A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on July 2, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

            An impressive number of our prayers ask God to suspend the laws of nature.  “Lord, let me have passed the exam I just took,” we pray, and “Don’t let one of the soldiers killed in the war be my friend,” and “Don’t let me run out of gas before I get to a filling station.” We may be encouraged in these prayers by the notion of the miracle—an event so unlikely it could only happen if time runs backward, or the earth stands still, or internal combustion cars stopped needing fuel or if some other law of nature is suspended for a bit.  The popular notion, I think, is that a lot of the signs and wonders Jesus did were of this type.  Some were, it appears, but a lot, like the healings in today’s Gospel are not important because they suspend the natural order. Rather, they are important because they point to the source of all the healing and wholeness in every day life.

            This morning’s Gospel is two stories in one.  On his way to attend to the sick daughter of a respected religious leader, Jesus is touched by a woman in the crowd.  There’s an ironic contrast here.  Jesus is on his way to one of the most prestigious households in town when he is stopped by an anonymous woman whose disease makes her ritually unclean. She is far from being beneath his notice: Jesus seeks the woman out to tell her in a surprisingly tender way, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” When Jesus finally gets to the sick child, she appears to have died, but Jesus restores her to life.

            Theologian Paul Tillich suggested that such healing stories as these are not miracles—no matter how strange they may seem.  Instead they point to the universal, infinite, divine healer who intends wholeness for all creation. Tillich says that the concept of a “miracle” suggest an intervention that changes the downward spiral of events.  Instead, our bodies have a natural, God-given tendency toward healing, and God apparently desires wholeness and balance in all things. Jesus’ involvement in the recovery of the old and the young, the rich and the poor inspires awe and respect for the restoration of wholeness wherever and whenever it occurs.

            It is tempting to believe that we can control and direct God’s impressive drive to wholeness, but I think the best we can do is to trust that God is moving us to wholeness, then to co-operate with it when we see it, and finally to give thanks for it.  I read recently that there is a plain old shoemaker’s awl on display in the hallowed halls of the French Academy of Science.  It gets a place of honor because it is part of a strange story.  The shoemaker’s awl fell one day from the shoemaker’s workbench and put out the eye of the shoemaker’s nine year old son.  The wound became infected and soon the child became blind in both eyes and was forced to attend a school for the blind. There he learned to read by handling large blocks of wood with letters carved on them.  It was a cumbersome way to communicate, so as the boy grew up, he experimented with other ways the blind could read. He settled finally on a method of punching dots on paper.  The boy, Louis Braille, worked out this method using the same awl that had wounded him.

            We pray a lot to avoid wounding and illness in our lives. When we get hurt and sick, we often ask, “Why did this awful thing happen?” Another response might be to ask, “What can I do with what has happened?”  For most of us, there is a way we can co-operate with the restoration of wholeness and balance God has in mind for us.  

I love the Chinese folk tale that tells of a woman whose only son died. She went to the holy man and asked, “What prayers, what incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?” The holy man replied that he could drive the sorrow from her life if she could bring back a mustard seed from a home that had never known sorrow.  So the woman went out knocking on doors.  Over the years, in each home she came to, she heard such stories of sorrow that she always stayed a few days to help the people she met. She said to herself, “Who is better able to help these poor unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?”  Wherever she went, in hovels and palaces, she found others who grieved, and she always stayed to comfort them.  In this way, the story says, she became so involved in healing others that she forgot her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had in fact driven the sorrow out of her life.

Healing and wholeness are wonderful and awesome wherever and whenever they enter our lives.  They are always signs of the presence of God.  Sometimes they seem to come out of the blue, as if by miracles.  More often they are the result of hard and compassionate work.  May God give us the grace to work for wholeness in our own lives.

                                                                                    AMEN