St. Andrew’s Pictou, March 26, 2006 Lent IV

 

Healing Interventions

 

Numbers 21:4-9 The caduceus symbol

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

 

Like most things, there are variations in what people mean by the word, “healing.”

 

In our “drive through,” “youth cult” world, many see healing as coming out of sickness or any kind of wounding, without any scars; without any visible sign that there had been a problem in the first place: like new; like a car going to a body shop and coming out looking like it had never even been in a accident.

 

Many people see healing as something that makes you look “like new.” They expect a scarless, blemish free, return to the way things were before you got sick or had an accident.

 

The notion of scarless healing sounds more like a reversal of the aging process than an authentic description of healing.

 

The truth is that most of us carry scars from the past: scars on our skin, as well as on our emotions. The reality is that we have both physical and emotional scars form the past: visible scars and invisible scars.

 

The important truth in today’s message is just two words: healing exists!

 

One could even say that the fact that healing exists points to the reality of God who desires health and improvement, but if we are to benefit, healing must be distinguished from magic.

 

Essentially healing means to be made whole, or to restore to health, but there is no mention that scars will not remain. In fact, we often see that the scar at the site of a wound is tougher than the original skin.

 

I attended a talk being given for us chaplains by the head nurse of all intensive care units at The Toronto General. I asked her what healing meant to her.

 

She said that she didn’t like the word cure, that it was misleading and unhelpful. To her healing meant that a patient would have a better day, that they were able to manage the pain, that they were able to make the patient comfortable. She told us that she struggled with her past because the healing interventions of her earlier career were now impossible to do because the patients were so hooked up to tubes and equipment to the point that she had a hard time telling the difference between “healing” and “torture.” She said that sometimes you just couldn’t turn the patient to avoid bedsores.

 

 

 

In each of today’s readings we find God entering people’s lives to bring some kind of healing intervention:

-In the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, the people receive healing from God while they are in the wilderness.

-in the Epistle, the Greco-Romans find that faith in Christ is a healing experience,

-in the Gospel reading Jesus Christ is offered as a healing for humanity.

 

In the book of Numbers the people were struggling on their journey from Egypt to The Promised Land and were facing an infestation of poisonous snakes. People bitten by the snakes were dying and they went to Moses demanding to know if they were to perish in the wilderness.

 

Moses prayed to God and was told by God to put a poisonous snake on a pole, and if someone has been bitten, they just have to look at this snake on a pole and they will live.

 

So Moses made a serpent of bronze, put it on a pole, and all those who were bitten looked at the bronze serpent and lived. A figure of two bronze serpents on a pole with wings is still used by the medical profession today to represent healing. It is called a caduceus; a visual symbol still recognized and used today, of healing.

 

In the reading to the people in Ephesus, the Apostle Paul is talking about lifestyle versus following Jesus. He is speaking against a lifestyle that is selfish and focused on personal wants and desires without regard to the needs and realities of others.

 

If Paul were standing here today, in today’s language he would be telling you that you are more than just “consumers” using the products that people are trying to sell you. He would be telling you that you have a higher calling, being the people of God, the body of Christ you are called to a higher purpose of serving God and each other in a caring community.

 

In the Gospel Jesus gives us who he is in his own words, “And 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.”

 

Jesus portrays himself as the healing serpent, “the caduceus” for us in the healing that we might need and for why he came to us. He is telling us that we might look up to him for healing in our lives.

 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

 

While we will all die some day, the healing intervention from God in Christ is that we will not “perish.” Dying is different than perishing.

 

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

 

As followers of Jesus Christ, isn’t our task not to condemn people but to save them as he did?

 

If Jesus Christ was God’s healing intervention into the world of human experience, is he not then a model for our interventions with other people?

 

Can we not have healing interventions with other people as men and women meeting them in the course of our lives as Jesus did with his?

 

I was attending a patient one day who had been in a bad car accident and was mostly immobile with casts and restraints. She was a member of AA and was comforted when I told her that my father had been a member as well. She was very anxious at being confined by her restraints. How she pined for a real cup of coffee. By the time that hospital coffee reaches your bed, it has lost something.

 

When I heard her comment, I said, “You want a cup of coffee?” “Yes.” I got up, took the elevator down, out of the hospital, down the street to a coffee shop, bought two coffees and returned. She just savoured that coffee like it was water from the spring of life; a healing intervention. It was indeed, sacramental Holy Communion of the highest order.

 

The healing interventions that we can give other people as we meet them in our lives are defined by what they need. They may not be able to get it for themselves, like the woman in the casts, or they may be totally able, but the healing comes for your giving, to them.

 

I always say that you can make a cup of tea for yourself, but the healing comes from the other person making it for you.

 

There is absolutely one thing that a person can never give themselves: they can never give your love to themselves. Only you can do that!

 

They can only receive the love that you give them give for yourself, they can’t give themselves your love because it is for you and only you, to give.

 

As the church, as the body of Christ we are called to be healers.

 

When we meet those in need, may our meetings with them be healing encounters that bring them wholeness, health and the peace of God.

 

AMEN                    Rev. Alan Stewart