“Healer of Our Every Ill”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
May 13, 2007

John 5:1-9

            A man has been ill for 38 years – crippled. He’s lying beside the pool close to the Sheep’s Gate in Jerusalem. The source of this pool is a natural spring that from time to time bubbles up. In first century Judaism, only a moving body of water could have healing powers. At such a pool one could find a collection of the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed, hoping to be healed. They waited for the waters of the pool to start moving. When this happened, hope appeared as a mad rush to get to the water.  This man was not able, in all those 38 years, to get into the pool when the water was stirred up. At least that’s his story.

            Jesus responds with a strange question. “Do you want to be healed?”  Wasn’t it obvious? Why else would he be hanging out by a healing pool for 38 years?  Here we enter the troubled psychological waters relating to the question of how much personal responsibility do we take for our own unwellness, in body, mind, and spirit? How much does our desire to be healed, or our unconscious resistance to healing, factor into our being made well?

I’ve spoken at other times about my own bouts with dark moods in the past – not exactly full-blown depression. I could still function. But I’d go a few weeks, making my life – and Ann’s – miserable.  Often, in the midst of one of these moods I would have moments of clarity, when I realized that I could end the mood in an instant – with nothing more than a decision. Now, if Jesus had come along right at those moments of clarity and put the question to me that he put to the crippled man beside the pool, I would have responded: No, not really. I was getting something out of indulging the mood. I was enjoying being a victim and then spinning a “woe-is-me” story which justified my misery. The truth of the matter was that the mood was caused when I didn’t get something that I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it, so I regressed back to a time as a child when I truly was helpless. Then, I didn’t want to admit that this was what was going on – that some insignificant thwarting of my desire brought the mood on. So, I clung to my misery and my story that justified it. I didn’t want to be healed.

            More of this kind of thing goes on than any of us care to admit, when it comes to our well being. Addicts will tell you that nobody could do a thing about their addiction until that decisive moment they made up their own mind that they wanted to be healed -more than they wanted the drink, the drug, or the next hit in whatever form. Don’t get me wrong.  There are genuine Victims, with a capital V, in life – those who suffered abuse, torture, war, genetic flaws, and illnesses that lead to death, and who aren’t getting anything out of this experience except a lot of trauma. What’s really interesting to me is when I see a capital “V” victim managing to take responsibility for the quality of their life, despite horrendous circumstances. The person who dies too young, but with such grace that you’re left feeling that there’s a deeper well-being than physical health. These souls are truly heroic.

But I’m talking about the small “v” victim within. If Jesus were to ask the small “v” victim in any of us here this morning, the victim might protest: Well, naturally, I want to be healed. But how can I be healed when all these awful people are doing all these awful things to me. Of course, I want to be healed, but I’m surrounded by such incompetence, how can I not be worried sick, be angry, get an ulcer, be miserable and depressed? Along with being very attached to the story of our unwellness, our inner victim loves to blame – the wife, the dog, God, the universe, the boss, even the weather.

Here are some questions to help us discern our honest desire for healing: If I weren’t a victim of my circumstances, who would I be? Or put another way: What am I getting out of not being well in body, mind, and spirit? What would I be giving up if I decided to be well? If I really took responsibility for my life, what life skills would I need to acquire that I don’t need as a victim in order to function fully? What help would I have to ask for directly, that I now receive without asking, because the world is full of rescuers? What would it be like to take a look at my life, just as it is right now, and own my part in creating it? If I stopped the blame game, how would I feel about myself?

            One of the effects of being a captive to the victim within is that over time our range of choices gets increasingly smaller. It can get to the point where we literally cannot imagine an alternative. They’ve all been closed off. Now, we don’t know the back story of the crippled man by the pool, but he’d been there for 38 years. Is his story really believable that he couldn’t figure out how to get close enough to the pool to be first in? In fact, I suspect that he had to work darn hard at figuring out how not to get into the pool.

Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis identified the many games we play to keep ourselves from being healthy. One of them he calls the “yes-but” game. A really good victim elicits all kinds of rescuers, and then when the rescuers suggest a strategy for change, there are 1001 reasons why it won’t work. Why don’t you just sleep right beside the pool, so when the water moves you can be first in? Yes, but…then I’ll miss the fellow who brings me a breakfast bagel every morning. Well, I’ll stay and get your bagel and bring it to you. Yes, but…then you won’t be there to lift me over the edge of the pool. Ok, I’ll get some of my friends to help. Yes, but…they don’t know me as well as you and I can’t trust them. On and on it goes, until we’ve convinced ourselves and others there is no way out – we are destined for desperation.

