February 2006 Archives

Christ the Healer - Refreshing Spirits
Mark 2:1-12
February 19, 2006
Rev. Nancy Pfaltzgraf

What an amazing story -Jesus trying to keep a low profile returns to his home base in Capernaum; word gets out, "He's home!" The people start coming and coming and coming. He welcomes one, then another and other until the house is filled -completely. But still they keep coming, crowding the doorway, trying to get in, seeking healing, searching for hope.
How disappointing for those four who arrived carrying their friend. It had taken them so long to convince him to go. And it was no easy matter carrying him through the streets. His lifeless body was dead weight and the streets were narrow, then, when they finally arrived, there was no room for them in this Inn.

"It's OK," their friend said. "There probably wasn't anything he could have done anyway. Let's just go on back home. I told you it was dumb to even try."

"NO!" they replied emphatically. "We haven't come all this way just to turn around and go home." They lowered his matt to the ground and tried to come up with a "plan B." There always has to be a Plan B! And what a daring audacious Plan B they formulated -climb the stairs to the flat rooftop patio, dig through the dirt, then lower their friend right into the center of the crowd!

Have you ever wondered what Jesus and the others thought when they heard footsteps on the roof and then suddenly felt bits of falling dirt hitting their heads? After all, it's inconceivable that a hole large enough to accommodate a grown man could have been created without attracting some attention.

Despite the comments they must have received, these bold companions continued their labor of love until the hole was big enough for them to lower their friend into the room. Now, I'm not sure where they thought he was going to land. If there was no room in the house, doesn't that mean they would be dropping him on someone's head or into someone's lap?

I suspect they breathed a collective sigh of relief and allowed themselves a bit of self-congratulatory pride when the their friend was safely on the ground and Jesus looked up at them with loving eyes and complimented them on their great faith. "He's not angry!" they whispered to one another, taking this as a good sign, certain it meant he would heal their friend. Nothing they had seen or heard about this Jesus prepared them or anyone in the crowd for what Jesus said next. "Son, I forgive your sins."

Now I really wish Jesus hadn't said that! I really wish he would have just cured the man's physical disorder and left it at that. Why does Jesus relate the man's need to his sinfulness? There are many other places where Jesus refuses to make that correlation stating emphatically that illness does not come as a punishment for sin. Why, then, should sin and sickness be somehow connected here?

Perhaps the answer comes, at least in part, in understanding the difference between healing and cure; as well as the understanding of sin and forgiveness. When most of us think about healing what we expect, or at least hope for, is either the gradual remission or instantaneous cure of some state of dis-ease -usually physical. In fact, there are those who believe that if they are not physically ill, they do not need to take advantage of the healing ministry of the church. But the truth is that we are each a complex interweaving of body, mind, spirit, and relationships. And dis-ease in any one of our multi-faceted dimensions creates a certain amount of dis-ease in the others as well. And relief of the symptoms of a disease -what we might call cure- may be only one step toward relief of the dis-ease in the other layers of our -
being -some of which may be completely unrelated to our physical state. In other words there can be cure without healing and wholeness, and there can be healing and wholeness without what we call a physical cure. For healing and wholeness are found in the dynamic balance of spiritual health, physical health, emotional or mental health and relationship health. Jesus never focused on one dimension of the person to the exclusion of the others. When Jesus brought healing, that healing was directed at a sense of wholeness, unity and harmony for the whole person.

Now what about sin? It's not something I preach about a great deal. Perhaps that's because I grew up in a church where I was told week after week what a horrible sinner I was. Even though I knew all the commandments by heart and pretty much followed the majority of them most of the time, I knew I was by my very nature a sinner; unclean and not really worthy of God's love. It was only because God chose to love me that I was not zapped off the face of the earth. And the sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle message was that God might change God's mind if I wasn't careful. It was, I believe, a form of spiritual abuse designed to keep us constantly in fear and constantly toeing some imaginary line. Even though I eventually left that church, my healing from the wounds it inflected was very slow in coming. Part of that healing came when I was in seminary and one of my professors was talking about sin. "The primary sin," he said "is separation or alienation from God. It is the placing of a "self-center" where God belongs. That's S1. When we are alienated from God, when God is not at the center of our lives then we do all those things that the church has labeled sin - S2; murder, stealing, cheating, lying, adultery, disrespecting our parents, bearing false witness and the like." Perhaps that's why Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love God with the totality of who we are and to love our neighbors and our selves with the same measure of care and compassion.

