This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2005 Daniel Harper.
Reading
The reading this morning is from a sermon by Theodore Parker, a sermon which almost split the Unitarians in the middle 19th C., by minimizing or denying the importance of the miracles of Jesus which are reported in the Christian scriptures. The sermon was called “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” and Parker wrote:
“Let us look at this matter a little more closely. In actual Christianity — that is, in that portion of Christianity which is preached and believed — there seem to have been, ever since the time of its earthly founder, two elements, the one transient, the other permanent. The one is the thought, the folly, the uncertain wisdom, the theological notions, the impiety of man; the other, the eternal truth of God. These two bear perhaps the same relation to each other that the phenomena of outward nature, such as sunshine and cloud, growth, decay, and reproduction, bear to the great law of nature, which underlies and supports them all. As in that case, more attention is commonly paid to the particular phenomena than to the general law; so in this case, more is generally given to the Transient in Christianity than to the Permanent therein.”
SERMON — “Healing”
If you had read our church’s newsletter, or our church’s Web site, you would have seen that I gave my sermon topic for today as “Forgiveness.” No doubt some of you actually came here this morning to hear me preach on forgiveness; and no doubt some people stayed at home so they wouldn’t have to hear me preach on forgiveness. Well, I started to prepare a sermon on forgiveness, but I didn’t get very far before it turned into a different sermon. Yet even though this isn’t quite the sermon that was advertised, I hope it will do nonetheless. And some Sunday, I promise you that I will return to the topic of forgiveness.
As I was preparing the sermon this week, I found myself thinking about something that happened late last winter, when I wound up at the beside of a man who was unconscious and who… but let me back up a little, and tell you a little bit about where I was late last winter.
Last year, I was serving as the interim associate minister with the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois. They were a congregation of down-to-earth, no-nonsense Midwesterners without an ounce of pretension. And they have long been a congregation of radicals and skeptics. The Geneva Unitarians took the word “God” out of their congregational covenant in the 1880’s, with the result that the congregational church in Geneva broke off having shared worship services with them in the 1880’s because, said the Congregationalists, the Unitarians couldn’t be trusted to actually believe in God. Even more radical, the Geneva Unitarians had three women ministers before 1910. In other words, they were and are typical Midwestern Unitarian radicals who have had no truck with the supernatural for over a century.
The current senior minister in Geneva is a woman named Lindsay Bates, a hard-headed New England Yankee who grew up in the Bridgewater Unitarian church. Like many of us New Englanders, Lindsay is plain-spoken to the point of being sharp-toungued. She does not tolerate sloppy thinking, and she’ll let you know when she thinks you’re not quite up to snuff. Which meant I liked her pretty well.
I was surprised, therefore, to learn that Lindsay was a certified Reiki master. I admit that I know next to nothing about Reiki, except that it is a kind of system of healing based on the old Chinese concept of “ch’i,” or the energy flow within a person. (I’m sure some of you know quite a bit about Reiki, and will be able to tell us more during social hour.) I don’t know much about Reiki, but it didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of Lindsay’ Bates’s personality. There were some members of the congregation who were also Reiki practitioners; and, since it is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, there were also those who thought the whole Reiki thing was a crock of beans.
Yet no matter what people thought of Reiki, there was this strong sense throughout the congregation that part of the business of the congregation was healing. Not just spiritual healing, or emotional healing, but physical healing as well. Lindsay was widely credited with one or two definite physical heaings (not that she’d make that claim herself). Now I realize that historically religions have been in the business of healing. But my sense has been that for the large part North American Unitarian Universalists feel that healing is a very small part of what we do in our congregations. Many of us don’t even pray, and we certainly don’t do anointing or laying-on-of-hands, or anything like that.
The Geneva church, however, placed some stock in the healing powers available at that church; even the ones who didn’t believe in Reiki. And as I thought about it, even a skeptic like me could think of some good and reasonable explanations for the repots of healing: coincidence; the mind-body connection we’re learning about; the reported power of prayer; and so on. And I found myself becoming more attuned to the possibility that even Unitarian Universalist congregations might have something to do with healing. Maybe I had missed something in the past. I was willing to keep an open mind.
One Sunday afternoon in late winter, we got two pastoral calls – crises, really – that needed the immediate attention of the ministers. A long-time member of the congregation died suddenly (but not unexpectedly), and it made the most sense that Lindsay, as the minister who had been there 28 years, should visit that family. And a man in the congregation had been in a terrible car accident, was in the Intensive Care Unit or ICU at a nearby hospital, having just come out of surgery. I’d spent some time doing volunteer chaplaincy in a hospital, so I went of the visit him.
I arrived at the hospital to find the family in shock. Only his wife had been allowed in to see him yet. She came out to get her children, and invited me to go with them into the ICU. He was still unconscious, completely unresponsive, and he looked pretty bad. His doctor came to talk with his wife; the doctor was pretty non-committal: He’d probably recover (probably!), he’d likely have some cognitive impairment, there was a good chance he’d wind up in a wheelchair or he’d probably need crutches or a cane for the rest of his life. All the nurse would say was that they had the best ICU around. It’s always very worrying to me when the doctors and nurses remain so noncommittal.
After the doctor left, I talked with the family. They wanted to pray (one never knows with Unitarian Universalists, because some of us don’t do that kind of prayer, or don’t pray at all). We gathered around the bed, they held his hands, and we did some praying together.
Then I thought it might be a good idea to do a little praying for healing – not something I ordinarily would do, but it was a part of that congregation’s culture. So I had his wife take his hand, and I took his hand, and we prayed in silence for a while — I emptied my mind of all thoughts, and just focused on healing.
