5 Epiphany B February 4, 2018
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39
Lectionary Link
I took several anthropologies courses in grad school from a professor who had gone to Bolivia as a Maryknoll missionary of the Catholic Church. He became conversant with the language and culture of the Quechuan mountain people. He later left the priesthood, got married and became an anthropologist who specialized in the folk medicine of the Andean tribes. His thesis was that health and the practices of health are always contextual in societies. When anthropologists study indigenious cultures, they find that the practice of medicine and health is very contextual. And within the contextual situation the people are convinced about their medical methods.
We, might be suspicious of the many of the medical practices of medicine men and women, shamans, witch doctors, herbalists, spiritualists and the like but their medicine as a symbolic system works for them within their situation and everything has a definition, even the failure of their treatment.
Not long ago, we in our own medical tradition practiced blood-letting. When I grew up in high school, we were taught that we were not supposed to drink water when we played sports because we would get water logged and diminish our performance. How enlightened was that? Acupuncture, acupressure and herbal remedies used to be regarded as unenlightened but now they are found on our street corners as normal medicine.
As enlightened as we might think our medicine is today, we have more than 20,000 people die each year of overdoses. We have more than 20 million people suffering from opioid addiction; being literally killed by modern medicine. So, we cannot be too proud of all our modern medical practices, especially the commercialization of pharmaceuticals. Almost every other television commercial is for a prescription drug that we are encouraged to ask our doctors for. Often when a doctor is baffled by a person's symptoms, there is the fall back diagnosis: Your problem is stress related. Opioid addictions can occur when one takes medicine for "stress" without dealing with the lifestyle issues that caused the stress in the first place.
What we could learn from the medicine of Jesus is a more holistic approach. Healing from Jesus was an inside job. The healing of Jesus occurred in an environment when many people presented "stress" related illness. People were sick in their insides. When a person is sick inside, it eventually manifests itself in the body in all sorts of maladies. People who lived in abusive environments took on the environmental illness into their very beings even to the point of acting out in ways such that their spirits were declared to be unclean and their impulse control was lost.
Jesus as a healer, was shown to be also a person who went off to be alone and pray. A healer has to be one who knows the peace and inner equilibrium within oneself first. Paul in his prayers saw himself as seated with Christ above principalities of darkness. A person prays in order to come to know the power of God's health and goodness within oneself first. And from the practice of this meditative inner health, one can go forth to be a healing and whispering person for the good health of all within one's community.
Sometimes in reading the time-lapsed Gospel stories, we think that they are just about curative events of Jesus. We can think that being healthy means never getting sick or having faith means that we expect immediate cures whenever we are sick. All of the people cured by Jesus most likely got sick again in their lives and they all died. So what does health mean? Health is more than achieving temporary cures on our way to eventual death. Health is more about knowing how to live well no matter what condition we find ourselves in. This is a more holistic notion of health and it includes knowing an inner health of the peaceful Holy Spirit within our lives. Health is about the community of health to provide mutual support for each other in all conditions. The Gospels were written as health manuals for the church community which were successful because they practiced healthy mutual support of each other. The healing of Christ is also holistic for our futures; for our after lives. The resurrection narrative is a vision of God's preservation of our lives beyond this life. Why is this important when we can't presume to know too much about the afterlife? One of the greatest elements of healing is hope. Hope is living, knowing that we always have a future and in the experience of the eternal Holy Spirit, we are given the sense that we will never be without some sentient state of existence. This means we don't have to be greedy about time as a personal possession; we can live our lives sharing our time with others because we have a sense of always having enough time to be the process of becoming what we need to become.
As we might be tempted to be dismissive of the seeming folk medicine of Jesus, let us embrace health and healing in the holistic sense that is implied in the Gospels, the health manuals of the church. Let look to Christ as one who is with us in our sickness, even as we wait for our next cures. And let us be a community of health who support each other within all of the conditions of life. Amen.
