Healing!

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Second Sunday in Lent, March 3, 1996

John 5:1-9;16

Just before last Christmas I took a spill on the ice out in our alley. My feet splayed out just beneath the rear wheels of a refrigeration truck making a delivery down at Stephanie's. No sooner did my foot land there, than the truck began to move and rolled over my right foot. You all saw me hobble through Christmas with crutches and cane and these last weeks wearing what the hospital called a "post-op boot." The foot is healing now and though still somewhat swollen and stiff, forces me to walk with all deliberate speed and to limp a little. I'm hoping it will be healed enough to take the trip with the boys to the Presidentials this next summer.

In any case, on the Sunday following the accident, Ruth Ricker, a member of our congregation and Church Council and President of the Little People of America, greeted me out in the narthex. She offered me a knowing smile with the words, "Welcome, Jim, to the world of disabilities." And with that she was out the door.

"Welcome, Jim, to the world of disabilities." And she was right. I found myself disabled. I could not get in and out of the shower without mechanical assistance. I couldn't walk without a crutch. I couldn't put on my own shoes. I couldn't drive. I couldn't go skiing with the boys. I couldn't plow the driveway in the pre-Christmas snow storms of '95 or the blizzard of January '96 so my son Robert came to live with us to bail us out of the drifts.

"Welcome, Jim, to the world of disabilities." I have been giving some thought to Ruth's telling observation. I never thought of it that way, but after further reflection, I want to let you in on another little secret: I'm disabled in other ways as well. I can't read the exit signs on super highways without glasses or I'll cruise right by and end up on some cloverleaf to disaster. A memory, which thirty-five years ago snapped to attention with names and faces finds itself, as I approach my sixtieth summer, processing those names and faces no longer with Pentium chip speed, but what feels to me like sluggishness and a sense that from time to time the old computer crashes. My doctor calls it overload.

And as a footnote, I received in the mail yesterday a note thanking me for a letter of condolence that the writer called, "kind, sentimental, and illegible." He was able to read it, he said, only because he was a connoisseur of cartoons. Somewhere Phillips Brooks called illegible handwriting the height of selfishness, and I tend to agree. But I always remember the fury of my first grade teacher when my small motor muscles just would not make the shapes she and I wanted them to make. D's in art and writing spread across my first grade report card. . . and I'm still ticked off at her!

Now this doesn't sound like much, and it's not. In fact, I wouldn't classify myself as disabled. At the outside--at the far outside--I might classify myself as a normal person with some disabilities. Normal with a glitch or two, here or there. And aren't we all?

Normal, I mean. Of course. But I wonder. In the popular mind, as Walter Wink in a wise and compassionate reflection observes--in the popular mind there are two kinds of people: "normal and abnormal; normal and deformed, normal and disabled. Some we think are OK; others we think are not. And yet if we were pressed we would soon discover that each of us has disabilities and that if we were to share them with one another and take a close look at ourselves we would probably identify ourselves as normal people with disabilities. In our own minds each of us would be normal and we would discover a long continuum running from what we might call "slightly disabled" to "extremely disabled." But that is as far as we would go in identifying ourselves.

And here is where I want to dig in this morning, because as I look at that character lying beside the pool at--what will we call it, Bethezda?--lying there, as he says, for 38 years, one of those among what John informs us are the lame, the paralyzed the invalids, the blind--those, as Walter Wink says, who lie there and in the popular mind might be identified as abnormal, deformed, disabled. And here is the catch: Abnormal compared to whom? Deformed compared to what? By what criteria do we make judgments about who is disabled, abnormal, deformed, and who is not?

Does it not come from what we consider to be normal? Do we not we make judgments about who is abnormal, deformed or disabled on the basis of what we consider to be normal? And it is right here I believe our Christian faith and confidence that love--love--lying at the heart of the creation throws our popular mind, our conventional stereotypes, into a cocked hat. It is right here, when we begin to make our definitions of "normal" the lens through which we view and identify others that the Gospel says, "Whoa! Hold it! Hang on! For Christ's sake, stop it!" You see, this wonderful passage we read this morning is not a dazzling, supernatural miracle story, although compared to our usual perceptions of one another it affirms a miracle. It is not a narrative designed to blow apart our credulity. It is not a story written to proof-text arbitrary divine power. It is not a propaganda story written to demonstrate the one-up-manship of Jesus. The question we ask is not, "Did it really happen this way; and if so, how?" Hardly.

