Wounded but not abandoned

The news is a bit of a downer at the moment, isn’t it? Although I suppose it’s been like that for a while now - Climate change, war, people’s rights being stripped away, and communities divided by ideology…everything feels a bit broken, doesn’t it?

 

And amid all of this, today we celebrate the Feast Day of St Luke, as we’ve done for quite a few years now, with a service of Wholeness and Healing. When people hear the word healing, most of us naturally think about physical healing. And that makes sense on St Luke's Day as in scripture he is called a physician.

 

In today’s Gospel Jesus sends out the 72 to "cure the sick" and in the Old Testament reading, Isaiah speaks of the eyes of the blind being opened and the lame leaping for joy.

 

But the Bible's understanding of healing is much bigger than curing illness so the word I want to think about today is wholeness.

 

Because many of us carry wounds that can’t be seen -maybe grief, anxiety, loneliness, fractured relationships, disappointment, or fear about the future

 

And many of our communities carry wounds too.

The good news of today's readings is that God's healing is about making whole again what might appear broken beyond repair.

 

We have to remind ourselves sometimes that God's vision for creation is wholeness. Isaiah gives us a glimpse of this, which he hopes will strengthen weak hands and calm fearful hearts, and we hear the words echoed through all of scripture 'Do not fear'."

 

We hear of blind eyes opened, deaf ears unstopped, and streams flowing in the desert. This is perhaps less a list of miracles and more a vision of a world being put back together.

 

Fear is replaced by hope, isolation by belonging and places which were bare spring up with new life.

 

It might be that this is what our hearts are yearning for when we feel something in the world or our lives is amiss – not a simple wish for our lives to become easier but a deep longing in our very souls for life to become whole - for those parts of ourselves that feel fractured to be reunited with the person God created us to be.

 

As I've reflected before, sometimes God's work is not making us into someone different but helping us become more fully ourselves. More fully alive. More fully human. More fully the people God intended us to be.

 

There’s a difficult truth at the heart of every healing service; not everyone receives what they pray for. We see Paul’s experience of this in today's reading from 2 Timothy; Paul isn't writing from a place of triumph.

He's tired, abandoned by friends and approaching the end of his life.

 

I don’t feel Paul would claim everything worked out as he’d hoped, that everything he’d prayed for was given to him, but he does tell us that no matter what went wrong "The Lord stood by me and gave me strength."

 

Throughout scripture, history and our own experiences we see that God is often surprising and unexpected - sometimes God heals through restoration, sometimes through peace or reconciliation, sometimes through courage, and sometimes through the strength to take the next step even when it doesn’t feel possible.

 

The Christian promise is not that God prevents or removes what may hurt or harm us, but rather It’s a promise that we’re wounded but not abandoned. And neither is creation. And neither are our communities. And neither are any of those troubling things we see in the 24-hour news cycles.

 

If Jesus were walking around Urmston and Flixton today, where might he see the need for healing? He’d of course see Trafford General and the GP surgeries, but I also suspect he’d notice loneliness -many people surrounded by neighbours and yet feeling completely alone.

 

He might notice anxiety - people worried about money, caring responsibilities, their health, their children, and of course the state of the world.

He might notice how easy it’s become for people to retreat into tribes as we're increasingly encouraged to define ourselves by who we're against. There’re countless voices telling us who to blame for society's problems, often in the name of God or Jesus, but Jesus doesn’t tell the seventy-two:

"Whatever house you enter, if you enter in my name, you’re always right"

But "Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’”

 

What if healing begins there?

Could one of the most important ministries of the Church today be helping people rediscover how to live together?

 

Learning to listen before judging, choosing compassion over suspicion and seeing people not as categories but as fellow children of God.

 

And then there’s creation herself. We know something of its wounds - we've seen changing weather patterns, flooding, drought and wildfires much closer to home than perhaps we imagined possible.

 

Creation is groaning but creation is not abandoned. The streams flowing through Isaiah's desert remind us that God's vision of healing includes the whole created order.

The wonderful thing about today's Gospel is that Jesus doesn't simply tell the disciples to pray for healing but sends them out to actively participate in achieving it.

And there’s ways we can do that too:

 

Recognising loneliness and helping alleviate it, offering forgiveness where it’s needed, mending a broken relationship, welcoming someone who feels excluded, actively caring for creation, or standing alongside somebody who is suffering

 

We might not perform miracles, but we can be signs of God's healing kingdom.

 

Jesus tells the seventy-two: "Cure the sick and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you.'"

Whenever we see healing in the bible it always reveals a little bit more of who God is and it points to God's great plan of making all things whole.

 

Today, we pray for healing.

For ourselves.

For those we love.

For broken relationships.

For our community.

For our world.

For creation.

And we do so with hope.

Because in God’s kingdom fear does not get the last word.

 

Jesus has shown us that even death doesn’t have the last word.

 

For the kingdom of God has come near.

And through Christ, all that is wounded can yet be made whole.

Amen.