My Relationship with My Favorite Writer

I.

Thanks to Johanes Guternberg and the moveable type printing press he invented in about 1440, we can enjoy an endless variety of books on every imaginable topic. Over time, as we read, many of us have our favorite writers. Writers in the modern world are in many ways the storytellers for contemporary “tribes” of people who do not have to gather around the campfire to hear the stories any longer. Both fiction and non-fiction books are important stories to us--some about presumed facts related to how the world works and what has happened to people over time; and some imaginary tales about what might be, what could be. So, again today’s writers are our storytellers; they entertain us, challenge us, and in all sorts of ways may also help us understand our world and even ourselves.

The editors of American Book Review chose the best 100 opening lines from novels that were written or translated into English. Four of those jumped out at me.

• In 1813, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published, and this is how it began: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” I can think of a handful of reasons this might not be the case, but why should I fiddle with great literature?
• Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was first released in 1830. He began: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
• Many of you can quote the opening line of Charles Dickens’s 1859 A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
• In 1877, Leo Tolstoy began Anna Karenina as such: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
• And this is how Graham Greene began his 1951 The End of the Affair: “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

Ernest Hemingway wrote:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

And Arthur Schaupenhaur insisted that:

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, ''Lighthouses'' as the poet said ''erected in the sea of time.'' They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Many of us have a favorite writer who only wrote one book, or only one that captured us. That is the case with my favorite writer, Alice Walker, and her profoundly insightful, superbly entertaining, and daringly written novel, The Color Purple. I love all three versions of that story--the book, the film, and the Broadway play. Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides made me weep because he’s the only person I’ve ever come across who could articulate to perfection the pain and the pleasure of being a southern male. For a writer whose whole collection of works consistently grab and keep my attention I’d have to say the southern writer Will Campbell is my favorite, and that admiration is enhanced because Will is a friend of mine who has made the fight for social justice his life and his pen mightier than a machine gun.

We develop a fondness for our favorite writer. In the case of a writer who has written several books, sitting down with one of her or his volumes begins to feel a little bit like sitting down with a friend.

Ralph Waldo Emerson shared this insight about readers and writing:

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

I asked several folks this week who their favorite writer is. I figured if I asked around widely enough, eventually I’d find someone who’d say that “God” is their favorite author, and the Bible their favorite book written by God. Sure enough, I was grabbing a quick sandwich at the Corner Bistro this week, sitting at the bar, and I found her. I’m sure she first thought I was trying to pick her up. I mean how much different is, “Who’s your favorite writer,” from, “What’s your sign”? Hoping not to be stereotypical, I have to tell you that she was from Alabama. The minute she said that God was her favorite author, one of Carson’s co-workers, a waitress working the bar that day, spoke right out and said, “Oh, please! God didn’t write the Bible.” Needless to say, I was with Carson’s co-worker, Laura, on that one. It was a polite disagreement, and no argument ensued; in fact, no other exchange of any sort took place between the two of them or between either of them and myself. Carson remained calm enough because he didn’t have any potential tips at stake; the woman at the counter was someone else’s customer.

By the way, that phrase, “needless to say,” is needless to say, but many of us say it anyway. I do. We preface something with, “needless to say,” and then we say it anyway. If it’s really needless to say it, we shouldn’t or wouldn’t say it. Oh well, needless to say, we still say “needless to say.”

Now, I think that the Bible with its many writers might very well be the favorite book for several people; in fact, statistics prove that this must be the case. More copies of the Bible have been sold than any other volume in the history of books. I’m not exactly sure why it’s been so hard to keep track of specific sales, but at least 2.5 billion copies of the Bible have been sold and perhaps as many as 6 billion copies; this includes all versions and all languages.

You might have a favorite writer within the biblical collection, but God isn’t an option as the writer for any of the books. My favorite biblical writer is the John who wrote the book of Revelation; it’s an absolutely magnificent book. Creative, artistic, dramatic, bold, inspiring, frank, and hopeful. John was a literary genius.

