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The gift of healing at Christmas
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| 12/28/2008 |
Last summer while on sabbatical, we did a lot of camping. We became quite proficient at setting up our tent, which, as all campers know, is a project of some tension often accompanied by marital stress.
Our last camping trip was a family reunion of sorts with my brother and sister along the coast in Santa Barbara, California. My brother Teddy had reserved, or so he thought, three contiguous campgrounds for four nights in a row. But as it turned out, because of his poor internet skills, he arranged for three different campgrounds, on four different nights, and none of them were next to each other.
So each morning we had the burden of taking down a perfectly constructed tent, moving it, and setting it up next to strangers less familiar, and certainly less genteel, than my brother and sister. No one in his or her right mind can enjoy setting up a tent that much; I was pretty sure that significant marital strife was soon to follow. If I could’ve gotten bars on the Blackberry, I would’ve made reservations at a beachfront resort, pronto.
I was saved when we figured out that each morning we could pull up the stakes and pick up the entire tent and carry it down the road to our new locale. It was quite a sight to watch us carrying our geodesic dome tent from place to place. We became the curiosity, if not the laughingstock, of the campground as we walked our balancing, jiggling tent to its next destination.
I tell this story, a rather silly and insignificant story, to illustrate an important image found in the poetry of the Gospel of John, in the eighth verse: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." John is saying this: “God has pitched a tent in our camp.” This is John's Christmas story. What Luke tells so carefully with Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem, and the baby Jesus being born in a manger, because there is no room in the inn, and then the shepherds hearing the good news in the fields from the lips of the angels, John simply tells by saying, "and the Word became flesh and pitched a tent in our camp." No matter where we have to move our camp from day to day because of the chances and changes of human life, the Word made flesh will continue to camp among us. God's Word will always pitch a tent.
In the Old Testament, God is often seen living in a tent, camped among the people of Israel; God’s very presence is among them. You might notice each Sunday morning when the clergy scamper up the chancel steps, we bow to the cross on the windowsill. While this shivers the timbers in my low church sensible shoes, I was taught to do it as lad so I do it still. Many of you do it when the processional cross passes you in the aisle. That’s fine. We were taught to reverence the reality of the presence of God among us, represented as contained in the symbol of the cross. Or, we come from a church where the holy communion was kept in a tabernacle on the altar with an ever-burning candle next to it, and we were taught to genuflect before it, because in the tabernacle (an aumbry, for those who do the NYT Sunday puzzle) is the presence of the Body of Christ.
What John is telling us in his Christmas story is that the tent that God has pitched is not out in the campground, not in the cross nor tabernacle. God has pitched the tent in our very flesh. If we are going to be bowing in the church, we should be bowing to each other, because the presence of God is incarnate in each other. God is in the flesh of your neighbor, not up on the windowsill. God is not just the thoughts of your mind, but resident in your very flesh.
That’s the reason that the Sunday following Christmas—the Sunday on which we always read these verses from the Gospel of John—is a healing service, a service when we invite anyone desiring the laying on of hands for the strengthening of God’s healing spirit within you. The laying on of hands is an ancient and focused form of intercessory prayer calling on God’s presence within our very flesh to be about the work of healing.
For many, spirituality is strictly cerebral, rarely physical. The Gospel of John, in whispering through the centuries that the Word became Flesh and dwelt within us, reminds us that there is no separating the mind from the body, as far as God’s presence among us is concerned. When we promise at baptism “to seek and serve Christ in all persons,” this isn’t an intellectual enterprise, but a journey into the physical and fleshy reality of the human lives we seek. Christ is not discovered only within a person, but within the actual location of the person. So, Christ is found where Christ has pitched the tent, in the flesh of the homeless man in the overnight shelter, to name just one possible example. But, let’s not be cute with clichés of where Christ dwells. Just look right into your own fleshy selves.
One thought that makes many twitch is the reality that it is not just our mind that bears witness to the reality of God in our life, but our bodies. God is in our flesh, even the flesh we’d rather do without.
It’s funny how as the year turns anew that all advertising for the stores is about weight loss and storage. I guess the two most made resolutions are to get organized and lose weight.
Losing weight is usually an enterprise of vanity. But what if honoring our body, taking care of it, was about honor and witness to the very presence of the Word in our flesh?
Now, as the years pass on, most of us become increasingly disappointed in our bodies, or their decaying nature becomes a spiritual burden to us. How can the Word dwell within our flesh if our physical bodies are breaking down and aching more? It’s a fair question. I take comfort that God’s journey with me is a physical one. With the belief that God is within me, I know that there is no real separation between my body and mind. I cannot say that my body does one thing while my mind thinks another. And, I have cancer, or diabetes, or an addiction, then God is in that with me. The prayers for healing are about allowing God into the physical reality and pain of my life—and not just in an emotional sense.
The day will come when the earthen vessel that my body is will be separated from all that God loves about me. That is what we hope for in the prospect of death. We cannot avoid it. But in this journey of physical life, when we cannot even imagine what life changes to even as we hope for it, God journeys with us physically.
Here is a story from my ministry that seems relevant:
One Saturday morning, back in the late 80’s, I took communion to the home of man in the last stages of life. “I am dying of AIDS,” he told me, and in that moment I felt he was lying in his tomb, already decaying. I sat with him, and he told me of how alone he was. He had lost all of his friends, and his partner had died not so many months ago. He felt tremendous pain because his mother would not speak to him because he was gay. “She’s disowned me,” he told me, “and that is worse than the pain that wrecks my body right now.”
Then he told me, “In the next room, I have the pills and drugs to end my life. I can’t go on. It will be nothing but more pain for the months ahead. After you leave, I am going to do it. Do you think that’s okay?” he asked me.
I had nothing to say, no advice. So I just pulled out my little wooden box and said, “Let’s share communion together,” setting up the bread and the wine. After the prayers, we broke the bread, and each ate it, along with the wine, calling them “the gift of new and unending life in Christ.”
Right after sipping the wine and before the final prayer of this home service, he said, “Excuse me,” and shuffled off to the bedroom. I heard some rumbling around. I grew panicked, but remained frozen. I wondered if he would be back. Then I heard the toilet flush, and in a moment he shuffled back in. “Are you alright,” I asked, relieved. “Oh yes,” he said, “I just wanted to flush those pills away before we finished.”
God could not save him from his disease, and when he died eight weeks later, he had overcome death. He died healed and reconciled and at peace, his last weeks full of growth and new life amidst the struggle and the pain. His mother was at the funeral, having reached an uneasy, but liberating, reconciliation with her son. For him, that reconciliation was resurrection, even as his life slipped away.
God has pitched a tent in your very life, in your very flesh. God dwells within you, so that you may have life, and have life abundantly.
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