The Healing Place

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus finds a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years lying beside a pool. We all know what happens next. Jesus heals the man, who picks up his mat and strides away.


We should not, however, read past an important detail in the story. When Jesus asks the man whether he wants to be made well, he replies by complaining about how no one ever helps him get into the water and about how others cut in front of him when he tries to move there himself. The man has settled on a notion of what it would mean to experience healing: get into the pool. And, of course, Jesus has something else in mind entirely.


We tend to become fixed in our bad habits, our weaknesses, our failures of forgiveness and perpetuities of prejudice. But this story sounds a different cautionary note. It reminds us that we can also become fixed in our vision of what it would mean to be healed, to be made well, to be made whole. And it warns us not to miss the still small voice of a better way in our eagerness to get to the places in which we have firmly settled the confidence of the unknowing.

Beyond the Boundaries: On Limits, Love, and Lanyards

Scripture: Psalm 51:10; Mark 1:21-28

       I had a vision that I had passed to the next world and found myself standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven.  Peter stood behind an ornate golden table that held two stacks of paper, one consisting of just a couple pages and the other about three feet high.  Peter said, “Well, Len, before we make any final decisions we will need to review both the strengths and the limitations that you displayed during your time on earth.”  He gestured toward the small stack as he said “strengths” and toward the very tall stack as he uttered “limitations.”

       Deeply concerned, I thought a little show of humility might help my cause, so I said “Well, why don’t we start with my limitations?”  Peter frowned at the giant pile of papers before him, shook his head, and responded, “I don’t know.  We’ve only got eternity to get through them all.”

       Victor Hugo wrote: “There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.”  Often, when we refer to the infinite capacities of the soul, we mean the immortality that frees us from the bonds of death.  But, because our faith has at its center the promise of redemption, we must believe that even in this life our soul has “prospects greater than the sky,” vast, limitless.  When the Psalmist cries out “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me,” he leaves us with only two possibilities: either we think him a fraud or a hopeless dreamer, or we take seriously his testimony that the Lord can remake us right down to our very heart and spirit. 

       Despite these assurances, however, I suspect that each of us sometimes feels that no dimension of our infinite potential is so fully realized as our potential for messing up.

       Our faith offers us abundant consolations in this respect.  But it also poses some serious challenges.  And, in this sermon, I want to suggest that one of those challenges is that our faith demands that we keep two very different thoughts in mind at the same time, all the time.

The first of these thoughts is that God loves us in a measure beyond our understanding despite all of our weaknesses and shortcomings.  The second is that God nevertheless wants us to change: to know the Father more clearly; to follow the Son more closely; to experience the Holy Spirit more completely.

       And, to complicate things still further, our faith calls upon us to use these two disparate thoughts in order to free us from our limitations, even though we often use them to facilitate our limitations.  I’ll have more to say about the freedom these two ideas can afford us in a minute.  But let’s start by noting some of the perverse and regrettable ways in which we allow these ideas to place boundaries around us.

       Let’s be honest.  Confidence that God loves us just as we are can encourage a brand of self-conciliatory complacency.  We sit mired and stuck in our angers, our jealousies, our biases, our prejudices, our judgments, our false certainties, our indifference to injustice, our inaction toward poverty and hunger and homelessness until we start to feel—oh, dreaded word!—guilty.  We ponder the possibility of change or repentance or renewed dedication.  But then we remember that God loves us—even in all our messiness and inadequacy—and we settle back comfortably into our happy inertia.

       Of course, occasionally we actually make a little progress on one or more of these fronts.  Being human, this typically prompts a bit of self-congratulation, even if spoken to ourselves silently and in the secrecy of our own hearts.  I suspect that God, who misses nothing, takes notice of our modest progress and forgives us our brief flash of pride.  But I wonder if God weeps a bit when He sees how quickly we stall out, declare that we have done what we can, and place stingy boundaries around our efforts to make His kingdom come to this tired old world.