Here is an excerpt from John’s dramatic opening:

I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.” Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Child of Humanity, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this. As for the mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands: the seven stars are the angels--the messengers of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches (Rev 1:9-20 NRSV, adapted).

II.

Among those whom I asked the simple question, “Who is your favorite author and why?”, were mostly members and friends of Silverside. I’m sharing their responses with you today, and I begin here with our esteemed Chair of Council, Mary Lew Bergman. Her husband has said that there are times when she literally reads all the time. What SHE said was: “I have so many ‘favorite’ authors! Marilynne Robinson, who wrote Gilead in a ‘luminous, tender voice,’ is an almost perfect writer. Sherman Alexie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Salman Rushdie on any given day could be my favorite. They write beautifully about cultures other than my own and hold my interest no matter what events try to intercede (like fixing dinner!). And all of these authors are witty. Perhaps my absolute favorite book is A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. He only wrote this one book, but I reread it often. It is hilarious--a true masterpiece of writing with wonderful characters and a clever plot; it is extremely inventive. Since I first started serious reading, however, Jane Austen has been a favorite and while other authors come and go, she remains. I love her wit--every sentence is a jewel, and her characters satirize people you can still meet today. Still, how can I choose?”

Both my sons are very well read; much more so than I. Jarrett, the librarian, who lives with books, wrote in response to my question: “My favorite author is a man named Robert Anton Wilson. He died last year, but during his lifetime he was what I'd consider a Renaissance Man. A philosopher, comic, mystic, writer, and amateur psychologist. He's probably most famous for his science fiction Illuminatus! Trilogy, which is a whirligig tour through the history of religion and magic, complete with conspiracy theory, politics, and humor. I really think he was one of the most intelligent people of the last century and of this one so far.”

Carson’s favorite contemporary writer is Ken Follett, and his favorite book by Follett is Pillars of the Earth. He says Follett really makes you care about the characters and hard times through which they are going. He is equally able to make you hate the bad guys--in a medieval context, often associated with the church.

Andee, short for Andrea, Reed, is a teacher and a singer and an actress in New Orleans, and when I was a pastor down there we had the great fortune to have her as our Minister to Youth. The talent just oozes from her, and she’s now head of the drama program for one of the high schools doing well despite Hurricane Katrina. Andee and Mary Lew have something in common; she said her favorite writer is Jane Austen “because she is so smart about human nature, so realistic and yet, ever hopeful. I adore her.”

I caught Neal Isaac, our church’s former Director of Education, on Facebook and asked him the question of the week. Neal’s answer was brief: “The last book that made me think was Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I found it interesting because it talked about situations that were both uncontrolled and controllable that lead to achieving.”

Dr. Bill Rogers was Dean of the School of Christian Education at Southern Seminary when there was anything be taught there that would be of any interest to any of you. This was Bill’s response to my question: “Admired among artists, scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, and educators, Leonard Shlain, M.D., authored three best-selling books: Art and Physics, Alphabet vs. The Goddess, and Sex, Time, and Power. He died in 2009. Why is he my favorite? Because he delighted in making connections between everything from art and physics, to human evolution and sexuality.”

Of course, I asked our literary scholar in residence, Bill Englehart, and this is what he had to say: “That's a dangerous question to ask a BA/MA in English Literature (and an even harder question for that person to answer)! There simply isn't one favorite, but at various times . . .

• Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, You Can't Go Home Again, etc.)--probably my first "favorite" writer . . . .Incredibly long, richly poetic sentences and sweeping subject matter, resulting in long, long books that I was always sorry to finish.
• John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse)--subject of my master's thesis. He is a native of, and has written much about, the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Most frequently considered a "black humorist," he taught at Penn State with Joseph Heller for a number of years. His early novels were mainstream fiction, then he broke out with Sot-Weed Factor, which was a parody of 18th century novels like Tom Jones; Giles Goat-Boy satirized everything from Jesus' "life-story," Joseph Campbell's study of mythic heroes, to the Eisenhower administration, and the (at that time) escalating Cold War.
• Everything since the late 60's has been meta-fiction (writing about writing) and the increasing frustration of trying to be creative in an age where everything has pretty much been said, coupled with the increasing impact of technology on communication. Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories and experimental pieces; one of my favorites is ‘Glossolalia,’ in which he presents six or seven passages that are legitimate words, but which are essentially non-sensical--only when read aloud, one discovers that each has the syllabic structure and spoken cadence of The Lord's Prayer! I could go on, but you get the idea, I'm sure. (As an aside, he finished his teaching career at Johns Hopkins and came to speak at the UofD a year after I finished my thesis. Naturally, I was determined to meet him, and I did. He was arrogant and condescending, an especially irritating human being. More proof that one should never try to get to know their heroes, I guess. . .But I still find his writing to be very special.)
• Truth to tell, in recent years, most of my non-work related reading is largely escapist--with well-written mysteries, especially series, leading the pack. James Lee Burke, Robert M. Parker, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Elmore Leonard and David Morrell are all on my ‘must read’ list. Most of these folks are serious, highly educated writers who have chosen to be commercially successful craftsmen in a popular genre. Quite a few of them started their professional careers as teachers or journalists and then quit when they could afford to do so.
• I hope you didn't ask too many folks this question. . . .We are liable to be in the sanctuary until 1:30 pm.” Yes, Bill, I got that time warning!

III.

In 722 BCE, the Assyrians crushed Israel. At the time, the ancient Hebrews were not a united kingdom or monarchy; they were a divided kingdom with Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Those who managed to escape death or forced exile to Assyria, ran as fast as they could into Judah, in the south where Jerusalem was the capital city. The descendants of David continued to reign in the south as the people tended to believe that this was God’s plan.

One of David’s descendants who came into power as king was Josiah; he was 8 years old when he was officially declared King of Judah; there was no more northern kingdom of Israel. Even as a boy, Josiah believed that his people had not honored God, which was directly connected to the troubles they were then weathering. By the time he was about 26 years old, Josiah became aware that there might be great riches left behind in the Temple. He called on his advisors, particularly priests, to find that silver. Hilkiah was the high priest, and much of the searching fell to him. In the process, he and his workmen found a very important book, a scroll that many scholars believe was all or part of the book of Deuteronomy. At the time, however, no one knew what the scroll was, but Josiah asked that it be brought to him and and read aloud in his presence.

As that was done, the young king began to weep because he realized upon hearing the words being read to him that his people had been violating God’s standards for a very long time, and in his theological framework there were penalties to be paid for such disobedience--such as invasions and deportations and a scattering of the people.

Josiah and his high priest went to work to correct the problems, but many of their sister and brother Hebrews would not cooperate with them so the atrocities to the Hebrews as a people continued. It’s a tragic chapter in Hebrew history that might well have been avoided.

We hear a lot in our day, with increasing emphasis on healthy eating, that, “You are what you eat.” But it might also be true that, “You are what you read.” If you read nothing but violence and destruction, war and devastation, there’s a good chance that you’ll believe these are necessary aspects of life in any era of human history.

Hear this chapter from the life of the Prophet Ezekiel at the time of another deportation. The conversation is between God and Ezekiel:

God said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and God gave me the scroll to eat and said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey. God said to me: Mortal, go to the house of Israel and speak my very words to them. For you are not sent to a people of obscure speech and difficult language, but to the house of Israel— not to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely, if I sent you to them, they would listen to you. But the house of Israel will not listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me; because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart. See, I have made your face hard against their faces, and your forehead hard against their foreheads. Like the hardest stone, harder than flint, I have made your forehead; do not fear them or be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. God said to me: Mortal, all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart and hear with your ears; then go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them. Say to them, “Thus says the Lord God”; whether they hear or refuse to hear.

Ezekiel wasn’t living in rebellion to God so the words of God, even the corrective words of God, tasted sweet to him. Those living in service to other deities, those living with no moral standards, would find the taste of the little book bitter indeed.

