In 2005 what we called “the Dream Team” was wrestling with
images that would describe the kind of church we were and wanted to be. Allan Cuseo, a member of the Team, gave us one
that instantly resonated: “A Healing
Place for the Soul.” This was the
inscription over the entrance to the ancient library at Thebes in Egypt.
To use the word “healing,” is to tread on somewhat
dangerous territory. We do not want to
take it to mean that we have somehow figured out exactly how God works, as if
God were our possession and simply did whatever we asked of him. There are Christians who seem to talk this
way—and it is easy enough for us to get caught up in this way of thinking and
praying. But none of that is what we
mean by healing.
There are three phrases in the reading from Paul’s Letter
to the Romans today which open up what we mean by saying “we are a healing
place for souls.” Those phrases are “the
spirit of adoption,” “the freedom of the glory of the children of God,” and “in
hope we were saved.”
I would submit to you that when we are fulfilling our
mission, then all of us, and the next person who walks through the door for the
first time, are experiencing these things as a reality, and not just any
reality, but a transformative one.
Let us start with “the spirit of adoption.” Paul contrasts this not with “a spirit of
natural birth.” He contrasts this with
“a spirit of slavery,” a slavery to fear.
How many of us struggle with our relationship with God, bouncing back
and forth between these two poles? Is
our relationship with God fundamentally formed by fear? Or is our relationship with God fundamentally
formed by grace, which is another word for this phrase “spirit of adoption”?
Adoption in human terms is a matter of grace. You call one your child who is not your
child. The fact that she or he is not
your child becomes meaningless. And the
child has done little or nothing to be treated as such.
So it is with God, with God’s acceptance of us. It is adoption. It is based on nothing we have done. It is simply God’s gracious desire. We put it this way when we baptize someone,
“We receive you into the household of God…”
And this reception can never be undone, as we also say, ”You are sealed
by the Holy Spirit…and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”[1]
Now the Bible also speaks occasionally of something called
“the fear of the Lord.” I suspect Paul
would not want to say that we should not
fear the Lord. But what he is saying
here is that any fear of the Lord comes after the spirit of adoption has taken
hold of us, and it is not a kind of slavery or bondage. The fear of God and the love of God are two
sides of the same coin.
A lot of us were taught differently, and a lot of people
out there in the world assume that fear comes first for us. The story they think we tell is that God is
first of all very angry with us and we should fear God’s wrath, God’s hatred of
sin. We have to do something to change
God’s mind about us. We have to “accept
Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior,” or some other way of “getting right
with God,” and once we have done that God adopts us as his children.
That is not our story, and I do not think we could tell the
opposite story—that is our story—that
God loves us, adopts us, first often enough.
Jesus himself told this story quite plainly in John’s Gospel,
You did not choose me, but I chose you. (John 15:16)
And John in his first letter writes even more clearly
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out
fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached
perfection in love. We love because he
first loved us. (1 John 4:18-19)
To know you are an adopted child of God no matter what the
circumstances of your life, is the beginning of what we call healing.
Once we accept our own gracious acceptance, we can embrace
“the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” But here is the tricky part. This freedom and glory is ours today and we wait with patience for it to be
revealed fully to us, sometimes with suffering, sometimes with groaning too
deep for words, in which the whole creation and God’s own Spirit dwelling in us
joins us and even prays on our behalf if necessary.
Paul goes so far as to say that we are not saved by some
present act of God, we are saved by hope.
We are saved by what we cannot yet fully see or experience, but we
nevertheless believe to be true.
This is a very hard thing.
Waiting. Patience. How can this be a healing place for souls if
there is not an active witnessing of healing?
Because of three things: faith in
what God has done, love as our way of life in the present, and hope that, as
Dame Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well.”
How can we believe that?
How can it be that this quote from Dame Julian was my mantra over the
past four months, that “all shall be well,” and here I am today and “all” is
decidedly not well. My illness has not gone away despite the
prayers of many, and it has resulted in a great suffering, our separation from
one another as priest and people.
The answer is the gift of seeing the world sacramentally,
that there is more going on here than meets the eye, and although that more
remains a mystery to me, I believe the mystery ultimately loves me and loves
you, and, in fact, has the ultimate purpose of all being well.
And for me at least, and I think for everyone, how I learn
to see this way and believe this way and accept this way is in community. Your prayers for me did not result in my Physical
or mental healing, but they very much helped drag me out of the abyss. And my experience of being back with you for
these short weeks has buoyed me up even more.
This is a healing
place for souls, because it is a place where, together, we discover again and
again that we cannot be separated from God, despite all signs to the
contrary. And in this hope we begin to
discover the freedom that is the glory of the children of God.
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