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.

Salvation As Holistic Health

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

  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.