Tabernacle United Church - Philadelphia Progressive Presbyterian UCC

Job 2:11-3:1

Luke 8:42b-48

“Seen, Soothed and Safe”

by The Rev. Lynn P. Lampman

She was a good athlete and then she couldn’t even walk around the block. She would go out with friends for dinner, and she could see their mouths moving, but she couldn’t really follow the conversation, much less respond.  Every morning, her body was stiff, and it was hard to move around, the 37-year-old felt like she was 100. At church, when it came time for the person next to her to hold her hand in the prayer circle, she prayed they wouldn’t hold on too tight because even the soft tissues of her body hurt that day, along with the joints and muscles.  

I am she.  

27 years ago, I was diagnosed with the neurological disorder – fibromyalgia.  Over the years another chronic illness has been diagnosed which is causing degenerative disease throughout my spine, and bone spurs in my wrist, shoulder, feet, and back.  Who knows where else.  That is just the list we currently know of. 

 I am not alone.  133 million Americans deal with chronic illness.

Several years ago, every member of my nuclear family got cancer, except me – my mother, father, and brother – within 18 months of each other.  Each went through surgery and treatment.  It was hard, each tried to help each other out and I tried to help them all.  

Each of us has known, currently knows 

or will know people with a terminal illness.

I believe that good preaching must be relevant and must be practical.  Chronic and terminal illness is relevant to all our lives.  Yet, I have never heard it addressed in a sermon, nor ever been given practical ideas by the Church on how I can deal with and respond to it.  Which leads me to today’s sermon which I have been thinking about for the nearly three decades. Better be good, right, if I spent so much time thinking about it.  Expectations are now high.  I might have set myself up.  Oh well, here goes.

Let’s start with illnesses, I like some of you had been given some very strong messages both by our culture and the Church about who gets sick and why, and what things one says and does when people are sick.  So, for a bit this morning, I would like to recognize what we have seen and heard regarding people being ill and unpack how a lot of that has not been helpful and sometimes even hurtful for people who are chronically or terminally ill.  And then, I would like to bring it all home with how, as individuals and as a community, might do better than our culture and some teachings of the Church when it comes to people who are chronically and terminally ill.

What does it feel like to be in chronic pain and feel sick most of time, if not all the time?  First, there is the social awkwardness of being asked over-and- over again, over a long period of time, “How do you feel?”  For most of us with chronic or terminal illnesses the best we can offer you is “same” or “worse” than last time you asked.  Thus, if truth be told, sometimes I change the subject without answering, or say “Ok” when that isn’t the truth. Let me propose a better question “how have things been?” Is a good place to start. If it is someone who you are close to you might even ask about their ups and downs of late.  Part of the reason that works better is that most chronic or terminal illnesses are a package deal with companion illnesses and symptoms who like to come along for the ride, which means their impact on daily life can be huge.  In other words, you don’t just have pain, you may have digestive issues, brain fog, balance trouble, limbs that weak or not fully functioning, swallowing issues… and the list can go on.  These questions are better because they can help those who are ill get at the breadth and depth of their current reality and feelings, rather than a one-or-two-word answer, which doesn’t move us any further into seeing the other person or connecting with what is really going on with them.

Next thing, we can tend to give unsolicited advice.  People mean well, but for the person who is ill for the long haul or exhausted dealing with the medical community who can’t agree, whether you’re really sick or how you got it or what treatment is best, or dealing having to deal with a change in treatment which has made you further sick.

Listening to “my cousin had this and this is what she did”,“or  I used this and it really worked” or I read an article on the internet… Trying not to be rude, in response can be exhausting, on a bad day you just want to shout, “I didn’t ask for advice”.  On a good day, you just realize this person is not among those who will be helpful to you.  Move on…

Which leads me to our first scripture text for today – Job, good, old Job.

Here’s the brief introduction as a reminder or if you haven’t read about him yet.   Chapter 1 begins with Job’s piety and life of bliss, then, Job gets sick and then nearly every part of his life falls apart, Job’s three friends come from far and wide to comfort him.  They travel to see him, and even from a distance they didn’t recognize him because he looked so bad.  Then, they sat with their friend Job for seven days and seven nights, not speaking a word to him, for they saw that he was in excruciating pain. Then, Job finally speaks up and the first thing that comes out of his mouth was he cursed the day he was born.

