Scripture: Jeremiah 8:11-22; Matthew 6:25-34
Why? That’s what a friend asked me when I told him that “healing” was going to be our theme at Sojourners during Lent this year. It took me a little bit by surprise.
I didn’t say it out loud, but what I thought was: What do you mean, “Why”? Isn’t healing a perfectly good thing to have as a Lenten theme? Is this something you think that as Christians we shouldn’t be talking about or thinking about or praying for or trying to make happen somehow? Don’t people need healing? Don’t I need healing? Don’t you? Did Jesus not spend a good deal of time going around healing people? Is there something I’m not getting here? Is there something wrong with healing as a theme? What do you mean, “Why”?
That was my immediate reaction going on inside my head, but I was glad I didn’t speak any of those thoughts because after I stopped being defensive, I realized that there were probably good reasons for asking. Some people associate healing in a Christian context with Oral Roberts. Some people may see it as too much focused on health issues, physical or psychological, and not enough on the full range of concerns Christians need to have. There are some bad associations people have with healing. And besides, it isn’t such a bad question after all.
Remembering why, and being able to say why, you’re doing something is usually helpful. And the suggestion that we should not treat healing as though it were a self-evident good may also be helpful. It might lead me to ask some other questions I need to ask, such as: What do we mean by healing anyway? In what ways might it not be a good thing? I think I even remember questioning the word myself, maybe in a conversation with J.R. sometime back in the fall as we were exchanging thoughts about stress and grief and such things, and I said, as I recall, that I wished there were a better word for what we were talking about than healing. Granted that it’s a richer and more religious sounding word than, say, stress reduction, still it’s a little too broad a term and a little too many people have used it in too many different ways. I remember trying to think of another word myself.
While I was working on this sermon and thinking what a large topic this is, I happened to be out in the car—this was last Friday, the day the Olympics started—and I happened to hear on the radio a report that President Bush’s speech that night was going to say something about how the Olympics would provide healing from the events of September 11. I remember furrowing my brow. It’s not that I necessarily disagreed. It’s more that I couldn’t tell whether I agreed or not. What does he mean by that? What does healing mean in that context? I wasn’t sure, which I’m fully prepared to say may be my problem, but it underscored for me how loosely we can use the word, and how we can’t count on what a person means to say being the same thing as the way another person hears it.
And I do think it makes some difference what exactly we mean by healing and how we understand it. Because in a common sense sort of way probably what we mean by healing is that the pain goes away. We have a wound in our body and it hurts and we know that the wound is healing when the pain gets less and eventually goes away. We all sort of know what healing is because we have experienced it, and usually when we experience it, we do feel better. But from a faith perspective, I think we need to be a little bit picky about definitions, because from a faith perspective healing is not the same thing as the pain going away.
But let me hold that thought for a minute, and say a few things about the “why healing” question, not so much from the philosophical angle but from the angle of how this came to be. I spoke to this briefly in the newsletter, and at the risk of repeating myself, I wanted to retrace some of that again this morning. And again I’ll be brief.
Back in the fall I had several conversations with people here at Sojourners and elsewhere, in which people expressed the feeling that maybe the events of September 11 and the aftermath were affecting many of us in ways that were deeper and more subtle than we generally acknowledge and that maybe we ought to pay more attention to how all this has affected our inner life. There’s lots of talk, lots of attention paid to what our national response ought to be, the pros and cons of military action, the ins and outs of international relations, presidential speeches, budget proposals, providing for national security and personal safety and protection of civil liberties all at the same time, all important issues, all widely discussed. But then there are other questions. How has this all affected our inner lives, the anxiety level we live with, the fear level, the worry, the stress, even our overall sense of optimism or hopefulness or our basic sense of well-being.
We all know there’s such a thing as post-traumatic stress disorder. And for people who have experienced extreme trauma we know the effects of that can be severe and long-lasting. What it seems we know less about is how a severe trauma affects people who may have been deeply but less directly affected. What are the long term effects for me? I clicked on the radio after I finished this sermon last night and the program featured several teachers from around Virginia, including Nikki Giovanni, who were reflecting on how this had affected their writing or their teaching.
