6 Epiphany B
February 12, 2012
2 Kings 5:1-15ab
Psalm 42:1-7
1 Corinthians 9:24-27 Mark 1:40 -45
I was
at a clergy conference this week for three days at the Franciscan retreat
center. On the first day we had
presentations from representative of the Episcopal Medical Trust. The presentation was on Clergy Wellness. The Medical Trust is interested in our
wellness, so they send to us a fitness coach who went from almost 300 pounds to
a svelte 160 pounds. And they had a health
statistics guru giving us the bad news; boomers have started to retire at an
overwhelming rate and the health costs are going to be over the top. The subtext: it is more cost effective to
promote preventative programs now than to wait for all of the diabetes,
hypertension and by-pass surgeries. They
gave a free six week program and promised to be our wellness police and help us
figure out our Body Mass Index (not really flattering to use Mass and body
together), count calories, exercise and keep sugar out of our diets. And I was
feeling very guilty; we were asked to bring snacks for the evening social time
and I took from my house some killer chocolate brownies and cookies. I did not have a bag to hide them in so I
left them in the car. But on the second
day, when the calorie police had left the building, I put the brownies and
cookies into a bag and put them on the table.
And the next day, they were mostly eaten. So there is a confession about clergy
wellness.
But this preventive trend in health is very
important. It may not be fun to break from
habits of the kinds of comfort food and drink that we often avail ourselves of,
but preventive health is important.
St. Paul was about preventive health. He spoke about spiritual life as exercise: “I
punish my body and enslave it.” Preventative health at first seems like
punishing the body in order to get it to obey and simulate tougher conditions
so that when tough conditions arise, we are prepared.
In a sense what we are about in the church is
preventative health; living longer with strategies of health.
Why do I say that? You and I understand the word health better
than the word salvation. Salvation is
heavily coded religious term and yet salvation means health and preservation of
our total lives. And we are more or less
concern about the preservation of our lives depending upon the preventative
steps we take regarding our health. The
Gospel notion of salvation is a total notion of health since salvation is a
concern about all kinds of well-being: preventative health, response to our
diseases, social health, spiritual health and our health after we die, both for
the departed and for those who continue to live. Gospel health is concerned about life from
cradle to the grave and after the grave.
Let us consider some insights about health
that are found in our biblical readings for today: Health is a universal issue; an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure; health
is about access to treatment; health most often is about doing lots of little
easy thing; health is about honesty about weakness and disease; health is about joyful recovery.
Certainly it is a no-brainer that health is a
universal issue. We as human being are
given an alarm mechanism to establish health as a chief issue; we have the gift
of pain to send us a signal that we need to deal with the issues that cause us
pain. And pain of all sorts is what
causes us to seek out what we regard to be the normal condition of life, namely
the condition of health. Pain is a
blessing in that it tells us that the condition of not having pain is the
intended condition of life. Pain is
given to us in order to be honest about our condition. Pain
is no respecter of race, age or religion.
The conditions of pain come to everyone and one of the important roles
of civilization is to be able to respond to the pain of the members of human
society.
In ancient society leprosy was a condition
that marred the appearance of the body. Biblical
leprosy was not the disfiguring variety that we know today. It could be cured; it referred to a variety
of different kinds of skin disease.
Since it was a condition of appearance, those afflicted were quarantined
from society until they could be verified as cured by the priests of
Israel. It was quite a double-bind; how
does one get the care one needs if one is quarantined and kept from
society. In the case of Naaman the
Assyrian, he had to go across the border to seek his cure. In the case of another leper, he had to be
bold to approach Jesus or any person, since he was breaking the rules by
approaching any person with his disease.
Both the prophet Elisha and Jesus responded to the faith of the
lepers. The lepers had hope for healing
and they acted upon that hope; this acting upon hope is what we call faith. By faith we may not always get what we hope
for, but living with faith is its own reward.
I suspect that why what is called the “placebo effect” works because
faith is an essential attitude of health.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure. Sometimes we think that health is
about all of the elaborate and expensive treatment responses. Yet just as the Medical Trust has warned us
clergy about the impending impossible health cost due to the large numbers of
boomers who will be retirement age, part of the response to this involves the
ounce of prevention: half hour of exercise a day, cut down on the sugar, count
calories, eat in more healthy ways. We
can reduce health care costs with better prevention and prevention involves
little and repetitive acts that become habits of health. Naaman was offended to be told to wash in the
dirty Jordan River; he wanted some mighty event of cure. Preventative health involves little
repetitive acts. (Yes, preacher, heal
thyself). St. Paul spoke of buffeting
his body as a way of building his spiritual life of faith. Faith exercises of prayer routine, small life
style changes and physical exercise help
us to maintain the optimal conditions of mind and body to be ready to respond
to the variety of conditions that we often have to face.
Finally, when do we discover the true importance
and value of health? The value of health
is discovered in a very poignant way when we experience recovery. Illness and pain can be so disruptive of life
that when life returns to normal we feel like the psalmist: “O LORD my God, I cried out to you, and you restored me to health. You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead; you
restored my life as I was going down to the grave.”
When we’ve recovered from being sick we often
think, “I don’t want to experience that again.”
What recovery teaches us is to cherish health as the normal condition
and to believe that is what God wants for us all. God in Christ wants us to be a community of
health, total health, often called salvation.
And this notion of health embraces realistically the conditions of pain
and disease and it embraces even our death because we are given the hope that
we will live in a new way beyond this life.
Let us accept the fullness of salvation
health; let us take steps in preventative health; let us be a caring community
responding to those with health needs; and let us be thankful for joyful
recovery. The Gospel for us today is that
we are invited to the Health of Christ, the Salvation of Christ, and it is an
invitation to Abundant life. Amen.
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