Rev. Barbara H. Gadon

Interim Senior Minister

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

January 29, 2012

Do you want to be healed? Jesus asked the crippled man, no longer young, who had come every day to lie by the healing pool of Bethesda for 38 years.  Do you want to be healed?  What a question.  What else would he be doing there?  He had come through the Sheep Gate, part of the golden wall that still rings the old city of Jerusalem.  It was once the place where they brought in sheep to the temple for sacrifice, so it had a great aura of holiness.  There were all kinds there -  “a great multitude of impotent folk”, the King James version says, “of the blind, the halt, and the withered”.  They were waiting for something to happen, something called the “troubling of the water”.  This expression refers to the belief that God or an Angel, would stir up, or “trouble” the pool of water there.  And the first one into the pool after that happened got healed.  Complete cure.  This wasn’t just some idea foolishly cherished by one or two delusional types, but believed by many at the time.  It was part of the culture, it was normal for them.  A great multitude gathered every day, hoping that it would be their turn.  Can you imagine the suffering, all collected in that one place?  The disappointment, the shame?  This too was part of the culture, normal. 

And so in the midst of all of this, walks a man, whole and healthy, with no apparent need of the pool’s curative powers at all.  The text doesn’t say so, but it doesn’t sound like he came here by accident, or that this was just the most convenient route for him to take to his next appointment.  I think Jesus went there on purpose. I see Jesus in these stories as a kind of healer, perhaps a combination medicine man, community organizer and teacher, all within a very Jewish framework.  He went there on purpose – he was going to work.  And Rabbi Jesus picks out the sorriest man of the lot, and asks this colossally stupid question:  Do you want to be healed? 

It’s a question for everyone.  All of us, in one way or another, have experienced being broken.  All of us have felt alone and hopeless at one time or another.  Sometimes it drives people to come to church.  Susan, a dear friend of mine back in Wilmington, tells the story of being newly divorced.  She was living in Dallas, a city she hated.  She had moved there for her husband’s job, and now they were divorcing, and there she was, native New Englander, feeling alone in the conservative, sweltering, foreign place.  She didn’t have the money to move back home.  She decided to go to the Unitarian Universalist Church for awhile.  At first, she said, she was so raw that all she could do was sit in the back row and cry during the hymns.  She ducked out early in the postlude, so she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.  Sitting there, just sitting in that place with its music and its caring words, was healing.  Within a year, she was active in that church, had found her people, the ones who could make her life bearable.  Sometimes it is just about bringing your body to the right place, and that’s enough to start.  We heal. 

But lasting and real healing involves doing hard work, change, giving up all that is comfortable.  Ask anyone who has Type 2 diabetes, who the doctor has told time and again to lose weight, or you are going to die.  Do you need to be healed?  No doubt.  But do you want to be? 

Of course I do, thought the lame man who lay by the pool of mercy.  But he doesn’t say that.  The lame man doesn’t answer the question directly.  When asked, do you want to be healed? he says, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up.  And while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”  His mind races on ahead, assuming that his questioner is like everyone else, wondering how he could be such a loser - to come to the healing pool for 38 years, and still not be healed.  He assumes that Jesus’ real question is, “What is wrong with you?  Because surely God would have healed you by now if you were a good person.”  That too, was a common belief in those times.  It was part of the culture, it was normal.  So he has forgotten what it was like to really want to heal.  To change.    

A lot of people object to the Gospel of John because of the miracle healings.  It gives us Super-Jesus, the God man who can lift up a monster truck with one hand.  I don’t know what actually happened in the life of Rabbi Jesus, but I find it very plausible that crowds did gather around him, the way they do for anyone whose very presence seems healing.  An example today would be the Dalai Lama.  I think the Dalai Lama would laugh his head off if you said that he was God, by the way.  But I think Jesus would have, too.  He knew, as does any great leader, teacher, healer, or Shaman, that you have to want to be healed.  You have to work for it.  Don’t just sit around, he said, take up your bed and walk.  I know change is hard, but let me just ask you:  Do you want to be healed? 

Tina Rosenberg, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, writes about the enormous difficulty people have with change.  Even things that we know will kill us.  Drinking.  Overeating.  Smoking.  “You smoke,” she writes.  “Someone comments.  You tell him that you’re not hooked.  You can quit any time!  He doesn’t believe it.  But the funny thing is – you do.” 

A smoker, she says, makes “a choice to perform an act 20 or so times a day that is likely to cause him or her serious illness and very possibly a premature death.  This fact is intolerable.  So the mind does tricks to make it more tolerable.”  We rationalize things, we repress them, we deny them.  Easily, fluidly, without even knowing we’re doing it.  Children “forget” trauma from their childhoods, though they suffer greatly as adults without knowing why.  We make tolerable the intolerable, we soothe ourselves.  And in so doing, we become helpless to act on our own behalf.  We don’t change. 