What I was hearing from people was in a sense the question asked in the reading from Jeremiah: Is there no balm in Gilead? In Jeremiah’s time that question was brought on by a national catastrophe greater, I think we would have to say, than ours. The capital city, the holy city, Jerusalem had been attacked and laid waste and the national leaders and many of the people carried off as prisoners. It was bleak. Is there no balm in Gilead? Even in our situation where the trauma is not nearly as severe, we may need to ask: Is there no balm in Gilead? Presidential promises and policy debates are not balm. So maybe we need to acknowledge and address in the context of the church our need for balm—healing. And do that with an open mind—beginning not with a definition but with an attitude of seeking to discover for ourselves what healing might be.
Then too it hardly needs to be said that our need for balm can be rooted not only in big public events but in big private ones as well—the loss of parents or partners, the loss of relationships, loss of jobs or physical abilities, losses of all kinds, to say nothing of the ongoing struggles you have and I have with whatever our personal demons may be.
Since the theme of healing came from these kinds of recognitions, what it means to me is that we all have some inner work to do. It won’t all come from the same place or arise from the same reason or take the same form, but we all have inner work to do. Healing can mean lots of things, and I’m sure some of you are saying to yourselves right now that healing can also refer not just to dealing with our own anxiety but to trying to bring some kind of justice to the Middle East. And I agree. Healing can mean that. Healing does mean that, ought to mean that.
But reminding ourselves of where the concern came from in this case says that that’s not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about places within ourselves that are not serene, and we’re talking about tending to those places and mending those places. It’s inner work we have to do. Our leading concern is in one sense all about healing, but we also need to specifically recognize that some of the work we need to do with regard to racism or racial justice needs to take place not just out in the world but inside us. We have work to do in our inner lives, in lots of areas of our inner lives. It is necessary work. It is good work. It’s hopeful work. It’s work that is always there, but what better time to lift it up and pay some special attention than Lent.
When I put it that way—that we have work to do in our inner lives—that probably doesn’t sound too soothing, not too much like balm, maybe not like healing at all. Maybe it just sounds like another obligation, another something we are supposed to do, and therefore something to feel guilty about if we don’t do it, and therefore something that will require even more healing. “We’ve got work to do.”
But of course I put it that way intentionally. And this brings me back to what I said earlier about healing not being the same thing as getting rid of pain. We do have a role to play in our own healing, and that role is not simply to engage in a search for things that will make us feel better.
I was thinking about what healing does mean to me as I was putting the bulletin together this week, and as I wrote down the three hymns Beverly had given me, that we sang a few moments ago, my eyes rested on “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. It’s true, I thought. Sometimes I do feel like a motherless child. Pretty much all the time actually, though sometimes I can be pretty good at covering it over. Sometimes—lots of times—I feel a long way from home. And those are not happy feelings. And I guess those are some of the parts of me that need healing.
I’m a long way from home because I’m separated from some of the people who once meant home to me.
I’m a long way from home because I don’t feel sheltered from airplane attacks or sadness attacks.
I’m a long way from home because I do not live a safe and secure existence free of anxiety or downright fear.
I’m a long way from home because I am very far from the person I would like to be, and I’m a long way from home because there are too many things in this world to mourn over.
I’m a long way from home, and there’s not a doubt in the world that I do need healing.
But I don’t need, I’m pretty sure, to stop feeling like a motherless child. My healing is not going to come when I no longer feel like I’m a long way from home. Somehow, without those feelings, I think I would feel less human. Somehow, if I were to stop feeling like a sojourner on the earth, I think I would feel less human.
This Wednesday, those who gather in homes for Ash Wednesday will hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The gospels say that before he began his public ministry, Jesus went to spend forty days in the wilderness, which is what the forty days of Lent are based on. It says that he spent forty days in the wilderness, but in another sense, the way I read the gospels, he entered the wilderness prior to the beginning of his ministry, and he never came out. And if we are to follow him, no matter how imperfectly, we will find ourselves there too.
So it’s not exactly our job, or even our hope, to be delivered from the discomfort, or even the pain of being in the wilderness. What we want, deep down, I think, is not an existence that is free of the pain, but to have something to do with the pain, the restlessness, the longing, the loneliness. What we want, deep down, maybe is to have someplace to put all that humanness, something to put it to, so that it’s not just me and the wilderness staring each other in the face. What we need is not to find some way to be comfortable out here in the wilderness, not some way to be calm and serene out here in the wilderness, but rather some way to be loving out here in the wilderness, some way not to be panicky out here in the wilderness, some way to be somewhat whole out here in the wilderness.
May God grant us healing out here in the wilderness, but may it not be a healing that soothes but rather a healing that strengthens us to brave the adventure of whatever lies next ahead on our journey of faith. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 10, 2002