Healing

By The Rev. Christian Carroll, Priest Associate

This morning we’re doing something a little bit out of the ordinary. We’re directly tying the topic of the sermon to the theme of the adult forum following the 10:30 service. The topic is “healing”. The topic came to be healing because the wardens and the sabbatical committee proposed that during our rector’s sabbatical we link some of what we’re doing and thinking about with Bernie’s activities while he is away. Healing is one of his interests and he will be teaching and preaching about healing throughout his travels hence we focus on healing today.

I take as my starting point those many times in the New Testament when Jesus talks about healing or heals someone of a malady. Here are just a few. In Matthew we read that, “… Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and sickness” and later he says “… As you go proclaim the good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons”.

In Mark we hear that Jesus “appointed the twelve whom he also named apostles to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons”.

And in Luke we see Jesus in the synagogue on the Sabbath. “When he stood up to read, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where this was written:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

So, it is safe to say that Jesus understood his life to be about proclaiming the kingdom of God, freeing and healing people and telling his closest followers to do the same.

But problems can creep in for us modern folks as we take up the disciples’ commission to cure, caste out, and cleanse.

Healing gets complicated. It gets complicated when we begin to take a closer look and see that we have some questions. For instance, Is there a difference between healing and curing? What is healing prayer? What does it do? What’s a healing ministry all about? Can anybody be a “healer” or do you need to be trained? What’s happening when a person goes over to the prayer desk and kneels down in front of another person who lays their hands on them and prays? What if I don’t get the healing I ask for? Does it mean there’s something wrong with me? Is the healer not good enough? What does it mean if some people are healed right away and some people have to keep coming back? What does it mean if it looks like someone is healed but whatever the problem is returns?

In addition to questions like these there are suspicions about healing. Take for instance healings we see on religious TV programs. Someone comes before the healer. The healer prays over them and the person throws down his cane and walks away restored. When I was growing up I watched Oral Roberts on TV.

Some of you might remember him. He was a famous “faith healer” and things like that happened.

That wowed me and I had no problem believing that it could really happen. The man was praying. He was helping people. That made sense to me. That was until I caught on to what my older siblings and cousins thought about it. It wasn’t cool to believe that things like that could be real. “It’s all an act”, they said. “Those people are fakes”. “They plant those people in the audience.” “They’re all in cahoots.”

Besides the views of my suspicious and cynical siblings there came a more sophisticated language of doubt and suspicion. “It isn’t scientific”, “It’s irrational to believe that can happen.” Then there’s also the idea that what we think of as healing is a mere matter of suggestion. It goes like this. I put the notion in your head that you can be better and you become better. I put the notion in your head that when I touch you, you are going to fall on the floor filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and you fall on the floor.

There is a lot about healing to occupy us in study and conversation. I think I read the better part of six books in preparing this sermon. One way or another they all suggested answers to the questions I’ve posed.

And frankly I overwhelmed myself. I invite you to read the books. I can provide a bibliography if you’re interested. But you have a great opportunity today. You can to go downstairs after the service, get some food and coffee and join the adult forum in the parish hall. I really encourage you to do that.

It’s an opportunity to talk to people in this congregation who are committed to a healing ministry. The people who offer healing prayers during our Sunday and Wednesday worship are going to be there talking about their stories and experiences.

But I’m not going to talk about the ideas or answers in the books.

I have another meditation on healing I’d like to put before you this morning. And it begins with this – after all my reading and thinking, about healing, healing ministry, healing prayer and the laying on of hands, after all my reading, prayer and study of the Scripture readings for today everything seemed reducible to ten words. From my personal experience and study I want to tell you what I know about healing – in ten words.

“You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.”

When all is said and done that’s it, “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.”

That message is surely in today’s Scripture readings. Here what the spirit is saying to the church. It’s right there. The naughty, impatient, fearful followers of Moses complain and complain and the God of their understanding sends poisonous serpents among them, people are bitten and die. They admit their wrongdoing and beg Moses to pray to God to take away the serpents. So Moses prays and the Lord tells him to do something, “make a poisonous serpent and set it on a pole and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses makes a serpent of bronze, puts it on the pole and when anyone is bitten they look at the serpent of bronze and they live.

God continues to love and provide for the people in the wilderness. They discover it over and over again. When they turn away from trusting God and when fear finally drives them back to God, God is there to provide.

It’s right there in this morning’s gospel. John depicts Jesus alluding to today’s Hebrew Scripture in his conversation with Nicodemus. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life”. The gospel says that for us to have life, eternal life, we must open to this man Jesus, we must look to this man Jesus and come to believe that Jesus lifted high up on the cross, Jesus lifted up to the Father bears us our true life.