The forgiveness that Jesus offers this paralyzed man is the forgiveness God extends in order to restore, renew and refresh our spirits and pull us back to a God center. In Isaiah 43, after listing a long litany of S2's the people have committed God says an amazing thing: "I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins." [Isaiah 43:25] Notice that the paralyzed man did not ask for forgiveness, Jesus simply offered it, because God's forgiveness -that energy which is always at work pulling us toward our highest and best self- is an ever-flowing stream of love that seeks to untangle the knots and erase the sense of separateness and alienation that fear and shame and guilt create in our lives and in our world. It is an ever-flowing stream of love that draws us back to who we already are and who we are called and created to become.

Now, I believe that there was, at some point in Jesus' ministry, a real man who was paralyzed with a real physical condition. I believe that Jesus pronounced forgiveness and cured the man's physical condition. I also believe that through the remembrance of this event we are invited to recognize a deeper and more profound truth. When we allow old wounds and hurts to fester; when we live with unuttered shame and guilt; when we are locked in self-defeating and self-negating thinking; when anger and fear, prejudice and hatred consume our energy, we are paralyzed every bit as much as the man who received Jesus' forgiveness so long ago.
Notice if you will that in order to receive his healing, in order to find wholeness; in order to complete the forgiveness, that man had to trust what Jesus said and the new sense of wholeness that was beginning to bubble in the depths of his soul. "Get up. Pick up your stretcher and go home," Jesus said to him. "Can I do it? Will my legs actually work? Can I really stand on my own, pick up this matt and go home? Can I really do it?"

"With God, all things are possible!" [Mark 10:27]

Could it be that when we -as individuals and as a congregation- are stuck, unable to accomplish what we think we want to accomplish, unable to move forward, unable to feel that sense of vibrant life Christ has come to bring; could it be that it's because we are suffering some S1? Could it be that we have been pulled off center? Could it be that we need to hear Christ the Healer say to us: "I forgive your sin ... Get up. Pick up your stretcher and come home, home to the heart of God, home to my loving presence, home to a life that turns around me."

"With God, all things are possible!"

Amen.

