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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD 6th Sunday after Epiphany February 11, 2007 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kip@TwinbrookBaptist.com |
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With a little research, you can check out the truth about some of the things you might have been told and passed along in former times. For example, if you swallow your chewing gum when you are young, does it really stay in your stomach for seven years? The truth is ”no.” The stomach digests gum like anything else we swallow. This didn´t stop many parents, however, from using it to warn their children. Here´s another one: do we really only use about 10 percent of our brains? I´ll let you insert your own bit of humor here, but the answer again is ”no.” Neurologists study the brain with increasingly sophisticated equipment, and it is clear that we all use most of our brains, even when we are sleeping. How about this one: can chicken soup cure the common cold? This was implied, if not explicitly stated, by many a concerned parent hovering over a child´s bed with a hot bowl of chicken soup. Well, ”cure” may be too ambitious a word to use, but doctors say that broth actually has anti-inflammatory properties that will help to reduce congestion. We´ve come a long way over the centuries and even in recent decades in studying the body and the processes which cause us to be sick or healthy. There has been plenty of motivation to study the body because we human beings are so vulnerable to sickness. It is something we all of us know by experience of one kind or another. Maybe you feel it coming on, or it hits you all at once, or something happens to you in an accident, and you realize things are not quite right. Maybe it comes after numerous trips to the doctor and a lot of tests. However it comes, you realize you are sick, and that puts you in company with every other human being in the world who has ever lived. There are different kinds and different levels of sickness. There are the familiar signs we have learned through experience which tell us it is a cold or a virus or a bad meal. We know how to deal with the relatively familiar when it comes to sickness. We take an aspirin or an antibiotic or a day off. There are also deeper forms of sickness, more extended in duration, for which we seek out a doctor´s treatmentBa painful nerve, a broken bone, congested lungs. These require more than a day or two of prescription and care. They call us to a short-term process of recovery or repair, a largely foreseeable segment of time, after which we will return to our usual selves and our typical routines. There are also the deepest forms of sickness, which challenge our sense of return to well-being--the intensity of major surgery, the presence of cancer, the diagnosis of a disease which will be with you from now on. With this deepest form of sickness, the interruption in our lives is not just for a day or two, or a foreseeable segment of time, but for a more open-ended process of treatment and anxious change, with more tests and doctors and necessary interruptions in lifestyle. Whatever our varied experiences of sickness, it raises for all of us fundamental issues of trust, of what we can control and can´t, of how we deal with a wide range of possible feelings, and of what role our faith can play. The prophet Jeremiah speaks clearly about the place of trust in the life of a faithful person. He spoke to those in Judah several thousand years ago, and he spoke to them about how they were living as a nation. In perilous political times, they were looking to other powerful nations to come to their aid and rescue them. But Jeremiah has some clear words to say about the importance of trust, and his message was not only for them, it also can speak to us, we who get sick in our lives. Here the words of Jeremiah again, but this time think about what they might mean for us when we get sick. ”Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.” ”Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals . . . blessed are those who trust in the Lord.” It´s not that simple, though, is it? We ”trust in mere mortals” all the time, and rightly so. To some degree, we trust those people who package our food, those who treat our drinking water, those who guard our retirement accounts. And when we are sick, we trust people as well. We trust doctors and nurses to be professional and knowledgeable, and we trust pharmaceutical companies and the FDA with our medicines. In a very real sense, every time we put a pill in our mouths, it is an act of trust in ”mere mortals.” So is Jeremiah´s message about trust simply wrong and irrelevant to our lives? I don´t think so. Jeremiah has an important point to make, and I think we will understand it if we make a distinction between relative trust and ultimate trust. Relative trust is the trust we give to limited, changing situations and values and people. It is the varying degrees of trust we give to our world and our many relationships in it. So when sick, we trust the effectiveness of medicines, the diagnoses of doctors, the directions of nurses, the care of family. Ultimate trust, however, looks through and beyond all the limited situations and people in our lives to the absolute origin, the One who creates and loves us as our God. To be sure, God works in, with and through all the limited, relative situations of sickness, but we are always invited to learn the difference between relative and ultimate trust, and in whom to put our ultimate trust. This is Jeremiah´s point: in the middle of all the finite situations and circumstances and people, ”blessed are those who trust [ultimately] in the Lord.” Learning ultimate trust is an important issue in the way we think about and relate to the doctor. Doctors carry a significant place of