Luke 8:42-48

The crowd welcomed Jesus, for they were all expecting him … As he went, the crowds almost crushed him.  Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her.  She came up behind Jesus and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. “Who touched me?” Jesus asked.  When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”  But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power had gone out from me.”  Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet.  In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him, and how she had been instantly healed.  Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you; go in peace.”

Always, wherever, whatever, however, When I am able to resist For once the constant pressure of failure to exist, Let me remember That truly to be man is to be man aware of Thee And unafraid to be. So help me God.

GRASPING OUR HUMANITY

Those words of surrealist poet David Gascoyne have been my inner support for decades.  From the moment I first read them I held them as a summary of my life’s commitment.  Let me be a man able to resist the constant pressure of failure to exist.  Those words affirm my sense of being both a man and a human being.  They free me to release my own inner healing and growth into the world around me.  And all begins with ‘being’, holding a sense of wonder, exploring imagination.

… seeing YOU for the first time

But this also entails seeing you in a new way and as if for the first time.  That for a long-term city dweller is the hardest to achieve.  When you live in the inner-city you discover that the first rule is never to look people straight in the eye.  Your dwellings and life-style press so closely together, that to look intently at another is like an invasion of their only privacy.  To use a fun comment of our household ‘we live so close to our neighbors we can hear them change their mind’.  But there is also that other darker side of the inner-city where people have moved to be anonymous.

… seeing life from a different perspective

It takes concentration to sit with a street person or a remote Indigenous person and to let them tell their story in their own way.  You don’t interrupt or comment; you just sit quietly and wait in their time. Slowly, you gain the privilege of seeing, sensing and touching the other’s world.  You are amazed to realize that difference not sameness is the essence of being human.  ‘Truly to be man, is to be man aware of THEE’. 

Reading Gascoyne against the background of his 1930s Idealism and Existentialism suggests he meant engaging ‘you’ my different other.  You are the one who embraces and helps interpret my sense of self.   That is where healing begins.  I learn to love and respect the other for their difference and so to bind difference into my understanding and experience of the whole.

… meeting First Nations’ cultures – Canada

Just weeks ago, Margaret and I visited the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, across the Ottawa River from Ottawa.  The building itself is an amazing architectural landmark designed by Indigenous architect Douglas J. Cardinal.  We paused for hours at the display.  Artisans, descended from original communities, had recreated Northwest Coast family homes and massive cedar totem poles.  Sensitive museum guides explained the 20,000-year First Nation peoples’ history.  Their lifestyle, culture and ultimate tragedy were on display.  The guides helped us look the past in the face directly.  We saw our own loss in First Nation abandonment.  We learnt again the inner-city lesson that healing is about living with difference.  We recaptured the wonder of connecting with the environment and ultimately the universe itself.

Their Creation stories and ours, from the Bible to the Norse legends, link human wondering and questioning with the foundation and shape of everything.  Our own religious traditions should not therefore surprise us.  They are filled with accounts of miraculous healings, awakenings to mysterious divine presence and psychic links across time. 

… meeting First Nations’ cultures – Australia

A month or so before coming to the United States I sat with remote Australian Aborigines.  They told stories of bush apparitions, healing wells, animals in human form and voices from distant generations.  Anywhere but seated in their company I might have dismissed the conversation as nonsense.  But these were stories about human hope and the struggle to survive. Their message was about more than magical interventions and interruption of the natural order.  They were sharing their life of interconnection with all things; they were part of the land and lived its message.  At these meetings they repeated their prime value of ‘respect’ for self and for nature.  Through respect some of them had discovered the healing of more recent memories.

RESISTING THE PRESSURE OF FAILURE TO EXIST

… an Athabaskan woman surmounts grief

Margaret and I heard this again in our recent visit to Alaska.  An Athabaskan woman stood on a natural platform, against the concealed and mysterious backdrop of Denali the ‘High One’.  She told unaffectedly the story of her son’s death.  She then sang in her own language a song of healing and reconciliation that she had created for his potlatch.  She had resisted ‘the constant pressure of failure to exist… and was now unafraid to be’.  She was once more bonded with neighbor and nature.  Her own healing from grief intimately embraced the memory of her son and the power of the natural world.  The living earth held the sacredness of all life.

