5 Epiphany B
February 5, 2012
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39
Lectionary Link
I have a spray bottle of Windex here and I
will be practicing the folk medicine art according to the Greco-American
patriarch Gus Portakalos in the movie, My
Big Fat Greek Wedding. Just come up
and I will give you spray unction with this cure-all.
Every family has members with hypochondria
tendencies. “I may not be sick but that
doesn’t mean that those germs are not out to get me.” And so every family probably has a history of
its own folk medical practice. And I’m
glad the regular practice of high colonics died out in a previous generation.
Whether folk medicine or modern clinical
medicine, health is a major issue of people of all times and all places. Whether ancient or modern, folk or primitive,
health is a universal human issue. It is
a truly catholic issue. It should not
surprise us that the Prayer for the Sick is one of the Sacraments of the church
and it follows from the healing ministry of Jesus who is often called the great
physician.
When we think about the history of human
health, we might cite the persons responsible for some great breakthroughs in
the history of disease. In the time of
Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, they had moved from blaming things on spirits
but the microscopic world responsible for infection was given the name, miasma
or bad air. The discovery of the microscopic
world and the development of antiseptic practices was a great development in
the history of medicine. So too was the
discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.
And in my time, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine. My father had polio before the vaccine was
developed and in the 1950’s I was able to take the vaccine. How many of you remember the polio
vaccine? After Salk’s discovery, he was
asked about a patent for the vaccine.
And he said he could not take a patent on the vaccine; that would be
like claiming a patent on the sun. Would
that pharmaceutical companies today were a bit more generous with their
products for promoting health. (Yes, I
know they have R & D expenses but universal accessibility to health
solutions should be the Christian goal).
The Gospel today is about Jesus Christ as a
folk healer. And the type of healing
that was promoted by Jesus was free and it was manifold. One might say that religion itself is all
about health. And religious health has
lost out to the scientific health of modern medicine whereby the body is
detached from the soul to study it like one would analyze a machine. It has parts and we can oil it with the right
chemicals to make it work better. The
human sciences of psychology and sociology have help to re-attach the inner
life with the outer body and fortunately many have recovered the holistic
notions of health which include faith and spirituality.
Jesus Christ is call the Savior or in Greek, soter.
Another meaning is the
preserver. Savior is derived from the
Latin root, salus. Salus was the goddess of health and
prosperity, perhaps the equivalent of the Greek goddess, Hygeia. The message of
Christ is about health, salvation and preservation. And Jesus had a special message about health
and healthiness. And he wasn’t waiting
to write a book and sell his intellectual property. What did he say? He said, "Let us go on
to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for
that is what I came out to do." Jesus
was saying, my kind of health is like the sun, and you cannot have patent on
the sun. So let’s get this message out
as far and wide as we can.
Let us look more closely at the Christly
notions of health. The words “save” or “preserve”
have built into them the main issue of the human dilemma. As soon as we are born into this world,
adults have secret for us that they do not tell us; they wait for us to find
out in a more appropriate way. And what
is the adult secret? “We’re all going to
die!” And if we going to die then part
of the human vocation is to save and preserve life as long as we can with as
much effort as possible. Preservation is
a basic instinct because we know in some way we are all swimming against the
current of death.
Jesus recognized in his time that methods of
preservation were not working for lots of people. One sign of failure was the lack of
socialized medicine of his time. Now
that might sound like an anachronistic political comment but what I mean is
that the social medicine of the time of Jesus ostracized lots of people. They were left outside of the health
coverage. They were not given access to
human community because they were declared unclean. Dead bodies were declared to be impure and
people with all manner of sickness were also declared unclean. Some of those states of uncleanness seem
quite trivial to us today. Such people
had no access to the community of care; they had to live quarantined
lives. This lack of socialized medicine
has plagued human history for a long.
When any person or group of people are declared unfit for human society
based upon a condition for which they
had no choice, then there cannot be fullness of health for those who are oppressed
and also for those who do the oppressing.
The health of Jesus was social health, because he restored people to
community. When I worked as an orderly
at a VA hospital, I immediately noted that the veterans who had friends and
family who visited them had much shorter stays in the hospital. The saving and preserving health of Jesus is
social health.
The health of Jesus is expressed in others
Gospels as the experience of abundant life.
In the healing stories of the Gospel, we find that the interior lives of
many people are so wracked that their spirits were called unclean. Fear and anxiety, panic, lack of self-control,
envy, greed, hate, anger, wrath are just some of the names of the torturous
interior states that people experience because of traumatic events in their
lives or because their own genetic inheritance.
In addition to the social health of being welcome to community, Jesus
offered people to experience their inner life as the life of the Holy
Spirit. This is the experience of a
higher power, a force that is the great lion tamer of the interior life. This is the abundant life; this is to know
our deepest life force as an engine of bliss and peace that helps our bodies
swim upstream against death. The Holy Spirit is the evidence of abundant
and eternal life in us now, even while our bodies are wasting away.
Jesus Christ has become known as the manifestation
of God as our Health, our Savior and our preserver. Why?
Because he sought to repair human community by inviting all to
community. Our communion is a continuing
witness of the invitation of Christ for all to come to the family meal of
God. Jesus Christ is also a manifestation
of God as Health because he introduced us to a way to know our interior life as
Holy Spirit abundant life. And this is
our ultimate preservation in the midst of things that are passing away.
Once again today, we want to get this message
of the health of Christ out to all. It
does not have a patent. It is free to
all. Amen.
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