Healing

A sermon preached by John Sherlock on 27 September 2009

Text: Psalm 139

The history of Jesus coming into the world – God being, for a while, a human – is not story of a sort of Superman – going round fixing things and getting people out of scrapes, and then whizzing off to the next disaster scene. It’s a history of deep involvement in the affairs of humanity.

You don’t tend to find Jesus saying – this is all wrong – there shouldn’t be any sin and suffering in the world.

You find him saying ‘get real’. The world is broken, we know it’s not ordered in the perfect way of God. We know that. But there’s another way – another way of ordering the affairs of the world – where God is at the centre – God who is both life and love – and that way of ordering the world mends the things that are broken. It mends broken relationships, it mends broken bodies, it mends broken hearts.

That way of ordering the world Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven, and he told us about it in numerous allegories and illustrations.
It’s like a man going out to sow. It’s like a seed – the tiniest seed you can imagine – a mustard seed or a yeast. It’s like a net that catches fish.
It’s like a landowner who owns a vineyard. It’s like a wedding banquet. It’s like a father welcoming home a prodigal child who thought he’d gone too far.

Jesus offers us all these pictures of the kingdom of heaven.

And the other thing Jesus offers is a very real analysis of the human condition. He knows that we are not just brains in bodies, just an unusual species amongst mammals, just the survivors in a process of purposeless natural selection.

He knows that we are – as St Francis put it – part of the Great Chain of Being. We are unbreakably connected with our Divine Creator, and with his extraordinary and diverse creation. The psalms are full of songs or praise in which the whole creation declares the glory and splendour of our creator God.

But we live in a broken world. Where God is life and God is love, there are forces at work that are anti-love and anti-life.
Sometimes those forces break through the created order and wreak havoc and cause God grief. Sometimes they manifest themselves in the condition and attitude of humanity towards God’s created order – and again they wreak havoc and cause God grief.
And sometimes they work in our minds and bring us to decisions that God regrets, and these human decisions are what the Bible often refers to as sin.

And sometimes these forces that are anti-life and anti-love work in our bodies to render us out of kilter, incapacitated, in a state of dis-ease.
Jesus knows that this dis-ease is part of the brokenness of creation as much as he knows about the ease with which we sin. When a paralytic is brought to him (Mark 2) Jesus says to him “Son, your sins are forgiven”, which being a rather God-like thing to say causes the teachers of the law to get flustered.

So he says – well what’s easier to say? Your sins are forgiven or get up and walk?

The two are interchangeable. Jesus is proclaiming, explaining, inaugurating the kingdom of heaven. He’s winding the clock forward to the time when God will be back as the focus of human relationships and he’s saying – in this new order sick bodies are well, and sinful minds are forgiven, and lost souls are restored. It’s all part of the process of restoring the kingdom of heaven to its rightful place in the order of creation.
Jesus knows what we’re like. God knows what we’re like. Psalm 139 tells us that God knows every part of us – every hair, every cell, every molecule.

And after this deep, beautiful and poetic reflection on God’s deep knowledge of each of us, the psalmist – who also understands deeply the human condition – cries out against those forces that are anti-life and anti-love and anti-God. He personalises them – he calls them the wicked, the bloodthirsty men.

As a man of peace, I don’t encourage you to rant against other people in this way, with words of hate.

But I do encourage you to take a stand against the forces that are anti-life, and anti-love, and therefore anti-God, that impact on our world, on your world, perhaps even in your mind, your body or your spirit – whether they be things you know you’ve done wrong (and we all have a list for ourselves), or whether they be infectious bacteria or viruses or cancerous cells that are incapacitating your body, or whether they be deep separations of the soul that make you feel far from God.

Count these things, as the psalmist said, as your enemies, because they are anti-life and they are anti-love, and they are therefore anti-God.
And a healing service like this is an opportunity to bring these things to Jesus – who is here by his Holy Spirit – and to ask for his understanding, his grace, his love, his life.

Jesus also knows that we’re all different. As God knit us together in our mother’s womb, he made each of us to a different pattern. As Jesus spoke words of healing to individuals, he hardly ever said the same thing to two different people.

But however you were made, whatever the beautiful pattern God had in mind for you, the world is still broken. Relationships are broken, hearts are broken, bodies are broken.

But God knows you. And God is on your side. If, as the psalmist puts it, there is ‘any offensive way’ in you, it’s only offensive it because it opposes life and it opposes love, therefore it opposes God. And if God is on your side, then it opposes you.

Bring it to Jesus, and hear him say something completely individual to you, because you are completely individual. You are unique.

It might sound like ‘I will refresh you’, or it might sound like ‘your sins or forgiven’ or it might sound like ‘get up and walk’. Or it might be a word so completely for you that you cannot share it with another.

Whatever it is, it’s a free gift – though it cost God a lot. It has no strings attached, and it comes from the very heart of God, who is life and who is love.