2022-02-14
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: LUKE 6:17-26
I know something about you and you know something about me that we tend not to think about or to easily face. And that is that you and I are sick. Maybe we all knew that before. But it’s easily possible we didn’t.
And if you’re like me, you may well find yourself protesting such a sweeping and obviously exaggerated statement, that all of us come here today sick. I, for one, am well aware of the health challenges I’ve experienced in my life. I had my tonsils out at five, my appendix at eleven. I had mumps and measles as a child, and numerous cases of cold and flu throughout my life. I arrived here in Chagrin Falls eighteen years ago, as some of you will remember, with a debilitating case of labyrinthitis that delayed my start by two weeks. I’ve experienced a serious shattering of my lower leg bones, several cases of blood clots going to my lungs, a prostate bleed that hospitalized me for eight days, and a hip replacement. So I know when I’ve been sick. And I’m not sick now, thank you very much. So please don’t tell me I am.
You may be thinking the same thing. And I want to believe you and me, I do. You and I are the ones who should be able to determine when we’re sick and when we’re not, not have the preacher announce it—incorrectly, we insist!—from the pulpit on Sunday morning.
And that may well be right, that you and I are as healthy as we’ve ever been, and we may well stiffen when we’re told we’re not. Here’s the thing, though. As Jesus is preparing to deliver the sermon for which he’s most widely known, the sermon that in Matthew’s gospel is called the Sermon on the Mount and in Luke’s gospel is known as the Sermon on the Plain—as Jesus is getting ready to preach in Luke’s story, this is what we hear: “a great crowd . . . had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch Jesus, for power came out from him and healed all of them” (6:17-20). All were trying to touch Jesus. And Jesus healed all of them.
And I confess it seems odd to me for the story to say that Jesus heals “all of them.” Surely some of the people who come out to him on that plain that day aren’t sick. They’re curious. They’ve heard something about this itinerant preacher that makes them want to see what the fuss is all about. They’re perhaps accompanying someone in great need. It surely can’t be true, though, that everyone in that crowd is sick. Can it?
And then I start reflecting and remembering. I think of the over 77 million COVID cases that have been reported in this country since the beginning of the pandemic. And I think of the 918,000 deaths it has caused here. And I think of the family and friends who have also been held in its grip. And then I think of the measures that have been taken to try to rein in the disease, and how those measures—masking and social distancing and limited hospital visitation, among others—have impeded us all. Even if we have not ourselves contracted the virus, we have all lived life in its shadow. The disease envelops us. All.
And that’s only the beginning. Other diseases and accidents have assaulted us, as well. Here someone tears an ACL. There a diagnosis of dementia or Parkinson’s or diabetes suddenly disrupts life. Cancer casts a shadow over a home, its pall of death never far from the surface. Not to mention the colds and flus that are ubiquitous this time of year.
And that’s just diseases of the body. Sickness of mind, psyche, and soul affects so many others. Depression overtakes a young woman who thought she could always will herself into a good mood. Anxiety relentlessly unnerves and disheartens a man who had always been even-keeled. Alcoholism refuses to relinquish its tenacious grip on countless lives. Here a man’s primary energy goes into a lifelong hiding of his sexual orientation. There an ancient grief is still felt as fresh, and still exerts its persistent stranglehold on a woman’s every moment.
The sobering truth is that sickness is a pervasive dimension of daily life. If we’re not sick today, we may be tomorrow, or we may just be afraid of it, and we know that its tentacles are never far from grabbing us. Sickness is physical. But it’s also psychological. And despite what may be our best attempts at denial, we’re never far from it.
So when huge crowds go out to Jesus, and everyone wants to receive his revitalizing energy, and finally everyone there is healed, maybe we get it in a way that we hadn’t before. We’re all broken in some way. As Ian Maclaren once said, “Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” We may deny it or push it down or avert our gaze. We may be heavily invested in an image of ourselves as hale and hearty and entirely whole. And yet, at some level, life, for most of us, is not what we might have hoped it would be.
There’s even an added dimension to our illness, our brokenness, our incompleteness. We think of illness as private and personal. Jesus, though, knows otherwise—he knows that the healing we need is also societal. As Jesus begins his sermon to this crowd hungering for wholeness, what’s the very first thing he talks about? He issues a set of blessings and a set of woes. “Blessed are you who are poor,” says Jesus. Not “poor in spirit,” which is the gospel of Matthew’s more familiar way of putting it, but simply “poor.” And he goes on to say, “Blessed are you who are hungry now.” And “Blessed are you who weep now.” (6:20-21). So immediately after we’ve been told of his healing power, Jesus lifts up people beset by poverty and hunger and sorrow. And we come to see that individual human wholeness is inextricably tied up with a larger societal wholeness. We’re reminded that healing isn’t just about curing the physical woes of individual bodies. It’s also about righting the wrongs that make some people poor and others wealthy, that let some of us eat to our hearts’ content while others dive dumpsters, that allow some of us to purchase our happiness with entertainment and vacations and leisure while others are consigned to the sorrow of a persistent deprivation.
It’s not just that our bodies are sick, in other words. It’s also that we have arranged society in such a way that our common life, too, is desperately short of wholeness. In this Black History Month, for example, we may note this brokenness in matters related to race. The Plain Dealer reported this week that, when visiting a health care provider, “Nearly 60% of Black women and 52% of white women reported their symptoms had been dismissed as compared to 41% of Black males and 20% of white males.” In a not atypical scenario, Yvonka Hall, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition, reported that she visited a nutritionist in hopes of finding out why she was gaining weight when she was attempting to eat healthily. “But the nutritionist was more focused on his computer than her. He didn’t ask questions; just gave his opinion. Stop drinking Pepsi, and you’ll lose weight.”
