St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A sermon preached by the Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in the City and Diocese of Cape Town at the Cathedral Eucharist on the Twenty-Eighth Sunday of the Year: St Luke the Physician - Healthcare Sunday, 15 October 2006

We live in a world desperately in need of healing. We need it, our families need it, our communities need it. The world needs it. Torn apart by violence and war, threatened by the rampaging pandemic of HIV and AIDS, crippled by the addiction and abuse, at the risk of crime – we are sick and suffering.

The Gospel passage before us today presents three windows through which we may glimpse the mystery of healing. But before we try to peer through them, first a word about the mystery of healing.

Disease, suffering and death are part and parcel of our human existence. Sometimes they are the direct result of our own choices, sometimes they come upon us because of choices made by others. Sometimes disease, trouble and suffering come upon us from out of the blue as it were, randomly, and we are innocent of the suffering we are forced to bear. However, and this is the mystery of healing, whatever the cause of our pain and disease, God's will for us is always, restoration, renewal and wholeness. This is the Good News of God in Christ: that God is for ever with God's people, bound in intimate and loving solidarity, always close, never remote, lavishing on us grace upon grace, so that nothing whatsoever of trouble or pain, sickness and death can sever God's people from God's love and God's grace. Alleluia!

This mystery is hard to hold on to when cancer threatens, or retrenchment robs us of our livelihood, or rejection casts us outside the love we cherish, or death comes with its finality of absence and lasting loss. I find in the passage from Luke's Gospel read to us this morning, Good News, pressed down, overflowing and running over.

Talking to the crowd of thousands that had begun to gather around him, Jesus tells a story of a man who owned a vineyard and who grew so impatient with an unproductive tree in it that after three years he ordered the gardener to chop it down. More patience, the gardener lovingly counselled, a little more time to dig around it, fertilise it, nurture it. Another year, then let us see. In this parable it is not the owner of the vineyard who stands for God – omnipotent maker, ruler and judge. No, the divine impulse is that of the nurturing gardener who knows the tree, loves and cares for it, recognises its potential and is willing to risk his reputation on its possibilities. For those of us who are slow to respond and for whom growth and change are painful and frightening, this us Good News indeed.

The scene shifts to the synagogue on a Sabbath day where Jesus, as it had become his custom, was teaching. A woman who had been bent double, bent right over for eighteen long years was in the crowd. She was quite unable to stand up straight. Jesus saw her, called her over and said to her, 'Woman, you are set free from your ailment.' What Good News these words are to those of us who are bent over, caught in the restricting grip of pessimism and despair, bent double by the shackles of hopelessness and dejection.

Now there were among the crowd those who had religious standing and power. These complacent and arrogant people of faith had taken to following Jesus to keep track of his sayings and actions, so that they could trip him up, catch him out, and find reasons to do away with him, because he challenged their view of things, turned their world upside down. These men of power attacked Jesus for healing the woman on the Sabbath day, God's day of rest. In the face of their judgemental criticism, Jesus proclaims in word and deed the amazing grace of God, who with mercy and compassion, finds us where we are, as we are, whatever our need and whenever the time. And having found us, God's love embraces us, restores us, heals us and makes us whole.

The Good News in these three Gospel moments is that God is busy saving us from all that threatens to diminish and destroy us. This is God's work.

First, we are told that tirelessly, ceaselessly and unconditionally God lavishes God's grace upon us. Digging around us when we are tight and constricted, giving energy when we have grown weary, bringing new life when we have grown sterile.

Next we are told that God is busy unbending us from our rigid and inflexible stiffness. You know your unyielding places, where you are bound tight into negativity and resentment. I know mine. Hard and ossified places they are. Mean and spiteful. The grace of God sees them, recognises them, and with overflowing mercy and loving-kindness loosens and relaxes, releases and frees, to make us again what we are made to be, upright, erect, boldly looking life in the face, confident and hopeful.

And finally we are told that not all the world celebrates the healing that is God's intention for God's creation and for God' people. The world would keep us in the shadows of despair and hopelessness. The world does not want us to live in the freeing and empowering radiance of God's grace. To claim God's healing grace in our lives is to dare the criticism and rejection of the world that prefers bad news to Good News, revels in negativity and hopelessness rather reaching for the wonder of the light and the new life it brings.

The hymn we sang before the Gospel was read is a testimony to the remarkable power of grace and the amazing gift of faith in it. Those words were written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer just days before he was executed by the Nazis for his complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Surrounded by evil of a terrifying degree, with genocide as his environment and torture as his companion in word dark, dark, dark and with despair and good reason for it, Dietrich Bonhoeffer could sing:

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered,
and confidently waiting come what may,
we know that God is with us night and morning,
and never fails to greet us each new day.

Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented,
still evil days bring burdens hard to bear;
Oh, give our frightened souls the sure salvation
for which, O Lord, you taught us to prepare.

And when this cup you give is filled to brimming
with bitter suffering, hard to understand,
we take it thankfully and without trembling,
out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world you give us
the joy we had, the brightness of your Sun,
we shall remember all the days we lived through,
and our whole life shall then be yours alone.

By the grace of God, in the power of Jesus Christ, may this faith be ours, and in it may we be ever renewed, restored, healed and made whole.

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