And that was that. From then on, what I did was pretty conventional pastoral care and counseling. Much of pastoral counseling involves what are known in the trade as “active listening” and “presence.” Back in the 1950’s, psychologist Carl Rogers did research at the University of Chicago demonstrating that listening and just being present contribute to mental and emotional health, and the pastoral care and counseling I do is a kind of healing that draws from the research of Rogers and others. So that’s what I did, and after two hours at the hospital with this family, I went home.
When I got home, though, I wondered: when it comes to healing, what did my religion actually provide? I borrowed a few healing techniques from psychologists, true. And I thought then, as I have often thought: our liberal faith can claim to provide some relief from spiritual distress in times of accident, crisis, or illness; and that little bit is enough. There exist religious traditions which offer the certainty of healing –- physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual healing. We Unitarian Universalists do not deal in such certainties. We offer a “faith without certainty,” in the words of theologian Paul Rasor. We do not claim to have religious certainty of any kind; we know that we are limited beings and that we cannot ever know for sure about the mysteries of life and death, or of sickness and health. While you may feel that our religious uncertainty is not as comforting as you would like, I try to remember this: knowing that we are uncertain about many things is better by far than a certainty that doesn’t work in the end; consider what it would be like to pray to your God in the certainty that you will be healed, only to find your prayers don’t work; you pray for a loved one to recover and he or she doesn’t.
Religious certainty can back-fire, and I would rather accept the uncertainties that must come with my limited understanding as a limited being. I don’t want to pray that Lazarus is going to rise from the dead because odds are pretty good that when Lazarus is dead he’s going to stay dead.
At the same time, there is more than one kind of religious healing. We don’t have to ask for people to rise from the dead. We don’t have to ask for the cure of uncurable illness. There is the healing that comes after grief. If someone close to you dies, it is possible to become so burdened by the weight of grief that you are smothered by it and literally die of grief. I’ve seen it happen: one member of a couples dies, and the other, though in perfect health at first, dies within a year or two. Or if someone close to you dies, it is also possible to deny your grief, to the point where something inside you becomes frozen and you can never fully love again. Hatred and anger can consume us, when we find it impossible to forgive, leading to physical disease.
For all these: — grief, hatred, anger, and so on –- religion can provide healing. But this seems different than physical healing. Yes, I know body an mind are connected, are truly one, but I also know that a supernatural miraculous healing of physical illness requires a suspension of the generally accepted natural laws. I don’t need to believe in supernatural miracles of healing. But I do know that within ourselves we human beings to have the ability to heal ourselves; and perhaps to heal others. We get sick and somehow our immune system fights off the disease and we are well again; that is a true miracle. We get sick, and a doctor or nurse helps us to heal, sometimes with medical procedures and sometimes with just a good bedside manner; that’s a true miracle. We suffer from a broken heart, grieving over lost love, but with time we can heal and love again: another miracle.
That we heal at all is a kind of miracle; that we can promote healing in ourselves and in others is a miracle; these small miracles are enough, and help me be more understanding when the day inevitably comes when healing does not take place.
Last February, I stood by the man in the ICU, and I was convinced it was going to be one of those situations where complete healing does not take place; I was ready for him to make only a partial recovery. I left the hospital feeling down, worried about him and his family.
But he did recover. He recovered consciousness with all his cognitive faculties intact; after a couple of months he was able to walk without assistance, and has had essentially a complete physical recovery. His recovery is a kind of miracle.
Did our little beside prayer help effect that recovery? Perhaps it helped, but of course it’s more complex than that. He was in excellent physical condition before the accident, and that always betters the odds for recovery and healing. He was immediately surrounded by love and support, and that must have helped. His entire extended family came as soon as they heard he had been hurt; the church provided the family with casseroles and child care and rides; and as a result of all that support his immediate family were able to devote their time and attention to helping his healing. I think that the presence of all that love from friends and family and church must have had positive effect. We do not heal completely on our own. Doctors and nurses and primary caregivers promote healing, sometimes by what they do and sometimes by their mere presence. That’s why we visit people in hospitals: just the presence of a friend or a family member can promote healing; you don’t even have to say or do anything besides sit there.
I have come to believe that healing is one things that our Unitarian Universalist congregations can actually do pretty well. Now you and I know that churches don’t do everything well, and sometimes they can be frustrating places. You can wind up arguing and fighting with people at church, sometimes about minor matters. And you and I know that churches can be boring places at times. We come for that blast of inspiration but wind up with a dull sermon or music you don’t. Yet the core of what our congregation does well is it allows us to be with other people, to be present with other people. As when you visit someone in the hospital, healing can take place in churches just be present for one another; as we sit side by side with other people who care about truth and goodness. I’ve never been healed by sitting on a crowded subway car, so I know there’s something qualitatively different about sitting in a church: being in the presence of other people who are willing to be present for you, willing to sit near you while recognizing your human value and worth; recognizing that we heal each other, that we can be healed by each other.
We can come to church to be healed and to heal others by our presence: when we are in grief or in joy; when we are dying or sheltering new life; when we are embarking on a new relationship or ending one that has gone wrong. We come to church for healing. And while being a Reiki master might help some people, you don’t need to be a Reiki master; nor do we need miracles or supernatural explanations. All we have to do is show up, and be present. We need the caring presence of others to begin to promote our own healing; we can join in the collective caring presence of the congregation to help others heal.
That’s one of the main reasons to come to church, my friends: to heal ourselves; to help each other heal; that we may in turn begin to heal the world.