Christ the Healer: Restoring Relationships
Mark 1:40-45
February 12, 2006
Rev. Nancy Pfaltzgraf
During the height of the segregation storm, there was a little girl who went on her first day of first grade to a newly integrated school. At the end of the day her anxious mother met her at the door and asked, "How did everything go, honey?"
"Oh mother! You know what? A little black girl sat next to me!"
With a fearful heart -expecting that this might be a traumatic event for her daughter, but wanting to remain calm- the mother asked simply, "And what happened?"
Smiling, the little girl replied, "We were both so scared we held hands all day."
This week witnessed the funeral of Coretta Scott King, whose life was devoted to fulfilling a dream she shared with her husband: the creation of a society where those little girls could hold hands without fear. At her funeral, Coretta's youngest child, Bernice said that her mother's purpose in life was to spread her father's message of peace and unconditional love. "Thank you, mother, for your incredible example of Christ-like love and obedience," she said.
With a deep belief in the value and dignity of all people and the dream of a world where people lived together in harmony and peace, Coretta Scott King labored unceasingly to heal brokenness, hatred, alienation and fear. She was indeed an example of Christ-like love and obedience, for Christ the Healer was and is in the business of restoring relationships.
As we pick up Mark's story, Jesus is traveling throughout Galilee. During his travels "a leper came to him, begging on his knees, 'If you want to, you can cleanse me.'"[Mark 1:40] It is an odd scene, a strange request; not a plea exactly, but rather part statement of extreme faith and part challenge. If you want to... If you choose to... you can heal me, cleanse me, restore my relationships and my life. This leper had absolute confidence that Jesus could heal him; what he didn't know was whether Jesus wanted to heal him. After all, in approaching Jesus, in coming close enough to touch him this leper was breaking the law and crossing an uncrossable barrier. The code in Leviticus is quite clear:
45"Any person with a serious skin disease must wear torn clothes, leave his hair loose and unbrushed, cover his upper lip, and cry out, "Unclean! Unclean!' 46As long as anyone has the sores, that one continues to be ritually unclean. That person must live alone; he or she must live outside the camp. [Leviticus 13:45-6]
Can you imagine what it would have been like? Forcibly exiled from family and friends; blocked from any form of work; forced to scavenge the garbage dumps for food; viewed with fear, suspicion, hatred and disdain; not even allowed to enter the synagogue to seek the solace and comfort of God. And if someone did happen to touch one so diseased, that person also became unclean, an outcast until the proper rituals were performed and the proper penalties paid. No wonder this seeker was uncertain how Jesus would react to his approach. Perhaps he had gone to other healers; perhaps he had sought other cures, only to be turned away.
Seeing this leper, knowing full well the brokenness, the hatred, the ignorance and the fear that demeaned this child of God and reduced him to something less than a fully alive human being, our text says Jesus was "deeply moved." The actual literal meaning of the word Mark uses here is "his guts turned within him." Some translations capture this deeper sense by saying Jesus was "angry" -not at the leper, but at the alienation, not at the physical condition but at
the barrier that had been erected between this man and God. "Jesus put out his hand, touched him, and said, 'I want to. Be clean.'"[Mark 1:41] In one swift move Jesus crossed the line, tore down the barrier, dismantled the wall, identified himself with this outcast. Jesus who many times healed simply with a word; Jesus who didn't even need to be in the same physical location as the one who needed healing, Jesus reached out and touched this untouchable one and in so doing restored his dignity, his life and his relationship with God, himself and his community. Then after the touch, after the wall was down, after the relationships were healed, the disease was also cured.
If we are honest with ourselves we know that we live with all kinds of walls and barriers too. Perhaps they don't have the force of written code behind them but they are real. We shut out those we fear. We exclude those who are different. There are people we look at with fear and suspicion just because of the clothes they wear, the body parts they have pierced or the religion they practice. A long, long time ago I read a quote in a magazine article. I don't remember who said it or what the article was about, but that quote has deeply impacted my life. It said, "What we don't understand we fear; what we fear we hate; and what we hate eventually destroys us."
Now as then, Christ the Healer wants to break down our walls, dismantle the barriers we erect and invite us into the healing of understanding. Beginning with our relationship with God, moving to our relationship with our own truest self, extending to the relationships we have with others Christ desires to bring healing and restoration.
From about 1986 until 1996 I was actively involved with The Ulster Project. Conceived by Rev. Kerry Waterstone, The Project brings Catholic and Protestant teens from Northern Ireland together on the neutral ground of American soil "to promote reconciliation ... by fostering tolerance, understanding, and friendship among teenage future leaders" When The Project began in 1974 and even in 1986 the separation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland was almost total; different neighborhoods, different schools; different places of employment. And the bombing, the killing and the violence were an every day event on the streets of Belfast and other cities in the North of Ireland. In fact there were literal walls, called peace walls, that separated the neighborhoods and kept people in their place.
Every summer during the month of July our project greeted between 16-18 anxious, hesitant, cautious 14-15 year olds from Belfast. Each teen from Belfast stayed with an American teen and his or her family. All the teens, both Northern Irish and American, participated in all the activities. We did fun stuff like canoeing and going to Great American. We did more serious stuff like attending worship together in both Catholic and Protestant churches. It's hard for you to imagine, but from time to time we had youth that literally shook with terror as the approached the door of a church from "the other side." But the heart of the project was what we called the Discovery Time. Each week a Catholic Priest and I and a team of young adult volunteers from both the U.S. and Northern Ireland led all kinds of activities designed to help the teens build relationships, foster understanding and break down the walls of fear and hatred.
It was an awesome experience for all of us. I especially remember one discovery session about three weeks into the program when we were dealing head on with what the Northern Irish call "the troubles." There were two girls -one Catholic and one Protestant- sitting together on a couch. One started talking about the way her family had been affected by the troubles. Tears streaked down her checks as she talked about the police breaking into their home in the middle of the night; about the damage they did to her home; about the pain of having her brother arrested as a suspected terrorist. As she talked her new Protestant friend reached out and gently touched her. Then when she was finished talking, her friend began to talk about
how the troubles had affected her and her family. As she began relating how her brother had been shot by the IRA (the Catholic terrorist organization) and the fear she lived in because her father had to go near a Catholic neighborhood on his way to work, she too began to cry and her new Catholic friend gently laid an arm around her shoulder. By the time both of them were finished talking, they were literally wrapped in each others arms; the shared understanding and the shared love had broken down a wall of hatred and pain and fear. It was a powerful God moment!
Whatever the walls might be, in your life and mine, in this country and around the world Christ the Healer seeks to renew our lives and restore our relationships that we might live fully alive in God's love. Amen.