Some part of our reading diet should draw us toward that which is moral and beautiful and honorable and compassionate. The book need not be a religious book per se, but we need to see the good and the right and the consequences of wrong and results of apathy. We need to see a better world even if it shows up in small scenes and snippets. We need to be emboldened to take on a world that is more corrupt than most of us can let ourselves imagine. Our great writers, again, are the tribal storytellers who show how rugged the world has gotten but how much better it can be regardless of the odds.

Alice Walker got Celie out of her hell, and Will Campbell pointed the finger at the southern, very religious and very white citizens who treated the free Blacks as if they were despised animals and took various roles in stealing their freedoms and often their lives; but Brother Will also showed us away out of racism by walking the risky way Jesus walked in his time and place. Without books I might never have known these great storytellers who dared me to believe in hope for myself and others.

Yes, Lord.

My Relationship with My Healthcare Provider

I.

The only way you could have missed information about healthcare in the United States for the last several months would be if you locked yourself up in a remote cabin without any connection to the outside world. There are citizens of our country who believe that only those who can pay for it deserve the highest quality health care--or any health care at all. If services for the indigent aren’t available, well, suffering is a part of life and so is death. Providentialists in that number, those who believe that God has willed everything good and bad, go so far as to say that those who die way before they have lived a full life, because healthcare was unavailable to them when they were ill, die because it is God’s will that they die. That’s an easy way to get off the hook huh?

Then there are those US Americans who believe that health care is something every human being deserves--every human being, I said; not just citizens of the United States. These folks tend to believe, further, that levels of healthcare are not acceptable. In other words, people with cheapie health insurance can’t be denied a major, potentially lifesaving procedure, because they have a maroon plan instead of a gold or silver plan. Researchers giving their lives to try to find ways to save people’s lives aren’t slaving away in their laboratories thinking, “If we just work hard enough and long enough, the rich people can be healthier than they have been in the past.”

When medical care became a bedfellow to big business, healthcare went in the wrong direction, lost its bearings, and it’s never recovered. My friend, Ricky Grisson, Dr. Ricky Grisson, who is nearing the end of his residency in pathology at Mass General, got to Harvard to begin work on his M.D. credentials, and what he saw there, built on a year’s internship he did with Merk Pharmaceuticals, between university study and med school, convinced him that he would never be able to do what he hoped to do medically unless he understood how big business influences and, sometimes, controls decisions that should be entirely medically based. Thus, he interrupted the pursuit of his M.D. for eighteen months so that he could move to Emory University and complete an M.B.A.

In these last months of bitter political debate about who deserves what in terms of healthcare, who should pay for it, and should healthcare be one of the highest achievers in profitability in our country’s economy, we’ve seen businesses and politicians who’ve been making big bucks along with some of the highly specialized physicians resist most vigorously the notion that the processes of making people well must take a back seat to cash flow. We all knew that’s how it worked, but it was disconcerting to have it all laid out so clearly, so unmistakably.

This week, healthcare companies complaining about how broke they’ll be if all aspects of healthcare reform passed are implemented have been shown to be sitting around whining with record profits--in this economy, record profits. Chairperson Stark said:

Wellpoint and Aetna are on track for great years with multi-billion dollar profits. Now it’s time for them to return those windfalls to their enrollees in the form of reduced premiums. With business booming there is no excuse for any premium hikes of benefit cuts next year by Wellpoint or Aetna in their private sector or Medicare Advantage plans.

A few movies have stirred me during and beyond viewing them. The better movies, don’t you think, are those we can’t get out of our minds--even as years pass? One of those movies for me was “John Q.” Denzel Washington played a hard working family man who in a lay off situation found himself without adequate healthcare coverage for his son who needed a serious procedure performed. It was heart related as I recall, and the transitional insurance offered to laid off employees would not cover major procedures. Literally, the option left to the parents was to stand by and watch their son die because there was no health insurance available to cover the astronomical costs of the only shot the boy had at living--a surgery the health insurance company refused to cover and, which the hospital itself would not provide on a gratis or compassion basis.

