Wiped Out

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

April 26, 2009

Text: Acts 3: 12-19

Some of the healers of my childhood days were eccentric and maybe a little primitive.

My great-grandmother on my mother’s side, Mary Josephine Moore, “Josie,” was said to be able to cure thrush, a common baby’s condition, the symptom being a rash that breaks out around their mouths. Neighbors would bring their babies to her; she would take each baby in her arms cuddle her, and when the baby was settled, she would get real close and breathe on the baby’s mouth, or kiss the baby on the mouth (I have heard both versions from relatives.) In a few days, the blemish would go away. She had a lot of repeat visits from mothers and babies, so there must have been something to it.

Now my grandmother dipped snuff. The snuff did not come in a little pouch but in a little tin can. But she would take a little stick, put it in her mouth and then dip it in the snuff box and return in to her mouth. The most recent version of my grandmother’s thrush-healing abilities includes the belief that it was really the tobacco in her spittle or on her breath which did the healing. Which goes to show you that the Moore-Elliston-Hall clan had gotten scientific-minded as new generations came along! (I liked the story better when we all believed she had supernatural curative powers.)

In Graford, where I spent a good part of my childhood with my grandparents on my daddy’s side, Gene and Della Lavelle Hall, there was a man named Dr. Garland, known locally as the “foot-rubbin’ doctor.” Not a podiatrist, but a doctor who reportedly could heal many illnesses of the body simply by the manipulation of their feet. Now my grandparents had their own Dr, Smith, a licensed MD whom they went to most of the time. But I can remember my dad shaking his head when he would hear that his  mother had snuck off again to the foot-rubbin’ doctor because Doc Smith’s prescriptions were just not getting the job done!

And every now and then we would hear about the holy-roller churches wherein some members had the gift of healing by the laying on of hands and praying. We were skeptical. Methodists and Presbyterians like to do things “decently and in good order” (First Corinthians 14:40). But we were inclined to reserve judgment about the Pentecostals’ belief in miraculous healing. After all, the Bible had many stories of Jesus and the apostles healing people. It did not seem prudent to voice reservation about the powers of the Almighty. (The real line was drawn when someone of our acquaintance would go to purported faith healers in place of a doctor’s attention. We figured that medical doctors could certainly be the agents of God’s curative powers, too. And it couldn’t hurt to work all the angles!)

We still rely on healers of all kinds, and we ask for their help.

It is hard to imagine the condition of sick or crippled people in Jesus’ day. There were physicians, but they were scarce, and expensive and primitive. Life for sick people was too often “solitary, poor, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” (Thomas Hobbes) This was so especially for people like the nameless man who was crippled from birth. Can you imagine being carried by someone to the gate of the temple every day (not into the temple precinct itself, where he would not have been welcome) so he could beg money or food, just to survive. He was entirely dependent on the charity of others. No systems were in place for the helpless.

The apostles, following Pentecost had formed a community of believers in which everyone shared in the welfare of each other. They would gather and break bread “with glad and generous hearts.”  It is one of the most idyllic pictures of the church in the Bible. Peter and John, fresh from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and Peter’s first sermon, were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer. They were Jesus’ disciples but this did not mean that they had forsaken their heritage. But, as becomes evident, the function of the church was not just to gather to eat, pray and sing. That warm agape fellowship was empowering for a higher purpose.

At one of gates to the Temple area, they are asked by the crippled man for alms (money. We do not have money to give you, but I give you what I have, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” And Peter helps him up and he leaps up and walks into the temple with them, jumping around and praising God.

I have had this feeling so many times. I am asked for a little pocket change and in reaching for money thought to myself, what would happen if I said something like Peter did: “You don’t have to live this way; in the name of Jesus, pick up your sign and walk.”

Peter does an amazing thing! Which raises all kinds of questions! Wonder and amazement!
I wonder: did the religious leaders even know the crippled man? Had he become invisible to them?

What are we to make of these healings? Who is cured and who is not are questions which I have agonized throughout my life. Here are my thoughts as I have wrestled with God’s healing ministries. God’s most basic gift to the world is the consistency of nature, what we have sometimes called “natural laws.” God creates the world, which is absolutely dependent on God, (for God is not a being among other beings, but the “Ground of all Being.” (Paul Tillich) God is continually active, “sustaining its ordained patterns,” which we are still discovering!