Christ the Healer: Renewing Lives!
Mark 1:29-39
February 5, 2006
Rev. Nancy Pfaltzgraf
Mary had developed such painful ankles that she found it difficult to teach. Her doctors thought perhaps she suffered from a form of arthritis, but they were unable to help her very much.

Mary's predicament deeply troubled her. She loved teaching and considered it the ministry to which she was called. Her distress was compounded by her lifelong painful shyness. What could she do if she was not able to be with her "little people;' the only ones with whom she was really comfortable?

When her suffering became evident to some members of her parish, they invited Mary to attend a healing prayer group in her church. At first she refused, fearing she might have to talk in front of everyone. Worse yet, if the parishioners prayed for her, she would be the center of attention. And then there were all those hands that would touch her. . . .

In the end, her friends won out. Reluctantly, she went to the meeting and, just as she had feared, found herself in the middle of a group of people. They prayed for her, their hands on her ankles: "Jesus, please heal Sister Mary's ankles. . . . Hear our prayer, 0 God."
One of the clearest and most prevalent pictures of Jesus throughout the gospels is that of a healer. Time and time again Jesus makes it clear that he loves the whole person, thus his goal was to help each person become whole. From curing simple fevers, restoring sight, hearing or mobility to resuscitation from death, Jesus invited all he met into a journey of healing and wholeness. Some, like Simon's mother-in-law responded to that invitation, others were content with just a simple cure of their physical ailment.

As we pick up Mark's story Jesus and his newly called disciples have just left the synagogue where in the midst of his teaching Jesus cures a man of an unclean spirit. His disciples are, no doubt, both excited about what this means for their future. So when they withdraw to Simon's home for the Sabbath meal, and discover that Simon's mother-in-law is sick in bed with a fever, they immediately go to Jesus, anxious to see what he will do. Now in the scope of all the healings recorded in scripture the healing of a fever is by no means the most dramatic or even the most critical. Even though in Jesus day a fever was perhaps far more serious than it is today, it was never-the-less something that people could and did recover from without miraculous divine intervention. Even so, Mark tells us, Jesus went to the woman, took her by the hand and lifted her up. One translation says he stood her on her feet. The fever left her and she began to serve them.