Let’s deal with that “oh my” scene for just a moment.  The good thing his friends did is offer their presence – just be with him.  Then, they listened, just listened.  Please never underestimate the healing power of presence and being listened to by someone who cares.  People who are chronically and terminally ill usually have a short list of those who will listen to them for any length of time.  And sometimes, we need a length of time to adequately share all that is going on inside and even outside of us.  Sometimes we need time to work up the courage to speak all we are feeling and going through and that takes time.  Sometimes there is so much going on, we don’t even begin sharing because we know it won’t be more than a 2-minute check in or a 3-line text.  Let’s commit to being better listeners.  Let’s deal with the emotions that comes up for us when someone shares a really difficult thing and all we want to do is run.  Let us not be so busy that we can’t take the time to hear what life is really like for those with long haul, life draining illnesses.  Let us deal with our discomfort when we are with ill folx who are feeling anger, despair, grief, frustration, and sadness.  

Along the lines of letting people feel what they feel, let me just say a word about toxic positivity.  It sounds like “You won’t need surgery, even though you know you will or “You’re miracle is coming.” First, it’s not helpful.  Second, it is negating.  Third, it is not soothing.  It is as if the person has sent you a flashing billboard which says, “Don’t see you.”  Ouch.  Let’s face it, we all want and need to be seen, soothed, and safe.  At the end of our reading, we hear Job wishing he had never been born.  I get that and even have heard myself says something close to that when my pain level is at a 10. Positivity is toxic in times such as these. 

Back to Job’s friends. It is clear from the story, that it would have been good if Job’s three friends stuck with presence and listening, but they don’t.  It just seems that can’t help themselves.  They begin giving answers to the “why” of his disastrous life, in essence, Job brought this on yourself.  I have had people say to me, my illnesses are an outward manifestation of something very wrong with my inner life.  New Age opinion – not helpful and not true.  

Job’s “friends” go on to say, he must be a bad person, which is a version of, otherwise you deserved it.  Job was a righteous man according to scripture and bad things happened to him.  Bad things happen to good people according to scripture and the rain (the good stuff) happens to people who are “good” and those who “bad” according to Matthew 5:45. 

Some of us have been influenced by the “Prosperity Gospel” popular in some Christian churches and among most TV and radio evangelists and popular among Christian conference leaders and we don’t even know we’ve been snagged by the message, God blesses those who are obedient, and God punishes those who are disobedient. Is the tag line of such thinking. Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it is true.  While in seminary in the early to mid 80’s, I had a routine every Sunday night.  I would turn on the TV to one of the leading evangelists and counter what they were saying with Biblical truth.  I sometimes would hear myself say aloud, “if you’re going to hold that big floppy Bible, preach from it.”  Some of what we have heard and may continue to hear, is not Biblical.  That’s the truth of it.

In the Gospels we find stories of Jesus’s healing ministry, including the commissioning of the apostles to continue that ministry, which we see them do in the book of Acts.  

First, God does not heal you in any way contingent on the amount of faith you have.  That would mean you could earn your healing which is not consistent with the message of the Gospel. 

Second, in these stories handed down to us, Jesus heals more than the body. Jesus’s healing ministry involved holistic transformation: socially, relationally, and spiritually, including how people see them.  When healed, people are then integrated into community.  

Caring for people’s bodies mattered to Jesus, that’s true.  Yet, it is important to note the common thread in Jesus’s healing ministry is that the person left the encounter feeling good about what took place.  A bodily cure is something some of us will never receive.  The goal of Jesus’s healing ministry allowed people to have deeper integration into community, a growing connection to Jesus and a meaningful life path.  

What would it mean, if we as individuals and as a community that follows Jesus, shift our focus off a cure and onto healing.  What would it mean to make space for this kind of healing?

Let me just say, a word here, to those who find themselves in the same boat with me.  Please don’t let the people who act like Job’s wife who said, “Curse God and die.” convince you to give up on God.. I encourage you when others tell you to or you feel like giving up on God, be like Job, don’t.  