 Did you catch the CBC news special, when Mark Kelly went out and lived on the streets of Montreal for a week? He forms a friendship with a homeless man and gets the notion that he’s going to find him a job. He plays the rescuer. The homeless man initially says that yes he would love to work, but nobody will take a chance on him. So Mark Kelly goes on the radio and finds a business owner willing to hire him. The morning when he’s slated to begin work, Mark goes to where the man sleeps, but his new friend has changed his mind. If Jesus were to ask this man the question: Do you want to be healed, he would have discovered that his honest answer was not really.

Incidentally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this answer. I’m not standing in judgment of this man, or bashing him for being lazy. In fact, I think our society probably will always have 10% of the population who either cannot or simply don’t want to play by our rules, and there needs to be not only room for them, but rooms for them. But, what’s called for is honest ownership of that choice. Think of the anguish that could be averted if we would just learn the wisdom of Jesus’ question, “do you want to be made well?” In these instances, when a person we care for chooses not be healed, we can continue to feel compassion, we may continue to care for their needs, but we don’t turn our rage at being thwarted in our rescue attempts back on the victim. There are other stories in the New Testament of Jesus’ being unable to heal and being saddened when someone is not ready to be well.  We need to get over our fixation with fixing everybody, and then getting angry at them when they are unable or choose not to be fixed.

But here’s the thing: if we are sincerely ready to be made whole, there is a healing energy available in the universe that will we have access to 24-7. Jesus was a particularly concentrated embodiment of this healing energy. Still today, Christ puts that question to us – do you want to be healed, and the moment we decide, the healing powers of Christ are available to us. In fact, the healing power of the universe is coursing through us all the time, but we’re not typically aware of it. There is what David Bohm, a physicist, calls “hidden wholeness” at the heart of the universe. This urge to wholeness never sleeps. It comes to us even in the night, when we’re sleeping, weaving dreams out of the fragments of our daily experience, and if we learn the soul’s language, our dreams will make us whole. If we pay attention to the circumstances that arise in our daily life – I mean really pay attention to them – we will over time notice a hidden wholeness nudging us toward more abundant life. Think about the number of systems, biological, social and cultural that were operative this morning, just to get you out of bed and arrive here. These operate outside our conscious awareness for the most part, and they are so complex and elegant that it boggles the mind. There is an evolutionary bias in the universe towards fullness of life and wellness, and it is possible to consciously tap into this cosmic bias toward wholeness.

Opening to Christ’s healing power is to consciously allow Christ’s energy, that concentrated form of the hidden wholeness surging through the universe, to reshape your body, emotions, mind and spirit. The moment we answer Christ’s question with a “yes”, we consciously align ourselves with God’s desire for us to be whole. It may not happen on all levels at once. But because all these levels are so radically interrelated, all levels will be affected. It will undoubtedly mean that we’ll have work to do. The stories in the Bible present dramatic, instantaneous healings and I don’t question that these happen. But the journey toward wholeness is typically a lifelong process of consciously aligning ourselves with the healing power of Christ. Some may never be physically healed, but let’s not confine the fullness of life that Christ offers to the physical realm. In fact, it may be more important to begin with the healing of our emotions, our attitude, and our spiritual life, and then see what happens to us physically.

In other places, the writer of John’s gospel affirms that Christ is himself a stream of living water, bubbling up to eternal life. The crippled man in today’s reading waited 38 years to try and get himself to the healing waters. But then one day, the healing waters came to him. This is the gracious nature of the universe. The universe is always approaching us with invitations to wholeness. It’s not just a matter of us seeking our healing. The universe is seeking us out to offer us healing.

The healing waters known as the Christ comes to us and asks us if we desire to be healed. And when we are ready, Christ invites us to stand up and begin our new life in Christ. It can happen here this morning. Your new life in Christ is as near a decision that you want to be made well. There is no more powerful force in the universe friends than the healing power of Christ. Why not walk out of here this morning, or wheelchair out of here this morning, a new creation?