authority in our society. The white lab coat, the stethoscope, the surgical uniform are all powerful symbols of authority for us. And indeed, doctors are mostly deserving of our relative trust. They go through years of intense discipline, and when we follow their direction and understanding, we typically do better than when we don´t. Our world would be a much poorer place without doctors and nurses and a medical profession. But doctors are not divine and do not have magical powers, they are finite human beings. We need this reminder the more anxious we feel about our health or that of someone we care about. You see, when we are anxious, we are tempted to cling to anything or anyone who will fix it. Instead of relative trust, we are tempted to place ultimate trust in a doctor, turning him or her into a kind of god for us. And when we do this, we cease to see the doctor as a human being and fail to recognize that there are limits to what any doctor or medicine can do. In recent decades, doctors have somewhat helped to create their image as semi-gods. Backed by an ever-increasing technology and an almost exclusive focus on success, doctors can do amazing things which were unheard of in former times. And we are glad for what can be done and how it enables people to live longer and more productively than they could before. Heart surgery, eye surgery, joint replacement, disease inoculation, c-sections, back fusions, brain surgeryBwe have access today to more effective treatment that kings and heads of state and all others in history were able to get before the last 50 years or so. But, and here´s my concern, by focusing almost exclusively on technological mastery and success, doctors and their patients don´t have a good way of accepting limits, other than to call it failure. So doctors tend not to talk as well about the limits of what they can do, because it comes across more like failure. Yet there are times when anxious patients and family members need to hear an honest yet gracious word about limits from their doctor, and know that this is not failure for doctor or patient, but part of being human before God. It can be deeply meaningful and reassuring at such times to know and feel that our ultimate trust is with God. Another issue comes for us in how we handle our pain when we are sick. Pain comes in many formsBfrom the relatively mild pain of a cut or bruise or a sore muscle, to a headache or backache or arthritis, from childbirth to surgery to chronic illness. There is not one of us here today who has not known pain in some form, and in fact, there are probably some here today who are feeling pain right now. Now, part of the challenge of having pain is that there is an element of unsharability to it. In her classic study of pain, Elaine Scarry wrote the following: ”Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. ´English,´ writes Virginia Woolf, >which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.´ . . . Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state [preceding] language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Even though we can talk in general terms and locations about pain we might be having, there is an immediacy to pain which cannot be precisely shared. Even though there can be blessed moments of human compassion and sharing between people, there is a kind of bridge over which no person can cross for another and feel exactly what the other is feeling. That is the element of unsharability in pain, and this is true from its milder forms to its most painful. On some level we understand this. It can make things feel awkward at times between the one who is hurting and the one who wants to help but feels powerless. And it can bring a sense of isolation at times for the one feeling pain who cannot fully share it with another human being. Yet here is what I want to say: when we can´t share pain fully, we can entrust it to a God who knows what we are feeling, a God closer to us than we are to ourselves, a God worthy of our ultimate trust. Behind this act of ultimate trust in God is the conviction, or maybe just the desperate hope, that God knows. Putting our ultimate trust in God also helps us to keep our pain in perspective. It can help us with what Wayne Oates called ”the temptation to make pain one´s god.” When pain becomes our god, Wayne Oates goes on to explain, ”for all practical purposes it takes the place of God as the unconditional controlling force of life.” And yet, as one of his patients expressed to him: ”I will be [darned] . . . if I sit down and worship this constant pain. I will not let that happen. There has got to be a bigger center of my life than this, whether the pain goes away or not.” Now, we are not called to be stoic, denying or hiding the pain we feel. That kind of dishonest approach to life can isolate us even further from others and from ourselves. There should be times of talking and sharing about our pain, to the degree that it is share-able. But pain should not stay center stage, or make us bitter and jaded in such a way that it distorts everything else. When we pay attention to the issues of our trust, times of sickness can be times of faithfulness and not just failure. Even in such times, when we deal with discomfort or worry with waiting or struggle with decisions, our souls can find a kind of blessing, whispers of something deeper and more true, a source of comfort and hope, like a stream which waters our roots, renewing us in times of heat or drought, enabling us to see, often to our amazement, that we can bear the fruit of ultimate trust in our lives. i. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Press, 1985), 4. ii. Wayne Oates, ´Spiritual Concerns of the Pain Patient,´ in A Practical Handbook for Ministry, ed. Thomas Chapman (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 460 |
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