Even when you don’t get the cure, Jesus can provide healing.  Like the woman who came to Jesus with an issue of blood for 12 years, that separated her from community.  The text tells us, Jesus saw her, even amidst the smothering crowds.  And for her, like me, and maybe like you, you need to touch Jesus to be healed.  Long distance doesn’t work, pretending I don’t need Jesus doesn’t work, and cutting him off doesn’t decrease my interior and exterior pain, it just adds to it.

There is much more to say about healing, and chronic and terminal illnesses and more things I can say after 27 years of thought.  Yet, I must finish for now before this sermon length is 27 years.

Let me end for now, by offering to you a thank you for the opportunity to be seen.  Thank you for making the last 17 minutes safe through your listening, and I look forward to joining with you in providing others the third final thing we all need – soothing.  May God help us do just that!  Amen and Amen.

This is the transcript of Sana DelCorazón’s sermon from Sunday, July 10th, 2022. Here is a link to the video version of the sermon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jGS5ShiEig

Charlie Kirk, a 28-year-old conservative activist and host of a radio talk show that reaches 100 million people a month recently said this to his listeners about the United States: “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists. It’s derived from a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Convention.” Kirk’s statement about the separation of church and state harkens back to the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution and religion of reason. We are talking about the 17th and 18th century when white European men were revolutionizing our understanding of ourselves, of God and of the world. The age of reason questioned the authority of the church, church tradition, and scripture. Enlightenment thinkers believed reason and logic could be our ultimate guide, and we (meaning men) each have the ability to think for ourselves, if we have the courage to use our own intelligence over and above other forms of authority. Enlightenment thinkers believed and proclaimed that we as rational, thinking creatures are free to decide for ourselves what we know and test it by experience. (Nothing wrong with that, right?) This intellectual movement helped to bring forth ideas about autonomy, liberty, individual freedom and anti-authoritarianism that ultimately led to the founding of this nation-state as we know it. In addition, the Enlightenment and its rational spirit of inquiry laid the foundation for nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism.

What does this have to do with Charlie Kirk? In essence, Enlightenment thinkers were searching for a new authority (outside of the church and Christianity) that was reasonable and universal, and for knowledge based on scientific, provable fact, and not superstition or mythology. This intellectual spirit of progress meant secularization – read LESS CHURCH, less church control and authority. It meant that nation-states like ours, established during this time period, instituted the separation of church and state. And although Kirk is right that the United States constitution doesn’t explicitly separate church and state, our white founding fathers understood that “no establishment of religion” in the first amendment of the Constitution meant no national church and no government involvement in religion. Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that without separating church from state, there could be no real religious freedom. The hope of rationalists was that this would lead to religious tolerance and peace. Here’s a FUN FACT: The United States declared its independence about 243 years ago and we have been at war for 225 of those years. (That means we have spent 92 percent of our time at war with someone since the birth of this country.)  So maybe reason alone wasn’t enough to bring about peace?

This reign (or religion) of reason eventually led to attempts to specify rational justification for Christian beliefs, which led to the quest for the historical Jesus. In an attempt to bring Christianity into the modern era, theologians and philosophers wanted to prove without a shadow of a doubt the claims made by Christianity. They studied the New Testament critically to examine who Jesus of Nazareth was, what he did and what he actually said. They asked the question, Could we get to know the “real” Jesus by reading the Bible historically and critically in accordance with modern knowledge and experience? The answer is yes and no. 

Our Liberal Protestant ancestors tried to reconcile religion with science. I think we are still doing that even today when we struggle to define the relationship between the church and the state. In the 19th century, liberal thinkers quickly realized that a lot of what we read in the New Testament is mythology. Jesus in the Bible is portrayed in myth and legend and cannot be historically accounted for. Let me put it more plainly, liberal theologians, our religious and theological forefathers, asserted that the Gospels could not be used as historical accounts of the actual events since they were products of the early church and contained conclusions based on false assumptions. (I would be run off the pulpit and out of church for saying that in many fundamentalist churches who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible.) 

This assertion – the Bible portraying Jesus as myth and legend – makes sense, because mythology was the primary mode of religious expression prior to the scientific era. The quest for the historical Jesus does not deny that Jesus lived, but it challenges the idea that the Bible can be used to prove Christian claims about Jesus the Christ, the risen Christ, and what he means to our faith. Liberal theologians go on to argue that given the many supernatural claims made by the Bible, claims that cannot be rationalized by logic and reason, the Bible can be at best described as historical myth. One theologian went so far as to describe Jesus in the gospel as the “legendary embodiment by 2nd-century writers of the primitive Christian community’s popular hopes.”

