Pentecost +22 – Health Bestowing Wound

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 a...