The Freedom to Heal

This past week I was introduced to a book called My Grandmother’s Hands, which talks about the trauma that we hold in our bodies.

Not necessarily talking just of the trauma that we have experienced in our lifetimes, but that our ancestral lineage has experienced. Talking specifically about the trauma in African American bodies, but also the trauma in white American bodies. The traumas that we’ve experienced throughout history and how our bodies seem to hold that in a certain way, and it affects us unconsciously.

The author makes this statement, which is a pretty bold statement, that if we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict will need to be resolved. I don’t completely agree with that, but I think it’s a place that we haven’t looked before. We tend to look at all the external places and we forget that we have to be right within ourselves before we can be right with others. That’s what it reminds me of.

Rev. Adrian Thorn gave a lecture this week on embodied worship and preaching.

She was saying that to get more out of worship, we need to embody it. We need to feel it. We need to move. Thus, your hand gestures for “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” During this sermon, I’m going to ask you twice to place your hand on your heart and feel what’s going on in your body.

This may feel very uncomfortable to some of you because you are used to sermons being up in our heads. We’re very good at that. That’s our tradition. We appreciate educated clergy and we appreciate learning something in a sermon, but I also want you to feel it in your body.

With that in mind, let’s go to the Revelation scripture.

There’s a lot that could be said about the Book of Revelation, and I don’t wanna try unpacking that. That’s a whole series, and you can’t do that justice in one day. But I want to say that this is the last chapter of the Bible, and here we get the good news.

In the end, whenever the end comes, like Julian of Norwich used to say, “All will be well, and all matters of things will be well.” We will come back. It invites us back and almost describes the garden again. We started in the garden where everything was right, and then we broke that relationship with God. In the end, we’ll be reconciled with God, and the beloved community of Christ will be one again. It’s this beautiful reminder that in the end, all will work out.

With that in mind, I want you to put your hands on your heart, and I’m going to read you some other verses from the 21st chapter.

“and God himself will be with them and be their God; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” – Revelations 21:3-4

Notice how that feels. Take in the healing knowing that you are loved, forgiven, and free. There’s not a lot of places in our world that tell you that anymore, and I think that’s part of why we are here together. That’s part of why we come back to remember the stories, but we also come back to experience the healing.

Our second scripture is with the man at the gate.

There’s a bit of a problematic piece to this in that a lot of us approach the scripture, and we hear that Jesus is going to heal you. I’m gonna pray for you, and Jesus is going to heal you. You’re not going to need that wheelchair anymore, or you’re gonna be able to see again.

I think we set up God in a way that if that doesn’t happen, which it can, prayer is an amazing thing, but it may not happen in that moment. Healing may not come like that, then it looks like God’s not there or God’s not listening.

Maybe the problem is that we are not seeing the person as a whole, as they are. I read a story about a man in a wheelchair who someone came up to him and said, “I’m gonna pray for you so that you can walk again.” And he said, “I don’t need your prayer, for I am whole.”

Maybe it’s our perceptions that need to change, where we think that it’s only the very able-bodied person who is whole. Whereas, as the commercials tell us, disability is not a bad word. Many of us live with disabilities. It’s just some of us can hide ours better than others.

The whole story is that Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and then we have this whole issue with the Pharisees because he healed on the Sabbath, and is that allowed or not? Then, we can ignore the healing issue and just argue about whether or not he was right to do it on the Sabbath. But I don’t wanna talk about Sabbath.

I want to keep us in this healing space because I think that we have the power, the ability, to do some internal or spiritual healing that we don’t pay enough attention to. I’m specifically focused on that piece because I want us to hear that incredibly powerful question of Jesus, “Do you want to be made well?” – John 5:6

That’s the question I want us to sit with. It’s the question I’m challenging myself with. Do I want to be made well? Do I want to be whole? What do I need? What do we need to feel whole?

The man does wanna be healed. He wants to be healed, and he reaches out and says, “Yes, I want healing.” He’s following the rules. He’s been told that the healing only happens when the pool is stirred. Think of God’s gonna trouble the waters and you have to be the first person in the pool.

Only the first person in the pool gets healed, and somebody always steps in front of him. He’s following all the rules, and yet it doesn’t feel like he’s getting anywhere, and he’s stuck. Until Jesus says, you don’t have to worry about those rules. It’s not about getting in the pool. Do you wanna be made? Well pick up your mat and go home.

We can change our perspective, and it may open us to healing. Maybe even healing we didn’t even know we needed.

So what does he do? I stopped reading the scripture where he walks away. But what he does is he walks away, and he starts telling people he didn’t even know who Jesus was. He told people that he met a man and he told me to walk and I can. Then finally he meets Jesus and he knows that it was Jesus who healed him, and he tells everybody that he meets that Jesus healed him.

How often do we do that? How often do we tell everybody that we meet the healing that we found? Through our faith, through what Jesus has done in our lives.

You may not have a specific event like this man did that was so transformative. I think the transformative ones are the easiest ones to talk about. If you’ve ever seen someone who wasn’t raised in church suddenly encounter Christ. They wanna tell everybody about it.

What’s coming to mind is Tom Rex’s story, for those of you who’ve been here a long time, Christ encountered him on his deathbed and gave him new life, and he wanted to tell everybody about that new life.

In my own life, I don’t think that I’ve had that kind of a healing moment, but when I look at the trajectory of my life, I can see where God intervened. Maybe God turned me around because I was wandering off, and God said, “Let’s go this way instead. Have you tried this yet?” And He put people in my life who asked me questions.

I didn’t want to go to seminary. I had the person who was in charge of admissions at the time come up to me, and instead of asking me about when I wanted to come, she said, “You have a date with the admissions department on this day and time. Please show up.” I guess God’s got a plan that I don’t have.

There are those moments in our lives. Christ is here and Christ is offering you the healing that you need, whether you know that you need it or not. That might be something that you need to search for within yourself, but Christ is here. And will you accept that?

I’m going to ask you to put your hand on your heart again, and here you are, loved, you are forgiven, and you are free. All will be well and all manner of things will be well, and may you rest.

When we look at a scripture, I try to think about where we are in the scripture, and today I’m placing us in the position of the man at the pool, the one who wanted healing.

Maybe you walked in here thinking you didn’t need healing. But think about it. Seriously, spiritual healing within yourself. Placing you at that pool and allowing yourself to have the transformation.

I think we are also the ones called to go out and tell people, tell people we encounter about Christ. Not, asking, do you know Christ? But saying, I found this great peace within me, through my relationship with Christ. You have to find that within yourself first, and then tell other people about it.

I think that we are wounded healers. But the wounded healer is a very powerful person because we know how bad it hurts in the wounding, but we know that you can survive. Someone said to me, I have survived 100% of the hard things that I have had to do in my life, and so have you.

You have survived 100% of the hard things you’ve had to do in life.

I would say that was because of Christ. God is within you, giving you that strength, helping you to move on.

I invite you to look for that strength within yourself and to share the love, the faith, and the healing that you have found with at least one other person. Just one.

Or pray about who it’s to be. Maybe all your friends go to church, but it doesn’t mean that they have found that healing. Pray about who that should be and watch who God puts in your life. There are a lot of people in our world who are hurting, and they don’t know what to do with their hurt.

We can remind them that the answer to their hurt is in Christ.

May it be so. Amen.

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