Pentecost +22 – Health Bestowing Wound

Sermons – St. Brendan's Anglican Church

Jesus Honni (Jesus Reviled) by Georges Rouault from Miserere (1922)

Pentecost +22 2024
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Isaiah 53:4-12, Hebrews 4:12-16

But he was lifted up for our illnesses. He carried our pain in the name of the living God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The first open heart bypass surgery where the heart is exposed, stopped, and life is sustained by a heart lung machine while the operation takes place was pioneered by Dr. John Hessam Gibbon of Jefferson medical school in Philadelphia in 1953.

I observed my first open heart bypass in Evanston, Illinois in 1992, when I was a chaplain at Saint Francis Hospital. It’s a heady thing. He was a 53-year-old Indian man with three blockages by the time I entered the operating theater, which was cold. No one told me how cold it would be.

He was already sedate, surrounded by people in insulated blue gowns. The incision was made the sternum was cut with a saw. The ribs were spread open with something that looks kind of like an old-fashioned jack.

Major veins and arteries were detached cut and attached to a heart lung machine and then, with the tiniest jolt of electricity, the heart stopped as the blood went out of it, it deflated. We have those pictures of the heart, the models, and the drawings we see, and the heart is this big, rather impressive muscle that keeps going our whole life. No one told me when it deflated how small it would be except for the intervention of the machines, this gentleman was clinically dead.

And then the repairs began. Some four-and-a half hours later another small shock nothing. Another small shock. Nothing.

Dr. Murphy took his gloved hand and flicked the heart, and it started again. Four-and-a-half hours later, life resumed, but better, newer, reborn. A chest cut open, a heart not beating.

In this case, under these conditions, it was a medical miracle, but in another scene, idt could be the scene of a crime or the result of a horrible accident. surgery or violence. The only difference is intent an expertise. The intent to heal rather than harm and the skills to do just that. Today in Hebrews four, we read these words (verse 12-13):

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, piercing even to the point of dividing soul from spirit and joints from marrow. It is able to judge the desires and thoughts of the heart and no creature is hidden from God, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.

You pay attention to those words. It seems clear that Christ intends to operate on us. And if you think about that for a minute, that’s really terrifying.

Most of my patients in the hospital today have some degree of denial about the illness when I first meet them. and we are no different when it comes to the spiritual sickness of our own hearts. I’m not that bad any more that means I haven’t committed murder or adultery. I’m not that bad and yet there’s that anger I can’t let go of.

That judgmentalism that is like reflexive. The lack of forgiveness, the lack of love, the pride, the arrogance. is it that I’m not that bad or am I in denial? I can manage it.

I got this. And yet my life is a history of failed discipleship efforts, self-help that doesn’t help. Problems in our relationship with others, with ourself, with God, then over the course of a lifetime build up like barnacles and eventually are hard to ignore.

In truth, they can only build up so long. Over time, if we are honest and bold, we come to recognize the spiritual sickness of our heart, sin we call it, and in the words of the old general confession, the memory of our sins is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable. And if we’re lucky, that’s when the denial dies or dies again, because in truth, it’s an ongoing process.

And when the denial dies, we realize that we need heart surgery ourselves. If we get beyond denial, we next have to contend with shame and fear. My favorite definition of shame is as follows a pervasive negative, emotional state, marked by chronic self-reproach and an unending sense of personal failure.

Perhaps we resonate with those words because in this day shame is one of the enemy’s most powerful tools. It’s wicked really. Think about how it works.

We sin whether through intent or inadvertently weakness, we sin and shame fastens upon us so that rather than confessing rather than thinking seeking help, rather than opening our heart to those closest to us, we hide. just like our ancestors did in that garden. The hiding, that sense of being an impostor, that sense of having a false self creates emotional tension in us. That tension builds and builds and builds till we need release.

So we sin and then we have shame and then we hide. And then there’s emotional intention and it builds and builds and builds and we need release, and so then we sin And there is no health in us. If by some miracle of God, we are willing to take the risk to say yes, I did that and I need help.

Well, we’re not out of the woods yet, because next comes fear. Many of us come to Saint Brendan’s wounded by the church. Kate and I certainly were wounded by authoritarian pastors who use God’s law as a cudgel, not a scalpel wounded by fear of performance where we don’t measure up, we’re just not good enough.

We don’t look like church people, we don’t live like church people. We don’t sound like church people fear of other Christians who are all too ready to judge. My favorite bumper sticker I ever saw in Pittsburgh.

I couldn’t find one to buy, said, “Lord Jesus, I love you save me from your children.” So often if the denial goes away, if we can overcome the shame, the fear of God, the fear of his word, the fear of this place. can be too much and we still don’t get the surgery we need. We are embarrassed at the extent of our illness and afraid of those who say they would help afraid that will be too often an act of violence, not healing. This is where we have to turn to Christ’s expertise.

Christ’s expertise, so that we can learn to trust in spite of wherever our journeys have taken us. Christ expertise is not a degree from Johns Hopkins. It is not his teaching or practices even.

Christ’s expertise is who he is. Hebrews again verses 14 and 15 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens Jesus the son of God, let us hold fast to our confession, and here’s the money for we do not have a high priest incapable of sympathizing with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way just as we are yet without sin His expertise as a surgeon, as a judge, if you will, his expertise lies in the fact that he’s one of us. We don’t much like that verse.

We pretend it doesn’t exist. The author to the Hebrews tells us that he was tempted in every way, as we are. Boy, we don’t want to think about that if we’re honest.

All those coping mechanisms, all those escapist fantasies, he gets it He gets us. He is for us and he not only has a plan to save us. He is the plan to save us. And the plan is not so much heart surgery as it is a heart transplant. Ezekiel 3:26-27, “I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh I will put my spirit in you.”

I will take the initiative to hear that? Do you hear that? He will take the initiative. Gonna say it again. He will take the initiative. He does it for us. In what Luther called the happy exchange, we get his heart that loving heart, that blessed heart, that compassionate heart, that sinless heart, and he gets our heart of sin and stone and takes it to the cross where all that dies while he goes on living.

As Isaiah says today, “he lifts up our illness.” He carries our pain, which means we don’t have to any more For two to three days after heart surgery, the pain is intense. They give heart surgery patients, pillows. They think they’re being cute, they make the pillows in the sign of a heart or the shape of a heart. I’m not sure that the patients really find that all that amusing. But at any rate, they’re in so much pain, they don’t care a pressure on the sternum helps and so for two to three days, you see them half sedated, half in agony just hugging that billow to their chest.

Do you see the irony? This is after the surgery. They’re better now. But the pain is so bad. Sometimes new life doesn’t feel like it at the start. Martin Luther writes, “Christ’s word breaks through and wounds. It takes away every ground of trust and ascribes redemptions solely to the blood of Christ.”

This is a health bestowing wound. For these weapons kill in order to make alive. dying to self is hard because it involves dying. Growing up into him who is the head is hard because it involves growing up.

The pain is real in this assembly now, my friends, the pain is real. but I assure you it is not senseless violence. It is not punishment for your sin either. It is surgery with the goal to cleanse and heal us after care is important post-surgery. It’s important in the church too. It’s why we must endeavor to be a safe place full of humble and loving people and clergy, a place where his word can safely operate on us in the words of Hosea 6, the Lord both tears and heals. It needs to be a place where we can receive his word of forgiveness, his very body and blood as it transfusion. A place that can remind us in our struggles and pain well, that can remind us in the words of saint John Paul II, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures. We are the sum of the father’s love for us.”