unexplainable

I read an interesting book this past week titled This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith by Darcey Steinke who has lived with and through a spinal injury that caused her incredible pain. The book is much more than an autobiographical account of her suffering. Each chapter looks at the history and reality of human pain through various parts of the body—spine, knees, brain, skin, heart—as a way to talk about how we make meaning of our existence as human beings.

Early on in the book she writes,

“Pain is a kind of failure. The philosopher Jack Halbertsam has written that failure is a ‘hidden history of permission in a culture of optimism.’ Failure allows the truth to come out, and pain, like failure, lets us be honest about our vulnerable bodies, our fears, our struggles, and our grief.”

Her connection was helpful to me. Pain, like failure, is something we all experience to some degree, and it reminds us of our limitations and our losses. And as I was reading her words, I was also thinking about our passage for this morning where Matthew described three people in pain whom Jesus encountered: a person with a skin disease that alienated him from society, a Roman centurion who came asking for help for a servant, and Peter’s mother-in-law.

The man with the skin disease was able to talk to Jesus because they were still on the outskirts of town. All he said to Jesus was, “You can heal me if you want to.” And Jesus answered, “I want to,” and then touched him, which automatically made Jesus ritually unclean as well, and the man’s disease disappeared.

When Jesus got to Capernaum, a Roman centurion said his servant was sick. (It is worth noting here that the word translated as “servant” is a word that also means child, but was sometimes used to refer to enslaved people, so we don’t know for sure which one it was.) The barriers between the centurion and Jesus were almost as severe as those that ostracized the man with the skin disease. And Jesus said, “I’ll come to your house and heal him,” once again breaking through obstacles. The soldier told Jesus he trusted that all Jesus had to do was say the man would be healed and it would happen. And it did.

Then Jesus got to Peter’s house and his mother-in-law was ill with a fever. In this case, no one asked for anything. Jesus saw her, touched her, and she got up and finished making dinner.

Those are amazing stories. They are also stories I read again and again in a week where Ginger has been accompanying with two people through hospice, and two of our friends are celebrating birthdays without their spouses who died. We saw a couple we know in town outside of a store. The husband has Alzheimer’s and was a painfully vacant presence as we stood and talked in the parking lot.

And then I thought about you and some of the stories I know about the pain and grief you live with and have lived through, and I wondered to make of a story where people said, “Heal me,” and Jesus said, “Okay,” and it happened.

Does life really work like that?

One of my early heroes in ministry was a man named John Claypool. Part of what made him a good minister, I think, was he was well acquainted with grief and pain because he had a daughter, Laura Lue, who died with leukemia when she was ten years old. In his book Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, he wove together some of the sermons he preached and told the story of her life, illness, and death and how it shaped him and his faith. I thought of him as I heard the man with the skin disease and the centurion call out to Jesus because of this scene from the book:

“There were the times, for example, when Laura Lue was hurting so intensely that she had to bite on a rag and used to beg me to pray to God to take away that awful pain. I would kneel down beside her bed and pray with all the faith and conviction of my soul, and nothing would happen except the pain continuing to rage on. Or again, that same negative conclusion [that our existence is absurd] was tempting when she asked me in the dark of the night: “When will this leukemia go away?” I answered: “I don’t know, darling, but we are doing everything we know to make that happen.” Then she said: “Have you asked God when it will go away?” And I said: “Yes, you have heard me pray to him many times.” But she persisted: “What did God say? When did God say it would go away?” And I had to admit God had not said a word! I had done a lot of talking and praying and pleading, but the response of the heavens had been one of silence.”

I tell you that story not to negate the healing accounts in Matthew but to say the gospel writer was trying to convey something more profound than “just ask Jesus and he’ll fix it.” Life and faith are not that simplistic.

Let me tell you one more story.

Just before I turned one, as my parents were packing to move to Africa, I got double pneumonia and nearly died. After some time, I recovered enough to be cleared to travel. One of the last stops before they went to New York to get on the passenger freighter that would take thirty-two days to sail to the port of Beira, Mozambique, they went to see my grandmother in Oklahoma City. There, a man who was pharmacist asked my parents to carry a small box of medicine for one of the bush hospitals. He had all the necessary papers, so they agreed.

They met some people on board who lived in the town of Bulawayo (in what was then Southern Rhodesia) where we were moving, and they followed them by car to our new home city. The next morning, I woke up sick again, so my parents called the only people they knew, and they showed up with a doctor who heard my story, examined me, and confirmed I had relapsed into pneumonia. Then he said, “I’m afraid your baby is going to die. We need pediatric achromycin and there is none in this country. It will take three days to get it here from South Africa and your child will not live that long.”

My dad said, “We have this box we have been carrying for the hospital in Sanyati. Let’s see what it is.” They opened it, and the only thing in the box was pediatric achromycin. And I didn’t die.

All of these stories, including the healing miracles from Matthew, call us to remember that life is not as simple as “just ask Jesus and he’ll fix it,” nor as simple as “life is painful and then you die.” What our pain means, what our lives mean, can’t be reduced to a slogan or a single statement. Maybe that is why we call it a life story.

Remember, again, that the heart of Matthew’s message is in the name the angel gave Jesus: Emmanuel, God Is With Us. You can see Jesus live into his name in the way he reached out and touched the man considered untouchable, the way he offered to go to the home of a Roman solider who was despised, and the way he noticed Peter’s mother-in-law was ill and stopped to attend to her. He was living out the very things he had just preached about, from loving enemies to considering the lilies and embracing the beauty of the moment.

John Claypool closed the sermon that included the story I read by saying,

“I need you to help me on down the way, and this is how: do not counsel me not to question, and do not attempt to give me any total answers. Neither one of those ways will work for me. The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is gift—every particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful. You can really help me if you will never let me forget this fact, just as I hope maybe I have helped some of you this morning by reminding you of the same thing.”

In a moment, we are going to sing “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” an old gospel hymn written by Fanny Crosby, a wonderful hymn writer who was born blind. Her inspiration came from Bartimaeus, a blind man who called out to Jesus as he was entering the town of Jericho. The chorus says,

Savior, savior, hear my humble cry
while on others thou art calling
do not pass me by

May we remember as we sing those words together that we are not alone in our pleas for healing and hope. God is with us and we are with each other, whether or not we can explain it. Amen.

Peace,
Milton