Healing Mercies and Hallelujahs
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 9, 2022
Healing Mercies and Hallelujahs – Luke 17: 11-19
There are really only three prayers we need, writes the foul-mouthed modern Christian mystic, Anne Lamott. And they are: Help, Thanks, and Wow. It may not be the words they use, but in today’s story, I hear the lepers cry out a prayer for help.
On its face, today’s scripture story may be a simple, charming one. While on a journey to Jerusalem, Jesus came upon some lepers and healed them. One, a Samaritan, even came back to say thank you. But for those of us who pick up the Bible asking who and what is God, and how are we to live, this story may be troubling.
For there are plenty of us who live with chronic disease, a terminal illness, a persistent depression, a form of disability, or the challenges of aging. We’d like to be made well. We’d like to go skipping off to the priests with good news. If his faith made the Samaritan well, then what about us? Can’t God hear our fervent prayers for help? Isn’t our faith enough? This story may be enough to make a person angry or to lead us to despair. Why can’t we and the people we love be as lucky as the lepers in this story? Is there something we have done to deserve our plight or to not deserve healing? For some of us, it’s hard not to go there.
The ancient Israelites struggled hard with that question, too. Lepers, themselves, were commonly believed to have angered God somehow. What’s more there was a concern that God’s judgment might be leveled against those with whom the lepers associated. So, according to the socio-religious law as recorded in Numbers and Leviticus, “any person with a leprous disease was required to live ‘outside the camp,’ and cry out ‘unclean, unclean,’ whenever anyone approached. If a leper were fortunate enough to recover, a priest had to certify that the person was clean before he or she could return to the community.”[1]
I can’t imagine that in my isolation from my loved ones it would help me get any better any faster by contemplating what I must have done to deserve this disease. But that sounds very much like the plight of the lepers in today’s story who greet Jesus outside the village and keep their distance.
I find it odd that Jesus doesn’t use any medical tests or ointments or even healing touch with these folks. He just says, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” That’s all it takes to make them clean. Maybe it’s Jesus’s miraculous power that does it. Maybe it’s that they were never actually sick but rather unfairly outcast by some priests abusing their authority, and that troublemaker Jesus is calling their bluff. I wasn’t there, but even if I had been, I’m not sure it’s anything I’d ever truly understand, as a mere, finite human being.
I’d like to be able to explain suffering. I’d like to tell the folks with whom I visit that there’s reason and a purpose for their suffering. I know folks who do, and I know folks who find that encouraging. But I don’t tend to find that encouraging. It doesn’t really work for me.
It seems to me that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, and all of us are a messy mix of good and bad. I certainly can’t figure out who deserves what. And at this point, I think it’s because deserving ain’t got nothing to do with it.
In her book, Help. Thanks. Wow., Anne Lamott, offers a similar take on suffering. “Human lives are hard,” she writes, “even those of health and privilege, and [they] don’t make much sense.”
Lamott writes, “This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horse[pucky]. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’"[2]
Maybe that’s not a source of obvious comfort to everyone here. But I find it comforting, because I have come to believe that suffering is like the weather. I’m not talking about climate change. I’m talking about the weather. I’m talking about naturally occurring conditions that are largely beyond our human control. Yes, we can take steps to put ourselves in the way of more favorable conditions. But try as we might, our human efforts will not stop suffering from coming our way.
I have known top athletes who have died of heart attacks. And I have known pack-a-day smokers who have lived well past the age of 100. I have known PTO president mothers of three who have died in their prime, and I have known child abusers who have lived to a ripe old age. We can’t always count on some kind of medical or ethical math to tell us how many years we get or of what quality those years will be.
So, let me say it again in my worst grammar so that you know I mean it, deserving ain’t got nothing to do with it. We cannot control the weather, and we can never fully control our suffering. So, let’s not make it any worse by telling ourselves we deserve it or by telling someone else they deserve it or by telling ourselves–or others–we really shouldn’t be suffering when we just are.
Instead, we can try dealing bravely with the conditions before us, trusting that through the love of God as known in Jesus we are being made well in one mysterious, miraculous way or another. The word “well” that Jesus uses in today’s passage can mean healed, but it could also be translated as made whole, saved, or delivered.
Me? My suffering most often has taken the form of insomnia, anxiety, and panic attacks. You don’t need to pity me. I know it could be better. I know it could be worse. These are just the conditions I have to deal with.
I have not yet found it helpful to berate myself for not being asleep. What seems to be much more helpful is to try to accept that I’m still awake, but I’m also still loved. And though it doesn’t necessarily allow me to sleep, it allows my spirit to experience a greater sense of wholeness, ease, and rest. At least, it doesn’t make it any worse. I don’t know if that sounds like very much to you, but to me, that is a mysterious medicine and healing mercy on the level of the miraculous.
Jesus tells the leper, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” Maybe that doesn’t mean, if we just had enough faith we wouldn’t suffer. Maybe it means that even when we suffer, we can trust we’re still loved, and that’s how the miracle gets in, if we let it, through the teeny-tiny cracks in our armor–cracks we might call faith.
I think that’s the only way I could find myself running back to Jesus, giving thanks and praising God like the Samaritan. If I knew that it’s God’s love that makes me well in a way that goes far beyond my persistent suffering.
One thing I will say about suffering is it can have a funny kinship to gratitude. It doesn’t have to. Sometimes, if I get a cold or have a flat tire or whatever, I just get angry, because it’s getting in the way of my plans. I take for granted that things will go as I expect and that my life will have a certain level of ease–I feel entitled to it. But sometimes, I get over a cold or a stranger helps me fix my tire or whatever it is, and I am moved to tears of gratitude. Like, how have I never realized how beautiful the sun can be in the fall? And, isn’t walking around the block a miracle? And, how is it that even in our oft-maligned nowadays a stranger will still stop to help fix a tire?
In Help. Thanks. Wow, Anne Lamott writes about praying for a friend’s daughter, Angie, who has young children and a diagnosis of aggressive lung cancer. Lamott imagines the whole family held in healing light. She prays for them “to get their miracle but she writes, too, about wishing she had a magic wand or even better that God had a magic wand.
“I’ve never seen evidence of it,” she writes. “But…I have seen miracles, although they always take too long to make themselves known, if you ask me… I have seen many people survive unsurvivable losses, and seen them experience happiness again. How is this possible? Love flowed to them from their closest people, and from their community, surrounded them, sat with them, held them, fed them, swept their floors… I know Angie and her mother will get a miracle, although it may not be the one they want–the one we pray for, in which the doctors break the grip of the cancer and help Angie live. But the family will come through, even if Angie dies. The little ones will need their grandma on board. Time will pass. Death will not be the end of the story.”
Whether it comes in sighs, tears, or angry curses, when we’re honest we too, can cry out a prayer of help to God. When our faith in persistent love in the face of persistent suffering brings us merciful, holy healing, may we too be moved to prayers of thanks.
When we catch our breath at the miracle that is our living and our loving, may the prayer rise from our lips, too:
Wow. Hallelujah. Amen.
[1] The Gospel According to Luke. New Interpreters Bible Commentary, 325.
[2] Anne Lamott. Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. (Riverhead Books: New York, 2012), 24.
