“Ten Lepers Healing”
Proper 23 C (19 Pent C) –
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Brothers and sisters in Christ, Grace and Peace to you from the Triune God: Father Son, and Holy Spirit.
Much of my sabbatical time was spent working pulling together a teaching outline and a book outline for Trajectories of Hope: Faith and the New Face of Illness, Dying and Death.
The idea is that we as individual Christians, but especially as a community faith like Christ Lutheran, have to find new ways to “be church” to members of our faith community and the community at large who find themselves in a world and a society where the face and shape of death have changed radically in the last few years.
The combination of breakthroughs in drugs, treatments, tests and technologies have allowed us dramatically reduce deaths from heart disease and cancer, the biggest killers. More than that, people who do get these diseases can live longer, fuller lives even with the disease.
As a result, the average life expectancy in the
But the bad news is a new set of chronic diseases are emerging to take up the slack. We are seeing growing numbers of people being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and dementia, Parkinsons, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders, diabetes-related illness. It is not unusual for people today to suffer from two or more of these diseases at the same time.
I’ll bet you can think of examples in your own family. And if you can, you know that these people may live with their conditions for 10 or 20 years or more before the disease or complications finally bring about death.
The increasing numbers of elderly (did you know that 40% of
Unfortunately, while I see important gains being in the medical, I see those gains coming at the expense of the relational well-being of the individuals. By relational well-being, I mean the connections among individuals, family, community and --often ignored or forgotten or dismissed – the relationship with God we call faith.
I used to love to play pinball. The old mechanical machines that chanked and ba-ding badinged with lights flashing and flippers flapping. And inside a single steel ball bouncing around at break neck speed, bouncing off the bumpers, dropping in a hole for a second or two only to be rocketed out right back into motion.
That’s sort of what I see happening to our people. Home to hospital to rehab back home and another crisis back to hospital maybe further away for specialized care more therapy until the next crisis back to the hospital. This pin-ball game can go on for years, never getting any better, until finally long-term nursing care or hospice.
What I see today is that this pinball effect not only grinds on the patients but it can work to grind the families and friends and communities. It works to erode the relationships that provide the context for healing: family, community, society, and faith.
Lamin Sanneh, writing about today’s gospel says: In most societies outside the West illness is a social phenomenon that calls for social intervention . . . in their experience illness evokes a social response: family members, friends, and relatives are drawn into a wider circle of caring. The whole group is afflicted, though it is the individual who bears the pain. The time of illness is thus a time of renewing bonds, of summing the connectedness that defines who we are. When someone is sick human relatedness is affirmed and realized “even while one of its strands is unraveling.”
Too often our longer trajectories or paths of illness and dying work against these healing relationships. It is especially trying for the relationship of faith. This is dramatically illustrated in our gospel today in the healing of the ten lepers, where faith and healing are and aren’t what they seem to be
Jesus heals (cleanses) ten lepers on their way to show themselves to the priests. (Unhealed they would be deemed unclean and made outcasts in society.) One of the cleansed lepers returns to thank and praise Jesus, who says to him “Your faith has made you well.”
Eugene Kreider points out that Jesus’ words are not “a simple equation: faith = healing, or if you have enough faith you’ll get the kind of healing you want. The relationship of faith and healing is much deeper so that faith is, in reality, part of the healing itself, not the cause of the healing.”
Note that Jesus cleansed all ten lepers of their leproy. But only the Samaritan returned to Jesus. Only he received something extra. He saw God at work in his healing and responded in faith. Kreider says, “The Samaritan stands among those who asked only for mercy. But the end result was that he was made well . . .With him [the Samaritan] it was not a question of how much faith he had, but that he had faith at all.
Jesus performs 17 separate healings in the gospel of Luke. Seventeen. But don’t confuse this with 17 trips to the Red Cedar Medical Center. The work of the doctors and the staff is marvelous, modern medicine does heal. But without faith, healing is not whole, is not complete. The key relationship is missing. It didn’t used to be: just think of the names of some of the hospitals in the area: Luther, Sacred Heart, Gunderson Lutheran – faith has been part of the healing itself much longer than they have been separate.
And that is my belief that we as a Christian community of faith are called to work within our communities, with our families, we must establish connections and make substantial contributions to how we heal and care for one another.
The gospel today, indeed all of the healing stories in the bible, are stories of faith. How do we reconnect faith and healing in this place and time? How to engage communities of faith and institutions of medicine to meets rapidly and dramatically changing experiences of illness and death?
As with the story of the ten lepers, it begins and ends with faith. It the in-between part that I’m working on. And I am hoping you’ll be part of that work, too.
Amen.
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