          If a whole generation within a culture can do this, it becomes normal for everyone.  Rosenberg went to South Africa to study the AIDS epidemic.  There were massive public health campaigns, giving young people a lot of information about the dangers of multiple partners and unprotected sex.  There were long lectures, there were scary billboard ads that talked about the gruesome statistics, and the very real possibility that your behavior could mean an early death, and the passing of the disease along to your children.  Virtually none of this had any effect on the young people it was aimed at.  None. 

          Why?  Because receiving information, and receiving frightening images and stories about what could happen to us if we don’t change – doesn’t change us.  Information doesn’t move us.  Fear makes us dive under the covers even deeper.  Our ability to assume it’s all about somebody else and not me is immense.  None of the AIDS-prevention campaigns worked in South Africa.  Just as here in the U.S., none of the anti-smoking ad campaigns worked.  None of them lowered teen smoking.  Hard to believe we could care for our lives so little that we wouldn’t want to be healed.

          Self-deception is the practice of making tolerable what is intolerable.  In the case of teen smoking, other great forces are also at work.  In addition to the human inability to do something inconvenient and uncomfortable like losing weight, or going through nicotine withdrawal, other forces join in.  Profit motive – tobacco companies loved the anti-smoking ads for young people, some even helped sponsor them.  Why?  Because they predicted they wouldn’t work.  They put the Surgeon General’s warning on cigarettes because they had to, and to their immense relief, people ignored it.  They knew that advertising and warnings did nothing to change people’s habits, their need to belong.  And then you can have a culture that says something – smoking, or eating something called the Baconater – becomes acceptable and normal.  We tolerate the intolerable. Everyone else is.   

          For millennia, we have been people who need to be accepted, to live in a group to survive.  Our sort of hermit, individualistic approach to life is quite recent, and our brains have certainly not caught up.  We have just forgotten how much we need to belong.  Much of our brain functions still have to do with getting along in a group, helping us to fit in, in order to survive.  We just don’t know it.  Nor do we know all the things that we tolerate in order to survive in the culture.  You can have an entire culture, then, that is racist, sexist, homophobic, and committed to consuming vast quantities of resources at the expense of the planet and – not really realize it.  (Unless of course, these things are at your expense.)  You can have a finance industry that creates a sense of normalcy, even sacredness around the free market – with few regulations and a gross under-taxation of the rich.  We not only say this is okay, but it’s part of our freedom as Americans.  It’s our sacred right to drive a gas-guzzling automobile.  A sacred right, for some.  Do we want to be healed from these things, as a society?  Hell no.  And yet we feel the symptoms of it, the illness of it, the emptiness and the separation and the loneliness of it. Do you ever feel that?  Do you want to be healed? 

Healing – of individuals and of the world – is the business of people of faith.  It is a religious experience to actually feel the illness of a culture, and become unwilling to tolerate it.  It is a religious impulse, the desire to heal people.  To heal the world.  Tikkun ha Olam, is the Jewish expression, and the biggest aim of Judaism - the repair of a broken world.  This is why the Buddhists meditate to cultivate loving kindness, and why Christians (and Unitarian Universalists) tell inspiring stories about Jesus’ immense compassion.  It’s why religious folk of all stripes work so hard to feed the hungry, visit those who are sick and in prison, bear witness to economic justice and march for peace.  We see sickness and suffering in the world, and we want to be among the helpers, the people who bring about healing. 

So if giving people information and scaring them doesn’t bring about healing, if they prove to be as ineffectual as lying poolside, hoping an angel will come at just the right moment to trouble the water – what does work?  Tina Rosenberg found in her work as a journalist that she seemed to be following basically the same story around the world about people who made amazing changes in their lives and in the lives of others.  And the thing that usually tipped the change in situation after situation - was peer pressure.  Our desperate need to belong.  So in South Africa, there was a brilliant public health effort that seized on this notion of peer pressure and created a whole new approach.  It was called Love Life, and it included hip images of young people who seemed to know something.  There were smart, hip young women who were making good choices, who were strong, whom others wanted very much to be like.  There were social gatherings that had nothing to do with AIDS, or sex education.  But it had everything to doing what this “in” crowd was doing. Young people joined these clubs and experienced a new kind of peer pressure, a new kind of belonging.

She found this approach working in all kinds of places and situations, with all kinds of seemingly intractable problems.  Latino kids in high schools all over the US who were failing dramatically at math and science, were helped by people making it cool to do calculus.  Women in Indian villages becoming healers and people of stature, in spite of their bottom level in the caste system.  She found it in the drab little meeting rooms all over the world, people healing each other from all sorts of addictions – It’s called Alcoholics Anonymous – and all the Anonymous programs - where people heal one another, by the power of belonging.  I know this personally, because I am part of a fellowship called Overeaters Anonymous, and it has indeed changed my life.  Peer pressure, is even starting to work on teen smoking, with peer groups called the Rage.  They operate on the notion that teens like to rebel.  Once they were shown how they were being manipulated by the big tobacco companies, they started to rebel against them.  And they did it because there were a lot of kids around them doing the same thing. They did it because it was, well, cool.   

