{"id":607,"date":"2012-10-28T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2012-10-28T16:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=607"},"modified":"2019-11-26T11:57:05","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T16:57:05","slug":"faith-healing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2012\/10\/28\/faith-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith. Healing."},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark 10:46-52<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Many of us, after we\u2019ve been kicking around in the Christian faith for a while, have got a little list, of sayings we just wish Jesus had not said.\u00a0 Or, if he were going to say them, we wish he\u2019d included an indestructible set of footnotes, a bibliography, and a youtube video for the body language, so that there would be no confusion at all as to what he actually meant.\u00a0 \u201cYour faith has made you well.\u201d is one of those sayings for me.<\/p>\n

I served as a chaplain in both an \u201cacute, chronic, and tertiary care\u201d hospital and a mental health facility here in Boston.\u00a0 One of the hardest parts of the work was when faithful Christians, of many years standing, would recount their own struggles as they quoted Bartimaeus\u2019 story to themselves, and as they had his story quoted to them.\u00a0 They recounted their frustration as they told themselves, and as their friends told them, to just pray more, or just pray different, or just have more faith.\u00a0 They would wonder why their faith wasn\u2019t enough, why God did not heal their cancer or their blindness or their bipolar condition.\u00a0 They felt that they were at fault, that they were to blame, that their condition continued.\u00a0\u00a0 Their spiritual distress was as difficult for them as their physical or mental challenge.\u00a0 And so the particular<\/em> story of Bartimaeus\u2019 particular<\/em> healing, taken out of context and universalized, became a stick with which to beat those who already suffered.<\/p>\n

I do not think it is the purpose of this story to cause more suffering.\u00a0 So, what is the context and the specificity that might give another interpretation of this faith healing?<\/p>\n

The Gospel of Mark has been called a Gospel of conflict.\u00a0 The conflicts escalate, from Jesus\u2019 preaching and manifestation of the kingdom of God in the local settings of Galilee, to his increasing conflicts with the religious authorities and the imperial overlords that end in Jerusalem.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 teaching and acts of power are presented in the Gospel as a renewal of the people of Israel.\u00a0 They address the social, political, economic, and even physiological aspects of life, for a people and land subjugated by the collusion of religious authority with empire.\u00a0 Along the way there is also increasing conflict between Jesus and his disciples.\u00a0 As our readings in Mark over the last few weeks have shown, the disciples continually fail to understand what Jesus teaches and what he does.\u00a0 Their discomfort and quarrels with both Jesus and each other increases as Jesus leads them to Jerusalem.\u00a0 They refuse to accept his teaching that he must be rejected, suffer, and die before he is raised again.\u00a0 The story of Bartimaeus comes at the end of the part of the Gospel in which the disciples\u2019 conflicts with Jesus are made plain.\u00a0 It brackets this section, along with the earlier healing of another blind man in chapter 8, vss. 22-26.\u00a0 Most Markan scholars agree that here the author of the Gospel contrasts the restoration of the two men\u2019s sight with the continued \u201cblindness\u201d of the disciples to who Jesus is and what he does.<\/p>\n

Bartimaeus himself is not just blind; he is a beggar.\u00a0 In the culture of the time, both physical impairment and poverty were often considered to be signs of God\u2019s disfavor.\u00a0 But Bartimaeus, though physically blind, has insight:\u00a0 he cries out to Jesus as \u201cSon of David\u201d, the one who was widely expected to restore the fortunes of Israel as a king.\u00a0 Bartimaeus is also not cowed by his<\/p>\n

marginal status:\u00a0 He shouts out to Jesus;\u00a0 the people around him \u201csternly\u201d tell him to be quiet; he shouts even louder.\u00a0 Jesus, for his part, stops in his tracks, and calls for Bartimaeus to come to him.\u00a0 Now the people around him are all encouragement.\u00a0 So Bartimaeus, blind as he is, throws off what impediments he can, springs up, and comes to Jesus.\u00a0 Jesus then does not make things up \u2013 he asks<\/em> Bartimaeus what he wants from him.\u00a0 Bartimaeus, again showing insight, names Jesus as his teacher and asks that Jesus let him see again.\u00a0 Jesus then tells Bartimaeus that his faith has made him well.\u00a0 Immediately Bartimaeus regains his physical sight and follows Jesus along the way.\u00a0 Bartimaeus, \u00a0the physically blind beggar, sees with spiritual insight; whereas the physically sighted disciples remain spiritually blind.\u00a0 Bartimaeus, again in contrast to the disciples, \u00a0allows himself to be taught by Jesus, so that he exchanges his old suppression for the new kingdom of God present in the midst of the people.\u00a0 He also is taught by Jesus so that he follows Jesus along the way; not just the way of faith but also immediately on the way to Jerusalem, where Jesus will end, not as an earthly king, but as a physically broken and executed political criminal.\u00a0 If Bartimaeus\u2019 faith has healed his physical sight, the healing of his physical sight heals his faith also, as he is given a new way of understanding his life, and recognizes Jesus for who he truly is and what his mercy truly means.<\/p>\n