As the Israelites had to look at the serpent on the pole for life, Jesus tells Nicodemus the simple truth that he, Jesus, is the way. Jesus tells Nicodemus that his is our true life. He is the light in darkness but in our humanity we sometimes turn away from the light to live in darkness. But the light is always there for us. The light is always there for us to come to. You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.

In twelve step programs of recovery they say that the program offered for recovery is a simple program for complicated people. Jesus’ life is a simple truth that we complicated people have trouble understanding and accepting. Jesus’ lifting brings eternal life to us. His life and death and resurrection mark the culmination of God’s persistent re-creation of the plan for humanity - to be at peace, to walk in love, to share that peace, to share that love and to share hope with each other when we falter.

To shine the light of our faith in God’s love and in the saving life giving work of Jesus Christ into the lives of our faltering brothers and sisters is our purpose. And living in that purpose we are healers one of another.

You are loved by God more than tongue can tell. The message is there. Sometimes we take in the message. Sometimes we’re not there to hear it. There’s stuff that gets in the way. And under the weight of that stuff we sometimes buckle and we are brought to an aching desire for relief from our stuff, for soothing, for clarity, and it is then that we call out for the restoration of something. Some sense of rightness, some sense of wholeness, some hunger that makes us look outside ourselves for the truth of who we are meant to be. I think that is the movement toward what we call healing. Let me show you what I mean.

I’d really like to – I’d really like to ask you for a show of hands on the question of who believes “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.” But I won’t. I don’t want you to give a quick answer. It is too important a question.

I want you to think about the power of those ten words. They can restore and they can be very, very hard for us to hear – to take in – to be changed by, to be healed by. Hard for many of us just to hear – let alone believe.

I thought about asking you to engage in a little experiment. I thought about asking you to look at the person sitting next to you or near you and to say to them: “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell.” I decided not to do that because I don’t want you distracted by your reactions. Instead I want us to look at some of the ways we might react and see if our reactions have anything to say to us about healing or if healing has anything to say to us about our reactions.

I can think of a lot of possible reactions if you did actually turn to each other and speak those words. Some of us would put a smile on our faces and go along and do it. Maybe with a voice inside our heads that says this is so stupid, this is so manipulative, I resent this. Maybe you’d have trouble maintaining eye contact with the person you say it to. Or maybe you’d be able to manage a little eye contact and then uncomfortably look away. Maybe a look of resignation or embarrassment appears on your face that says, “OK let’s just get this over with” and then you’d mumble to each other “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell”.

But then again maybe you’d feel a sense of release, a sense of freedom, an exciting opportunity to open toward another person. For some people it may feel really good to be able to tell you “You are loved by God more than tongue can tell”.

Maybe you’d say it and a smile would form on your face that comes from a deep, peaceful place. Maybe you’d feel a childlike sense of freedom. Maybe you’d feel all of these things all at once. A cascade of pent up embarrassments or joys about your ability to love and be loved, to heal and be healed.

If you think about what your reactions might have been, you might identify a place inside you that wishes your reactions were different. Maybe we’d see things inside us that we want to be changed. Or maybe you’d identify something that has changed over time and you want it to keep growing. Those reactions – they all have something to do with healing.

Anything that has to do with our discomfort in ourselves or with others is about a place that hasn’t basked in the light. And anything, anything at all that has to do with our being comfortable in our own skin needs to be shared. Any gift that you know in your soul has been given to you by God needs to be shared.

Healing is taking and giving the love of God. It is about opening dark and troubled places to the love of God in the faith that you are loved by God. Healing is about opening your lighted, peaceful places to others because you know they are loved by God.

Let me ask you, “have you ever had a moment when you saw someone just suffering so and you felt impelled in your guts to just touch them ever so gently? You are so moved – so moved – inside the body that you want to reach out of yourself – out of yourself and lay your hand on them. And if you let yourself do it - as that hand gets closer to its destination something rises up in you and you know it’s not you that’s reaching out. You know that you are seeing with God’s eyes. You know it is time to open. You know this is the charity of the heart of Christ moving in and through you.

Have you ever felt so happy for someone that you’re warmed by a deep, deep sense of peace as you look at their joy? That’s something bigger than this heart at work.

Listen to these words of John Shelby Spong as he expresses who Jesus is and what the life he lived and offered to us can do in and through us.