Washington’s character and his wife sold everything they had to get a pool of money at least to make a dent in the staggering surgery fee. Friends were running fund raising efforts for them. Still, at the end of the day not enough money to get an OK from either the HMO or the hospital itself.

In desperation, and fully understanding the consequences of his behavior from a legal perspective, John Q. took a surgeon and a surgical stuff hostage and forced them to perform the necessary surgery. The captive surgeon couldn’t claim the needed surgery as his specialty, but when a gun is pointed at you, you can remember so much more from your medical school rotations than you thought you could.

The tension of the film was magnificent. It would have been impossible for a viewer to see the film and miss out on the parents’ angst, the nearness of the little boy to death, and the tornness medical professionals felt who were puppets in the hands of the insurance company and the hospital--not unwilling to help the little boy, but forbidden to do so. The gun changed that.

All through this healthcare debate, I kept thinking about this movie. The haves cannot without hold anything lifegiving--water, basic food, shelter in dangerous weather, or healthcare--from the havenots. History has shown repeatedly that eventually the havenots will revolt in order to try for their shot at life.

I remember how shocking it was to me during Jesse Jackson’s run for the White House when he was making a point about the reality of racism as still alive and well in this country. He said, “If affluent white people are in the hospital so sick they can’t get out of bed or even raise their heads off their pillows, a person of color will likely be the one to put a cool cloth on their foreheads to ease the fever and will likely be the person to get their bedpan and then clean them up and carry the bedpan away.” But when that person of color becomes ill, her or his chances of getting a hospital for treatment are slim at best. I was a seminarian back in those days, and things probably did improve a little bit for some few poor people of color, but there certainly has never been an across the board improvement.

I heard of people in my Baltimore years who had health insurance coverage for some of the hospitals, but not for Johns Hopkins and were therefore denied the super-specialized care available only there. The finest specialist in a field can’t treat everyone, after all, so who deserves the creme de la creme of medical specialists? People with the best insurance and/or cold hard cash are at the top of the list. Next come people who are famous; they may be rich, but not filthy rich so the fame counts for something. Next come cases that may make the news because of the doctor’s presumed success. That leaves someone with an entry level health insurance policy or a student policy or someone without a policy and without a stash of cash on the fast train to glory--you know, that train that most people don’t want to board while life is still worth living in this realm?

II.

Jesus’ concern for the sick cannot be overstated. He gave the most of his time in ministry trying to heal those who were sick physically and emotionally in a context where there were lots of sick people and more than a few faith healers like Jesus. Still, illness abounded--illness and untimely death. Obviously, Jesus affirmed wholeness as a highly suitable personal goal and seeking ways to rid oneself of illness as an appropriate investment of time.

It is obvious that Jesus expected those who could to take the initiative in seeking their own healing, but if they could not--if they were children or were too sick or impaired to seek out healing for themselves--then, Jesus embraced those who sought healing for those who could not.

Menstrual bleeding in ancient Jewish reckoning was unclean. A monthly purification was required before a pre-menopausal woman could resume her duties and her interactions with her family. Women who had additional similar bleeding--say a chronic discharge of blood--remained unclean according to the ancient religious law and would, thus, have been ostracized from their families, their friends, and members of the community at large.

One unfortunate woman who once crossed Jesus’ pathway had been hemorrhaging for twelve years. She’d spent everything she had on doctors’ fees and alternative medicines; nothing had done a bit of good. Nothing had stopped the flow of blood, which to make matters worse, she’d been taught to believe that God had willed as a punishment to her. She was rejected. She hated herself and wondered day in and day out why God had it in for her. Why had she not been able to make peace with God in twelve long, hard years of trying?

