“The Faith That Makes Well"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Oct 14th 2007

 Luke 17: 11-19

Ten are physically healed. Only one returns to give thanks. Jesus tells this man that his faith has made him well. Is Jesus making a distinction between physical healing and wellness or wholeness? It’s an important distinction to keep in mind. You can go to a massage therapist or a chiropractor and get the chronic kink taken out of your neck. But if you’re not dealing with the underlying stress that caused the muscles to seize up in the first place, you’re not yet “well”. You can have quadruple bi-pass surgery that has been caused by the build up of cholesterol, through genetic inheritance or poor diet. You’ll get tremendous relief from the surgery, but if you don’t radically alter your diet and take the right medication, you won’t enjoy “wellness”. Nine were healed, but only one was made well. Jesus said it was his faith that made him well.

It’s true that the other nine were Jews and this man was a Samaritan. Samaritan Jews were not welcome in Jerusalem. So the others have reason to return to the holy city. The Law said that in order to be accepted back into the community after an illness you must show yourself to a priest in the Temple, and go through the appropriate rituals. But the Samaritan leper would not have been welcome. So he returns the man who healed him – and gives thanks. This is not the only place where Jesus turns to the person who is healed and makes a point of saying “your faith has made you well.”

Some people interpret this to mean that faith in Jesus is what makes one well. That’s a possibility. But over the years I’ve come to think that Jesus meant something different. It wasn’t faith in him, so much as the presence of faith itself that makes one well. Faith is an attitude or an orientation in life that may include belief in God, but doesn’t necessarily. It’s an outlook in life, grounded in a deep inner conviction that the future is not absolutely determined by the circumstances of the past or the present. More than this, faith is the discovery that the power to shape that future resides in large measure within. Jesus is affirming that just because the Samaritan cannot have his healing officially validated by the priests, it doesn’t invalidate the healing. The man’s inner “faith”, replaces the external official validation. Your faith, says Jesus, not their rituals makes you well. Your faith, not their office, is what sets you free to claim a future of your own making.

This is the kind of faith that can make all of us well, individually and collectively. This inner conviction that we have the power to shape the future is relatively new in the history of humanity. Perhaps only for the last 300 years, that comprised what is now called the Modern period, did humanity have any sense that the future wasn’t fixed. One of the great gifts of enlightenment was in the way humanity, particularly in the Western world, threw off the chains of a theological belief system telling us that history and the future itself was totally in God’s hands. The God of this belief system existed separate and apart from creation, including humans. “He”, and I used the pronoun consciously, was like a cosmic puppeteer pulling the strings from outside the universe.

The gift of the enlightenment and scientific rationalism is that it liberated humanity from the shackles of a largely predetermined fate. Before this, biology was destiny. Women were the underclass. The colour of your skin was destiny. Blacks were meant to be slaves. Social class was destiny. If you were born poor, you stayed poor. Illness was destiny. More often than not, this was all considered God’s plan. Science did us all a favour when it tossed out the controlling, punishing, Monarch God. The problem was that in doing so, it also tossed out the Authentic Spirit – the loving, animating, life-giving Spirit of the Holy One.  From a certain level of spiritual intelligence, the only God that exists to be believed in – or not – is this old man in the sky. But here’s the good news. That’s not God. It’s just one particular image of God. We can have both God or the Spirit and the freedom to co-create the future. In fact, I would say that one of the primary ways we can experience the Spirit is through our creative powers to shape a future that can only be born through us. The problem with rationalism and scientism is that it threw out the baby – the Spirit – along with the bathwater, this controlling image of God. That left us with no inner moral and ethical compass, no connection to a Sacred Intelligence known as Wisdom.

When this creative power shifted back to humans, and away from the Controlling Monarch, we realized all the creative powers that were traditionally associated with the Spirit. This gave us modern medicine and advanced technology, both tremendous gifts. But it also gave us the nuclear bomb, genetic engineering, the military-industrial complex, toxic chemicals. This is the technology that develops when it is dissociated from sacred Wisdom. This is how I would distinguish secular faith from spiritual faith. Secular faith has tapped into the creative powers of Spirit – we know we have the power to create the future - but without any felt sense of connection to Spirit, it has proceeded far ahead of any ethical, moral or spiritual constraints. Spiritual faith shares with secular faith an understanding that the future is in our hands, but those who are grounded in Spirit are connected and accountable to a sacred Wisdom that includes, but is deeper and more comprehensive than human wisdom.

