is a revival of native settlements called tobys where people come to have both body and spirit healed. Ishida says, “People come or are brought to the tobys for healing, where body and spirit are interconnected….. There is a recognition that the power of sin and evil has a grip on our lives, and that because of this, true healing comes not just physically, but spiritually as well. It is a holistic approach. This kind of healing is understood to be a gift from God, a gift of the Holy Spirit, a gift of faith.”
“…body and spirit are interconnected…..” We in a so-called modern culture can still learn a lot from what we, perhaps short-sightedly, call “primitive” cultures. Here, as Franklin Ishida says, is a holistic way of understanding the mind-body-spirit connectiveness. And, by extension, we can also use this holistic approach to healing as a way of understanding the connections we have to those who are seen as outcasts in society (our own Samaritans) or as different from ourselves.
Take, for example, the homeless. Now, I know that there are some of you who have come perilously close to homelessness yourselves, and indeed none of us is very far away from that prospect (the RJ reported this past Thursday on “the skyrocketing number of Nevadans facing foreclosures”). So there can be some empathy, some identification here. But, for the most part, if I say the word “homeless” what comes to mind are those we have to occasionally roust out of nooks next to the church or the unfortunate souls like those in the RJ article a few days ago who have become squatters in the run-down Klondike Hotel near the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign. It is hard – very hard – to find connections here, unless we have been where these folk are.
A slight jump-shift here, but I think you’ll see how I’m going to circle back to the main point. Our companion scripture from the prophet Jeremiah has Jeremiah writing to the people “whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon” – what we call the Babylonian Captivity. It is one of the lowest points in the whole history of Israel. It was a time of much pain and depression and real anxiety – would the people of Abraham and Jacob and David ever truly be a people again, so scattered and distraught were they? Yet, strangely, Jeremiah’s words are full of hope. This prophet whom we usually associate with gloom and doom (the little-used book called Lamentations was supposedly written by him) is saying things like, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters…..” In other words, believe in the future. And while you’re about it, make a full and rich life for yourself there where you are in exile: “…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf…..” Pray. Not just for yourselves because you are depressed about the situation you find yourselves in, but for the people of the city where you find yourselves – indeed, pray for Nebuchadnezzar himself. This passage is reminiscent of another place in this book when God directs Jeremiah to buy a field at Anathoth as “a sign of trust in the future”. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to his fiancée from prison at the end of World War II, knowing that he would probably be executed soon, used this example of Jeremiah buying the field at Anathoth to say to her, “This is where faith belongs….. And I do not mean the faith which flees the world, but the one which endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the sufferings which it contains for us. Our marriage shall be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth…..”
“Our marriage shall be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth.” What a powerful affirmation to make in the face of the evil of Nazi Germany and the horror of a concentration camp! “…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf…..” What a powerful admonition to make to a people suffering in exile under the heel of a cruel tyrant! “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” What a powerful assertion to make to someone who has been suffering from the dread disease of leprosy and who, moreover, was an outcast Samaritan! Bonhoeffer, Jeremiah, Jesus have each seen how healing and wholeness can come both to individuals and to a people even when illness and dread and evil abound in the land.
And the key to it all is prayer. As the scientific study I mentioned a few moments ago indicates, there is power in prayer that we haven’t even begun to understand. I don’t believe, and I doubt that many of you do either, that prayer works miracles in any simplistic or straight-forward way. It’s obviously the case that we don’t always get what we ask God for, especially when it comes to healing. Yes, we know about the abundance of God’s gifts; yet there are times when we seek healing, when we pray and pray, and nothing happens. But the key thing to remember is that God desires our wholeness. In the midst of everything we face in life, God walks the journey with us and hears our cries, the “Lord, have mercy” coming from not just out of our mouths, but also from our minds and hearts.
As we face the brokenness in our bodies, as we face the brokenness of our very being, as we face the brokenness in our relationships, as we face the brokenness of a world torn apart by conflict and hatred, God, through the healing power of God’s Son, brings wholeness into our hearts. The power of prayer is to help us recognize this. Our prayers for healing ultimately become prayers of thanksgiving for the gifts of God that have made us whole.
Thomas Covenant discovered that the healing Earthpower that was in the Land is in fact real, and so he no longer is the Unbeliever. In shedding his unbelief he gains the power to overthrow a dark Lord and restore wholeness to the Land. As we shed our unbelief and let the power of prayer infuse our lives with new meaning and purpose, may we, too, participate in the bringing of wholeness to our own land.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
October 14, 2007