We listened spell-bound as she invited us into her journey to wholeness.  Somewhere deep inside us we knew, with a different kind of knowing, the healing connection she spoke and sang about.  The poetry and the landscape shaped their own magic in us.    At once emotions re-framed reason; they blended in a new way to help us understand how another sees the natural world; we drew that into ourselves.

… our own journey to a vision restored

We are often too busy or too preoccupied to grasp the power of this common experience.  It happens in surprising moments.  Music confronts grief.  A sense of wonder overwhelms trauma.  Generosity penetrates loss.  You come away a different person, healed of complacency.  Your vision of life is restored; new paths and fresh beliefs about the world you live in open for you; pain and sorrow have become a creative part of you.

LISTENING TO THE VOICES AROUND US

… New Age insights into old religious traditions

Some New Age writing has fascinating ways of exploring this experience.  Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit described one of her workshops on energy anatomy.   She drew seven circles on a blackboard, lined up vertically to represent the power centers of the human energy system.  Suddenly, the commonality of seven in Christian, Eastern and Kabalistic symbolism struck her.  She saw a congruency in these three traditions suggesting that spirituality is more than a psychological and emotional need: it is an inherent biological need.  In her words ‘our biological design is also a spiritual design.   The language of energy and spirit crosses a variety of belief systems.  It opens avenues of communication between faiths and even allows people to return to religious cultures they formerly rejected, unburdened by religious dogma.’

… John Robbins’ challenge to the Health System

To grasp all her argument we would need to explore more critically her focus on chakras.  What struck me as I read this was the common grounding of so much of our religious understanding of life.  Apparently diverse and contradictory faith systems find their unity in the bonding of spirit and body.  All things belong together; all are part of a unity.  And healing, or re-shaping life, as John Robbins, author of Reclaiming our Health so straightforwardly states: ‘is intimately interwoven with our mental outlook, emotional tone, and spiritual well-being, and coming to understand that taking responsibility for our health means more than simply lowering our cholesterol or blood pressure.  It means learning to tap the powerful regenerative forces that dwell within our beings.  It means opening our lives to the joy of awakening and the gift of peace’.

Robbins book is a breathtaking indictment of the United States health system.   In the process he urges us back to our traditions that spoke of human partnership with each other, with our bodies and with nature.  He, like Caroline Myss, presses return to these lost spiritual dimensions of health.  And for us in church this morning, here is an appropriate beginning with the Scriptures and the Christian tradition.  They persistently place healing and illness within a spiritual framework where people co-create their health and re-create their lives.  In doing this they become one in the sacredness of the natural world.

HONORING THE BODY

… through biological theology

Christianity made the daring assumption that God had a human body, called Jesus.  Caroline Myss provocatively takes up the point that Christianity crossed the biological divide beginning its new theology with a biospiritual event—the Annunciation.  In this story the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary that she had found favor with God; she was to bear a son and call him Jesus.  ‘The implication is that God is the biological father of this child.  Suddenly the abstract Divine principle in Judaism called Yahweh was mating with a human woman.   Christians made Jesus’ birth into a ‘biological theology’ and used Jesus’ life as evidence that humanity is made in the ‘image and likeness of God.’  Jews and Christians alike believed our physical bodies, particularly male physical bodies, to be like God’s.  More contemporary theological writings have challenged that biological likeness, revising it into a spiritual likeness, but the original notion that we are biologically made in the image of God remains, nonetheless, a major literal and archetypal aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’

… through the tradition of healing stories – Luke’s texts

Healing stories of this order tumble out from a single chapter of Luke’s text – indeed Luke was the man who invented the Annunciation story and its biological theology.  A crazy man, chained and isolated, confronts his inner demons seeking peace.  The story ends with him ‘seated, clothed and in his right mind’.   This is language reminiscent of the clothing of Adam in the Creation story and of Luke’s and Paul’s word ‘justification’ or being clothed with the righteousness of God.  He is re-made in the divine image. 