“The Christian story is a story of One who seemed infinitely to transcend his barriers, even the barrier of death: His ability to be open was uncompromised; he lived out a freedom and a wholeness; his capacity for love revealed that he had received an infinite amount of love, a love that continued to flow even as his life was being destroyed. As he died, he lived. This life, this love, tested that ultimate barrier of death and men are convinced he prevailed, generating power that other lives have met in age after age setting them free to live, to press the limits of their potential, to become persons they never dreamed they could be”. [1]

My brothers and sisters, in believing the realness of that Christ, in knowing that Christ, in allowing yourselves to live within the power of Christ’s love, in allowing yourselves to be a servant of that power, the healing love of God starts moving in us and out from us.

That’s what I know today. You are loved by God more than tongue can tell and the power of that love can knock your socks off.

[1] John Shelby Spong, Christpower. (Richmond: Hall Publishing, 1975) 11.

© 2009 The Rev. Christian Carroll

The Greatest Commandment

By The Rev. Christian Carroll, Priest Associate

If you have been here the last two Sundays or opened your mail in the last two weeks then you know we are in the middle of our stewardship season. I don’t like the word “stewardship”.

What does it mean when we add “ship” to a word? Think about it. “Friendship”, “Companionship”, “Leadership”. To me they’re concepts that point to activities. It’s the activities we’re interested in. The meat is in the “friending”, the “companioning”, the “leading”, the “stewarding”. So what’s “stewarding”?

If a steward is someone given the job of maintaining and spending assets (think of a wine steward with the key to the wine cellar where the good wines are kept and maintained) then stewardship would be reflecting on stewarding or how the job of maintaining and spending assets is going.

So when I say we’re in stewardship season I mean we’re at the time of year when we start reflecting on our individual and joint “stewarding” or how we’re doing at the job of maintaining, protecting and spending assets.

We’re asking “how am I, how are we doing at maintaining, protecting and spending the assets that we’re charged with.”

In a church the assets are not bottles of wine and the job is not just maintaining the correct temperature so they’re ready to be enjoyed. In a church our asset is God’s grace in our lives. Jesus gives us our most important charge in this morning’s gospel. That is, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind and loving our neighbor as our self.

Stewardship is reflecting on the “our stewarding” that is the actions that flow from our conscious desire to know love and serve God with everything we’ve got.

So every year at this time, a stewardship committee, made up of congregation members is gathered and charged with leading the congregation in reflecting on how we as individuals and as a congregation are responding to our charge to be stewards of God’s grace in our lives.

During this time we think about God’s grace. We think about God’s presence and impact on our daily lives. We think about, how or if we are motivated to respond. We ask “How are we doing with what Jesus calls the greatest commandments?” We listen to members of the congregation when they step forward to bear witness – to share their reflections and their experiences in stewarding. As we will again in a few minutes.

We take a step back and take an inventory of ourselves, our talents, our finances, our gifts, our time – all the stuff of our individual households – all the stuff that makes us who we are – and we acknowledge that – all things come of thee oh Lord – and question how – we are giving from what has been given us.

This inventory is not so we can passively offer thanks to God with a grateful heart but to see how we have lived the greatest commandment to “love the Lord our God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind”.

This inventory is not so we can passively offer thanks to God with a grateful heart but to see how we have “loved our neighbors as ourselves” using what is given us by God. Have we loved our neighbors as God has loved us?

And we form a committee to get us started. I have served on the stewardship committee for two seasons. And it’s not easy. Each year the members of that committee struggled.

We were uncomfortable. We struggled with the fact that the word “stewardship” seems to take center stage in our corporate life only when it’s time to plan next year’s budget.

Stewardship seems to always come down to the action of asking for money so we can keep the doors open, the lights on, the silver polished and the place warm, and ourselves doing all the things we have been doing here.

And each year the committee laments that we know that stewardship is not all about money. We know it’s about individual and corporate ministry. We know it’s about how we individually and corporately seek to witness to new life in Jesus Christ.

I think part of the struggle with stewardship as we practice it in this season occurs from a sense of embarrassment. That is embarrassment that, although we know better – stewardship always seems to get brought back down to money, despite the many ways we do indeed share our blessings in ministry both inside and outside these walls. Why is that?

We seem unable or unwilling to embrace stewardship as an ongoing reflection that can be a celebration of how we spend ourselves to the glory of God. We seem inattentive to integrating the joyful celebration of “our responses to God’s grace in our lives” throughout the church year.

I think I have an idea why. It has to do with fear and forgetting.

