“Called to Completeness”
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
12th Sunday after Pentecost
August 22, 2004

[texts: Hebrews 12:18-29/Luke 13:10-17]

My grandmother used to say: “If you have your health you have everything.” I don’t think my grandmother ever knew just what a profound thinker she was. Obviously health is something worth pursuing. Why else would Americans spend all the money we do to maintain, restore, and insure it? Everywhere we look there are programs, publications, and advertisements exhorting us to “be healthy.” So, what is “health”?

According to Webster’s 4th Collegiate Dictionary, health is defined as, “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit, especially freedom from physical disease or pain.” I found it interesting that the word derives from the Middle English word hal, which is also the root word for heal, whole, and holy. Once again, grandma was more on to it than she realized; if you have your health you do have everything!

When Jesus walked among us proclaiming that the kingdom of God was “at hand,” he was responding to the need of humanity for restoration to health, to completeness if you will. Scripture is on to something when it shows the human condition deteriorating after the separation of humanity from God in the story of the Garden of Eden. When we lose the totality of health in relationship with the Creator, we are truly in a state of “disease.”

Apart from God we cannot know completeness. As the 20th century French Jesuit anthropologist/ philosopher/theologian Teilhard de Chardin wrote we are “spiritual beings having a human experience.” Made in the image and the likeness of God the absence of or a defective relationship with God makes us less than what we’re called to be. Perhaps that’s why so many of us spend our lives in the “if only I could do or if only I had [fill in the blank] then I’d be complete” games. I know what that’s like, and I did it in pursuit of “authentic” Christian faith. I found that there was still always something left to long for. Completeness, not that I claim to have it mind you, comes when we realize that it’s found only in relationship to God. For me that meant finding God beyond the trappings of liturgy or ecclesiastical hierarchies and institutions or the ascetic practices of monastic life. Sooner or later one has to discover that wholeness, completeness is not found outside ourselves.

When Jesus healed that woman in Luke’s Gospel, I don’t think he was healing scoliosis or a bad case of osteoporosis. Rather, he was healing someone bent under the load of interior pain and distress -- one who had the weight of the world, as it were, on her shoulders. When Jesus healed, he did so to indicate the presence of the kingdom of God, that God was indeed near at hand to his creation. Jesus’ healing of the physical was done, primarily, because the physical illness was symptomatic of something deeper: the spiritual sickness of a broken soul and incomplete life.

Why else would Jesus only heal so few? Why didn’t he just blanket heal the whole world? Or why would those that he healed, like this woman or even Lazarus whom he raised from the dead, have to go through the process of death? Because the healings are not to point to the body, but to the wholeness of the person who underlies it. The contemporary German theologian Walter Kasper has said, “Jesus is not interested in a better world, but in the new world.”[Jesus the Christ, 1976, p. 96] Jesus’ working of miracles, then, was not meant to improve this world, but to proclaim a new one. So healings are a sign and a promise of deeper and lasting health and of the arrival of true humanity.

When we come to true humanity we are able to have an honest self-understanding, see ourselves for what we are and also appreciate our own value and worth. Those made truly human in Christ no longer need to project blame on others, since they have come to positive self-esteem and can accept responsibility for themselves: both successes and failures. That’s a healing. As Kasper says, “according to his [Jesus’] message, man and the world can only become really human when they have God as their Lord. Anything else would not be human, but would lead to superhuman efforts and very easily to inhuman results.”[Jesus the Christ, p. 96]

So the healing of our broken selves — alienated from God and from each other — brings recovery of our true selves, of our ordinariness. We are then able to live in the present moment with all the joy, wonder, freedom, and wholeness that it implies. In that present moment we can find God, others, and even ourselves. But before we can live in that moment we have to be healed. The late Anthony De Mello, a wonderful spiritual writer – who was condemned for his thought by his church, illustrates the situation like this:

“ Where can I find God?”
“ He’s right in front of you.”
“ Then why do I fail to see him?”
“ Why does a drunkard fail to see his home? Find out what it is that makes you
drunk. To see you must be sober.”[De Mello One Minute Wisdom, 1968]

In short, we have to acknowledge whatever is getting in the way of our being healed. If we don’t acknowledge the need to be healed, that things have made us “drunk” if you will, we’ve missed seeing what was there and who was there right in front of us.