A community leader mourns the wasted childhood of his twelve year old daughter but, lest we miss the innuendo, she is brought again to maturity.  A penniless woman with the burden of long illness and the shame of community rejection demands release.  She grasps hold of the hem of life and is reborn.  This is the personal beginning to a series of stories whose wider intent is waiting to unfold.
Their stories intrude into an otherwise orderly account that Luke has been developing about Jesus the wandering prophet and teacher.  Jesus speaks blessing on the poor and receives their blessing in return.  He tells familiar stories with awkward endings that leave the crowds curious and sometimes confused.  When at last family come bursting into his presence, he sets them aside with words about his own destiny to be a preacher of God’s love and justice. 
There was the barest hint in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel that Jesus, would be like the ancient prophet Isaiah.  He would thunder change and transformation to the nation, and set the earth’s transformation at its center.  But nothing so far has prepared us for these healing stories.  They read like distractions.
It won’t surprise you that some scholars see these readings as no more than acted parables.  A more mundane pattern of teaching about personal salvation misdirects the language about demons, illness, death and healing.  And on the surface of things, Jesus’ words about ‘faith’ seem to endorse this: when the worst happens, have faith in God.

… through meeting the OTHER

But if you have heard Carolyn Myss’ explanation a different and more fundamental meaning fills them.  They do not allow slick interpretations of healing ministries and expectations of divine intervention.   They offer release from the unthinking comments of people who didn’t understand your tragedy and left you angry and guilty with your own spirit not healed.  Myss’s explanation encourages you to look the other in the eye, see them face to face and then know that the essence of healing is reconciliation and transformation.  The ‘other’, whether person or environment, is critical to the reality of healing.

EXPLORING THE HEALING LANGUAGE OF LUKE CHAPTER 8

That point is best made in today’s reading about a woman subject to bleeding for twelve years.  Luke notes that ‘No one could heal her’.  In other words her transformation sits outside the legitimate framework of local medicine.  As scholars traditionally understand Luke to have himself been a medical doctor, this text has no intention of undermining that profession.  And in this sermon, I also would want to express gratitude for the care and expert advice and treatment received in a lifetime by a range of competently trained professional health providers. 

… healing through therapy - therapeuo

Luke wants to make another point.  She had sought therapy – the text uses the verb therapeuo from which we get our English word.  She had been to doctors, but without getting any therapeutic benefit.  With no recriminations – though Mark’s version is more scathing – Luke wants to engage other than medical needs in her life. 

That said, however, the woman had approached Jesus as ‘therapist’ or healer.  Like others of that time, she saw Jesus as a sort of medicine man or shaman.  In the instant healing that takes place Luke means us to understand Jesus’ power over nature, but this healing is not Luke’s main purpose in telling the story.  We as modern readers need to gloss over this part of the account to focus of the main theme yet to be described.

This woman has lost more than health through hemorrhage.  She has lost dignity and position in society.  What is more her contemporaries used her illness as a way of pushing her to the margins of her world.  In their terms, her blood-letting made her a ‘sinner’ or outsider.  She was the isolated other. 

The focus of the passage is not on the physical healing but on the act of touching.  She reaches out to grasp the hem of Jesus’ garment as he passes by.  Jesus at once says ‘Who touched me?’  Considering the crowd, the question is absurd: everyone must be touching and pushing him.   But the question hangs there embarrassedly: ‘Someone touched me for I noticed that power had gone out from me’.  That always puzzled me till I learnt what it meant to be a preacher and pastor, exhausted by words spoken and by energy given.  Every therapist and counselor, teacher, parent and committed neighbor will know that experience some time in their lives.  For loving and caring are about expending energy – giving truly from the heart as spirit and body blend in passion.