“‘I’m sitting there thinking, is he talking to me?’ says Hall, “who doesn’t drink soda, or eat pork or beef, but does have thyroid disease.” Her experience is entirely consistent with the experience of so many people of color who sense that they’re not being treated well when they seek health care. In a national survey, “Blacks reported being discriminated against or unfairly judged by health care providers almost three times more often than whites, and twice as often as Hispanics.”
So many of us who are white are infected with an often unconscious bias against people of color. Knowing that, the Cleveland Clinic recently conducted a learning session about these biases. “During one activity, participants were shown a photo of a Black woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and a white man with tattoos. Participants were asked for their first thoughts about these images. Later, it was revealed that the Black woman was an entrepreneur, and the tattooed man was a NASA scientist. Some participants admitted that they jumped to negative conclusions about the people in the images because of implicit bias.” As one participant in the seminar said, “Sometimes you need to learn that you don’t just allow your brain to make a decision for you, based on how somebody looks . . .. Instead, listen to that person, not just what your brain flashes” (Feb. 11, 2022, p. A10).
This subtle and not-so-subtle racism, of course, is part of an ongoing pattern in this shared life of ours. Some lawmakers in Florida have “proposed legislation that seeks to prevent teaching topics that might make white students uncomfortable.” One observer says, “the most pernicious part of the bill is this: ‘An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.’” The upshot of such a way of looking at things, of course, is that “White discomfort governs historical truth.”
This attempt to “protect whites—not Blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans, the groups that have actually suffered from racism and repression—from feeling ‘bad’ about historical facts” (The Plain Dealer, February 11, 2022, p. E3)—this attempt to soothe white discomfort is a sign of an endemic sickness that poisons the well from which we all drink. Are we all sick? You bet.
So we all suffer from bodies failing, from minds decaying, from chinks in our physical armor. We contract various illnesses. And we fall victim to a brokenness in soul and psyche, as well as in society as a whole. There’s no avoiding it: we can be a royal mess.
So in our disease, and our dis-ease, what are we to do? Maybe we’re invited to welcome a holy hand of healing, to approach the One whose healing touch can come to us in any of a thousand guises. The illness and brokenness that befall us all can be cured only by a sacred power that imbues us with a healing force that we can’t muster on our own, and that empowers us to be agents of that healing in ourselves and in the families and neighborhoods and nations in which we live.
That healing power is embedded in the story of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. A big part of healing, when things are as broken as they are, Jesus seems to say, is the giving and receiving of blessings. You may remember in last week’s “Gospel in One Minute” that Rebecca Anderson, in summarizing the good news of Jesus, referred briefly to this sermon of Jesus’ this way: “You get a blessing, and you get a blessing, and you get a blessing.” Blessings are things we rarely notice. They’ve been reduced to a pro forma “Bless you” after a sneeze.
A real blessing, though—that’s a gift of the highest order. It’s the bestowing of a transformative gift. It’s the conveying of a life-changing love. I was walking through our neighborhood on Friday, stewing about an issue I was having a hard time letting go of, when I stopped to talk briefly with a woman who’s part of Federated, and who hasn’t been able to be here since the start of the pandemic. As we finished our conversation and I turned to continue my walk, she said to me, in a voice that came from somewhere deep inside her, “God bless you.” This was no formulaic way to end a conversation. This was her offering me a profound gift, the only real gift she could give me and, as it happens, the best gift she could give me. She was offering me her blessing. And she was offering me God’s blessing. And the fretting of earlier moments evaporated into the crisp, cool air. I had been blessed. I was no longer sick in quite the same way.
We, too, can be agents of blessing. As white people who have received abundant privileges, for example, we here at Federated have the opportunity to bless Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, with our confession, our resources, and most of all our allyship. As neighbors, co-workers and friends, we have the opportunity to bless the people in all our various circles, even, and maybe especially, the ones who make us gnash our teeth. As parents we have the opportunity and the privilege and, really, the mandate to bless our children—to show them that nothing they do can separate them from the love that we have for them and that God has for them, to embrace them in all their faults and failings, to laugh with them and cry with them and share in their lives.
We see such blessing all around us. When Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow lifted up the poverty of Athens County several years ago in his Heisman Trophy-accepting speech, it had a striking effect that we mentioned a few weeks ago, as money poured in to alleviate that poverty. But it’s also had an ongoing effect as $108,000 has come into the Athens County Food Bank in just the last two weeks. That’s an enormous blessing.
In a different vein, white U.S. speed skater Brittany Bowe gave up her place in the Olympic 500-meter race because she believed Black speed skater Erin Jackson deserved it more. This, too, is a transformative blessing. Such blessings make the world around us a better place. They spark a sense of joy. And they heal.
And in order for us to be agents of blessing, we need to receive the blessing that comes to us, as well—to take in the shockingly counter-cultural care God exhibits for all of us at every moment and despite our manifold shortcomings. Breathe in God’s love for you. Absorb it. Celebrate it. Receive the holy blessing that makes all things possible.
Our granddaughter Allie celebrated her fourth birthday a couple of weeks ago. One of the rituals of her pre-school class is that the teacher invites each student to sit on a stool in the front of the class as the class sings “Happy Birthday” to them. Well, Allie was not looking forward to this one little bit. She did not want to be the center of attention, and she would happily have called the whole thing off. But she knew this was what the class did. So she steeled herself for school that day. When she got home, her parents asked her how it had gone. And she said to them, “I was nervous. And I took some deep breaths. And I decided to be brave.” And she sat there. And the class sang to her. Allie had received the blessing of bravery. And the class offered her the blessing of love. And in that moment, as it does with every blessing, healing bloomed. And life was made right. This blessing is our gift. And it is our calling. And it is our highest privilege. Thanks be to God!