Healing, Cure, & Sabbath

The Lectionary Gospel reading for tomorrow, August 21, 2010, is Luke 13:10-17, the story of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, and thus breaking the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, according to the synagogue official, who said: “There are six working days: come and be cured on one of them and not on the Sabbath.” {NEB}

The problem was that folks weren’t getting cured on those six working days, either. Certainly the synagogue official wasn’t doing it.

I had trouble preaching on this when I was younger, because I knew that not everybody got cured. Was it right to hold out hope of cure when I knew that some would not receive it?

Now that I am older, I am even more troubled about this scripture story. My friends have either already died from something from which they were not cured, or they have a disease now from which they will not be cured, or they will get some malady from which they will not be cured. Not every sick person gets cured.

We are really into curing these days, though. We spend 80% of the health care budget on people in their last 2 years of life. We can’t accept the idea that sometimes there is no cure. We’ve put great faith into the combination of money and medicine: put enough money into finding a medical cure, and it will be done.

One of my friends was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. Everyone else was upset. He wasn’t. He said, “What do I have to complain about? I’m old and I’ve lived a hard life. Of course I’m sick.”

When I first went to Orion, Illinois to pastor, there was an older man, early 80s, in my congregation, who was sick unto death. Members of another congregation proclaimed themselves “prayer warriors” and told him that if he just had faith enough, he would be cured. When he died, the “prayer warriors” blamed him and his wife for not having enough faith. His wife was very confused and came to ask my opinion. I said, “He was old and sick. Most of the time, old sick people die.”

Jesus did not heal everyone who was sick in his day. Sooner or later, there is no cure but death, for every living creature.

Death is the final cure. It comes to all of us. In the meantime, though, sometimes people get cured. When that happens, it is Sabbath. Even though not everyone is cured, everyone can be healed, can be made whole with God. God calls us to stand on the side of both cure and healing whenever we have the chance.

POST SCRIPT

When I was on chemo, my good friend and Dist Supt, Jack Newsome, invited me to go to a conference with him. It promised to be a great time. I told my cancer center that I needed to adjust my chemo by 2 or 3 days so I could go. They were quite upset. “You’ll die if you change the schedule!” was basically their approach. Three months later my schedule called for treatment on New Year’s Day. “We’ll change your schedule,” they said, “so we don’t have to work on NY Day.” “Hey, what about ‘you’ll die’ if you change the schedule?” I said. I guess they just wanted to keep the secular Sabbath, New Year’s Day, holy.