This assertion may be threatening for many people in our faith, a faith tradition that seems to struggle with an intelligent reading and analysis of our sacred text. But we are not afraid, like Jesus advised Mary not to be afraid. In today’s scripture reading, we read four different accounts of Jesus’s resurrection, a story we cannot prove, but a story that is foundational to our faith. Some theologians have argued that without the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we would have nothing. In today’s scriptures we hear four versions of this supernatural event, four versions of a story. What they have in common is that the tomb was empty and the messenger or messengers proclaimed that Jesus had risen! Mary Magdalene, the first apostle, would go on to proclaim what she saw and heard. 

What do you believe happened that day and does it matter whether or not this is historically true or accurate? Does your faith require a logical, provable accounting of Jesus’s resurrection in order to claim a Christian identity? Furthermore, what is the church’s confession of Jesus in light of the quest for the historical Jesus, a quest where some claim that about 18 percent of what is written in the Bible about Jesus can be attributed to the historical Jesus? 

Larry Hurtado argues that the earliest quest for the historical Jesus was prompted by the conviction that Jesus had resurrected. These four Gospel accounts of the resurrection, which many people believe is the most important event of our faith tradition, all differ in various ways. Some substantially, such as who came to the tomb? Was the stone already rolled away when they got there? Was there one or two messengers? One or many women? Did the people who went to the tomb see Jesus or not? What did Jesus actually say to the apostles? Why have these four accounts of the same story in our sacred text, if they contradict each other? What does this layer of perspectives or interpretations add to our faith or the stories we tell ourselves about Jesus and what he means to us? 

Some say that the Bible is full of contradictions and this cannot be a basis for true religion, but I would disagree. It is and it has been! The Bible is inspired by God but written and rewritten and edited by humans. The evangelist or writers of the Gospels had both a motive for writing down these stories and a certain perspective, and frankly understanding God, and Jesus, are too large to be grasped by a single perspective or a single story! We all know the danger of a single story! (The single story can create stereotypes and lead to default assumptions, conclusions and decisions that may be incomplete. They can make one story become the only story.)

Furthermore, faith is beyond reason – that is the definition of faith, things unseen, not provable and not always reasonable or rational. We are not throwing out science here. We are postmodern thinkers, followers of Jesus who hold our faith and science in healthy tension. (We are wearing masks and getting vaccinated, aren’t we?) What I am saying, what we are saying is, reason has its place in our faith community – but reason alone isn’t enough!

Reason can’t prove the existence of God or the risen Christ. Reason alone hasn’t brought about peace or more religious tolerance for that matter. However, the scientific revolution is in part why we are here in this church, and not a Catholic church. The Protestant reformation was supported by the idea that we can use our minds to figure out what we believe to be true or not. Our faith tradition trusts in God, and this faith in Christ (at times) transcends reason. 

Let’s keep in mind that nineteenth century enlightenment theologians were fighting against superstition, against church authoritarianism, against any authority that couldn’t be proven through modern science, reason and the intellect. And in some ways this struggle continues today for us in our time. Am I right? There are folks on the other spectrum of Christianity, our siblings in Christ, who want to turn back the clock, and take away the separation of church and state, who don’t believe in science, who think women and people with uteruses shouldn’t make decisions about their bodies, who believe lies even when the evidence is presented to them. But let me tell you, we aren’t going back. We can’t go back! We must and we will move forward!

As people of God and followers of Jesus, we look to the Bible as a source of authority in our faith in Christ. These Biblical stories, factual or myth, help us to define who Jesus is and what he means to us. The truth of Christ is communally formed and the Bible, even if not historically accurate, has some eternal truths about God, about creation and about our relationship to God and creation. 

Part of the reason we must hold faith in things not yet seen is that we are called to build a world (and we are building a world) that we have not yet seen. That world holds separate church and state, because we know that the joining of faith and empire is detrimental to both. We, as the body of Christ, look to the Word of God in the Scriptures, and to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, its creative and redemptive work in the world to proclaim and live out our faith, laboring with love to promote God’s justice in the world.

May it be so. Amen and Ase.