Jesus wasn’t her highest hope or her only hope; he was just one more healer along the way who MIGHT have some way to make the bleeding stop and who MIGHT deal with her on an intimate basis even though she was unclean due to incessant blood flow. Flowing blood, living blood was highly revered, but blood outside the body was dead blood and highly unclean whether it came from natural blood flow or an exterior wound. Animals killed for food and those killed to have their coats used by humans were considered unclean until purified and so were the tanners who dealt with making animal hides usable for humans. It was all about dried blood, blood that had stopped flowing. Death itself was considered unclean.

This is why the priest and the associate priest, in the story of the Good Samaritan, passed by their fellow Jew who’d been beaten up and left for dead by the side of the road. They were both on their way to the great Temple in Jerusalem for Temple duty. Had they stopped and attended to the man--if he were dead or if he were bleeding but still alive--that would have put them into contact with what was considered unclean, and they wouldn’t have been pure enough to do their scheduled Temple service. Some long series of rituals and some required passing of time would have been necessary in order for them to be suitable for ministering through prayer and ritual.

Twelve years of bleeding had probably cost this woman her family. A woman wouldn’t have been meandering around in public alone unless she were a widow, a divorcee, or a beggar. It was improper for a woman to be seen in public without the man to whom she was officially connected--her husband, her father, her son. This woman was alone, and she was darting through the crowds surrounding Jesus, head and face covered lest someone recognize her as the woman with the issue of blood who’d gone to every healer she could find--never, however, finding relief or healing. She wouldn’t have been able to travel far from where she lived so the chances of being recognized and then condemned for being in a public place ran high. For not knowing her place, she risked the fate of lepers and the mentally ill--being castigated to the edges of town and formally ostracized from the mainstream of her society where most people in public weren’t unclean.

Still, she was taking the risk of going out in search of Jesus as she was certain he wouldn’t or couldn’t come to her since she was unclean. She reasoned that she didn’t actually need him to touch her, thereby making himself unclean; she believed that all she needed to do was to inch close enough to him in the crowd just to be able to touch them hem of his toga, which she did. And as she suspected, she was healed.

Lots of people were brushing up against Jesus in a crowd like that; yet, Jesus felt the healing energy flow out of his body. And he wanted to know to whom that healing energy had gone. “Who touched me?” he asked his disciples.

“Who didn’t, Jesus? Like everyone here. You know better than anybody how crowds work. What kind of question is that?”

Evidently, Jesus essentially ignored the disciples and demanded to know who had touched him seeking healing, receiving the healing energy that God was sometimes able to put to work through Jesus. The woman feared she had done wrong, and she decided to ‘fess up knowing there could be any number of negative consequences coming her way. She begs Jesus to forgive her for her bold overstepping of boundaries; much to her surprise and the surprise of many others including his disciples, he commends her and blesses her for her faith and her courage.

Some of you have relived this woman’s life. Illness has dogged you, and you have spent your energy seeking healers to make you completely well once and for all. You know what it is to have spent all the money you have on doctors’ bills and payments to other health care practitioners. This story encourages you not to give up; perhaps there’s that healthcare provider somewhere, and only a brief encounter is needed to get the healing you need.

My dad had horrible back problems most of his life--up until he was nearly 50 years of age. There were pain pills. There was traction. There were constant conversations with doctors pushing him to have back surgery, promising a grand 50/50 chance of recovery. Dad was a mountain man who never did have much confidence in conventional medicine; he rarely saw a doctor until his later years except at the annual physical required by his employer since he worked around nuclear energy sources.

In pain though he often was, he rarely missed work or church, and he happily turned over back straining work to his first-born son. That was me. Mowing the yard became my job at the age of 9. Spreading gravel on our driveway became my job at the age of 12.

Just before my wedding day in 1980, Dad found a really old naturopath who heard his concerns then told him to bend forward. Dad said the naturopath moved his hand over the place where the pain was most intense and then pinched his spine. He said there was popping sensation and sound, and there ended his back problems for the most part for the rest of his life.

