Christian Wellness as Salvation

6 Epiphany B  February 12, 2012

2 Kings 5:1-15ab   Psalm 42:1-7     

1 Corinthians 9:24-27 Mark 1:40-45

Lectionary Link 

  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.