Before I had the privilege to preach each Sunday, I used another means to spout my opinions on religious matters.  I would write letters to the editor of the paper about issues like the evolution/creation debate, anti-Semitism in the church, and biblical scholarship.  Whenever I read other letters on these issues, they usually came from one of two viewpoints.  Either the author would be a conservative Evangelical or give a biblical literalist point of view, or they would be a secularist and dismiss religion entirely.  I believed then and still do, that the Christian tradition is much more diverse than that and have always sought to be an alternative Christian voice in the conversation.

Playing that role, has led to God providing some wonderful surprises in my life.  At the time when I wrote those letters, I would often get phone calls from people with whom my ideas found some resonance.  Like me, they were not comfortable being pigeon holed in either the fundamentalist or secularist camp.  So they would find my home number and call me to talk about God stuff.  It was as if God had opened up a safe little space for us to talk about things that were keeping us away from God.

I remember one conversation I had a man who called me from a town over an hour away.  We discussed some of the difficulties we had in having open discussions at our respective churches.  Each of us shared some of the unanswered theological questions that puzzled us. 

“You know what I think is the weirdest thing about my church,” he said.  “We had a woman in my church who battled cancer for over a year.  Every week, during prayer request time, someone would say ‘prayers of healing for Mary Smith who has cancer.’  And everyone would pray and talk about how God was going to heal her.  Then after weeks and weeks of this, the prayer request suddenly changed to ‘prayers for the Smith family as they deal with Mary’s death.’ “  This man was very annoyed at this point, “How can churches do that?  How can they pray for healing for someone one week and then just accept their death the next?  I don’t get it.  Why doesn’t God cure people like that?”

Usually, when one asks that kind of question in a church, one gets the stock answer of “Well, it’s a mystery.”  Actually the church is only arena in life where people can get away with that kind of answer. How many of you have spent the past few weeks doing your taxes?  Picture being audited by the IRS and the agent tells you, “Well Mr. Jones, on your tax return you claimed an annual income of $50,000 and we have uncovered receipts showing you actually earned $500,000 last year.  How do you account for this discrepancy?”  Can you imagine answering, “Well, it’s a mystery.”

That kind of answer doesn’t cut in the real world and if the church is to be a force of transformation in the real world the church cannot give lame answers to some of life’s most profound questions.  The concept of God healing people can make us cringe slightly and even encourage skepticism.  We associate faith healing with charlatans, people being smacked on the forehead by a well-tanned white-suited evangelists onstage while credit card scanners make the rounds in the arena audience.  We hear spiritual healing and we conjure up images of parents who pray over a dying child, refuse modern medical treatments and allow their child to die.  We may even look at stories of healing and where some see a miracle, we only see coincidence and just plain good luck.  All the while, we take some elitist comfort in the fact that we are modern intelligent people who are somewhat above the whole notion of ­ healings.

There is a little problem with that viewpoint, however.  We are here today because of one person ­ Jesus of Nazareth and in his day Jesus was known for one thing.  The crowds didn’t gather around him because they heard he was the second person of the Trinity, or because he was going to be an atoning sacrifice for their sins.  That comes later in the story.  The Gospels tell us that Jesus drew crowds and was primarily known for being ­ a healer.  (He was also primarily known for being an exorcist, but that idea may freak you out so much I’m saving it for next week.)  If you were a fellow Galilean peasant, the main attraction in going to see Jesus was not to have the finer points of Jewish law explained to you.  You went to see Jesus because you or someone you knew was in need of healing.

Indeed, healing is a mystery, but I do not use that word merely as some sanctimonious way of avoiding hard questions.  When we think mystery, we think of something like an unsolved murder.  In that case, mystery is the answer to a question that has a definable answer, but one whose answer we simply don’t know yet.  When we approach the mystery of God, however, especially how God heals, we’re talking about a different kind of mystery.  The mystery of God’s healing is not some undiscovered technique or mechanism that God utilizes and just hasn’t told us yet.  That is not mystery.  It is magic.  This mysterious gift of healing may in fact be unknowable and unexplainable, and may just have to remain that way.

Sure, we need healing from physical illness, but there is also mental illness and spiritual illness.  We need healing from things such as abuse, grief, addiction, brokenness, failure or doubt. The mystery of God’s healing may just open our eyes to see healing as something much broader, spacious and available than we previously thought. Healing may encompass people, events and situations so vast that indeed their only possible source may be God.

With an already outdated modernist mindset, we often read the stories of Jesus’ healings with the expectation that they should be written like an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association.  However, that is not why the Gospel authors wrote them. That God, present in Jesus the healer, always extended that mystery in new and surprising ways.  Jesus’ healing always extended to those on the outside.

The son of Timaeus or Bar-Timaeus was someone on the outside of his society.  He was blind in a culture that had no Braille books, no seeing-eye dogs, no health care system.  There was no Medicaid for Bar-Timeaeus.  He was truly on his own in life, in world of darkness.  Cut off from his culture and even his religion.  Unable to make a living for himself, he would just sit on the side of the road and beg ­ helpless, no control over his own life.

Imagine how he experienced that day described in Mark chapter 10.  There he sat on the road on the outskirts of Jericho and hears a crowd passing by.  Everyone is excited and he overhears them telling stories about all these healings that just happened in the city.  He hears about all this insightful teaching about God.  He hears debate about some guy, who he is, whether or not he’s a prophet or a heretic.  So he asks someone who they are all talking about and they tell him it’s Jesus of Nazareth.