It’s called the social cure, and it works on adults as well as youth.  We all need to belong.  Find a healthy people to belong to, live among people who no longer tolerate the intolerable, who make it look possible, and you’ve got a chance.  Ever wonder what happens to people who have deep conversion experiences, who are born again?  They say it changes their lives.  And their lives are changed – I’ve seen it.  People take on responsibility, feed the hungry, take in the stranger.  How does that happen?  Or what about those men, dozens, even hundreds, now, who convert to Islam when they are in prison, and manage to give up a life of violence and drugs, to follow the prophet?  It’s not clear to me how much the person of Jesus, or the person of Mohammed, are part of this.  Experience of a divine presence is a highly individual thing, and doesn’t translate easily.  But what we can easily see is that in such conversions, a whole community springs up around the newcomer.  People who love them.  They now have a group of people they belong to, with a mighty influence on the choices they make.  There is now a powerful group of peers they wish to be like.  Who will support them in changing their lives, in healing. They will notice if the convert starts to do their old thing.  And now the convert will care deeply what they think. 

In this church, healing is prominent in your statement of mission.  You begin with the words, “We are…” and end with the words “…the healing of the world”.  The middle part is just a quick sketch of who you are and how you’re going to do it.  If you are looking for the basic purpose of this church, I would suggest you start here – with this business of healing:  Your individual selves, your church community, and the wider world beyond that.  A very serious purpose.  And the hardest one I can imagine. 

Churches – including this one - are filled with people who are potential healers.  They are filled with people who practice inclusiveness, compassion, and who work for social justice. People who believe that our shared purpose in life is love, and seek to practice it.  A community is a powerful force for healing. We may focus a lot on what the preacher says.  You may be stirred by the words of a sermon on Sunday morning.  But the chances are slim that you will change your life, especially in ways that would mean a lot of hard work – because of a sermon.  I could hear a fine sermon on the dangers of obesity, and the importance of a good diet.  But that is nothing compared to the social cure – the loving, compassionate and powerful peer pressure I experience week after week in my 12 step meetings.  These little groups that meet in drab Sunday school rooms.  When I walked in I saw right away that I wanted to be like those people, I wanted what they had.  There was a light in their eyes that had gone out in mine, that had gone dead through addiction.  I wanted to live again. 

We come to church because something inside us has gone dead.  Something inside us has stopped caring about healing, has given up on the healing of the world.  We have tolerated the intolerable too long.  We want to heal, and we want the world to heal. 

I know that many of you come here because you care about what is going on the world.  You are a church that wants to heal the world.  And I could preach on global warming, and the grotesque income gap between rich and poor.  But if all you do is listen to a sermon, no matter how compelling, you might as well be watching a movie.  You are far more likely to really do something if you make friends here.  If you start hanging out with the people who live the way you want to.  If you see people who are living more joyfully, doing more service, are out in the world protesting injustice, or giving their time to help others, you will want to be one of them.  If you really want your life to change, you need to find your people here, the ones who will inspire you to change.  You need to take up your bed and walk – to choir practice, take up your bed and walk to Occupy the South Side, which now meets everything Thursday night in our building.  Take up your bed and walk to teaching our young people, to learning a spiritual discipline with Lorie Rosenblum and Jorge Espinel, our student minister.  They start their class after service today.  Yes that was an ad.  Take up your bed and walk.  There is a reason why parents care deeply that their sons and daughters are hanging out with honor students, athletes, or the band kids – and not the ones driving around loaded on a Saturday night.  Everyone wants to be one of the cool people.  This has not changed from high school.  Though what has changed, I’d hope, is the willingness of the cool people to let you in. 

Now I need to have a word with the active members of the church.  You need to remember that you are the cool people, the ones that newcomers are looking to for belonging.  Your welcome must be warm, your arms must open wider than you ever thought possible.  You need to find out what the barriers are to people coming into your church and be about the business of tearing them down.  Have few people heard about Unitarian Universalism?  We need to change that.  We need to get our message out there.  Another ad:  this Tuesday night, we are going to hear from Rev. Brian Covell, minister at Third Unitarian Church, who has created a radio program for Chicago Progressive Talk Radio on Sunday nights.  It’s called Food for the Soul, and its broadcasts have brought our message to people all over the city.  Its podcasts have brought our message to people to people as far away as Australia.  Unitarian churches who offer recordings of their services have seen all kinds of visitors because of them.  They find something attractive here, something to which they want to belong.  They find healing.

We are a people deeply resolved to no longer tolerate the intolerable, something that no one can do alone, but anyone can do with other people who care.  We are… the healing of the world.