We cannot be healed if we cannot admit we have needs — and that’s hard for Americans in these opening years of the 21st century. This is exactly what the late Dr. Karl Menninger acknowledged in his book Whatever Became of Sin? In that work one of the country’s preeminent psychiatrists said, repeatedly, that most people in psychotherapy are there because they’re suffering from guilt. The majority of these people, Menninger says, don’t need a therapist as much as they need the assurance of forgiveness and a sense of hope. They need the kind of healing that comes from a renewed heart. He quotes Arnold Toynbee, the great British historian.

Science has never superseded religion, and it is my expectation that it never will supersede it. . . . Science has also begun to find out how to cure psychic sickness. So far, however, science has also shown no signs that it is going to be able to cope with man’s most serious problems. It has not been able to do anything to cure man of his sinfulness and his sense of insecurity, or to avert the painfulness of failure and the dread of death. Above all, it has not helped him to break out of the prison of his inborn self-centeredness into communion with or union with some reality that is greater, more important, more valuable, and more lasting than the individual himself . . . [in Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? 1973]

Please understand, I’m not saying that we don’t need therapists or that mental illness isn’t real. Rather, I’m simply pointing out that in many cases what was really needed was for people to become new creations -- and it’s possible.

When Jesus heals the crippled woman the word used for healing is therapeuo. I found it interesting that its root meaning is ‘service’ and that the medical implications only came later. What is more it is related to the words diakeneo, leiturgeo, and latreo; all words for ‘service’ as in service offered to the Deity, ‘worship.’ What I think comes through here is that true healing leads to relationship, not just to the alleviation of symptoms. We’re talking about the difference between curing and making whole. Thus, Christianity is at root not a philosophy, or a belief system, or even a religion — it’s a therapeutic; a means by which we become whole and come into relationship with God and with others. The contemporary Greek theologian John Romainides has said that if Christianity was to come along as something new today it would be described as a branch of psychotherapy.[in Hiertheos Vlachos Orthodox Psychotherapy 1994, p. 26] I think he’s correct. Remember, please, that the early church called their faith “the way” and it was a way to become fully human. I think the early Congregationalists wanted us to remember that and thus the “Congregational Way.”

The way we enter into this therapy is through the disciplines which bring us into relationship with God. Like medicine, I’m afraid that there is no “magic bullet,” no “miracle cure.” In fact, I think we’ve discovered that so-called “miracle cures” most times turn out to be worse than the disease they’re supposed to cure. Look, I waited for years for a pill that would truly “melt-away-pounds-and-inches” and have seen everything that’s been hyped – including all the various diets, Atkins, South Beach, and in my case the “see food,” because I see food and I eat it. The truth is, the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise — I couldn’t expect anything to happen until I had disciplined myself to change. I’m far from svelte at this point, but I’m in process and I can feel the difference the change is making. It’s no different with the spiritual life. We can’t be healed, grow in relationship or spiritual maturity until we take the time to worship, to pray, to study, and to serve God in others. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.

The good news is that God is there and through relationship with the Incarnate One and the presence of the Holy Spirit gives us what we need to grow and to change. That’s what the writer to the Hebrews is talking about in the epistle reading today. We’ve not drawn near something ineffectual or useless; if we open ourselves to the presence of God in Jesus Christ we are made part of a covenant relationship that accomplishes what it claims. “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”

God is calling us — all of humanity — to completeness in God’s self. In Jesus Christ God has offered to share life with us, even to the point of our being taken up into God’s life, what the Eastern Christian writers call entheosis or deification. What this means, simply, is that we are called to find our true selfhood, our completeness, our health, if you will, in God. And this is what the whole slow process of growth in spiritual maturity is all about. When God called Jeremiah to be his prophet, Jeremiah didn’t think he had what it took — he protested that he was too young. The Bible is filled with stories of people who didn’t think they could measure up to God’s service. Nevertheless, God took them where they were, as they were, made them complete and did great things through them. It’s no different for us. God is willing to take us where we are and use us, but more than anything else God wants to relate to us, to know us, to loves us. God wants creation to know completeness.

When we come to the experience of healing — when we can admit our need and approach the God who can bring completeness — we become truly human, truly whole. We don’t come for wholeness, as Annie Dillard says, “with baited hooks and nets.” No, we go into the silence of our self, into the presence of the living God. We come with empty hands, are filled with the glory of the present moment, and know what it means to be called to completeness. Amen.