Sermon for Sunday, July 6, 2008

DO YOU WANT TO GET WELL?

5^th in a series on The Uniqueness of the Gospel of John

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  John 5: 1-9

¹ After this, Jesus went to Jerusalem for a religious festival. ² Near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there is a pool with five porches; in Hebrew it is called Bethzatha. ³ A large crowd of sick people were lying on the porches—the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. ⁵ A man was there who had been sick for thirty-eight years. ⁶ Jesus saw him lying there, and he knew that the man had been sick for such a long time; so he asked him, "Do you want to get well?" ⁷ The sick man answered, "Sir, I don't have anyone here to put me in the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am trying to get in, somebody else gets there first." ⁸ Jesus said to him, "Get up, pick up your mat, and walk." ⁹ Immediately the man got well; he picked up his mat and started walking. The day this happened was a Sabbath.

Dr. Rachel Remen is a very wise physician and writer who lives in Northern California and who was interviewed for a PBS special on health and wholeness several years ago. She has worked with patients who are seriously ill and has also worked with physicians who are caring for those folks. We have had her two excellent books on our bookshelves for a long time now and I have recommended those books very often, as I do today.

She tells a story in one of her books about being in the Four Corners area in the little town of Bluff Utah for a few weeks. She and a friend attended church at an Episcopal Church where the service was conducted that day by a Native American bishop. The congregation was almost entirely Navajo except for Dr. Remen and a friend, so the sermon was in the Navajo language. After the Navajo sermon, the Bishop repeated the scripture reading and the sermon in English for Dr. Remen and her friend. It was a good attempt but the preacher got frustrated and finally put down his Bible and just spoke to the two white women from his heart. Here is what he said: “This man Jesus—this man Jesus, He IS good medicine.”

We are looking through the gospel of John this summer and today’s story is one of several healing stories in the first few chapters. Jesus has healed the son of a government official a few verses earlier. Then a couple of chapters later Jesus heals a blind man in one of the longest and most complicated healing stories in the whole Bible – a marvelous account of how people can be physically sighted but spiritually blind. Jerry Herships will preach on that in two weeks.

Today’s story is about a man who spent most of his life waiting to get well, and how Jesus asks him a potentially offensive and explosive question. The place he was in Jerusalem has been excavated now and we have seen it. It is north of the Temple Mount and the pool of Bethzatha was fed intermittently by some mineral springs which, when they were full, poured mineral rich water with healing powers into the pool. Incidentally, the name of the pool is different in different sources but the root word means house of mercy or place of mercy.

Many people were present at the pool who were disabled – blind, lame, paralyzed. For some reason Jesus saw the man who had been at the pool for 38 years and asks the man a highly unusual question: “Do you want to get well?” Can you imagine being asked that question if you have been waiting for just the right time for the mineral waters to be stirred up and you never are able to get in at the right time – and you have been disabled most of your life?

How does that question sound to you? Can you see any reasons why Jesus would ask someone a question that should have so obvious an answer? On the other hand, maybe there is some familiarity in staying paralyzed. This is an offensive thought for most people. Most people I know who have been disabled would answer immediately that OF COURSE they want to get better, get well!!

On the other hand, if the man has just gotten used to his disability, he may not have wanted to make the change in his identity that being healed would mean. Or perhaps Jesus could see what was keeping the man from being whole. It may not have been a physical condition. Most paralysis is. But occasionally people are paralyzed/immobilized by something else. Occasionally people are stuck or paralyzed by fear. They just don’t make progress because they are afraid to take a risk and so they remain stuck or paralyzed. Have you seen that?

Or perhaps the man was stuck or paralyzed by anger. Dr. Remen writes about a person like this in her first book. She met with a 23 year old man who had been diagnosed with cancer and had to have a leg amputated above the knee. He was deeply depressed because he had a chance to be a real star in college and even in pro football. He was enraged by the unfairness of it all and lashed out at everyone. His physical therapy was not working because he could not see a future for himself. He was emotionally paralyzed even though he was physically able to get around. He saw no reason to go on and if he had answered Jesus’ question he would have said he could see no reason to get better. He drew a picture of his life in a therapy session with Dr. Remen and his picture was a beautiful vase with a dark jagged crack all through it, a crack so dark and deep it tore the paper it was drawn on.

Dr. Remen enlisted him to visit some other patients in the rehab center, and he met a young woman who had had a double mastectomy at the age of 21 and was herself emotionally paralyzed by anger and rage. He visited her room and got her to notice him by taking off his artificial leg and hopped and danced around on one leg. They made a connection and then a friendship and began to visit other recovering patients together. And I will tell you about the end of that story at the end of the sermon.

People can be immobilized, paralyzed by fear or by rage. They can get stuck and decide they are a victim and choose to not get better and just stay stuck. Or a person can be paralyzed by guilt. That seems to be what Jesus saw in this man because later on in the story he tells the man his sins are forgiven and he is now to change his life direction. Here again we are on such dangerous ground. Does this story mean that when people get ill it is our own fault?? The answer is complicated. Sometimes it is not and sometimes it may be.

