A wise and highly accomplished doctor whom I knew in his later years used to say to me, as he came more and more in touch with his own mortality, “Sean, every one of us was born with a terminal condition.” This is a rare insight for a physician to share so freely and so plainly. Some sicknesses will never be healed. Every one of us will eventually die, sooner or later. As the Psalmist says, “we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”
Philadelphia is home to the nation’s first hospital, and to some of our oldest churches. But even in the 18th century no one was confused that hospitals and churches might really be in the same line of work. Saving lives and saving souls may be related enterprises, but aren’t they distinctive disciplines? And shouldn’t we all stick to our respective wheelhouses?
I think the conventional way to acknowledge the feast of St. Luke - who is commonly understood to have been a physician, a practitioner of healing arts - is to celebrate the gifts of the modern medical profession. And in Philadelphia this custom makes sense: there is so much to celebrate. If you want to find an institution in this city that wields great power, to which many people contribute large sums of money, and that builds massive, architecturally impressive buildings in prominent places in which to carry out its work, you look to medicine. Have a gander just across the river, or up on North Broad Street; you will be impressed.
But it’s not just the outward signs of power, wealth, and authority that matter. The work carried out at Penn, CHOP, Jefferson, the Pennsylvania Hospital, Temple, Einstein, Shriners, St. Christopher’s, and (not so long ago) Hahnemann - the medicine practiced there - is world class, life saving, and exceptionally good. So it would be a good and holy thing to sing the praises of our doctors and nurses, and midwives, and technicians, and researchers, and all manner of those who practice healing arts in our own midst. I am all for it!
However, a question tugs at my mind and my heart. It’s a question that could also tug, I think, at the sleeves of the whole world, if we would consider it. The question is foreshadowed (again by the Psalmist) in a verse we heard today: the Psalmist tells us that the Lord “heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds.”
What’s that?!? Is this poetic license? Or is it possible that it’s so, that the Lord heals, that God heals, that Jesus heals? Can Jesus heal? Can Jesus cure us? Can Jesus make us well?
On the one hand, it would be dangerous to answer this question in a facile way, as though the question were this: can only Jesus heal? It would be akin to asking if only Jesus can make wine. Yes, he was known to do it; but it was not his regular occupation, his methods were unconventional, and he didn’t share the technique with anyone else.
On the other hand it would be a little too easy to suggest that Jesus can be called in like some specialist of last resort; to ask Jesus to be a practitioner of Hail Marys, rather than one of the objects of the prayer. It is in this role - of the purveyor of healing miracles - that we might most commonly regard Jesus, adding caveats that the age of miracles ended long ago, that there are no guarantees for modern exceptions, and that we have no idea how, when, or why Jesus performs such works in our own day and age, so no one should ever count on it. You can see why it would be easier to sing the praises of our medical establishment. With their training, their brilliance, their hard work, their vision, and their dedication, they are so much easier to account for.
But here we are, seven months in to a global health emergency. Sickness and death are all around us. Practitioners of medicine are not powerless in the face of this pandemic (or all the other illnesses that continue to threaten us) - far from it! But neither are they sorcerers, priests, or gods.
And here at Saint Mark’s, we have been praying to Jesus every day, asking for his healing grace. And who can count the number of bedside prayers that have been uttered in every language, in nearly every corner of the globe? Dear Lord, make me well. Help her get better. Heal him, Lord, and bring him home!
But can Jesus heal?
Homiletically speaking, you’d think that what I need right now is a good modern miracle healing story. But actually, such a story would more likely serve as the exception that proves the rule. If Jesus is only the purveyor of rare and unpredictable miracles of healing, then what’s the point? Do we really want to rely on some kind of divine health lottery for which we keep buying tickets because of the unlikely hope of a big payoff? No, I’d rather turn to more commonplace accounts of healing, recovery, and wellness that take place within and through the Body of Christ - his church.
The marvelous Episcopal priest, Becca Stevens, founder of Thistle Farms ministries in Nashville, has distilled the Gospel into two words that she has been able to illustrate in endless and compelling ways: Love Heals.
Thistle Farms specializes in healing lives that are so thoroughly broken that it’s hard to say where the healing is needed most: in body, mind, or spirit. And the power of the stories from the women who have been given the gift of healing there, after abuse, exploitation, injury, insult, addiction, imprisonment, and who knows what else, is astounding. Go to Nashville, as I have done, and see for yourself, how the power of love heals - not without medical professionals of many disciplines - but through cooperation that would not be accomplished without the commitment and assurance of Jesus’ love.
But you don’t have to go to Nashville to witness the power of Christ’s love to heal. Go to Clearfield Street, where St. James School does not look like a hospital for sick children, because it is not. But, relying on Christ, and responding to his call to care for children, the school is a source of both acute trauma intervention and careful preventative practice. It was the unstoppable Dr. Audrey Evans who taught us of the need to care for the whole child there. And her prescription, which stems at least as much from her faith in Jesus as it does from her medical training, has been proven correct time and time again. Children and their families are being healed at St. James.
I’d go so far as to say that a wound in the city is being healed there too, but I don’t want to suggest that healing on Clearfield Street is merely a figure of speech. It is the real thing, actual healing: the sick become well and the broken are mended. And, yes, there is a school nurse there who plays a crucial role in that healing, too. So does the chaplain!
Even closer to home, if you are wondering if Jesus can heal, you might consider our own program of Neighbor Care in this parish. Fr. Moore has called the program “a structure of kindness.” By strengthening the ties of neighborliness that bind us together, parishioners have found support and hope in times of sickness and need that are essential to healing and wellness. And I hear stories regularly that tell me of the healing power of Christ at work through many of you: the members of Christ’s Body.
These are not stories of heroic proportion, but they tell of real and measurable healing, all the same.
The power of Christ to heal is real. And Christ can heal wounds that are invisible to other healers. Jesus can even heal the wounded soul.
The Lord heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds. These words are true. And on the Feast of Saint Luke, while we do give thanks for the gifts of the many practitioners of healing arts and sciences in our city and throughout the world, we also pray to God, giving thanks for the power of healing that comes from his Son.
If you still think that I am using the term “healing” mostly figuratively here, just imagine what would happen if we applied the concept of Neighbor Care to the pandemic, and made our decisions about what to do in the face of dread sickness, from the perspective of a structure of kindness? Do you doubt that much illness would be prevented, that lives would be saved? It doesn’t always take a miracle to let Christ do his healing work.
Every one of us was born with a terminal condition, it’s true. But thanks be to God, for the healing gifts he has given to those who practice healing arts and sciences. And thanks be to God for the power of his Son Jesus to heal - and especially those wounds that are too deep the be seen by medicine. But also, those injuries and illnesses that can be avoided or addressed by a structure of kindness, or by caring for the whole child.
Thanks be to God that Love Heals. Love Heals.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia
Saint Luke the Evangelist by El Greco