Luke 8:16-39

After an operation for carpal tunnel, Jane asked her doctor if she would be able to play the piano.  "Of course you will be able to", he said.

"That's great," she said, “because I never could before.”

While we usually think of healing as a good thing, healing always changes reality and relationships.  When the Gerasene man who was possessed was healed by Jesus, he asked to go with Jesus.  He knew his place in his community was lost, and he would have hard work in establishing a new place.  His neighbours had a double problem.  A part of their economy jumped off a cliff, and the person they had locked up would need a new place in their community.  What might it be like to let this man take a normal place in the community, always remembering what he had been like, and wondering if he might become like that again? It is no wonder they asked Jesus to leave, and the faster the better.

And there are other kinds of disruption arising from healing.  When a person has a long-lasting, debilitating illness, the support person or people for that person develop new roles in their relationship with that person.  If the person becomes well, their roles can become uncertain, and sometimes healing leads to complete breaks in relationships.  A friend of mine worked as a rehab consultant for an insurance company.  One time he observed a client showing the signs of hyperactive thyroid and asked him to get his thyroid checked.  Medical treatment calmed him down and he shifted from being moody and over reactive to calm and supportive.  The employees under his supervision wanted him to be over reactive because they felt uncomfortable with him as a calm supervisor.

This is especially true with addictions. Co-dependency and other behaviours become part of the system of relationships.  If a person breaks from an addiction, friends, family members and co-workers can be unwilling to do the work of reconstructing their relationships, and will undermine the healing process.

In the first part of our reading, Jesus had changed in some way, and his own family wanted to take him home and fix him, try to make him like he was before he started his mission.

There are many possible messages for us from this reading.

We have the option of healing for our lives offered by Jesus in whatever way we need.

If we experience healing, we need to be ready to resist the efforts to subvert our healing.

If someone close to us receives healing, we need to give our support to help that person succeed in their new way of being.

If we want healing for someone else, we need to love them enough to understand the barriers to that person's healing, love them enough to be patient in developing our relationship to the point where it can be supportive.

When I was interviewed to serve at St. Matthew's, it seemed some expected St. Matthew's to close sometime in the next few years. This acceptance of death by some members is an illness blocking this congregation from the ministry that is around you.  Part of the block is the belief you will have to give up what is most important to you in growing into new ministry. 

When I did a little survey early in my ministry, the most important items included fellowship and the music in the worship services. 

Growing this congregation will take more fellowship, not less.  Our experiment with Fun Fridays and coffee before church revealed a desire for more fellowship opportunities.  Now we need each of us to invite people we know to try out St. Matt’s, and to make connections in the communities where we live.  Many people today need to get to know members of. a congregation before they will try it out.

Some worry we will need to change our style of music.  My target for new growth includes people who are not likely to want to come to a Sunday morning service, regardless of the music, and many of the ones who might come would prefer our current style of music to other forms of music.

Maybe a key worry is that we need to think of St. Matthew’s as God’s church, not our church.  What we will need to give up is making decisions in terms of what we want, replacing that with deliberately and discerning what is needed to serve God where we are.  And this will be both healing and painfully disruptive to some.

What I am asking some of you to give up is the idea life will be better if we just do as little as possible and coast into retirement as a congregation.  I am asking you to believe you can help God’s ministry connect with hundred’s to thousands of people in the communities around.

To me, this is God's church, and you have a God-given mission to share the good news that Jesus shared.  As we let this belief fill us, it will bring healing of our spirits, and it will disrupt our lives, a disruption that will open the way for even more healing.  And it will strengthen our capacity to make a difference at times such as this when floods shake our whole community.