Church of the Incarnation

The summer after my first year of seminary I worked as a chaplain at Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga. My supervisor assigned me to the neonatal intensive care unit, and as he handed me the pager for the floor, it went off. I was called to the room of a new mother, a 15-year-old girl who had just delivered at 30 weeks. The baby didn't even weigh a pound, and wasn't expected to live. I walked into the room and was struck by how small the little mother looked in her bed, sitting all alone in the dark. She told me she wasn't worried about her baby, that she knew God was going to make her well. The young mom had been pretty wild before, she told me, but when she found out she was pregnant, she had turned her life around. She quit smoking and drinking and she started going to church. She was sure God would reward her efforts by keeping her baby safe. I asked her if she was angry at God for letting the baby come so soon, and she said that no, she wasn't. She was confident God would cure her tiny newborn and make everything OK.

The woman in today's gospel has been hemorrhaging for twelve years. She's spent everything she has on doctors, and she keeps getting worse. She's desperate for a cure. She's very ill, probably anemic and weak from blood loss, but she's also an outcast. A bleeding woman was considered ritually unclean. She was expected to avoid contact with others while she was bleeding in order to avoid making them unclean, too. She has to be very lonely. But she also must have a difficult time procuring food and water without coming in contact with others. Her life has to be miserably hard.

This woman risks everything to see Jesus. She puts herself in the middle of the large crowd following Jesus, pressing up against all those other people, tainting them all with her uncleanness. Then she reaches out and touches Jesus, the beloved teacher, the one everyone is there to see. She makes Jesus unclean. And she feels her bleeding stop; she feels her body cured by its contact with Jesus. She knows that the sickness has left her, that she is physically well.

Then Jesus stops to talk to her. She tells him that she has been cured, but Jesus uses a broader word for what has happened to her. He says she has been "saved," using a word that has spiritual as well as physical connotations. He suggests that she has been delivered not only from her disease but also perhaps from being shunned and even from feeling unworthy of love and attention. Jesus sees beyond what she thinks she needs. Jesus sees her deepest need, and he responds to that. He doesn't just cure her illness; he heals her heart.

On my second day as a chaplain at Erlanger Hospital, I went back to see the fifteen-year-old mom. Her baby had died in the night. This time her room was full of visitors, but when she saw me in the doorway she shouted over their heads, "OK, now I'm mad at God. I did everything I was supposed to, and I prayed every day that God would make my baby well. And he didn't. Explain that to me."

I don't understand why God doesn't always cure our physical ailments when we ask. Our first reading today tells us: "God did not make death, And he does not delight in the death of the living." 1 Then why doesn't God cure us all? I don't understand. I don't understand why Carla Winter's spending her birthday without Bill. I know everyone in this church prayed that he would be cured. I don't understand.

But I do know there's a difference between healing and a cure. God may not always take away our illnesses or our emotional pains or our trying circumstances. But God will always heal us. God always offers us peace and wholeness even in the midst of sickness and even death. Today's Psalm says, "You have turned my wailing into dancing, you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy."2

I think the trick is that we need to train ourselves to see the healing God's bringing in the midst of pain and sorrow and disease. The woman in today's gospel was only looking for a physical cure, and that's all she saw. Jesus tried to explain that her healing went beyond the physical, but we aren't told that she saw it at all.

The grieving fifteen-year-old mother didn't see it either. She didn't see how God had healed her broken relationship with her parents and brought them to her bedside in her time of pain. And she didn't see that the change in herself from a self-destructive and probably self-loathing teen into a centered and focussed young woman ready to be a mother. She didn't see that she was a new person because of this.

Illness and death are realities in our lives, and God doesn't always choose to intervene and stop them, no matter how hard we pray. But God always, always heals us, holding us through the pain, sending us wonderfully loving people to speak for him and hug for him. "Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning."3

Amen.

References:

1. Wisdom of Solomon 1:13.
2. Psalm 30:12.
3. Psalm 30:6.