Sharon V. Betcher is a theologian and a disability activist.\u00a0 At the age of thirty-seven, ordained, married with a child, teaching in university, she tripped, she fell, and she injured her leg.\u00a0 Her leg became infected, and, to save her life, it was amputated.\u00a0 In her book Spirit and the Politics of Disablement<\/em>, she points out that with the removal of her leg, she will never be \u201cwhole\u201d in the sense of \u201cnormal\u201d, ever again in this life.\u00a0 She describes the challenges brought by her literal \u201cfall\u201d from cultural and religious ideals of \u201cnormalcy\u201d and physical perfection , the challenges that are harder to bear than her physical disability itself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And she describes the challenges that stories like the Bartimaeus story posed and still pose for her and for many other people of faith, those who like St. Paul, receive \u201cno\u201d as the answer to prayers for the thorn in the flesh to be removed.<\/p>\n

Betcher notes that the healing stories were told as witness to the visitation of the kingdom of God, over against the occupation of the Roman Empire, with its elitist rule, foreign occupation, heavy taxation for war and empire building, and the dislocations it brought to people and to the land.\u00a0 Reading or hearing these stories, early believers were challenged to believe in wonder; they could fall in love with the world again, as she writes they \u201ccould again take joy in a life from which pain cannot be cut away.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cMiracles\u201d, Betcher writes, \u201cget below or outside our infrastructure of tacit knowledge and may invigorate ways of thinking \u2026 may serve to break persons out of old patterns of thought.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 compassion \u2013 as it is free from pity, disgust, avoidance, or the assumption that he already knows what Bartimaeus would want from him \u00a0— Jesus\u2019 compassion encourages Bartimaeus to chart a different course, encourages him to increase his faith, that faith healed and justified in Jesus\u2019 acceptance of him, as he was, and now as he is Jesus\u2019 follower.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 compassion upends the normal order of things, in which the blind to not see, and are so often not seen.<\/p>\n

Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, writes in his book Pathologies of Power<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cTo<\/p>\n

explain suffering, one must embed individual biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy \u2026 as social forces \u2026 structure \u2026 risk for most forms of extreme suffering. \u2026 Social forces ranging from poverty to racism become embodied<\/em> as individual experience \u2026 translated into personal distress and disease.\u201d\u00a0 In our culture the quest for physical perfection is also one of those social forces.\u00a0 In our fascination with extreme makeovers of all kinds, we forget the economic, political, and cultural forces at work behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

Dominique Moceanu, at fourteen, was the youngest member of the 1996 United States Women\u2019s Olympics Gymnastics Team, the only American women\u2019s team to take gold at the Olympics.\u00a0 In her riveting memoir Off Balance<\/em>, she describes the behind-the-scenes cost of her physical perfection and agility:\u00a0 years of emotional and physical abuse from her trainers, family discord and deceit, and physical injury and pain.\u00a0 Behind the Olympic gold and the national glory was a young girl in great personal distress.\u00a0 Even though her faith in her dream granted her physical perfection, for a long time Dominique was not well.\u00a0 Ironically, or perhaps miraculously, it is the discovery of a sister, born without legs, given away at birth, who also became a competitive athlete and performer, it is this sister who is of great support to Dominique in her own healing.<\/p>\n

So, where does all this leave us, here this morning, many of us bearing thorns in our flesh, none of us getting any younger, and all of us living in a world increasingly toxic to healthy living?<\/p>\n

At the very least, we may join with Philo of Alexandria, who wrote, \u201cBe kind; for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.\u201d\u00a0 We may also affirm that whatever we carry, it is not the whole of who we are.\u00a0 As a woman who had become blind as a result of diabetes complications once told me:\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m just<\/em> blind.\u00a0 I still love to hike, to sing, to play the piano, to get together with friends and family.\u00a0 I still have my faith, even more since God has brought me through so much.\u00a0 I feel very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, Faith.\u00a0 Healing.\u00a0 Sometimes our faith does heal us.\u00a0 Sometimes our faith is not the issue, in our human condition.\u00a0 And sometimes it\u2019s just that the answer is no.\u00a0 But always, Faith. Healing. the healing of our faith, is possible.\u00a0 It may not come easy; it is a great challenge for us, especially in our culture of denial and suppression, to learn to live with pain and loss, of any kind.\u00a0 We do experience the diseases of empire, and of the corporate empire building of globalization:\u00a0 war, pollution, economic disparity, consumerism, perfectionism; seemingly impersonal forces that become very personal, often to our great distress.<\/p>\n

Yet God wills to meet us where<\/em> we are on the road, God wills to meet us exactly as<\/em> we are on the road, to help us chart a different course, to find a new community of love and inclusion, and to increase our faith as we follow along the way.\u00a0 As Sharon Betcher invites us to consider, we are offered a life of neither tragedy nor triumph, but of trust:\u00a0 trust that expects wonder, and the expected and unexpected presence of God, even, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta notes, in \u201cdistressing diguises;\u00a0 a life of trust that allows us to fall in love with the world again; a life of trust in which, even in a world in which pain cannot be cut away, we can still take joy.\u00a0 Thanks be to God.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Rev. Victoria Hart Gaskell<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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