… healing through mystery - iaomai

Luke now takes us a step closer to his ultimate meaning.   The woman, exposed and isolated in the crowd, comes forward to tell that she had been healed.  Luke introduces here another word iaomai, which the Bible uses to describe strange and unexpected happenings.  She sensed some thing else in her psyche, which was beyond healing.  The Bible links this word with the idea of sign or pointer.  A more profound transformation was taking place in her.  I can only guess at the circumstance.  I imagine her standing before neighbors who had shunned her, landlords who had evicted her, religious leaders who had treated her with contempt.  She must have experienced the gossip we hear in every community that an illness like that must have been the result of her own stupidity or loose life.  The woman knew that a different sort of healing was taking place in her inner being.  She was free from their malice; the healing she had found was dignity and strength to stand upright in the face of others’ hostility.

Even now, the story is not finished.  Jesus has one last word to say to her, ‘Your faith has made you well’.  Don’t be distracted at this crucial moment by the way faith is so often explained as a quality that we might or might not experience.  You have too often been offered the cliché, ‘Just believe and everything will be alright’.  No, the word faith has a different sense altogether.  Perhaps the simplest way of describing it is faithfulness, probity, honesty, awareness, hanging onto that inner strength that you have just this moment realized.

… healing as resistance – sozo

Touch the inner self; allow the memories to find healing; know that the pains of the past for so long stored in your body have release.  Jesus says to her: ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you.  Go in peace.’  At this climax of the story the word for healing is sozo.  This encounter between Jesus and woman is not about medical treatment or healing from particular disease, it is about transformation.  The power of this word only becomes clear as you explore the many stories in the chapters surrounding this reading.  The normal translation of the word used here is ‘salvation’.  The text tears the word from its exclusive and narrow casing and places it in a world where the ‘other’ comes into view.  She has looked into the eyes of Jesus, seen the depth of his being as he has seen hers.  She will now see the place and people around her with different eyes. This healing is a true awakening of someone now unafraid to be.  She had resisted for once the constant pressure of failure to exist.

The previous chapter had prepared us for this meaning through a similar remarkable encounter between Jesus and a woman who anointed his feet.  Again, Jesus said to her: ‘Your faith has saved you. Go in peace’.  The same verb sozo is used with the same dramatic intention.  What happened in both stories was that love had invaded the shadow-land where we hide from ourselves, each other and world around us.   Religion and spirituality are forced out of the closet and into the natural world of relationship.  We see what is about us with different eyes.  We have done what is natural to us and in doing so have found where our humanity lies.  All true religion links us to environment, to nature, to the spirit that unites all things.

HEALING OF SELF AND HEALING OF NATURE

… listen to Tom Hayden

If you have not already met up with the writings of Tom Hayden, civil rights activist and Californian senator, then do so quickly.  Read especially his book The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics.  I read him in the local library last time I visited Michigan.  He places in dramatic social context everything I have been attempting to say in this sermon.  Salvation is believing ‘the sacred’ to be ‘present in the living earth’.  He moves us beyond the morality that dominates so much of common religious discourse to sense sacred presence in others and in the earth as well as in us. ‘Health comes from learning to live in vibrant harmony with ourselves, with the natural world, and with one another.’

His words add an urgency to our biblical theme: 

We need to experience nature and the universe within ourselves, not as external scenery we view outside the window of real life.  In religious terms, we need to be ‘born again’ in nature.  We were baptized after our first birth into a special religious sphere that promised eternal life beyond natural boundaries.  Now we need a rebirth, a connection to the nature we lost in that baptism.

… sense the sacred in yourself and the world around you

As healed men and women we join those of every religious tradition who live with awe and reverence for the world around them.  We begin to see ourselves and all other things with different eyes.  And then we learn what that ancient unnamed woman discovered when she reached beyond her own constant pressure of failure to exist.  In reaching out to touch she encountered the sacred in herself.   She became aware … and unafraid to be.   The text surprises us with the realization that by this act she found more than bodily healing or inner peace; she discovered harmony with the world around her and met God in the events and relationships of daily life.  To use Hayden’s words her meeting with the sacred was ‘interchangeable with God’.