The Medicine of Community

Readings: Exodus 15:22-27, Matthew 9:9-13, Secrets of Heaven #8356 (see below)
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Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash


Today’s texts introduce a powerful metaphor for the way God works in our lives, and how we can grow and evolve emotionally and spiritually. Now one of the frameworks that we often use to talk about spiritual progress is sin and repentance. Sins are actions or attitudes that harm others or ourselves. A loving and caring God guides us to see those sins for what they are, guides us to experience appropriate regret and accountability for them, guides us in repairing harm and choosing to avoid those harms in the future. As we engage with this process, we become more heavenly from the inside out, because we are learning how to practice mutual love, and heaven is a realm of mutual love. This is an excellent and useful framework, one that particularly appealed to Swedenborg. (I’m imagining this is because it is very process-oriented and that this appealed to his scientific nature).
But, there are also other helpful ways to imagine our spiritual journeys, other metaphors that might guide us towards growth. Today we see one of them in God as our Healer.

In our first text, Moses is leading the newly liberated Children of Israel away from the Red Sea, where the Egyptians had perished in pursuit of them. They had traveled three days without water but when they finally found some, it was bitter. I’m sad to say that I certainly would have grumbled as they did in that situation. Yet, Moses appeals to the Lord and is told to throw some wood into the water so it can become safe to drink. After this miracle, God characterizes himself as the “God who heals you.”

In the Matthew text, Jesus is being very provocative as he often does. He begins by calling Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him. We can’t quite appreciate today how transgressive that would have been. Tax collectors in those days were collaborating with the oppressive machinery of Rome. Matthew would have been extracting payments from his neighbors in ways that would have harmed them and certainly have made them resentful. Yet, he responds to Jesus, and allows himself to be called out and away from that oppressive system. Given Matthew’s record of behavior, the Pharisees understandably question what Jesus is doing. He responds by trying to widen their lens. They have existed in a highly-regulated religious structure based on ritual and respectability, which ends up offering fairly narrow accessability for those who found themselves on the margins, for whatever reason. So Jesus uses the metaphor of sickness and healing to try explain what he is doing, to explain that God doesn’t demand perfection and respectability first, before God will engage with us. God is not a gate-keeper. God will try to heal anyone who needs it, because God’s ultimate goal is a healthy, honest, thriving person, not necessarily one who is “respectable” by whatever human standards we might be judging at the time.

The thing that is so interesting about the physician and healing metaphor is that it pre-supposes the existance of our wounds. Every person has been emotionally wounded in their life, in some way, large or small. Many times, depending on the depth or the severity of the wound, we might build our personalities around protecting that wound. Perhaps we have learned a robust self-sufficiency, perhaps we have learned to be extremely and co-dependently aware of the feelings of those around us, perhaps we just never ever look in the direction of the wound or anything that would remind us of it. We need not feel ashamed for having done any of this. Our former child selves, or our inner child now, is just doing the best they can to survive and not be hurt again. Many of these protections look and feel a lot like strength or success. But just as often they hide an inability or an unwillingness to be vulnerable in ways that connect us to others. At worst, they might cause us to lash out at others, or engage in other kinds of harmful behavior. We all find ways to protect, soothe, or cover over our wounds. But that is not the same as healing them. That is not the same as learning who we could be without them.

The framework of sin and repentance doesn’t really acknowledge where our sinning might come from. And often, our attempts to change our behaviors can only go so far without understanding the wounds that drive us. The trick is that most wounds are caused within relationship, and so they can only be healed in relationship. This can certainly be a relationship between us and God. But just as often, it is our relationship with people; friends, partners, therapists, colleagues, church, affinity groups and more, that help heal us. This is what Jesus was getting at with his practice of eating with people who others called “sinners.” When healing is the goal, rather than ritual or respectability, then community is essential to that healing process. And in fact, this is the motivation of the incarnation as a whole. God decided to come closer, decided the embody human community with us, so that we all might have more pathways towards healing.

The point of of the incarnation is often discussed in terms of “salvation” for us, but when we think about it in terms of healing and community, it allows us to redefine or even reclaim the word, allows it to sing a different song.

Because, unfortunately, salvation as a concept is vulnerable to the exercise of illegitimate power. In the words of Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, an indigenous Episcopal priest:

“the word itself speaks of the illegitimate power claimed by the church, which, whether through force or influence, has held the world hostage to its demands concerning its ability to grant salvation or, if you will, paradise. If you hold the “keys to the kingdom,” you get to decide not only who gets in but what they have to do to get there. I don’t think Jesus ever intended the concept of salvation to be associated with that kind of illegitimate power.”  (1)

In Rev. Dr. Woodley’s opinion, healing conveys a more accurate meaning as to what Jesus was trying to do than salvation. Healing requires our cooperation, and cooperation is a word that belongs to community, and in fact only has meaning in community, even if it is just a community of two. Healing is a process, one that takes time and intention, and we must bring to it our honesty and accountability, our patience and determination. And like all relationship, healing requires vulnerability, a recognition of what we have been powerless over, a willingness to receive the gift of care.

Now, when Swedenborg interprets our Exodus text, he does so using the sin and repentance framework. Yet, there are pieces of the interpretation that can speak to a healing framework as well. Water represents truth, and there are times when certain realities feel bitter to us, so we shy away from them. In the sin and repentance framework, Swedenborg posits that this is because we are not yet ready for the accountability acknowledgment would require. I’m sure we can recognize how this has played out in our lives. But in the healing framework, the bitterness can also represent our woundedness, places that feel too confusing, painful or overwhelming to explore. And into this truth is thrown a piece of wood to make the water sweet, representing the way that goodness received can not only transform us, but also transform how we understand the truth of our wounds. Swedenborg writes here that the goodness represented by the wood revives our “affection for truth,” our basic sense that it is good to know the truth about ourselves. We need to know the truth about ourselves and our experience if we are to grow as people. Yet, knowing the truth about ourselves and our experience can be very scary, especially as we consider the trauma of our woundedness. So, we can understand how the goodness, the presence, compassion, patience, or trust, received from another can be such an important part of the process, can be an incredible gift that human beings can give to each other.

Now the caveat of course, is that for extreme trauma and woundedness, trained professionals are an integral part of the picture. I’m not asking us to dig deeper than any of us have the expertise to explore. But for our everyday woundedness, the regular difficulities of being human, our various communities are essential. Even though, to make a point, Jesus separates the sick and the healthy, the righteous and sinners, in his conversation with the Pharisees, in reality, we are all both, and we can’t really avoid that. What we can do is choose to engage in the process of healing, whatever that looks like for us. For we have a God who heals us, and thank goodness for that. Amen.

(1) Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59pm Conversation, Randy S. Woodley and Bo C. Sanders, p18

Readings:

Exodus 15:22-27

22 Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water.
23 When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah. )
24 So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
25 Then Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink. There the LORD issued a ruling and instruction for them and put them to the test.
26 He said, “If you listen carefully to the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”
27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water.

Matthew 9:9-13

9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples.
11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Secrets of Heaven #8356
'And the waters became sweet' means that as a result the truths were made pleasant. This is clear from the meaning of 'sweet' as pleasant, for 'sweet' in the spiritual sense means sweetness of life, which is the same thing as pleasantness; and from the meaning of 'the waters' as truths… The situation here is that a person's feeling of affection for truth comes from good. For goodness and truth have been joined together as if in marriage…