Bearing Our Diseases (for a service of healing prayer)

(Readings: Isaiah 53:1-5, Matthew 8:14-17)

Our Gospel reading tonight is taken from Matthew’s Gospel, in a section immediately following the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ teaching had begun to attract crowds, and among them were various persons asking for healing – a leper, whose disease had cut him off from his community, and a Roman centurion asking for healing on behalf of a beloved servant. Although Jesus had offered to go to the centurion’s home to lay his hands on the servant, the centurion felt himself unworthy to have Jesus under his roof – “only speak the word, and my servant will be healed” was the centurion’s request. Having commented on the centurion’s great faith, spoken the word of healing and sent the centurion on his way with his blessing – “go, let it be done for you according to your faith” – Jesus entered the home of Peter’s mother-in-law, who was in bed with a fever. Jesus touched her hand and healed her, and she got up and began to serve. That evening, those who were ill and were possessed by demons were brought to Jesus, and he healed them. Matthew ends the passage with a reference to the Isaiah passage read tonight: “he took our infirmities and bore our diseases.”

We read this passage tonight in unique context, in a time of great debate over how our society will deal with the cost of treating illness in our country, with legislation passed that some see as a decades-overdue expression of caring for the most vulnerable in our society and others see as governmental intrusion into private matters, a turning point down the road to bankruptcy and national ruin. In other words, how in our society will we bear the cost of one another's diseases? With strong views on all sides of the healthcare debate as a backdrop – and you’ll hear no policy prescriptions from me – it seems like a unique perspective from which to consider Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant, which the writer of Matthew’s Gospel saw fulfilled in Jesus, “surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.”

In our age of advancing technology – and in my day job I work for one of Philadelphia’s academic health systems that serves some of the poorest neighborhoods of the city – disease is treated as a collection of symptoms, and a patient presenting with a complicated set of symptoms may be shuttled around from one specialist to another, one physician looking at the heart, another at the lungs, another at the gastrointestinal tract, and so forth - sort of like a car going through an assembly line. And yet, just as human beings are more than a collection of body parts, illness carries over into many dimensions of our lives. Physical or mental illness can leave us unable to hold a job, socially isolated and cut off from friends and family, homeless, even threatened by physical attacks by those who prey on the vulnerable. And the relationship works both ways – our life choices, our social and economic context, can either protect us to some extent from illness, or promote the onset of disease. For example, residents of some inner-city neighborhoods are vulnerable to asthma and other respiratory problems because of industrial pollution or because of widespread infestations of vermin in peoples’ homes.

So when Jesus healed those with leprosy and demon possession and various illnesses, he was doing more than relieving physical distress, far more than relieving symptoms. He was restoring wholeness, returning a leper isolated by disease to the embrace of his community, returning Peter’s mother-in-law to her place in the household. More than this, Jesus’ healings had ramifications far beyond helping the individuals touched by Jesus. Both Jesus’ teaching, as in the Sermon on the Mount, and healing represented an in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into the world, God’s reign breaking into a world dominated by the power of sin and evil. In teaching and healing, Jesus was taking on and driving out the powers of evil that kept people in physical distress, mental ignorance and spiritual isolation and deprivation. A cosmic mission – but played out in scenes as individual and tender as Jesus touching the hand of Peter’s mother-in-law as she lay in bed with a fever.

God loved the world – God loves each of us, every one of us here tonight – so much that God sent Jesus, his only-begotten Son, to take on all the powers and principalities that keep us enslaved to sin and oppressed by illness. Jesus took all our sin and all our sufferings on himself – he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. Upon Jesus, through his death on the cross, was the punishment that makes us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.

And so, as Christ’s body in the world, we who call ourselves Christians are to be those to whom people can come for healing. The mission statement of one of our neighboring United Church of Christ congregations in Mt. Airy expresses it well – they see their congregatiuon as "a healing station for the spiritually wounded." That can be the mission of our various churches in Bridesburg as well. People come to the church sick and wounded in many ways – spiritually distressed, suffering family turmoil and social isolation, unemployed and economically struggling, and, yes, sometimes in physical and mental pain and illness. Sometimes they come to us wounded by abuse from previous congregations, and wonder whether they will find in our congregation the healing touch of Jesus, or a fist slamming them in the gut. So in our ordinary conversations in the church, we truly meet people at their most vulnerable, and in so doing we walk on holy ground.

In a minute or two, we will begin a time of healing prayer. There is oil, olive oil, for anointing. In a few minutes, after some brief introductory words, I will invite those with prayer requests – for yourself, for others, for the world – to come forward. I would also invite any other clergy here tonight who feel so led to come forward as well. In so doing, we can walk in the way of our Lord and Saviour, as we bear one another’s burdens and come together to ask for Christ’s healing touch. Amen.