Healing and Wholeness

 

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Damien and Marianne of Molokai

May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

So, friends, you get me two days in a row, and we have another set of texts on healing. Well, the good news is, that is a topic about which I have no shortage of things to say. It is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about! 

Although we could focus on the people. Like yesterday, we have another set of examples of wonderful, selfless individuals in Damien and Marianne who were willing to risk their own lives to care for people in need. In their case it was a leper colony in 19th century Hawaii. We also get something else in today’s texts - both in Isaiah and our Gospel. We get stories of healing. And that is where I would like to focus.

If we just had our Gospel story where “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” we could have a very narrow definition of healing. We could think it is merely the absence or reversal of a disease. It certainly can be that. I hope we all have lots of stories of people who have full and complete recoveries - where it is as though they were never ill to begin with. And we all know, likely from personal, real life experience, that is not always how it goes. Disease is not always erased. Sometimes death still comes even when we have fervently wished for another outcome. Our lives do not always reflect that ideal world offered to us in the Gospel for today. 

And so, I think it is important to look at our other texts, and to think more broadly about our experiences. Our passage from Isaiah talks about healing. And healing does not only mean the absence of disease. Healing is about comfort. Healing is about being in right relationship with God and with each other. Healing is about wholeness. 

It took me a long time in my own journey to get to that understanding. For a long time I wanted healing, in my own life, in my own body to look like a complete restoration. I wanted someone to be able to replace the collarbone they surgically removed. I wanted a body that did not feel diminished. That was not physically possible. Collarbones move too much. They took too much out, and if they put a replacement in there there was a risk that my body would reject it. I really am better off with all my muscles sewn together even if that comes with its own set of challenges. 

So if that door of restoration was closed to me, if I could not go back to “before,” what might healing look like? For me, on a practical front, it has looked like building up the strength of my back and my shoulders to compensate. But more importantly, on a spiritual front, it has meant coming to an understanding of healing and wholeness that is much bigger than what my physical body can or cannot do. 

In many of the healing stories, Jesus tells the person who was healed, “Go. Your faith has made you well.” In many translations it is “Your faith has made you whole.” I like that better. Our faith makes us whole. It is not about what our bodies look like. It is about our faith. It is about our relationship with God and with each other. We are made whole when we are connected to God. When we are present to God, and we are open enough to allow God to be fully present with us. 

Wholeness then is about honoring and welcoming God’s presence in our hearts and lives. A fitting message for this Easter season where we hear again the stories of how the resurrected Christ (who still had his wounds) made himself known to the disciples. We can indeed be made whole, no matter the outcome of physical illness or trauma. That wholeness is a gift from God. We need only be open to receive it. Amen.