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39
Lectionary Link
I took several anthropologies courses in grad school from a professor who had gone to Bolivia as a Maryknoll missionary of the Catholic Church. He became conversant with the language and culture of the Quechuan mountain people. He later left the priesthood, got married and became an anthropologist who specialized in the folk medicine of the Andean tribes. His thesis was that health and the practices of health are always contextual in societies. When anthropologists study indigenious cultures, they find that the practice of medicine and health is very contextual. And within the contextual situation the people are convinced about their medical methods.
We, might be suspicious of the many of the medical practices of medicine men and women, shamans, witch doctors, herbalists, spiritualists and the like but their medicine as a symbolic system works for them within their situation and everything has a definition, even the failure of their treatment.
Not long ago, we in our own medical tradition practiced blood-letting. When I grew up in high school, we were taught that we were not supposed to drink water when we played sports because we would get water logged and diminish our performance. How enlightened was that? Acupuncture, acupressure and herbal remedies used to be regarded as unenlightened but now they are found on our street corners as normal medicine.
As enlightened as we might think our medicine is today, we have more than 20,000 people die each year of overdoses. We have more than 20 million people suffering from opioid addiction; being literally killed by modern medicine. So, we cannot be too proud of all our modern medical practices, especially the commercialization of pharmaceuticals. Almost every other television commercial is for a prescription drug that we are encouraged to ask our doctors for. Often when a doctor is baffled by a person's symptoms, there is the fall back diagnosis: Your problem is stress related. Opioid addictions can occur when one takes medicine for "stress" without dealing with the lifestyle issues that caused the stress in the first place.
What we could learn from the medicine of Jesus is a more holistic approach. Healing from Jesus was an inside job. The healing of Jesus occurred in an environment when many people presented "stress" related illness. People were sick in their insides. When a person is sick inside, it eventually manifests itself in the body in all sorts of maladies. People who lived in abusive environments took on the environmental illness into their very beings even to the point of acting out in ways such that their spirits were declared to be unclean and their impulse control was lost.
Jesus as a healer, was shown to be also a person who went off to be alone and pray. A healer has to be one who knows the peace and inner equilibrium within oneself first. Paul in his prayers saw himself as seated with Christ above principalities of darkness. A person prays in order to come to know the power of God's health and goodness within oneself first. And from the practice of this meditative inner health, one can go forth to be a healing and whispering person for the good health of all within one's community.
Sometimes in reading the time-lapsed Gospel stories, we think that they are just about curative events of Jesus. We can think that being healthy means never getting sick or having faith means that we expect immediate cures whenever we are sick. All of the people cured by Jesus most likely got sick again in their lives and they all died. So what does health mean? Health is more than achieving temporary cures on our way to eventual death. Health is more about knowing how to live well no matter what condition we find ourselves in. This is a more holistic notion of health and it includes knowing an inner health of the peaceful Holy Spirit within our lives. Health is about the community of health to provide mutual support for each other in all conditions. The Gospels were written as health manuals for the church community which were successful because they practiced healthy mutual support of each other. The healing of Christ is also holistic for our futures; for our after lives. The resurrection narrative is a vision of God's preservation of our lives beyond this life. Why is this important when we can't presume to know too much about the afterlife? One of the greatest elements of healing is hope. Hope is living, knowing that we always have a future and in the experience of the eternal Holy Spirit, we are given the sense that we will never be without some sentient state of existence. This means we don't have to be greedy about time as a personal possession; we can live our lives sharing our time with others because we have a sense of always having enough time to be the process of becoming what we need to become.
As we might be tempted to be dismissive of the seeming folk medicine of Jesus, let us embrace health and healing in the holistic sense that is implied in the Gospels, the health manuals of the church. Let look to Christ as one who is with us in our sickness, even as we wait for our next cures. And let us be a community of health who support each other within all of the conditions of life. Amen.
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