IF IT’S BROKEN,
James 5: 13-16; Mark
The president of Pittsburgh Seminary,
where Cara got her degree, is Dr. Bill Carl.
Before he became seminary president, he was a pastor and a professor at
different points in his life. But in 1997 instead of visiting parishioners in
the hospital, he himself was a patient, for test after test to get to the
bottom of his symptoms. Blood work, CT scans, multiple X-rays and more than 5
doctors doing different things were working to hopefully “make the wounded
whole.” It was the night before Thanksgiving, and, being a man of faith, he
thanked God for his good health that he had enjoyed to that point: good mental,
physical, and spiritual health. He said to his nurse: “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving
and I’m truly grateful, not only for God’s healing power but for a new insight
into care for myself as part of God’s gift of healing.” He then thought to
himself: That’s my testimony, that’s my
song, thanking my God all the day long. That night he slipped into being
deathly sick with nausea. The nurse tried to medicate him to stop his horrible
discomfort, but the night dragged on to the point it felt like the longest
night of his life. He thought the healing power of death would be welcome. He had remembered his doctor saying his
readings in 1Corinthians 15 reminded him to treat death is a final healing, not the enemy. He remembered also that even though Jesus raised Lazarus
from the dead, it was a temporary raising because
later he died as we all will.
Death is part of living. But
sometimes in our age of medicine we make the mistake of equating “healing” with
“cure;” of thinking one cannot be “whole” if they have an illness or a
disability. There are some in our world,
such as Dr. Greg Baer, who founded the
In the New Testament we not only find
reminders of Jesus healing physically:
a paralyzed man took up his mat and walked and raised from the dead the only
son of Nain’s widow. And in today’s passage with spit and a prayer Jesus made a
blind man see. We also find that Jesus healed psychologically, as he showed Pharisees how a so-called “sinful”
woman could show love better than they; and Jesus healed spiritually, going to the cross never believing that it was a dead-end
or defeat, but naming it as a victory and a spiritual healing: and it was so.
I grew up around axioms like “If it
ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” That may apply to appliances or automobiles, but it
certainly does not apply to relationships or the healing of our bodies, minds,
and souls. This last week in the paper was the story of a homeless man who,
contrary to what some politicians think, really did not want to live any other
way than on the ground, with $30.00 a day for cigarettes, beer, and to give the
rest to his friends. Science would say that not attending to dental and medical
needs and eating so poorly would have contributed to the man’s death by now.
But he feels loved. Could that be extending his life? What are our teachable moments about what
matters most, my friends? When you’re sick? When you hit bottom? When you face
death? Funerals are times when, sometimes, we heal time-crusted wounds or test
the waters in relationships that had become strained or distant. Often a sense
of well-being can result from closing a door on a toxic relationship or
building new bridges to healthy ones. In her book MY BEAUTIFUL BROKEN SHELL
author Carol Hamblet describes, as a parable, her daily walk on a beach, at
first looking for perfect shells, but finally deciding to look for broken
shells, for their beauty and uniqueness came alive to her, seeing that their
brokenness, like her own, was what made her precious. Your brokenness makes you precious to Jesus.
In our brokenness, we need a Savior!
And so I write these words to you
this week, my Westminster congregation, as a survivor of diabetes, as one who
signed up for every Lifescan health screening on
February 29th, as one who had his first
Jeffrey A. Sumner