The Doctor is On Call

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the First Sunday of Lent, February 21, 2021, by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

Perhaps the most difficult patients to treat are the ones who don’t believe, or won’t admit, they are sick. In the interest of full disclosure, I count myself in that obstinate group of stiff-necked Israelites, the bane of good doctors everywhere. When this happens in a medical setting, it slows things down. The sickness can progress unnecessarily and make the eventual treatment more drastic and invasive. And the spiritual life is no different. Our first step is the recognition of the truth about ourselves, and about our world. We’ve each fallen short of the glory God as Paul reminds in his Letter to the Romans, and our world has not yet (Extra! Extra! Read All About It!) come to fully resemble the Kingdom.

The purpose of the Church is to heal us, our relationships with each other, our relationships with creation, and our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. The Church, in one of its earliest formulations, was seen as a hospital whose purpose was to heal. That’s right, the Church’s primary role--through prayer, participation in the sacraments, dwelling on God’s word as revealed in Holy Scripture, acts of mercy, witnessing to justice and peace, and working for a more just and equitable social order through the process of forgiveness and reconciliation--is to heal, to cure souls. In earliest days of Christianity, the parable of the Good Samaritan was read allegorically as broken humanity who’s beaten, robbed and tossed in the ditch, Jesus as the one who comes to rescue us, and the Church as the hospital where injured humanity beset upon by brigands recovers and heals. That word we hear without blinking over and over and over in Church--mercy--actually comes from the same Greek root as olive oil--a substance which was widely used in the ancient world as a soothing agent, a balm, for the healing of minor cuts and bruises.

Some of you have heard about Bishop Curry’s “Jesus Movement,” by now. That’s simply a contemporary recasting of an ancient, time-honored image of the Church as a place, a community, a matrix, of healing. He describes the Jesus Movement as “the ongoing community of people who center their lives on Jesus and following him into loving, liberating and life-giving relationship with God, each other and creation.” Centering our lives on Jesus, we are healed and become water to wash, oil to heal, bread to feed, and water to slake the thirst of the parched. Like so much of what Bishop Curry does, it’s a recovery of an ancient image of being Church done in service of opening new possibilities for the present and the future. Anglicans go back, not out of mere nostalgia, but in order to see afresh, and renew the present. We are an Ancient-Future Church.

So the Church exists for healing. Jesus himself says that he comes not for those who have their ducks in a row, but for those who are hurting, wounded, sick, and in need of healing: “When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Does that mean that Jesus is only here for those “notorious sinners” and not for the rest of us good, upstanding citizens? Wouldn’t that mean that Jesus is not “for all” but only for the unfortunate few (and certainly not for us perfect little peaches)? No, Jesus is saying something different. Jesus, the Divine Physician, the source of all healing, and the means of our cure, is telling us that we are all sick. Healing is available to all, but because Jesus is Unconditional Love, he won’t treat us against our will. There is no compulsion in love. It takes the consent of the patient for the treatment to begin. It takes an admission that something is off--in us, in our relationships, in how we treat God’s good creation, and in our relationship with God. It takes an admission of need, an admission that going it alone, under our own steam, just doesn’t work anymore. It takes asking for help. It takes the willingness to take the risk of vulnerability, the willingness to be in relationship with the Divine Physician, the willingness to admit we’ve “missed the mark” (welcome to the human race!), the willingness to let ourselves be loved into loving.

The season of Lent is a season of healing, a season of coming closer to Jesus the Divine Physician, putting ourselves in his care, and letting the oil of mercy love us whole. Through prayer, fasting, alms-giving, works of mercy, and nourished by God’s Word and Sacraments we are gradually healed of all that is not God’s love in us. Slowly, sometimes painfully, we let go, we surrender our greed, our anger, our pretensions to be independent, self-reliant actors, and fall into love. We are made to participate, even here, even now, in this life, in the Glory of God. We are made to be partakers of divine nature, to embark in Christ on the journey into our full humanity. Anything that is not God, ultimately disappoints and provides but fleeting satisfaction. Without God, without the recognition of our need for God, of recognizing our illness and need for healing, we know only gnawing ache, the pervasively vapid creep of non-existence that permeates our days. We find ourselves living in what Eliot in the Wasteland calls that, “Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter noon” where there is but a “heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/And the dry stone no sound of water.”

Auden, in his tribute to Eliot writes, “it was you/Who, not speechless with shock, but finding the right/Language for thirst and fear, did most to/Prevent a panic.” Auden praises Eliot as a skilled prophetic diagnostician for naming the sickness, giving voice to the thirst and fear that beset England after the Great War, what was then called “The War to End All Wars.” Lord, have mercy. Chirst, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. 

These forty days are a precious, perhaps last (who’s to say?) opportunity to come near to the Kingdom of God that has come near to us in the person of Jesus. The desert into which we follow Jesus is shorn of all the usual distractions, emptied of all the usual ways we’re “etherized like a patient upon a table,” the deeply patterned and habitual ways we plug our ears to the Good Doctor’s healing words. These forty days are a time when we make a little space for God to get at us--in the stillness, in the silence, in the simplicity--that we might become who we were created to be, that this world might come to more closely resemble the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. What can trim back in our lives to make a little room for God? What new practice, habit, or disposition can we commit to that will help us harken to his voice, and nourish our relationship with Jesus Christ?

Just in case we didn’t get the message that Lent is for our healing, our three readings for today all talk about water and baptism. Death and rebirth. New creation. The establishment of an undying covenant of love, provision, and mercy between God and God’s people. Do you remember what the dove (the same dove that appeared at Jesus baptism I wonder?) came back to the ark with when the rains had stopped? An olive branch. God’s messenger brings the oil of mercy, loving-kindness, and covenantal faithfulness to the water-logged crew aboard the ark. When we baptize in the Episcopal Church, there are those lines in the small print before the service that nobody reads, but that say it all--”The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble.” How many times have you heard people say, “I gotta get my kid baptized,” as if it were something we, through the priest, do? But that’s not what the Prayer Book says! It speaks, instead, of the bond that God establishes. Exactly the reverse! Baptism is God’s work on us. It is the outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual grace: the covenant that God establishes that nothing but nothing can break. God reaches out. God comes to us as mercy in the beak of a bird, in those healing waters of belovedness that rain down on us in every moment.

“For I am convinced,” says Paul in that astounding climax of chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans,  “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,  nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Even judgement, trials, the inevitable deserts that open up in our lives when seen from this perspective, are doorways to deeper and deeper, surrender, deeper and deeper union and communion with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. When, at effort’s end, we find ourselves finally uttering those words, “Lord, help me!” God never fails to provide a way through the waters that rise up to our necks. It may not be that our illness is cured, our bank account suddenly overflowing, the social inequalities that plague us magically resolved at the drop of a hat. But God hears our cry and God is faithful to God’s promises. We are never comfortless, never orphaned, when out of our lostness, littleness, lastness, and deadness in sin, we speak our need. God’s mercy opens a way where there was no way, blessed assurance in the midst of everything being seemingly lost. Even “tempted by Satan… with the wild beasts” all around, angels wait on us, minister to us, pouring that healing oil of God’s undying, unconquerable love, on our scraped and bruised souls.

The hospital is always open--by day or night it will never be shut. The Divine Physician is always on call. He never sleeps and all he wants is to make us well, draw us home from that far country where we munch insatiably on the pig pods of self-sufficiency. He’s paid the bill with his very life and waits for that single word, that mustard seed of consent--help--to slather us in his healing oil that we might be that oil for a broken and hurting world.