I was sad to read about 24 year old British singer Amy Winehouse who has symptoms now of emphysema according to her father because of her smoking crack cocaine and cigarettes and may soon need to be on oxygen. How responsible are we for caring for our health and for taking care of our bodies which St. Paul calls “the temple of God’s spirit?” It gets even more uncomfortable when we remember that two thirds of American are overweight and when half of those persons are not just overweight but obese. Who is responsible? Is it the fast food restaurants who have encouraged super sizing or is it we who are in charge of what we put in our mouths and in charge of how much we move.

I have acknowledged to some of you my concern every time I go to annual conference session and see so many of my colleagues exhibiting health problems with nutrition and weight control and exercise. Most of us wrestle with weight control and nutrition and exercise – all the members of my family deal with that and we know that if we don’t eat responsibly or if we don’t move our bodies regularly, we will gain weight. And it is an ongoing challenge to be healthy and not let ourselves in for the scary side effects of eating too much and moving around too little: if we take those risks, we let ourselves in for heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and a long list of other complications that can mostly be avoided by loving ourselves enough to care for our weight and our health.

This is a dangerous and sensitive topic. It is one that at least among my clergy colleagues is about to make some progress because our Bishop and District Superintendents have recently entered a covenant of healthy exercise and nutrition to set a more positive role model for the other 400 ministers in our region – especially important because as a group clergy are some of the unhealthiest groups in the country.

How responsible are we for how well or unwell we are? This is hard to talk about. We can do some things to decrease our chances of getting ill. We can stop smoking. We can start a walking program. We can eat smart. We can control some things about our health. We have to want to badly enough. Jesus’ question is for us: do you want to get well and be well? And on the other hand bad things can happen to us anyway, random illnesses. People who have never smoked get lung cancer. People who take good care of their health can have a stroke.

We can make a difference in our wholeness but we will not have total control. And when we become ill, the physicians and health professionals are instruments of God, because what the healing stories in the Bible tell us is that God wants all of us to be whole and well. How well do we want to be and how hard can we work to decide our attitude about whatever illness may come to us?  I have mentioned before that some persons Judy and I know from the disability community who seem more capable are just labeled by that community as the “temporarily able!” 

Something else today’s story reminds us about is that there is a strong connection in us between attitude, will, spiritual health, emotional health and physical health. This is an area just on the edge of our learning. The pioneers in this field are folks like Norman Cousins who forty years ago, when he was struck by a serious, unknown illness decided that laughter would be one of his resources for dealing with the pain, and checked out old comic movies featuring Charlie Chaplin and other comics to help him laugh. He discovered that after watching the films and laughing a lot, he felt better and the pain was diminished. He did some research on placeboes – sugar pills that are used in drug tests –  and discovered that some people get better just taking a sugar pill, because our minds and spirits do have some influence on our bodies! 

It is God’s will for us to be whole and well and we can have some effect on that for good or for ill and some random things happen to us. But the question from Jesus the man lying by the healing pool still applies: How well do we want to be and what part are we willing to take in our own well being or ill being? And what attitude do we want to choose when some illness does befall us? Do we see ourselves as victims who choose to remain emotionally paralyzed or stuck and just expect others to pity us, or are we willing to do what it takes to feel better emotionally and physically? Are we willing to control what we can control – our attitude – toward what life throws at us? Had the man in the story decided he was more comfortable being a victim than in taking charge of what he could take charge of in his life?

I promised I would tell you the rest of the story about the young man in his early 20’s whose leg had been amputated. He befriended the 21 year old woman in the same rehab center and they visited others to help them heal their bodies and their souls. And in Dr. Remen’s last psychotherapy session with him she pulled out his dark and dismal picture he drew several months earlier that had the vase with the dark and jagged crack in it. He looked at it and asked for the crayons again. He took the yellow crayon and began to draw beams of yellow light emanating from the crack to the edge of the page. He showed it to Dr. Remen and told her that the jagged crack was what allowed the light to shine through.

Do you want to get well? What are you willing to do to contribute to your wellness and your healing? Do you love yourself enough to take better care of yourself and to know that you deserve to be healthy and whole? Will you let your relationship with God through Christ be a large part of that wellness and healing?  That will be important because as the Navajo minister said at the beginning, This Jesus fellow, he IS good medicine!!

Let me close by asking us to pray. Is there someone you know who is like the man in the story – paralyzed by guilt – who is unable to make progress in life because they are stuck in the past? Is there someone you know who is immobilized by fear and unable to move forward in life because they are afraid? Is there someone you know who is paralyzed and stuck in one place because of their anger and rage and that anger is so in control that they can’t let go and move ahead? Let us pray for those persons to want so much to be whole that they may be free and be able, like the man in the story, to pick up their life with the help of Christ, and move ahead. Amen.

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