Wow, this sermon brought tears to my eyes

[GrouchoTheCat]

St. Luke’s Cathedral
October 21, 2007

I am so pleased to be with you on this day of celebration in the community that is St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Every time we put flesh on the historic document “Called to Common Mission,” which gives official status to the relationship between the Episcopal Church USA and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I feel as though we defy those forces in our world that seek to bring division between peoples. Every time we say “yes” to our unity in Christ on behalf of God’s kingdom of justice, mercy and grace, we say “no” to the principalities and powers that would seek to threaten our work on behalf of our common mission. Thank you for affirming our relationship by inviting me to be part of this day. It is my honor and joy to be with you.
I must say that I am also very pleased to be at St. Luke’s Cathedral on the Sunday closest to the Commemoration of St. Luke, the Evangelist. Tradition of course has posited that St. Luke was a physician, a healer. And whether or not this is historically true, many congregations have celebrated this tradition by offering services of healing on the Sunday closest to October 18th, St. Luke’s Day. Matter of fact, when I sat down to start preparing for this morning, I called Father Shambaugh to ask if today’s service would be a special service of healing, and he said, “no,” that you have a healing ministry available every Sunday morning in a small side chapel; so this morning would be no different than any other in this regard.
How wonderful, I thought to myself. How helpful for people, to know that there is an on-going ministry of healing here, rather than it being only a once-or-twice- a-year event. I must admit to you that in Lutheran circles there is still quite a bit of confusion about healing services. In my own congregation we usually set aside three Sundays a year on which we offer the possibility for folks to come up to the communion rail for the laying on of hands, for anointing, and prayers of healing. And while there are many people who look forward to these Sundays, there are others who simply will not come for fear that we’re doing some kind of hocus-pocus….Others still who come expecting to be cured of their ailments.
Given the confusion over the Christian understanding of healing in general and of healing services in particular, it is important I think, to find ways to help us all understand what it means to say that Jesus came to heal the sick and suffering, and that he calls us as Christians to do the same in his name….
This morning I would like to reflect a bit upon what I believe healing in the “Christian sense” means. And in order to do so, I will begin by way of introduction, with a song and a poem. The song is one we sing often at Redeemer, most notably at our monthly Sunshine service, which is a service for people with developmental disabilities….. (Sing “Beautiful.”)
Beautiful, beautiful, Jesus is beautiful,
And Jesus makes beautiful things of my life.
Carefully, tenderly, causing my eyes to see,
On Jesus makes beautiful things of my life.
The poem to which I referred is by Laura Gilpin, and speaks to the situation in which we all find ourselves as we gather for worship this morning….. It is a poem entitled,

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.


It may seem an odd place to begin a sermon about the Christian understanding of healing; with a poem about a two-headed calf. But any attempt to speak about what healing means in the Christian sense of the word must begin with the truth about our situation, the truth about our condition as human beings….. And the truth is that we all come to this place broken, dis-eased, “freakish” in our own ways, and in deep need of healing. The truth is, for all of us tomorrow is uncertain…..
You may have thought when you walked into the door of St. Luke’s cathedral this morning that you were walking into a church. But it would be more accurate I think to say that all of us who walked through the doors of this beautiful cathedral actually walked through the doors of the triage unit in an emergency room. We all come to this place broken, dis-eased, “freakish” in our own ways, in deep need of healing….. The kind of healing I have begun to understand through reflecting upon two events in my life, the first centering on my knees and elbows…..
I grew up out in the farmlands of Northern Illinois on an old poorly-paved road with only boys in the neighborhood to play with. Two Italian boys down the road in one direction; an Irish boy across the road in the other. So I grew up making forts in the woods, constructing rafts to take down Ferson Creek, and playing all manner of cops and robbers. I was not all that gifted in the running department, and these boys were challenging to keep up with (mostly because they were always trying their hardest to lose me in the dust.) So it was not uncommon to find me limping down our country road toward home with blood issuing forth from a scraped knee or an elbow, feeling bruised and abandoned.
As soon as I came into the house my mother had a ritual for tending to my bloody, cinder-filled wounds. First she would bring me into the bathroom, put down the toilet seat cover, and tell me to sit down. Then she would take a wash cloth, run it under the hot water, rub it back and forth on the bar of Ivory Soap, and take it to my wound, scrubbing with all her might, as if doing battle with any germ or cinder that might have ideas of making my knee or elbow its permanent home.
After her version of germ warfare my mother would gently dry my scrape. And then she would take the little brown bottle of mercurochrome with its dip stick suspended in the red medicinal liquid. And with the painstaking love of an artist she would paint a rabbit on my wound, using the wound itself to form part of the rabbit’s body. If the scrape was round, it would become the rabbit’s plump stomach. If the wound was oblong, it would become one of the rabbit’s ears. If it was small, my mother would use it to make the rabbit’s tail.
Did the mercurochrome sting? Yes. Did it cure my aliment? Well, maybe. Eventually. But did the mercurochrome heal me? Did it work to heal those deeper wounds like my feelings of abandonment at the hands of the neighborhood boys or my feelings of ineptness due to extreme clumsiness? No. Mercurochrome can’t heal a thing, not in the fullest, deep-down sense of the word, because it’s power only goes skin deep.
But, was I healed in that little brown-tiled bathroom out amongst the cornfields of Illinois as my mother scrubbed and dried and painted rabbits on my wounds? You bet. Not because of the soap or the water or the mercurochrome, but because of the love…..because of the deep heart-felt knowledge of my beloved-ness in my mother’s eyes. Because of the relationship which I knew I could trust come hell or high water, come bumpy roads, come falls and failures and abandonment by others…. My mother’s love worked to heal me because it is love that heals. A certain kind of love, that is….