One of my favorite Bible stories as a kid growing up in the Sunday School program of the Beaver Dam Baptist Church in Halls Crossroads was another story from the life and ministry of Jesus. There was a man who was an invalid; he couldn’t get himself to Jesus so four of his friends put him on a stretcher and took him to Jesus. Jesus was working inside someone’s house, and there was no way they could stand in line with this man on a stretcher so they climbed some steps to the top of the house where many people had rooftop patios and openings into the house that could be covered or uncovered depending on the season. At the time of year in question, the opening was uncovered, and these great friends to the man who was sick showed additional intelligence by lowering the man on his stretcher down through the opening where he happened to end up right under Jesus’ nose.

The man ends up getting healed, and Jesus praises the concern of the man’s friends and framed their assistance as a part of what ultimately made the man whole. This story was told not just as another instance where a sick person was able to receive God’s healing energy through Jesus, but to praise friends who help friends who are ill.

Most of us know people who need some encouragement from us to move toward healing. Maybe all they need from us is a ride to the doctor’s office and a willingness to sit in the waiting room with them while they see the physician or the physical therapist or the nurse practitioner or the chiropractor or the acupuncturist or the naturopath. I’ve heard that actress Cloris Leachman began, a few years ago, telling people, strangers, whom she encountered in restaurants and grocery stores and department stores that they needed to lose weight. I’m not recommending that you try this, even with people you know and certainly not with your pastor. I think the way we go about encouraging those whom we love to seek optimal health should be gentle, caring, kind, and practical--like lowering the man who couldn’t walk at all down through the roof into the presence of the healer.

III.

The relationship with one’s healthcare provider is a very emotionally intimate one, and often a physically intimate one too. I remember the first time this dawned on me as an adult. I’d gone out in search of a new doc. I was out of college, no longer could I rely on Mrs. Dereberry, the college night nurse who once offered me two Mylanta tablets to treat a stomach ache; she didn’t take her eyes off her soap opera playing on the little black and white television as she reached into her big white pocket and fished around for the loose tablets. I declined.

Anyway, the new doc’s office at least allowed patients to keep on their underwear; some don’t allow even that modicum of dignity. The doc walked in, my first time ever seeing him, so being the southern gentleman I am, I naturally stood up to shake his hand, and it suddenly dawned on me how inappropriate that should be. Yet, there I stood in my skivvies shaking hands with an absolute stranger. A few minutes later, I’d have felt perfectly proud to have been able to hang onto even that sliver of cloth. Oh, well. My acupuncturist showed me recently a chart of all the possible places he could stick a needle to keep me healthy. Talk about humiliating! I made sure I learned what disorders were treated with that needle and pled with my body never to fail me in any of those places.

Have you ever wondered why Jesus could preach to the masses about how to be healed spiritually, but when it came to physical and emotional healing, he worked one on one? Healing is an intensely intimate art.

My late father used to occasionally watch faith healers on television for entertainment. He once called me when I still lived in the Knoxville area and said, “Turn on your TV now. You’ve got to watch this nut, Dr. Thea Jones,” so I did. This faith healer was going around through the audience asking people what ailed them, and when they told him he would lay his hands on the ailing body part, the person would be “slain in the spirit”--something like fainting, and come to presumably healed. His assistants were always in the right place to catch the ones who’d been healed as they fell backwards. Someone had migraine headaches; Dr. Thea Jones put his hands on the man’s head. He fell out, and when he came to his headache, which had been with him for weeks, was gone. This was live television mind you so it was rather dramatic.

Another man was having pain in his knee, which made it hard for him to walk at all. Dr. Thea Jones laid his hands on the man’s knee. The man, as we’d come to expect, was slain in the spirit and fell out. When his consciousness returned he stood up and walked and ran and jumped--no pain at all.

Next, a woman came up to Dr. Jones and said she was having pain in one of her breasts. She opened her blouse, and Dr. Thea Jones laid his hands on her head.

One of my church members in the little church where I first served as a pastor, called one of the other members and asked her to phone me to request that I come and lay hands on his diseased prostate gland. I sent back my response: “No, but I’ll beef up my distance prayers starting now!”