Now despite the fact that some of you may be thinking, "Isn't that just the way it is; the woman has to get up from her sick-bed to fix dinner for the men!" Mark points us to something far deeper. Healing and wholeness are far different and far more profound that the mere cure of a physical ailment. Healing and wholeness are about the renewal of life that happens when we shift the focus of our lives from serving ourselves to serving God, from listening to the demands of our ego to attending to the voice of the still-speaking God, from trying to be the masters of our own life to joining God in the on-going work of creating our lives and our world in God's image, according to God will, in openness to God's dream and vision for us all.
I think that's why Jesus refuses to go back with the disciples the next morning when they interrupt his prayer with what they think is good news, "Everyone is searching for you." From his previous days encounters Jesus knows these seekers are interested in nothing more than a physical cure. He, on the other hand, has come to call people into deep communion with God who lives in the depth of each heart and invite them into openness to the power of God's love that brings healing and renews life.

When her prayer group prayed for Sister Mary, God heard; but God did not heal Mary's ankles. Instead a wonderfully funny thing happened. As the group prayed for her ankles, her ear that had been nearly deaf since childhood suddenly opened, allowing her to hear with that ear for the first time in many years. Amid the laughter and the tears that followed, any illusions that the group could predict what God would do quickly melted away.

The next week Mary did not need urging to attend the healing group. Once again the group prayed for her ankles, and once again she experienced healing, but not in her ankles. Instead, the arthritis in her arm improved.

This went on week after week for several months. Each time the group prayed for Mary's ankles, some minor ache or pain would vanish or improve. Many times the group would end in laughter at the peculiar way God seemed to be working. However, Mary was certain that God was indeed at work, and the small physical improvements kept her coming back.

During this time, God was working marvelously with Mary in other ways. She became deeply aware that God loved her. Of course Mary already "knew" this, and she had taught her first graders that God is love. But now for the first time in her life Mary felt God's passionate, tender love. God was no longer a demanding father ready with punishments if she did not work hard to please him, but one who delighted in her. As Jesus became more real to her as friend as well as savior, Mary's shyness gradually diminished. She even found herself reading the Old Testament lesson at Sunday worship in front of hundreds of people, something she would not have dreamed of doing only a few months before.

But here is the enigma: Mary still had painful ankles. They had improved only a little after months of prayer. One day Mary was asked why she thought the pain in her ankles persisted. She replied: "My ankles were the bait that enticed me to pray for healing in the first place. The continued pain kept me coming back so that God could heal me in ways I didn't even know to pray for. I couldn't have imagined the depth of this healing and how it involved so much of me. Just think of what I would have missed if my ankles had been healed that first night. God had something much more profound in mind for me than just my ankles."

Then her eyes twinkled and she smiled her wonderful smile. .'Anyway, don't say my ankles weren't healed. Just say 'they aren't healed yet'." She went on to say that she had begun to sense a new call to be a chaplain to some of the older sisters in her community who were in poor health. She was looking forward to developing a new ministry in that direction.
In their book, Stretch Out Your Hand: Exploring Healing Prayer, Tilda Norberg and Robert Weber offer some profound insight into the ways Christ the Healer seeks to renew your life and mine. They write:

Christian healing is a process that involves the totality of our being -body, mind, emotion, spirit, and our social context- and that directs us toward becoming the person God is calling us to be at every stage of ourliving and our dying. Whenever we are truly open o God, some kind of healing takes place, because God yearns to bring us to wholeness. Through prayer and the laying on of hands, through confession, anoining, the sacraments, and other means of grace, Jesus meets us in our brokenness and pain and there loves, transforms, forgives, redeems, resurrects and heals. Jesus does this in God's way, in God's time, and according to God's loving purpose for each person.

Very often the results of our healing are increased faith in God and a new empowerment to love and serve others. Frequently we find that the very thing that caused our greatest brokenness becomes transformed into our own unique giftedness.

Whatever the state of your physical health, I invite you to join us each month at the Service of Prayer for Healing and Wholeness and open your heart to what God has in store for you. You might choose to experience the laying on of hands, as Sister Mary did. Or you might simply rest in the healing love of Christ that baths us all as we sing and pray and open our hearts to Christ. Christ the Healer meets each of us where we are, takes us by the hand, lifts us up, and invites us to return to the path of healing and wholeness. May we too, rise up and serve and find LIFE!

Amen