Because stewardship gets linked to money the whole reflection on blessings gets tainted. We taint the whole practice of seeing how we’re doing at using what we’ve been given. Linking stewardship only to money links stewardship to a resource we have that can become scarce at the drop of a hat. Poof, “money”, now it’s here, now it’s gone, will it ever come back? That particular asset is so tied to our self-esteem, our value and sense of security that money becomes hard for us to talk about. “Money”, now it’s here, now it’s gone, will it ever come back?

When stewardship gets linked principally to money it gets linked to fear and fear gets linked to giving. “If I give it – anything – I will not have it, – I will not have it and I will not be safe. If I am not safe, I might die.

The scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Stewardship is not about raising money for church, but about asking if there is any alternative to the culture of death in which we live.” Translate “the culture of death” in your mind to the “culture of not enough”. To restate Brueggemann then “Stewardship is not about raising money for church, but about asking if there is any alternative to the culture of not enough in which we live.” In the culture of not enough fear replaces stewardship – that is – our responding in action to God’s graces in our lives, becomes something fearful. “Fear that there won’t be enough.”

And the fear that there won’t be enough, says Brueggemann, is really about seeing our past, individual and corporate” as “barren of miracles”. “A past without gifts and a future without hope gives a present that is an arena for anxiety.” If there is no acknowledgement or a denial of miracles, of God’s beneficence, then “the only way to get anywhere is to invent yourself and scramble for whatever you can get.”

If we leave unchallenged “a culture of not enough” or if we turn away from challenging our own fears of what will happen to us if we do not have enough than Brueggemann suggests we end up living as if our neighbors are a threat and the greatest and second greatest commandments are too much for our fears to bear.

The alternative is to step away – even if only in small steps – from whatever it is that stymies us from embracing in celebration all the ways we do spend ourselves to the glory of God. The alternative is to step away from whatever it is that stymies us from integrating the joyful celebration of “our responses to God’s grace” throughout the church year. The alternative is to reclaim stewarding and “stewardship” from money and fear.

I’m convinced we have a new opportunity here. We can throw open clouded up windows and take a new look at stewardship. Reclaim the word. Take it away from money; dissociate it from a financial burden. Don’t think about the money.

Think about this. Let’s look at reality – the reality of how this congregation has been maintaining, protecting and using its gifts.

There is palpable new energy in St. George’s that doesn’t have much to do with money.

We have neighborhood kids joining the choir camp. Our kids are inviting friends to join them in church. Our music program keeps getting bigger and better. We have a new liturgy for people in recovery. We have the willingness to experiment with the shape of our worship space. We have the ability to change.

We have women in the congregation stepping up who want to offer the congregation and the community more. Women who want to pray and learn together. We have new adult leadership jumping in and getting involved in guiding our young people. People from the outside, our neighbors, come in here to take a look at us to see if we have what they want or are trying to find.

We have people in our midst who greet those newcomers with joy and enthusiasm. New people are interested and excited about learning about the church and they come to seekers class. People come here to have their relationships blessed in weddings and civil unions. People come to hear our musicians in concerts. People come here to do yoga. People come here to celebrate the changing of seasons in ritual celebrations. People come here to learn how to stay sober and help other people attain sobriety. We have new people stepping up and teaching Sunday school and new people on the behind the scenes committees like property and finance. We have a talented and generous web master. Our wardens are active and vestry members supporting individual ministries.

And there are other ministries going on behind the scenes. Volunteerism, the pastoral visits, the gardeners, the people who pray with people for healing, the people who loving and prayerfully maintain the sanctuary, the people who make our worship function smoothly and all the helping hands giving unbeknownst to all of us. We have people serving on not-for-profit boards. We have people hammering nails for the Abraham House project. We gave over $20,000 to community organizations whose work reflects our commitment to be of service. If I’ve forgotten you or your ministry activity forgive me.

Let’s get used to speaking about the plenty we have here and let ourselves be inspired to keep using it. Let’s keep holding up our graces. Let’s keep holding up God’s beneficence in our lives. Use it, Use it, and Use it.

We each are an opportunity to witness to God’s grace. Your life itself is the opportunity. I challenge us to free stewardship from fear and concentrate year-round with stewarding – active intentional spending our treasures.

If I could I would give you all little keys to put on your key chains. They would be reminders like the wine steward’s key. They would be like the key to the wine cellar but our wine cellar has the bounty of the kingdom of God and we’re going to keep opening it up everyday to every neighbor we touch. And we’ll commit to doing this when we remember the miracles and when we fear they’ll stop. We keep doing it with or without fear. That is our charge. We’re going to keep opening the Kingdom up everyday to every neighbor we touch.

© 2008 The Rev. Christian Carroll