This was a name Bar-Timaeus had heard of before.  When you sit at the side of a busy road in the ancient world, you get to hear all the news from the surrounding countryside.  He had heard about this Jesus before.  Stories about people healed by this wandering rabbi.

Bar-Timaeus was like us.  We’ve heard these stories.  We’ve heard about this Jesus working powerfully in people’s lives but it all seems a little strange and remote.  Whatever this Jesus thing is, we think, maybe it’s just for church people, Christians, those Bible-thumper types.  Or maybe it’s for people a little less screwed up than us, people who have their act together, people who haven’t done the things we have done, people who aren’t as far gone as we are.  Like the son of Timaeus, we may feel cut off, far from those around us and far from God.

But like that tax-collector in the story we explored last week, Bar-Timaeus takes a first step out into the mystery and gives it his last shot.  He says, “Jesus, have mercy on me.”  In other words, “I have reached the end of my rope Jesus.  I’ve tried a lot of other things and they haven’t worked.  I have nowhere else to go.  This thing that torments me is something I can’t fix myself.  I’ve heard about you and figured I would give you a try.  Something, anything Jesus.  What have you got?”

The dumbest sign I ever read was one I saw few years ago in a fast food restaurant.  It said, “Braille menus.  Take one.”  The catch-22 of that sign is like the catch-22 of human existence.  It tells you the one way to find what you need but our condition blinds us to seeing it in the first place.  We are incapable of fixing ourselves.  When we realize that, it opens a space for God to reach us.

Poor Bar-Timaeus does just that.  He cries out in desperation.  He turns to God and what happens?  It all works out, right?  No, not at all.  Instead, the crowd turns on him and tells him to be quiet.

Oh, people, even those who call themselves Christians pull that one all the time.  Hurting people come to us, people with real life sufferings just aching for the healing only God can provide, and how do we respond?  Quiet down.  Listen, the people in your AA meetings smoke and put cigaret burns in our carpet.  Your substance abuse problems or porn addictions mean you’re a sinner and we don’t want sinners here bringing the place down.  Your cancer reminds me of my own mortality, so you think you could play it down? 

If you are one of those hurting people, (and make no mistake, in one way or another, isn’t that all of us) how do respond to that reaction?  Usually we just give up.  It is as if we tried God and God rejected us.  We prayed for a sickness, an addiction, or a hurt to go away and nothing happened.  Maybe it even got worse.  So we resign ourselves to anger, resentment, depression and negativity.

Bar-Timaeus refused to do that.  He has the audacity and persistence to shout out again even louder, “Jesus have mercy on me.”  It is then that Jesus responds and says “Call him here.”  Then some in the crowd, probably the disciples, tell Bar-Timaeus, “Hey,  take heart.  Have courage.  Get up.  He’s calling you.  Jesus is calling you.”

We are the disciples, the followers of Jesus.  When people come to us in need of healing, our response should not be to ignore them, or send them away with your skepticism or judgmentalism.  We are not to be the voice in the crowd that says, “Quiet down.”  We are to be the voice that says, “Have courage.  Get up. Jesus is calling you.”

God’s church is like a good hospital.  We take in anyone, even if you aren’t part of the right plan.  You can come here sick, but God’s desire is for you to be healed.  But hospitals are disturbing places.  I have heard people say they love the smell of a new car but I have never heard anyone claim to love the smell of a hospital.  Healings places are full of uncomfortable smells, sights and sounds.  But through it all comes the voice that says, “Have courage.  Get up. Jesus is calling you.”

As a community of faith, that is what we are proclaiming here today.  No matter what you situation.  No matter how physically, mentally or spiritually ill you are, Jesus is calling you.  He’s calling you to be healed.

If that’s true, you say, then what about all those people who pray to be healed and die anyway?  Doesn’t that mean that God cannot heal everyone? 

Maybe we too are like blind Bar-Timaeus.  We cannot see clearly.  There is a difference between healing and curing.  If you were the victim of physical or sexual abuse as a child, there is no “cure.”  These is no time machine that will ever undo the horrific thing that happened to you.  But you can be healed of the guilt, shame and anger that abuse caused.  Ask a recovering alcoholic if they are cured.  Everyone at an AA meeting introduces themselves as an alcoholic.  They struggle with their alcoholism every day.  There is no cure, but there is healing. 

Eventually, Bar-Timaeus died. All of us will die.  It is not a question of if, but when.  Regardless of how it happens, there is no cure for death.  No matter how hard we pray, or how good we are, all of us will die.  There is no cure for death, but we can die healed.  Many of us have seen people we love die of terminal illness from which they never cured.  But they did die healed and the experience of their death and how they died may have even healed others.  We know people who have died full of hurt, hate, self-pity, anger and resentment at those around them and even at God.  We also know those who have died filled with love, forgiveness, gratitude and a right relationship with others and with God. 

They die. There is no cure, but there is healing.

There are issues in our lives that we cannot fix ourselves anymore than a blind person can see the sign that says, “Braille menus.  Take one.”  We cannot see everything clearly.  We hear the confusion of the crowd passing by.  We cry out for help and are often told to keep quiet.  However, today hear the other voice in the crowd.  It is the voice Jesus’ followers that says, “Take heart, Get up.  He’s calling you.”

He is calling you to step forward and allow the Great Physician to do his healing work in your life.  And after that healing works within you, he invites you, not to  sit back at the side of the road, but to do what Bar-Timaeus did.  As one who has been healed, get up and follow Jesus along the way. A way of transformation into a life that is beyond life, beyond all categories of life, even beyond death itself.