       This past Christmas, Lisa gave me the book Aimless Love: New and Collected Poems by Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.  I highly recommend the book, which brims with wonderful poems, including a personal favorite of mine called “The Lanyard.”  In that work, the narrator remembers attending summer camp as a child and learning how to braid a lanyard, which he gave to his mother as a gift.  The poem continues:

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that is what you did with them,but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

I do not pretend to know much about God.  But I suspect that God treasures every lanyard that we offer up to Him.  Nevertheless, I think we have to ask ourselves: do we use our confidence in God’s boundless and generous love as an excuse to limit ourselves and to call things “even” when our halting work has really only just begun?

       Alas, we are capable of using the idea that God wants to change us as a limiting principle as well.  This happens in a variety of ways.  For some of us, the magnitude of the work that needs doing serves as an excuse not to try.  We read the words of Jesus and we say:  “Wait a minute.  I am supposed to turn the other cheek to the jerk who offended me, love the enemy who has done me wrong, forgive people not on seven occasions but on seventy times seven, give away my hard-earned money, refrain from judging, have faith that moves mountains, visit the sick and imprisoned, work for peace, serve the poor, and pray with humility?  I—who do not even have the self-discipline to keep my New Year’s resolution to eat fewer potato chips—I am expected to do all of this?”  We declare such a transformation impossible, which, of course, fulfills our prophecy of failure.

       Others of us, daunted by this challenging project, will turn to living life in the passive voice.  We say: “I pray that I will be given courage, strength, clarity of purpose, a generous spirit, a forgiving heart, and all the other stuff I need to do God’s work.  I pray that I will be made into the sort of person God wants me to be.  Here I am!  Use me!”  Sometimes we sound as though we have a sentimental fondness for the good old days when we were inert lumps of clay laying around waiting to be fashioned by the hand of the Lord.

       Through all of these persistent and very human habits of thought we limit ourselves.  We place boundaries around our infinite souls.  We let ourselves off the hook.  Let me be the first to confess: I have not done this seven times.  But seventy times seven.  Times seven.  Times seven.

       And this is a divine and human tragedy, because these two ideas—that God loves us as we are but wants us to change—are given to us for precisely the opposite purpose: to free us; to break our bonds; to help us do things and feel things and know things beyond our most extravagant dreams.

       That God loves us just as we are liberates us from the chains of self-loathing and self-condemnation.  It compels us to love ourselves even when we feel fully persuaded that we do not possess a single loveable characteristic.  It moves us out of the crabbed and confining space of human judgment into the vast and unbounded realm of divine promise.  Because who are we—who are we—to loath this person whom God adores and for whom God gave His very son?

       And that God wants us to change offers still greater freedom.  It assures us that the daunting project ahead does not fall entirely on our shoulders.  We will get some help.  We will get some aid from the one who fashioned the vast seas, and the vaster sky, and that most vast thing of all—our soul.

       Now, as I have suggested, we have a role in this and God’s grace and generosity do not excuse us from trying as hard as we know how.  But do not be surprised if, at some point, God steps in to give you a good, hard yank in the right direction.  This happens, and sometimes it happens despite our resisting and kicking and yanking back.

       I take that to be one of the central points of the story we read together this morning in the Gospel of Mark.  I find it a remarkable story, particularly because of a critical way in which it differs from so many of the other healing stories that appear in the New Testament.  After all, in most of those stories, we encounter someone who pleads for Jesus to heal them, to restore their sight, to let them walk, to make them well.  I am sure that all of us have, at one time or another, prayed in that voice.

       But in this story we encounter a different voice—another voice that also may sound familiar to us.  It is an obstinate, resistant, settled-in-its ways voice.  It is a voice that says: “What have you to do with me?  Why do you want to change me?  How can you hope to destroy what I fear I really am?”  Boundaries?  This man is nothing but boundaries.  And Jesus will have none of it.  He looks inside of that man and he finds the source of that voice and he says, with the power of God Himself behind it, Get out.

       Sisters and brothers in Christ, what boundless potential does Jesus see within you?  What are you doing to see the same infinite promise within yourself that He sees?  How are you helping Him to move you from that which you are to that which you might become?  Are you prepared to discover things about yourself that you never imagined?  Are you ready, like the witnesses of two thousand years ago, to be amazed?

       My friends, there is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is within you.  For it is there, Jesus tells us, that we will find the very kingdom of God.

       Praise Him that it is so.

       And the people said hallelujah.

       And the people said amen.