John with his images sends a message. With his narrative John paints the meaning of the Gospel. What John paints for us is an image of divine love, care and power making no distinction between normal and abnormal, normal and deformed, normal and disabled, but rather creating, standing behind and participating in a creation where the full humanity of each of us is affirmed. It is a creation where all of us are declared normal, where no hierarchy of abilities and disabilities is cataloged, where human value is not measured by grades on a report card, digits on a salary check, not by what we produce, who we know, where we live, what we own, and in our case this morning, not by how well we see, whether we can walk, or hear, or talk, not by our height, our waistlines, our sexual orientation, neurological intricacies, glandular differences, the physical, mental or emotional consequences of disease, or abuse, or catastrophic illness or accident, or birth trauma. When Jesus commands that paralytic to take up his bed and walk, the Gospel asserts for all time the undiminished humanity of each of us and the indefatigable love of God bearing with each and all of us through our diverse conditions and capacities. John's gospel is grounded in life! It erases distinctions we construct dividing us from one another, placing artificial values on one another's humanity. The Gospel dissolves the distinction between what is normal and what is not. The Gospel heals the wounds we induce amid our vast human diversity; it heals us, embraces us, and out of our diversity forges a unity. It grounds and sustains us all in the overarching, undergirding, recreative love of our Father-Mother Creator God.

Oh, heaven knows there is a great deal in our world denying the richness and diversity of our humanity. Our world is structured around a narrow vision of normality. Just consider where we are and what we are doing right now.

You would think, for instance, that one of the places we might find those people John refers to as invalids, the paralyzed, those who are blind and lame, you would think that because Jesus takes them so seriously you might find scores of them in church. But do we? Not many. Less than a handful. So-called normalcy rather than diversity, normalcy rather than imagination or, yes, normalcy more so even than love may rule here, too. Look at this very room. Look at this service of worship. Indeed, listen to the verbs I use: "listen" and "look." My soul! What we do here depends upon hearing and seeing, and much, much more. For instance, apart from all the color and intricate design and lighting here in this room, the incredible amount of reading we do assumes you can see and read. Or this chancel. It is designed for those of us who climb stairs. Are you in a wheel chair? Do you have arthritic knees? Did you have a stroke, or polio? You name it, you are excluded from this chancel because it is designed for what we call "normalcy." And the preaching, the prayers, the organ, the choir, you had better be able to hear or the bulk of the service will be a dead letter. This pulpit: perfect for those of us 6'4" and above. This, in Christ's name, is normalcy. And it is just a tiny illustration of a world we design as if those on the our disability continuum with more significant, profound and decisive conditions were of little value, perhaps invisible, treated as nonexistent. Do we fly right in the face of the Gospel's promise? Do we deny the full humanity, if not the existence, of the very people Jesus affirms most frequently? Do we separate ourselves-myself--from that paralyzed man John shows us at poolside and all those others crowded in among the pillars surrounding the pool eager for healing and wholeness? Of course we do. And as we in this church begin to look ahead to the twenty-first century and evaluate the building we treasure, we need make sure it opens itself structurally for a broader spectrum of men and women who wish to function fully here. We want it to provide accessibility and possibility for broader dimensions of diversity distributed by the Creator across the human family.

You know I have been thinking about another metaphor for our church. Could we consider ourselves a church, a people, a gathering of men and women at poolside? I like that: Old South, the church at poolside. Each of us with his or her full humanity intact; each of us laboring in one way or another with what we might call a disability; each of us seeking health, but not yet possessing it completely; each of us yearning for wholeness, but because of some distortion, a physical challenge, a chemical imbalance, a mental twist, an aging body, a soul in chaos we find ourselves lying at poolside alongside that paralyzed man ready for the fullness of life, yearning for a sense of completion, praying for the healing we need.

And it is healing, friends. Healing! If there is one thing our brothers and sisters with AIDS these days teach us as they wait at poolside, it is that cure for our disability may not be possible, but that healing through it is. As vital, as important, as paramount as cure may be, what counts, nonetheless, is the sure and certain confidence they rest in the affection and respect of the family they love, that they are surrounded by friends and who will not abandon them in even the most dire circumstances and that however serious the illness, however tortuous it may be, however troubled they may become, they will be secure in the arms of One who is with them in the worst the illness can do to them, never letting them go. That is truth. That is hope! That is love. That is Divine healing!

Can you receive that healing? Can I? Will we? To some degree we have already received and shared it this morning. And in a few moments I pray you may receive and know it even more profoundly. Because, you see, we are singing some hymns this morning composed or written by church men and women standing with and among us on our long human continuum of disabilities, men and women healed or even now being healed by the Gospel of Christ. We opened this morning singing a hymn of joy to a tune composed by Ludwig von Beethoven. Deaf!

A few minutes ago we sang a new text to Hassler's great passion chorale, a text celebrating and thrilling to the possibilities of health, wholeness and universal healing and reconciliation. Dosia Carlson wrote that text, a U.C.C. minister confined by childhood polio to a wheelchair and ever since writing glorious verse.

In a moment we will sing another marvelous text: "O Love, That Will Not Let Me Go." That is Christ's promise to the man at the edge of the pool, to us--and to the hymn's poet George Matheson. Blind! And, as he said when he wrote it, undergoing great mental suffering.

And finally, as we close, a hymn text by the clown preaching at the Old South Church in Boston this morning: himself, one of those disabled at poolside, perhaps with some of you, stumbling to our feet in confidence, in trust, in hope--O God please--as we hear the urgent command and heed the eternal promise of our savior, our healer Jesus Christ: take up your bed and walk!