The kind of love I don’t think I really began to fully understand until my best friend Catherine, otherwise known as Charlie, was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 38. Charlie, who lived with her husband and two young sons on a small sheep farm outside of Frankfort, Maine. Charlie, who, once she was diagnosed with breast cancer, did everything she could to rid herself of this stranger in her body; surgeries, chemotherapy, macrobiotics, healing teas, Native American cleansings, Roman Catholic prayer groups, yoga. She raged through two years like a bull, pawing the ground upon which she stood and charging the demons which visited her in the darkest hours of her days and nights; most particularly that demon which raised its head at every opportunity and hissed, “You are less than nothing. You deserve nothing. You are unworthy of blessing.”
It happened that I visited Charlie one warm Fall day a few months before she died. We sat at her kitchen table where we had sat so many times before, and her words on that particular morning became for me an illuminating event, a refiner’s fire, which suddenly brought focus and shape to all the stories I had heard during the hundreds of Sunday morning sermons and Sunday School lessons of my childhood…..
It was my friend Charlie, who had lost the rounded beauty of her breasts and the soft warmth of her gentle brown hair who taught me on that October morning what all the stories of my faith meant; my friend who faced the pain of parting soon from her young children, her husband, her friends, her flowers and sheep and kitchen window, who helped me to remember what I had never really known….
Charlie told me that morning about an appointment she had recently had with a doctor who had previously been a surgeon, but who gave up the profession to counsel those battling cancer. She told me that the doctor asked her to sit quietly and to think back to a time in her life when she had felt unconditionally loved. Charlie said she did as the doctor asked. She closed her eyes and thought back through the years of being mother, wife, friend, daughter, sister….. At no time, she realized, in all her life, had she ever felt unconditionally loved. She said she thought back even to the time when she was in her mother’s womb, and was grieved to feel there a resistance on her mother’s part to the birth of her daughter. Even there, Charlie realized, she had not known a love that was unconditional.
And then, my friend said, the most amazing thing happened as she was able to think back in time further still….she felt herself out amongst the stars in the vast darkness of space, and there felt herself bathed and embraced by a total and unconditional love. A love which held her before conception…. A love from which Charlie realized she had come and to which she would return.
I remember thinking about the hairs on my head as Charlie spoke, suddenly realizing that perhaps God really did know their number, and I remember saying, “You mean it’s true? God knew me before I even ‘was’ and loved me even then?” I was reeling with the magnitude of what I had heard when Charlie finished her story. My friend told me that this cancer, this alien disease in her body, had become for her an angel, for it had brought her face to face with the God of love…..
Before I heard my friend Charlie tell her story that day, I had thought the love of God was sweet and tame; associated with tidiness and proper manners, dispensed like gold conduct stars for good behavior. But in reflecting upon what Charlie said as we sat in her kitchen on that October morning, I subsequently wrote in my journal, “There is no God who sits on some ancient throne dispensing love like gold conduct stars to nice girls with tightly-braided, well-kept hair…. There is only a young woman without breasts and hair. She is, by the world’s standards, deformed and unlovely. She is scarred and filled with a growing cancer with which she wrestles fiercely. But in her story, as in the story of Jacob at the Ford of Jabbok, it is Charlie who in the end takes hold of the stranger and cries, ‘I will not let you go until you have blessed me.’
And she is blessed; brought face to face with the very God who stretches God’s self out across both time and space and binds God’s self to the creation he loves with a raw, boundless and unfathomable tenacity. In the story of Charlie’s blessing, I hear the stories of Exodus and exile and restoration and manger birth and betrayals and crucifixion in a whole new way. I hear them focused on a divine determination to redeem, to heal creation, even at the expense of God’s self. I see God revealed in the scarred and empty breast of my friend Charlie, and I know her to be bathed and embraced and encompassed by a total and unconditional love that will not sit on the thrones we fashion for God….
For God keeps crawling down from the celestial heights in which we imagine him: God keeps crawling down into the open wounds of our lives; into the untamed, uncharted, raw and boundless suffering of humankind. And in that untamed geography God wrestles with us until we are blessed; until we know what Jacob and Charlie and so many others have learned in the howling waste of their own wilderness…..that God loves us even before we are formed, that God knows even the number of hairs upon our heads, and that God will be with us always and always and always. This is most certainly true.”