I had no idea when I planned this sermon series, this topic, or this date for this topic that it would be preached right at the 45th anniversary of the law President Johnson signed bringing Medicare and Medicaid into existence. On that important date, July 30, 1965, millions of Americans and about half of all senior adults had no heath care at all. Who said that nothing good could come out of Texas? Oh! That might have been me. Never mind.

Some important lessons about health and healthcare. Since we are more than just physical entities, healing often engages us at the physical level and beyond; our emotional selves and our spiritual selves contribute to the possibilities for our healing. Very simply stating the obvious, most people who don’t want to get well don’t.

In this discussion, we have to face the fact that not all the sick get well. Jesus didn’t heal every sick person he encountered or tried to heal. The stories we have are just a handful of his “success” stories.

Disease is not divine punishment for sin. People who are sick are not being punished by God because of moral failures or for refusing to do God’s will. Blaming God for illness is one of the top three worst theological positions ever taken. Some illness is certainly the result of our bad personal and corporate choices; and some disease just happens in a random universe, but some people believe that every sickness that comes to them and/or to their loved ones and their enemies has been willed by God.

Someone in the healthcare orbit must deal with the emotional side of illness for the patient and often for her or his family members. There are clinicians who can deal only with the biology or the chemistry of the situation, and perhaps that is needed by some professionals to try to maintain as much objectivity as they can. The patient, however, must not be treated as a specimen in a gargantuan petri dish. The emotions of the patient must be taken into consideration and dealt with--if not by the physician then by someone on her or his team or by a mental health professional.

Human beings also have a spiritual dimension that is affected by disease, and spirituality may indeed be a part of healing processes. This shouldn’t be overlooked in the processes of diagnosis and treatment; and certainly not in the consideration of prognosis.

Several years ago, when I was still living in Baltimore, I got the news that I needed to have sinus surgery, and I thought long and hard about it before agreeing to it. Of course, I wanted a skilled surgeon and a perfectionistic anesthesiologist working on me at the best hospital my health insurance would provide, and it wasn’t Johns Hopkins. I didn’t want a religious fundamentalist as a surgeon because fundamentalists are unlikely to take responsibility for a negative outcome--calling it “God’s will,” rather than their own responsibility.

I did, though, think a person with some openness to God wouldn’t be a bad idea since God’s love energies are at the heart of all human wholeness, I believe. So, with all due respect to my agnostic and atheist friends, they were out too.

The obvious choice was a Reform Jew who figured God was in the picture somehow, but not to the degree that if he had killed me or sliced off my nose he would have passed the buck to God; he’d had to have owned it himself. And he thought it would be very bad for his career and his self-image--not to mention his ability to sleep at night--to kill off a Protestant clergyperson. So Dr. Ira Papel was just the right surgeon. And I wrote to the Greater Baltimore Medical Center to request as my anesthesiologist a Seventh Day Adventist, Dr. Mark Ottley, who was always trying to goad me into theological debate at the gym where we worked out and who had so much commitment to health as a religious foundation that he couldn’t bear to let me go under forever. It all worked out beautifully.

There has been ongoing research for years about the place of prayer in contributing to the healing of those who are ill. Opponents of such research are critical of any possible positive findings, but the research continues with enough possibly positive results to keep looking into the dynamic.

Going back to 1988, San Francisco cardiologist, Dr. Randolph Byrd, conducted an experiment in which he asked born-again Christians to pray for 192 people hospitalized for heart problems, comparing them with 201 not targeted for prayer by any group known to Dr. Byrd. None of the patients knew whether they were in the group bring prayed for or not, but those who were prayed for needed fewer drugs and less help breathing.

Numerous other studies have yielded similar findings; not all have, of course. But there’s enough evidence of something positive going on with prayer and health that we shouldn’t discount the possible power of prayer as an adjunct to what may make someone well.

I don’t want to get into theology with my doctor, but I hope someone holds me up in prayer when I am sick and struggling because I will for sure be wanting to be whole.

Amen.