Sermon: Since You Are a Child of God...

Luke 4:1-13

Since You Are a Child of God…

James Sledge          Service of Healing and Wholeness          February 17, 2013

I don’t have much experience with services of healing and wholeness. This is my first. And I suspect some of you may find such events a little new age or trendy.  And yet… most all of us have those parts of us, those pieces of our lives that are broken, tattered, that get in the way of living fully. Most all of us have areas where we struggle to be whole, even if we don’t think of it as a religious or spiritual problem.

Sometimes the church hasn’t been much help, speaking of faith as purely a belief thing and confining the spiritual to a narrow little slice of life, divorced from work, physical health, politics, and so on. Sometimes we’ve even acted as though physical bodies are a spiritual problem. If we could just shed these bodies and our base, carnal humanity, becoming purely spiritual beings… But then Jesus comes along, quite content with a human body, quite content to be human, and he comes offering wholeness.

Actually, if you were to flip through the four gospels in our pew Bibles, you will not find the word “wholeness.” For that matter, you won’t find the word anywhere in those Bibles, but wholeness is in there.

Have you ever noticed how Jesus sometimes says, “Your faith has saved you,” and other times, “Your faith has made you well”? In fact, Jesus says exactly the same thing in both cases, but translators feel the need to make a distinction when Jesus is physically healing someone. In our worldview, saving and healing are different, even unrelated things. In our un-integrated, some might say dis-integrated lives, sometimes Jesus is playing doctor; sometimes he’s playing priest. 

But Jesus will not separate the spiritual from the physical, and so healing and salvation are simply different sides of the same coin.  And very often, our Bibles would do well to translate all of those verses, “You faith has made you whole.”

Jesus comes offering us salvation, healing, wholeness, but in our broken, divided, dis-integrated ways, we struggle to combine these things. Salvation is a future thing, we think.  Healing is about now. So what is wholeness? I think there are some insights into wholeness in today’s well-worn story of Jesus tempted by the devil.

The story itself sometimes takes on cartoon-type dimensions. Half-starved Jesus is visited by a horned, pitchfork-wielding adversary who taunts him to prove he really is God’s son. Except that is not at all what happens.

These temptations in the wilderness are not about proving who Jesus is. That is never in question. We could correctly translate the devil’s words, “Since you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” The question is not whether Jesus is God’s son.  The question is, What does a Son of God do?  How does a Son of God act?

Well if I were the Son of God, here’s what I’d do… How would you finish that?  Think about it because your answer says a great deal about your image of God and how a god should act, as well as your image of humanity and how humans should act.

I’m afraid I would have answered the devil differently than Jesus.  Starving, and I could get food with a snap of my finger. Why not? But Jesus won’t take the shortcut. 

Carl Jung famously said, "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering," which is a way of saying that we suffer unnecessarily because we aren’t willing to do the genuine suffering inherent to being human. We equate happiness and success with the absence of  all suffering.  And so we are not much inclined to “go through” things to get to something better, or even to accept the inherent constraints and limits of our humanity. The foundational myth of our consumerist culture tells us that only more can make us happy and fulfilled, never less, and certainly never suffering. Give me that bread! Now!

“How about some glory, authority, fame, and power?” asks the devil. Yes, give me some of that, too. Our culture celebrates fame and lusts for power.  But it is hard ever to get enough. Most of us aren’t famous and don’t have tons of power, and longing for these is yet one more way our culture creates anxiety. But Jesus won’t go along. “I will live my life focused on what God wants of me. That,” he says, “will be more than enough.”

Neither will Jesus go the self-aggrandizing route, nor will he presume that God stands behind every audacious claim dressed up with a scripture verse. Linebacker Ray Lewis and lots of others might want to note how the devil quotes scripture in order to get what he wants while Jesus is much more interested in figuring out what God wants.

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If we could meet someone who lived several hundred years ago and tell him about all the knowledge we have, the resources, the power to set the course of our lives, the medical advances, not to mention all our possessions and property, he would surely conclude we are a bit like gods, and that we are deliriously happy, fulfilled, satisfied, and healthy, with scarcely a care in the world. Surely most of us would feel the need to correct such conclusions.

The reasons why all our knowledge, resources, advances, and things do not make us happy and fulfilled are many and complex, and I can’t begin to address them all in this short sermon. But I suspect that for many of us, issues of identity and call play a big part. Many of us have acquired a false identity from the prevailing narrative of consumerism. And such identities make it incredibly difficult to hear our callings, what we are supposed to do with our selves. And so many of us are left with a profound sense of dis-ease, a longing for something we cannot name that leaves us ill at ease. It is a spiritual longing. It is a longing for true wholeness.

Jesus comes for this. He comes offering healing and wholeness. He come to give new and reoriented life. He offers salvation, a wholeness that includes the physical and the spiritual. It includes the assurance of God’s love that is for us and is stronger even than death. And it includes a call to lives that give themselves to God and others. We need all of that to be saved, to be healed and whole.

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If you were a child of God, what would you do; how would you live? But “if” is the wrong question. God’s parental love embraces us in Jesus, and so the question is, “Since you are a child of God, how will you live?” Jesus knows that struggle, and he longs to touch you, help you find your way, and make you whole.

Thanks be to God!