Faith as Salvation and Health

5 Pentecost cycle b proper 8   June 28, 2015

Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24 Psalm 30

2 Corinthians 8:7-15 Mark 5:21-43

 Lectionary Link

To be human is to be faced with sickness and death.  Sickness and death mark human experience in poignant ways.  They effect the individual but they also affect the community because we are all connected in various ways.

  In the salvation history included in the Bible one can find the writing results of people who were seeking insights and meaningful ways to integrate all human experience in ways which still allowed the quest for excellence in community and personal living.

  And so it is not surprising that biblical literature deals with the insights and meanings of people learning to live with the reality of sickness and death.

  Death and sickness have caused the experience of such human abhorrence that people have regarded them to be shadows and deprivations of the goodness of life, health and salvation.

  The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon could not really see death as a creation of God.  It is one of the most blatant writings about death and dying that one can find: “God did not make death, And he does not delight in the death of the living.  For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them,and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.  For righteousness is immortal. God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.” 

   This writer cannot attribute the existence of death to God's doing; it is the result of the freedom which God permits within the created order.

  This writing indicates to us about how difficult the topic of death has always been.  Death represents the significant demise of enough of the systems of the body so as to no longer be able to be comprised as a whole person within the community of the living.  Sickness partakes of the nature of death in that it means that a disorder has affected one or more of our bodily systems so as to create dis-ease or discomfort even while the majority of bodily systems have enough health to maintain one living presence within a community.

  Communities of faith in providing realistic orientation in the art of living have had to deal with death and sickness.

  The Gospels present Jesus as the great Physician; as the one who is present in restoring health and restoring life, resurrection life.

  The healing stories and the restoration to life stories of Jesus are so amazing that we in our primary naïveté like to read them as actual events even though we know that in our own life experience instantaneous cures and restoration to life events do not often occur.  Why do we allow for these things to be real in the stories of Jesus even while we don't see many of such instantaneous events in our own lives?  If God is not involved directly causing sickness and death why can't there be universal instant recovery from sickness and death?

  The Gospels are about the ultimate health in human living which is about having faith.  Having faith is what is regarded to be salvation in the Gospel.  The healing stories and restoration to life stories were symbolic ways for the Gospel writers to present the meaning salvation for their communities.  The meaning of salvation was about living with faith in the midst of sickness and death, which are two of the worst things that human experience throws at us.

  If this were not the case, why doesn’t the Gospel finish the story and say the little girl was restored to life so that eventually she could die again.  Or why doesn’t it say that woman was cured so that eventually she would just get sick again of something else and die?

  The purpose of the Gospels were not to deny sickness and death or to expect that temporary cures and resuscitations were to be the Christian norm.  If this were the case we in the church would be seen to be living fraudulently for 2000 years.  We don't know instantaneous cures and resurrections to be a normal part of our lives.  I certainly would be a fraud of faith because I have lost too many people too early in my life.  I imagine you have too.

  The stories of healing and restoration of life are metaphors for the actual realistic experience of salvation in living with all of the actualities of life, namely salvation as the attitude and habit of living by faith.

  And this faith is anchored upon the hope of all of us always having a future, even a future beyond the grave.  Hope provides us with a future beyond our particular infirmity or sickness.  Hope is the experience of absolute Future inspiring us with deliberate acts of optimism toward that absolute Future for us and for everyone.  And those deliberate acts of optimism and intentional living are performed as though we are loved by someone greater than us who can preserve us is the experience of salvation.  This is the salvation experience, the health experience of living by faith.  Living by faith is the greater experience of health.

  Living by faith means that we anticipate some wonderful and uncanny things happening to us.  Living by faith means that we also learn to live in winsome ways even as we integrate the reality of sickness and death which are two very natural human experiences.

  The church has always offered the sacrament of holy unction both for sickness that doesn’t lead to imminent death and for the sicknesses which conspires to bring death.  Why?  because we are realistic about both as rites of passages.  Why?  because we are not sick alone nor does one die as alone, one is sick within community and dies from within the community and so we share both and we invoke the presence of Christ to be with us during these significant rites of passage.  We don't deny sickness and death; we invoke presence of Christ to be with us.

  Living by faith is the salvation of healthy living.  People who live with faith can be unwittingly touched by people who are seeking health in their lives.  The woman who secretly touched Jesus and received her health is a story of how health occurs unknowingly when we learn to live by faith.  We, collectively living by faith, can create the effervescence of health and be the salvation for the people who need to be touched by hope.

  Let us commit ourselves to the sacrament of healing today.  Let us seek the sacrament when we need it but let us also be a community that lives in this practice of faith who can be the source of health to people whose lives are inadvertently touched by our witness.

  Christ is present in our sickness and at our deaths.  In believing this we have the health and salvation of faith in Christ today.  Amen.