This is the kind of love that heals. Notice I didn’t say “This is the kind of love that cures,” not that sometimes curing can’t happen as well. But curing is only skin deep. It is only mercurochrome deep, while healing reaches into the depths of the heart with the promise that by the power of love, in the end everything will be alright, and if everything is not alright then this is not the end. This is the only kind of love that has the power to bring hope from despair and life from death…. This is the kind of love Jesus made known as he came down, came down deeply and fully into the wounds and wonders of the world to bring the full reach of God’s redemptive and healing embrace into every place and every time including our own.
This is what Jesus was trying to say to the hometown crowd in our Gospel lesson this morning, as he spoke the words of Isaiah about bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, and sight to the blind. He was saying that in him the healing kind of love that had moved over world from the beginning to bring order from chaos, something from nothing, justice from oppression, freedom from bondage, life from death; in him this love had come in a new way…..in a way that was so tender and so fierce and so real and so complete and so close and deep down, that now the hometown crowd too could participate in its power of transformation and healing. (Of course you may remember that by the end of Jesus’ teaching in the temple that day folks were so angry they brought him to the brow of the hill so they might hurl him off the cliff. Probably in large part because like us, they were good at pretending that they had it all together; that by the power of their own wits, talents, bank accounts, pedigrees, remedies, face-lifts, anti-aging creams, and gold conduct stars, they could lead full, whole and relatively unblemished lives….. Who needs healing when you can hold it all together by yourself just fine?)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, our healing in the Christian sense of the word begins when we acknowledge that like the two-headed calf, we are broken and wounded, that tomorrow is uncertain, and that we cannot hold it all together. Our healing begins when we pray the prayer, “Help me, help me, help me,” and allow Jesus to take our hand, to sit us down by the baptismal font, and for the ten thousandth time to wash our wounds with the same fierce and tender love as my mother when she tended to my knees and elbows. Our healing begins when we allow Jesus, with the painstaking love of an artist, to draw upon our wounded heads and hearts and souls the image which speaks of the love that will not let us go until we are blessed, healed, made whole, in the fullest sense of the word….. (make the sign of the cross on my head, my heart, and upon the congregation.) This is the image, like the red mercurochrome rabbits that still adorn my elbows and knees if you look very closely…..this is the image….the empty cross, that could not with its nails or hatred hold love captive, just as the tomb could not…. This is the image that reminds us that in the end everything will be all right, and if it’s not all right, then it’s not the end…..
To be healed is to know this love; to know that we have been sealed by the power of this love and marked with its image forever. And then you see, knowing this love makes all the difference in the way we live this human life….. Knowing this love means we can look up into the starry sky, even in the freakish presence of a two-head calf and see not despair, but twice as many stars as usual. Knowing this love means we can look up into the starry sky, even in the absence of breasts and hair and know ourselves beloved, eternally held in an embrace from which we came and to which we will return….
Knowing this love means we are given the capacity, the courage, the freedom and the joy of extending the same healing power to our weary, broken, war-torn, fragile, beautiful world. Continuing in Jesus’ footsteps to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind and the year of God’s favor….
May it be so for all of you this day as you consider how St. Luke’s Cathedral might continue to be a beacon of hope and a place of healing for all who would enter its doors. May you acknowledge your need for healing. May you see twice as many stars as usual. May you know yourselves to be beloved. And may you live as if this is most certainly true. In name of the One who gives us the voice and the heart to sing, even in the uncertainty of what tomorrow may bring….. Sing “Beautiful.”
Beautiful, beautiful, Jesus is beautiful,
And Jesus makes beautiful things of my life.
Carefully, tenderly, causing my eyes to see.
Oh Jesus makes beautiful things of my life.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

A sermon preached by Pastor Elaine Hewes of Redeemer Lutheran Church, Bangor, Maine.

Sermon given at the Cathedral of St. Luke, Portland, ME