Sermon - Becoming Whole

Isaiah 35:1-10, Psalm 27, John 5:1-18

The Healing At the Pool of Bethezda.

Have you ever wondered why Jesus heals people? There are famous stories of healing in the bible but healing isn’t a large part of the Biblical story up until Jesus. Yet, we have made healing so synonymous with God’s work that we pray for it often. Unlike the centuries of the biblical narrative, we live in a world that has potent medicine and treatment, yet we still turn to God for healing. It isn’t just our desire for health, or that we know we need God, I think there is something even more to it. We want something that only God can offer that is beyond health, we want wholeness. We want to be healthy in mind, body, and spirit. We want to become whole.

What does it mean to be whole? Well, sickness or even a disability can tell us a lot about that, by telling us what wholeness is not. Numerous things happen when we are sick. Usually, there is something in us that is not meant to be there - like a virus or bacteria. Something that our body has to fight against, something that is distorting or eating away at us. Our body has to put all of its energy into self-protection and that often means that other parts of our body, mind, or spirit aren’t working right. Sometimes an intense fever can distort our mind's functioning. Sometimes your body can use so much energy that theirs no energy for anything else. We could go on.

This tells us a great deal about the wholeness God wants for us. We too often ingest things that aren’t good for us and end up hurting or even destroying ourselves. Yes by eating, but also by what we watch, how we act, who we hang out with, and more. We don’t realize it, or maybe we are just ignoring it, but there is a lot out there that is really bad for us - media, activities, conversations, and more. This lack of wholeness, is like we are trying to build a puzzle, but we use gum and sticks instead of the actual puzzle pieces. On a spiritual level, we are taking in evil and it is now working through our body. We are acting out and ingesting something God did not mean for us and now our spirit is fighting back. If you are struggling to find the peace that surpasses understanding, if a godly lasting joy seems to escape you, look at what you are taking in and understand that your body, mind, and spirit are probably fighting off something that is not good for you - at least in the way you are taking it in.

I will admit as much as I know where and how to find, ingest, and live in God’s love and joy, I too often do seek other things. I have an addictive personality, so I can very easily get into, even in obsessive ways, games, shows, or activities that take me away from what I am meant for. Many of these things are not good for me or us even in small amounts, but even good things can become bad for me or you if we take too much in. A worldly example might be sleeping too much or working, eating or too much water. Yet this negative excess becomes even more true when we realize that it gets in the way of our relationship with God too. Wholeness here is about ultimately taking in God and trying to realize that (everything we do, experience, and take in should be a way in which we meet, understand, and become closer to God x2). If something isn’t doing that, we either aren’t looking at it right, we are taking in too much, or we shouldn’t be taking it in at all.

Cancer is an interesting vision of sickness or a lack of wholeness. Here our cells are rebelling against their natural function or the purpose of cooperating with the rest of our body. It isn’t a foreign invader or a lack of something, it is a rebel in our bodies. Something in us wants to be something that hurts the rest of it. It’s like in our metaphorical puzzle, that we are trying to jam in a piece in the wrong spot and make it fit. We can understand this isn’t wholeness.

We can find this broken reality in all of us, even if we don’t have cancer. Cancer just becomes a physical sign of the ways that our desires, our minds, our bodies are rebelling against God’s purpose for us. All of us can look at our lives and see something we want, even really want that is bad for us. Maybe too much sugar, a relationship, a job, or a financial reality. These are only lesser signs of the ways that our wills/desires and even our actions are rebelling against God and His purpose for our lives. We have a cancer of the heart that we have too often given free rein. As Jesus said, “Evil comes from the heart”.

This goes deeper though. When we allow evil to reign over us, even in ways that we feel are minor, we become those rebels. We live out a different kingdom and we act against what God wants for us and the world around us. I remember reading, I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “We shouldn’t be surprised when we get sick. We have rebelled against the creator, we are fighting for a different Kingdom, so of course, God’s kingdom is going to have to fight or debilitate rebels”. Sadly, we can become a cancer to God’s world that God needs to hold at bay. Wholeness in this reality is about aligning our wills and actions to God and living into who we are meant to be. We need God to guide our thoughts. We need to be of one mind with God in a humbleness that says, “Not my will, but yours be done”

I recognize I am talking about sickness in a way that may not be comfortable or approved of, I will ratify that, but give me a quick moment to relate wholeness to disabilities. A disability is often the lack of something or the dysfunction of some part of us that creates a limitation. Many of us have obvious disabilities, but there are many disabilities that are easier to hide. This might be the first way we think about wholeness. When a puzzle is missing a puzzle piece or when a puzzle piece is broken, we know that it isn’t whole.

On a spiritual reality, we can often feel like we lack something or like something in us isn’t working right, because its true. Through both our own action and inaction and what we experience in the world, we do lack the relationships we are meant for, especially the one with God and this means that our body, mind, and spirit aren’t working as they should be. Most, if not all of us, live with a spiritual disability.

At all these levels we need God’s healing. Now to clarify, as Jesus did, just because we get sick, have a disability, get cancer, or get in an accident, does not mean we are worse than anyone else. What it does point to is that we still have a way to go in our faith, and our relationship with God and that ultimately, we need to be healed and find our wholeness in God.

I want to quickly look now at our 3rd miracle, where Jesus heals the man at the pool. We don't know a lot about this man, other than that he is weak, feeble, and alone. These are all levels of sickness and a lack of wholeness. I think his sickness is ambiguous because that means that most of us can relate to it. Most of us have felt weak and alone.

Normally, those who were sick would wait under the shade of a portcullis, and when the water was stirred by an angel they would get help from someone to get in. I don’t know how often this led to miracles, but we know that this man couldn’t get there in time and didn’t get help. What this meant in this moment, as he faced Jesus, was that he was more willing and able to depend on Jesus. His physical and social sickness had actually equipped him to see Jesus and to respond. So, he was actually more able to find wholeness with God because he could physically see his needs. This is what any kind of weakness should do in us. It should point us to, make us watchful for and ready to respond when Jesus approaches us. And He is calling.

Up until now we have looked at the negative aspects and our inability to live into wholeness, but here we see why we need Jesus and our great hope. God wants to give us wholeness. He wants to give us healing at all levels. We can’t achieve that on our own. We need his help and God will act miraculously in our body, mind, heart, and soul - when it is good for us and those around us - and we need to trust and follow him through it all.

You might remember the paralyzed man that was lowered through the roof. Jesus didn’t heal him right away, he said “your sins are forgiven”. In that moment, Jesus saw that what that paralyzed man needed more than anything else was to be whole in his spirit. Jesus did eventually heal him physically too, but he did it at a time that was for the benefit and wholeness of him and the community around him. The man we hear about today was healed, but then Jesus tells him to “go and sin no more, or else something worse may happen”. We see something here. The brokenness of our spirit and our broken relationship with God is what, too often, leads us to the brokenness of everything else.

So healing and wholeness, is first about a right relationship with God, which then leads to a right relationship in our body, in our communities, even with our stuff. We all long to be whole and yet we too often want it on our terms, taking in the wrong things, following our own desires, or rebelling against God. Our God is a God who desires to give us wholeness and healing, so we should turn to him and seek it and follow him to it. The healing we need might not be what we want (at first), but again we have to trust God. Finally, just as this man came to the temple when he was healed, we should use every bit of wholeness and restoration as a reason to depend on and seek God even more. It was there that this man met and knew Jesus and there that we can find a wholeness that we can realize too. AMEN