But God is not bound by ordained patterns. Consider “the freedom and love of the Creator” who chose to do something miraculous by “bringing the creation to be.” “God works miracles outside our resources,” as well as within our resources. Gabriel Fackre, in Feasting on the Word, a commentary on lectionary texts.) God works “in unexpected and intense ways, as well as in familiar and undramatic ones…[which] will not seem strange to people of faith.” (The Illustrated Bible Handbook, pages 463-466). And so I pray for what I need and for what it seems to me others need. I have tried to stop advising the Almighty. And I no longer decide what is possible for God to do! I have many unanswered questions and I hope that will be a Q and A time in the hereafter. The witness of the Christian gospel is that the Holy Spirit works in ways we consider unusual (as through Peter) and through the skill and intelligence and self-discipline of doctors and other health professionals. Both are creative, healing actions of God through human beings.

In the MASH TV series, there is an occasion when Winchester is getting ready to operate on a soldier. Father Mulcahey tells Winchester that he will has been praying for healing. Winchester retorts that the good priest had better be praying that he and the other doctors know what they are doing. As Winchester walks away Father Mulcahey mutters to himself: “That’s exactly what I have been praying for.”

God’s healing power is present with us as we live in these fragile bodies, and will be with us as the same loving God in whatever forms we take on the other side of the River. Meanwhile, God wills abundant life for each person, without exception, for as long as our mortal bodies last us.

So what we do we learn from the healing of the man crippled from birth?

#That the healing and reconciling power that was in Jesus is now given to the apostles to use. The same Jesus was with and for people continues in the work of his disciples, people like us.

#That healings like this one are signs that the kingdom of God is still breaking in.

#That Peter and John were doing the most natural thing in the world for someone who had been learning and being shaped by Jesus in his ministry:  in meeting a desperate fellow human being, one ostracized from his own people, they used God’s power to make him well. You can suppose that Peter and John are thinking to themselves as they encounter the lame man, “We have seen this before, when we were following Jesus. The Risen Crucified One has sent us to continue his work!”

#Our anointing and touch may indeed be one way Jesus anoints and touches and intercedes in real time, now.

We live in a vastly different context than Peter and John. We know vastly more about bodies and minds and diseases and causes of suffering than Peter and John or anyone else in the first century did.  And so we are called to bring all of the resources at our disposal to the ministry of relieve needless human suffering of body, mind and spirit. To say this another way, God is still creating and re-creating; creation is not a one-time event but is a continuing process, as we know now. We are participants in God’s work in the world, junior partners in healing and redeeming.

So we perform acts of mercy to people outside the gate, as Peter and John did. Millions of persons alive on this planet die daily of curable diseases and for lack of basic necessities. There are millions of people without the benefit of basic health care. For Christians, health care and healing can never be reserved only for those who can afford it! And we are called to use our power and knowledge to help. Peter knows a teachable moment when he sees one. He has another service to render, not only to the lame man but for walking-around people too.

The healing of the man is a signal of God’s saving grace.

Peter, himself a Jew, speaks of the wrongs the religious leaders did in crucifying Jesus, “the author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” It is a hard word. To our shame, the church has used such texts as this to foster persecution of the Jews. Peter’s point is that not only those who cried “crucify him” were to blame, but all who deserted or acquiesced at the time are guilty---which means Peter, too! But there is hope; there is forgiveness. Jesus words from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing,” are words now on Peter’s lips. The same Jesus who received sinners in his ministry on earth now invites you to turn:

Turn away from your old lives; so that your sins may be wiped out. Picture a dry erase white board with your sins on it, with an eraser swept over it. “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden…. Turn to God in faith. “If with all your heart, you shall truly seek him, you shall truly find him;”

Turn into the church with other followers of Jesus (redemptive fellowship); And turn toward serving the neighbor with the powers and skills God has given you. (Fackre)

“The way to God is a life immersed deeply in the land of hope and hurt, keeping company with a band of fellow pilgrims.” (Source lost)

We are servants of God’s power to heal and to save.

The apostles were swept along by the Holy Spirit and bold in their witness to Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

And so must we!

We work as we are empowered and use our disciplined skills and resources.

And we witness to the One whose power is here and now saving us and the world.