Healing Service
[audio http://www.opcbrookhaven.org/worship/audio/sermons/healing 11-01-09.MP3] 1 Kings 17:10-16 John 11:32-44
The John text is the same one we read this morning in worship. In the context of a service for healing and wholeness, it has a different flavor to it, especially after hearing that story of Elijah meeting the widow of Zarephath, this Gentile woman who was supposed to be outside the bounds of grace. Elijah goes to her, this poor woman who has run out of food and even oil, and he performs this miracle where the oil never runs out. Oil was not only a staple in cooking, it was also used in the anointing of priests. It was used sacrificially and in healing. There's something in that story that reminds us that God's mercy, God’s love, God’s healing never runs out.
Lazarus had been dead four days by the time Jesus came on the scene and raised him from the dead. There's something about these stories that is prone to misinterpretation. When we look at these stories of Jesus healing, we might be tempted to think that if only we had enough faith we might be healed and fixed. I’m pretty sure that everyone has had experiences of being with people who are deeply faithful and still get sick and still die. God does not send cancer because we do not believe in Jesus enough. God gives creation just enough freedom and these things happen. The reminder is that God is always with us through it all.
A couple of years ago, I realized that I had taken this the sense of creation’s freedom to heart so much that I had almost given up on the idea of God doing miraculous things. It was as though I were hedging my prayers. What I realized was, and it was in stories like the story of Lazarus, that there was something to be said for prayer that was bold, that asked for the impossible, there in the midst of the ICU in the hospital, and at home in the midst of broken relationships, to ask for God to be a work in miraculous ways. The foundation at the foot of all that remains trust in God, that God would be there no matter what.
It reminds me of a story a chaplain friend of mine shared me. One of the first families he visited when he was a chaplain were in the ICU, gathered around their loved one. And their prayer was fervent: “God, we know you’re going to heal her, and we just give you praise and we know that she is going to get up and walk again.” My friend beginning to think about what will happen when this doesn’t come be. Is their faith going to be shaken? Is it going to be destroyed? And it became clear that she was not going to make it. And when she died, their prayer became one of thanksgiving: “Thank you, God, that her suffering has ended.” They prayed boldly, and no matter what, they knew that God was at work. They trusted that healing, true healing, wholeness, is bigger than life and death, and that God would be at work no matter what.
There’s something else about this story of Lazarus that is remarkable. Jesus calls out to Lazarus and he comes out, but he’s still bound up in those grave clothes. Jesus turns him over to the crowd, and says, “You unbind him and let him go.” There's a reason we're all here tonight together. Maybe tonight is the first step of healing for some of you. But maybe you need more than just one person. Maybe you need to know that you’re not alone in the midst of this. Jesus has commanded us to unbind one another. That’s what it means to share in our meal together, to gather in this community, in this communion. The strangest we proclaim in the midst of this feast is that Jesus is broken, and that is what heals us. It is as though our own brokenness becomes one with Jesus’ brokenness, that our need for healing is taken up into Jesus himself on the cross, is buried with him in the tomb, and is raised with him.