God Wants Us Whole (Morrison Chapel)

Morrison Chapel, Macau, once the chapel of the British East India Company in the territory, and now an Anglican chapel. Robert Morrison, the Presbyterian minister who worked as a translator for the British East India Company to support his mission to China and his work in producing the first published translation of the Bible into Chinese, is buried in the protestant cemetery in the chapel's churchyard.

[The following are notes from an extemporaneous homily I delivered Feb. 15 at Morrison Chapel in Macau. The officiating priest was delayed by heavy fog, which had closed the port and shut down ferries entering the territory from Hong Kong. My wife and I were visiting for the weekend. Congregants asked me to assist, and the priest asked me by phone to officiate until he arrived. We proceeded with liturgy of the word, hoping for liturgy of the table when the priest arrived. As it turned out, the delay was longer than the service. Since there was no reserved sacrament available, we finished the liturgy of the word as if it had been Morning Prayer. The congregation at Morrison Chapel is small, very diverse, and extremely warm and welcoming. For blog readers, sorry for the repeated paras from a couple of other recent sermons--but this was extemporaneous, after all. -T]

Morrison Chapel Stained Glass Window with Chinese "In the beginning was the Word."

God Wants Us Whole
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (HKSKH/TEC year B)
15th February 2009 10:00 a.m. Liturgy of the Word
Homily delivered at Morrison Chapel, Macau
Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-15, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45, Psalm 42

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

The Old Testament reading today and the Gospel reading deal with healings of lepers.

First a word on leprosy in the Bible: it is probably not Hansen’s disease, the highly communicable and, until antibiotics were discovered, hopeless progressive disease that gradually disfigures and then kills—the disease we call leprosy. What the Bible calls leprosy is almost certainly a fungal or viral disease of the skin like ringworm or athlete’s foot. The disease was highly polluting in terms of ritual impurity under the Law of Moses, and was to be avoided at all costs for this reason. It was seen as a source of “dirt” or disgusting filth, and this ritual pollution was highly contagious and contaminating.

Jesus, a practicing Jew, believed that mercy and humanity was more important than purity. He was what we would call a moderately liberal Pharisee in his halakic (ritual legal) interpretation.

Jesus always looks to the person before him and asks how his legal interpretation will affect her or him. He replies to stingy images of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12) It is almost as if Jesus went out of his way to encounter the unclean, though he knew that in so doing he was incurring uncleanness in the eyes of the Law. He reserved his deepest anger for people who put heavy burdens of the law on others, people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13).

One of the major parts of Jesus’ ministry was healing, whether of mind or of body. In the story of Jesus healing the leper, we see him pursuing this call even as he approaches and engages the ritually unclean. The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick—like those in today’s gospel reading from Mark—tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for us any more than we do.

But does this mean that we have an easy out with them? That all we have to do is pray and have faith, and we too will automatically have healings? No it does not. That is not the world we live in.

I was raised in a religious community that taught that God blessed the righteous, punished the wicked, and heard and answered the prayers of the righteous. My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to Church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers of his skin. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with what essentially were second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I wished that the world were as simple as I had been taught in Sunday School: my wife’s mother’s cancer, my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed. I am sure that most of you have had similar experience where we have seen or suffered great pain, but also seen miraculous alleviation of pain. But it is not a simple mathematical formula.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about this in his book Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). I found what he has to say on this subject very helpful. It coheres with my experience both of prays answered and prayers seemingly rejected.

Rowan says that though God’s ultimate purpose does not include disease, insanity, and death, unfortunately the world as it is currently constituted does include these things that are against God’s ultimate purpose. Citing St. Augustine, he notes that the miracles of the Bible are most often simply the natural processes sped up a bit. Jesus turns water into wine—but this recapitulates a natural process where water, sunshine, grape vines, given enough time, produce grapes, then juice, then wine. Miracles are inbreakings of God’s ultimate intentions in the current time frame. We cannot force this, or expect it as a matter of course—we are talking about miracles here, not magic. But we can perhaps do things that make it just a little easier for God’s ultimate purposes to have their way now.

“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic, and we could never have a comprehensive manual of techniques for securing what we pray for. It would be very comforting if we knew the formula for success, but we don’t. All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45)

The fact is, Jesus showed us the path here. We need to reach out to others and see the people in front of us first and foremost, as people. We need not fear contamination or condemnation. We should amend our ways when we oppress others, and work to overcome all forms of such abuse of God’s creatures. We should pray, sometimes fast, and work to make the world and our lives a little more congruent with what God’s ultimate purposes are. For what God wants for all of us is good indeed.

In the name of God, Amen.

Entrance to the cemetery just behind the chapel.

The cemetery. Morrison's grave is at the right back corner.

The gravestone; behind it is a Chinese memorial plaque erected on Morrison centenary.

The gravestone inscription.