To use the imagery of today’s parable, spiritual faith looks a lot like a man who has been made whole and returns to the Source to give thanks. Secular faith does not return to the Source to give thanks, and therefore the future that it creates will not flow from a relationship with the Holy, nor from the gratitude that issues from that relationship. As a result it may operate outside any moral or ethical restraints.

I wonder what that man’s future will be, the one whom Jesus healed and made well? How will he use his newly discovered freedom? What contribution will he now be able to make with this life that he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to make. The gospel story is clear. Jesus was a liberator. The healing stories in the gospels follow a pattern. Someone is healed, they are told that their faith has made them well, and then an invitation is issued to join the movement. “Follow me”, says Jesus. This means different things to different people, of course. To some it means going out and converting people to Christianity. I have difficulty with this. To others it means trying to be good. This is better. Yet others would tell you it means becoming a member of a church. That would be even better. We’d like to have your creative energy with us. But that’s not the deepest meaning.

In the 21^st century, following Christ means to know that you are a center of creativity, through whom a sacred future is taking shape. I associate discipleship, not with slavish obedience to Christ, but rather to lighting up with all the creativity of the universe, and making a Christ-shaped offering of that creativity in the service of the world. That will look different each one of us, of course. I have a friend who was sexually abused for years when she was a child. As an adult she was dysfunctional. She lived in mold-infested basement apartments with all the curtains drawn for most of her life. And then something told her she needed help. Thus began a 20-year odyssey of counseling. The light went on the day she realized that she didn’t have to live in a dingy apartment under the ground. Her journey from the dark basement to a sunlit apartment is the equivalent of NASA putting a space shuttle on Mars. For her it was an enormous act of creativity – shaping a future for herself that was not determined by the circumstances of her past and present.

The healing stories in the gospels follow a pattern. Someone is healed, they are told that their faith has made them well, and then an invitation is issued to join the movement. “Follow me”, says Jesus. This means different things to different people, of course. To some it means going out and converting people to Christianity.  I have difficulty with this. To others it means trying to be good. This is better. Yet others would tell you it means becoming a member of our church. That would be nice. We’d like you to throw your hat in the ring with us. But that’s not the deepest meaning.

Others are less wounded. Less gets in the way of our creative offering. But it is work. There’s a lot of clutter that stands in the way of our wellness – our capacity to presence the future through imagination, hard work, and cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

Church is too small a word, too fraught with historical baggage and assumptions, to describe the potential that exists in a community of people who have discovered the gift of faith. We can be anything we want to be at Canadian Memorial. We can decide what difference we really want to make in the world and it will happen. We have the capacity to pre-sense and then presence the future through the decisions we make, or don’t make. To exercise this gift of the Spirit is truly to discover and live in to our wellness.

Al Gore pre-sensed 30 years ago that global warming could devastate humanity’s dreams and creation’s radiance. He began to slowly chip away at it, trying to bring it to people’s attention. When he lost the presidential race – if he did lose it – he didn’t collapse. He saw it as an opportunity to spread the word about global warming. He dedicated himself day and night, made a film, and trained facilitators to show it. This past week he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He played an enormous role in waking us up, at the personal and collective level, to the crisis. He had faith that he could make a difference.

The problem with telling these exceptional stories is that we tend to fall into a passive stance, waiting for the next great man or woman to do the next great thing. But this is why Jesus consistently refused to be worshiped. He had no desire to be the great man that paralyzed others’ capacity to take action. This is why he said to the leper – your faith has made you well. He turned it back on the man’s own capacity to imagine a different future for himself. He does the same thing with you and I this morning.

After the service, we will engage in a conversation about the future of Canadian Memorial. It’s the beginning of a process to discern what kind of church we imagine ourselves being in five to ten years. What kind of church will we create for these children that we baptized this morning, and with both these parents and their children? You’re welcome to join us. It will take faith; it will take hard work, yes. But there really is very little in the way of us creating a Spirit-filled future here. No one else can do this for us. The Christ has healed us of this belief. For this we return and give thanks to the one who assures us that it is our faith that makes us well.