February 1, 2009

Yesterday I saw not one but two gorgeous rainbows! Now, mind you, I've seen maybe 8-10 rainbows in my entire life and I saw two yesterday, right from my house. The first one was so perfect - an arc that reached evenly from one side to the other - that it felt digitally projected. It was stunning. Only because it faded naturally within 10 minutes do I know it wasn't some special effect being digitally beamed over La Crescenta. A rainbow is like a perfect rose. It is a thing of beauty, yet a fleeting thing. The rose lasts longer than the rainbow, but as you admire its aroma and its color, you know that in a few days you will be discarding it in the trash. What are we to make of these beautiful and fleeting moments in our lives? A rainbow, a stunning flower, a moment watching our children, an expression of tenderness between two people, a moment of grace? And, how are we to reconcile them with longer and more enduring experiences of our lives? I'd like to focus on that interplay between those things that are fleeting and those things that are enduring in our text today.

In our story today we hear of Jesus' growing popularity. He and his followers leave the synagogue, presumably on the Sabbath, and go to visit the home of Simon. Simon's mother-in-law is in bed with a fever. They tell Jesus about this and he is able to touch her and heal her immediately. Her fever leaves her body and she is able to resume her normal role of ministering and providing hospitality to family and visitors.

No one else visits till sundown, until the Sabbath is over, but then many gather who need healing and cures. In fact, the whole city gathers to watch and bring the sick. The narrative tells us that "Jesus cured many who were sick?" Not all who were sick but many who were sick. And in the morning Jesus got up, slipped away and went to a deserted place to pray by himself.

Nowhere in Hebrew literature is the Messiah supposed to be a faith healer, so there is no reason to suspect that these healing stories are made up. The Messiah was to be a man anointed by God to usher in a new age, be a political figure, and many other things, but faith healer was not one of them. So it is most likely historical accurate that he was a successful faith healer. But clearly Jesus wanted to be more than a faith healer. He wanted to bring people the good news of God's love for them and bring people into a closer relationship with God.

Jesus did not want to be known as a fleeting local healer. He wanted to bring people to an enduring relationship with God. When I read of the stories of these spontaneous healings in the Bible, I do so with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am glad for those folks who were able to be healed of their affliction with an encounter with Jesus. And yet, what about all of us who are not healed instantly? What about those of us who have ongoing illnesses and diseases to manage? What is the message to those folks? What is the good news to those of us who suffer?

I imagine these are the types of things that Jesus pondered in his prayer life. When he slipped away to be alone with God, I imagine that he wrestled with his reputation as a faith healer. It was something he was very successful at and I imagine he could have worked it to his advantage if he wanted to. The crowds were big, the impact was impressive, but I also get the feeling that this was not what he felt called to do. His calling was not to be the flash in the pan, the wonder worker, but the person who helped people make deeper changes and transformations in their lives. And those kinds of changes don't come nearly as fast. When we listen to Jesus teaching and instructing his disciples, we hear of his patient teaching and his method of slowly building a faith relationship with God.

A lot of my learning right now is coming from my spiritual practice of yoga. Like a lot of significant spiritual practices, the results are slow to come forth. As I tell my students, progress and success comes over weeks and months in yoga. Over time, you learn to breathe deeply, to listen to your body, to work on poses gently. You do your practice of yoga consistently and your body begins to respond. Yoga is not easy for the impatient person who wants quick results. I think other spiritual disciplines are very similar - we don't learn to pray or do anything in a disciplined manner immediately, but instead build it over time. We learn to sit and meditate, we learn to carve out regular time to pray, and we make a decision to get ourselves to get out of bed on a Sunday morning to come to worship. These things take disciplined commitment and as we do these things over time, we realize that we are able to make real and lasting changes to our lives.

There are many things in this Bible story that I find compelling. Jesus heals on the Sabbath and begins to anger the local religious authorities for this. This is one story among many of him violating the Sabbath in their eyes. Jesus doesn't care. When there is a real human need, that need comes before religious observance. Secondly, Jesus made time to heal the throngs of people who came to see him after the word spread that he was a healer. Jesus did respond to these people but he was not defined by their needs. This was not his calling to be a faith healer. He came to teach people about God and he wasn't going to be blown off course because he was on his way to becoming extremely popular in this one area. Another thing I find compelling is the way that Jesus made the decision. He slips away for a time of quiet clarity and prayer. You don't see him debating what to do. You see him decisively pulling away for some time of discernment. The story ends with him traveling through the region of Galilee preaching and casting out demons that were confining and trapping people.

So, there are some important pieces in this story that we need to hear - some things we learn about Jesus that we are to apply to our own lives and our own callings: when to bend the rules for a higher calling; when to resist being defined by other people's idea of success; when to carve out time to listen to God and clarify your calling.

The one piece of this narrative that is still disturbing to me is the instant healing. I wish that we had stories of Jesus visiting people over a longer period of time, talking with them and encouraging them as they live with afflictions and diseases. The idea of people suffering from long illnesses doesn't just show up in our time in history. We can think of numerous stories in the Bible of people suffering for a long time: the bent-over woman who could barely lift her head because of her back problems; the woman with the flow of blood who couldn't go to the synagogue or any other public event because of her perceived uncleanliness; the lepers who were ostracized and separated; the paralyzed man who was lifted up and carried by his friends to see Jesus; the homeless beggars at the gate of the rich man. These and many other people were suffering and dealing with long-term illnesses and afflictions. Yes, Jesus healed some of them. But I expect that he also sat down and spent time with others who were not miraculously or instantly healed. I think Jesus encouraged people to care for people who still had their illnesses and afflictions. I think Jesus invited people to rise above and not be defined by their particular affliction.

This month in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin there is an article by a man who is living with cancer - multiple myeloma which is "an incurable malignancy with a median survival of three years." (Winter 2009, p. 19) Yet the author Mark Edwards has had the disease since 1996 and that has given him time to ponder and analyze his life and his cancer. He prefers to think of his cancer from the inside out rather than something attacking from the outside in. He describes his cancer as something that is "part of our evolutionary legacy and operates through successive mutations and selection within the microenvironment of the body. As a natural process, cancer develops by chance, follows no plan, and cannot be characterized as good or bad, right or wrong, purposive in the teleological sense, or unnatural." (Ibid., p. 21) Through the article, Mark Edwards talks about living long-term with an affliction that is part of the natural process and not ascribing to it some moral meanings of right and wrong - if he had done this or that he would not have gotten the cancer; if he had a more positive outlook, he could beat this disease. He chooses not to view his body as a battlefield with military images - fighting the cancer, being attacked by an outside invader, etc. The point for me is that sometimes there is no miraculous healing, but a series of steps that we take to live with our affliction, address the pain, ask the difficult but important questions of life and meaning and mortality, manage what our bodies are experiencing, and make good choices about how to listen to what our bodies need and are telling us. It is a thoughtful reflection on living with a long-term malady.

Because I believe that Jesus was the real deal, I believe that he took the time to engage people with more intent than a drive-by healing. I believe that is partially what he resisted in this passage of scripture today. He didn't want a long line of people brought to him for instant healing. He wanted people to build more depthful relationships with each other and with God. He achieved that because he stayed focused on what his calling was.

Each of us has a mission to accomplish with our lives; a calling from God to fulfill. It may not be achieved instantaneously but it may be something that is created and defined over time. Jesus modeled for us a depthful persistence and an unwavering commitment to our callings. May we each persevere in our work and in the ministry that God has called each of us to be engaged in. Amen.