Health

Epiphany 5 year B
Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:29-39
Health
By Rich Gamble

In just a few short sentences Mark gives us a picture of what our faith is all about. Jesus comes home with Simon and Andrew and there Jesus discovers that Simon’s Mother in law is sick with a fever. Jesus lifts her up. She is healed. She gets busy serving her guests.

It’s almost a throw away story, a filler between bigger events, a commercial. But in truth it is a concise depiction of our faith.

We talk about our lives in many ways. Illness is often a cause for concern and conversation in our lives. We talk of health when think about sickness. But in a couple of weeks we will show a movie which has health experts saying that health is much bigger than diet and exercise, medications and surgery. Health is about race, and income, and freedom.

They did an interesting study in the movie. They gave people a cold virus and measured whose immune systems best fought off getting the cold. In studies of a sufficiently large sample, they were able to show that the better your income, the better you were at fighting a cold. In fact it goes beyond our current conditions. People who grew up in households where their parents owned their home were better at fighting off the virus than people who grew up in apartments their parents rented. And people whose parents moved from an apartment to a house while the child lived at home were better able as adults to fight off the virus than people whose family never moved and worse than people who always lived in the house their parents owned. Housing security as a child makes us healthier adults.

Income we earn as adults is a large factor in determining how long we will live. On the whole people who make over $100,000 a year will live longer than people who make $50,000. And people who make $50,000 will live longer than people making 30 and so on.

The biggest impact on our nation’s health in the last hundred years wasn’t all the latest health technology, it was the improvement in the standard of living of folks, and the reduction of the disparity between rich and poor. Unfortunately that reduction in disparity ended forty years ago. We’ve been heading in the wrong direction ever since.

Race is another important factor. African Americans on the whole will not live as long as Caucasians. This has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the stress caused by racism.

One of biggest things that we can do to improve the nation’s health is to more equitably distribute our nation’s wealth.

Economic Justice is a leading health factor. To say that makes us think in new and broader ways about health; our physical health is directly tied to the just distribution of resources, power, and equality.

The issue of health is much broader than sickness and medicine. The folks in Jesus’ day knew that, that is why Mark talks about Jesus curing illness and demonic possession in the same breath. Both can be seen as the internalized manifestation of the broader ills of the community. When we see the world through the lens of the Domination System we are internalizing that which is opposed to the rule of the love of God. We see that clearly when one of the demons Jesus encounters calls itself Legion. The demon was the internalized manifestation of the oppressive Roman military which is the only place the title of legion was used in those days.

Those who believe in and support systems of greed and violence are in a sense possessed by those demons.

Those who suffer from the toxic environment of economic, political, or social injustice are made sick as the whole of society is sickened.

If we read these stories as journalistic accounts of healing then they have little to say to us except that Jesus had a gift for healing. But if we read these stories as stories then we can see in the healing of people from demons and illness Jesus was overcoming the internalized world view of the domination systems and the internalized physical effects of that system.

I believe that Mark told this little story to slip in the basic vision of what Jesus was all about. Healing bodies, hearts, minds, relationships, social systems, religious systems, political systems, so that those bodies, hearts, minds, relationships and systems could serve others.

This leads us to looking at our lives of faith in two ways: healing and serving. The thing is that there isn’t a clean, cut and dried, delineation. We are always in the process of working with God to heal ourselves, our relationships and our communities. Part of that healing is found in our service to the call of God to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We are healed to serve. We are healed by serving. We provide healing to others by our service to God.

We are a wounded people. When you get to know a group of folks, you find out that they often are carrying wounds that are not healed. We are wounded by our jobs or lack of them. We are wounded by children or their absence. We are wounded by the violence or uncertainty of our childhood. We are wounded by the pain of those we love. We are wounded by those who build a nation of great disparity in opportunity, resources and power. We are wounded by those who will not try to change the way things are.

For these wounds, for the illness of injustice, the call of Christ is the call of healing. The love of God helps us move beyond the wounds and move towards the solutions offered by service.

So it comes to this. If you are not working to make the world better for someone who needs help, then your health will always be in doubt. If you are waiting to get all the answers, or get brave enough or strong enough or smart enough or healthy enough to reach out to someone worse off than you, then you probably will never make the reach. And without the service, true healing is in doubt.

The Christian faith isn’t expressed in intellectual speculation, or emotional ventilation but in acts of compassionate liberation. It isn’t a faith for bystanders. Like Simon’s mother-in-law we are healed to serve. But more than that, we are healed in serving and we heal the world through our service.

Isaiah’s poetry speaks of how the all powerful God strives to aid the most vulnerable humans. So we, with whatever health we may possess are called to do likewise. And when we do so, we are acting in concert with God who heals us, so that the world may be healed. And that is good news.