6 Epiphany B
February 12, 2012
2 Kings 5:1-15ab
Psalm 42:1-7
1 Corinthians 9:24-27 Mark 1:40 -45
The body does not exist in isolation from the mind and the soul and the
spirit. And it does not exist in isolation from the social coding of society.
Our society tells us what to think about our bodies. Our society has many
agents who put their brand upon our bodies. A slight comment by someone about
our size and weight; a young friend who has learned to call us fatty, skinny,
or four eyes and we become marked forever. Some of the major branding agents of
our bodies are the people who want to sell us something. We need diet programs;
we need clothes and perfume and deodorant and hair styles. We are told in so
many ways that we are “not with it” unless we run with the crowd or have the
right car or have the right look. This social coding of our lives starts very
early and perhaps one of the greatest events of spiritual healing is to be able
to come to accept ourselves in the way that we find ourselves constituted at
any given time. This quest we have for spiritual health is an on-going process.
You
have heard me preach about the purity codes that the rabbi practiced within
their communities. If one was regarded as unclean according to these codes,
then they had to wait until they could be ritually purified before the unclean
person could be declared clean and return to their society. The leper’s
condition in ancient society was what one would call an obvious condition: One
can see skin infections and rashes and so one’s appearance became a social
marker. We can feel sorry for the rabbis and those who were responsible for
“public health.” Sometimes in a preschool program, parents and teachers will
disagreed about the health of a child. So the handbook specifies color of
expectorate and nose discharge to determine whether a condition is a cold or an
allergy. If it is a cold, it is deem infectious and a child should not be at
school. Is that a purity code or just a practical health code?
Certainly the ancient people could observe that infections happened and
perhaps we should cut them some slack since they did not have the proper
techniques to really know whether a specific condition was infectious and hence
all appearance of illness was treated in the same way: it had to be
quarantined. How do you take care of a growing class of people who have been
socially quarantined?
Over time we have developed our modern system of medicine, and hospitals
are kind of quarantine. Skilled nursing homes are a kind of quarantine that
reveals that we do not have the family and economic structures to keep our
elderly within our homes. And we are raised to be such individualists that when
we get older we really think that we “should not be a burden” to anyone.
The point of my sermon is not to be overly critical of the health system
in the time of Jesus or of our own health system. It hardly helps to be
critical. What needs to be stated though is the condition of alienation that
exists because of what we call disease. The physical, mental and social
conditions that cause people to feel “ill at ease,” comprise our systems of
health and our system of salvation.
I believed that Jesus brought good news and his good news was salvation.
Now salvation is a holistic notion of health. In this notion of health there is
recognition of total connections and total relationships. These connections and
relationship pertain to our relationship with God, our relationship to society,
our relationship to our bodies, our relationship to religious authority, and
our relationship to ourselves.
The worst aspect of sickness and disease is when we ourselves are made
to feel alienated from the significant group of care in our lives. When we are
made to feel like we do not deserve the company of others because of some
condition that we have then the branding of social alienation has effectively
separated us from the community health that can tell us that we are okay, in
spite of any acute or chronic issue of health that might face us.
One thing that we know about illness; it is no respecter of person. The
great military man of Assyrian, Naaman was not so great to exempt him from a
skin condition. He had been mighty in war but a this skin condition left him
humbled and as a man of strong will he was going to conquer it. One thing that
we learn from the Naaman story is this; sometimes the remedy of our condition
is found in something that is very simple to do. And if we are too proud to do
some simple things for our health, then we may not really have the right
attitude of health. To be healthy, we need to have the right attitude; maybe
trying some things and changing some habits that we have been unwilling to
change.
There is another aspect of health that is found in the appointed writing
of St. Paul. St. Paul uses a metaphor of the athlete training for the Olympic
and forum sports of running and boxing. Health and salvation is a matter of
being in constant training. If we ever just sit back and think that there is no
struggle involved in our health, we will lose because we lose the attitude of
health. Struggle, training, discipline of mind and the body is always needed to
counter the forces of atrophy and entropy. If we know we have the genetic
tendency towards death, health and salvation means that we set goals of
excellence to make the very best possible response to the conditions over which
we have no control as they pertain to our health.
Until we finally run completely out of the energy of life itself, our
health will always be the issue of life. Jesus came so that we might have
abundant life and abundant health. By that, I don’t think that he meant that we
should be exempt from illness and death.
I believe that Jesus preached a profound wellness to our lives to release
us from the burdens of life caused by ignorance, bias and prejudice. The
challenges that face the body, mind and soul are great enough without the added
burdens of ignorant and biased society. Jesus appealed to the higher society of
God to proclaim us well, good, clean and acceptable in God’s sight. And with
this proclamation of a bill of clean health from God, we are given the task to
confront all of the ignorance and biases that causes illness to be more than it
actually is.
May God give each of us the ears to hear Jesus pronounce for us a clean
bill of health. And may we use this good news to be wise about our own health.
And may we spread the news of good health to others as we resist every form of
ignorance and bias that would alienate people from the good news of God’s love,
favor and acceptance. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment