The Messy Work of Healing

A sermon on Mark 2:23-3:6.

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash]

This week my friend Jamie Bruesehoff (who happens to be a national trans rights advocate, speaker, and author) shared a really moving reflection on her public profile.

Without going into specifics, she explained that someone in their sphere had done something that caused harm to Jamie’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Rebekah, as a trans person.

Now, Rebekah is an advocate and author in her own right, and she is wiser than many adults I know.

Whereas Jamie’s instinct was to go hard at the person and publicly expose their wrong-doing in the process, Rebekah said no.

She told her mom, “This isn’t how we do things. You know that. Fighting fire with fire just makes a bigger fire. It doesn’t create change.”  

Jamie is a great mom in addition to everything else she is, and she knows when to listen to her children’s wisdom. At Rebekah’s prompting, she tempered her response, addressing the harm without the side-helping of vitriol, and some learning happened.

What really struck me about her reflection though was what she said at the end of the story. She wrote:

“This is not about moralizing always taking some supposed ‘high ground.’ It would have been totally justified to call this human out. Truly. Your blood would boil if I told you what happened. And to have shown folks once again the harm trans people experience in the most unexpected places would have had value. But this time… what was most important was centering the voice and the wisdom of the trans person impacted. And in this instance, I think more good was done than what might have otherwise been done. It’s all messy. So, we lean into the mess.”[1]

Jamie is right.

Dealing with the harm that other humans can cause in the world, and trying to not do more harm through our response, while also not giving it a pass, is messy work.

That challenge was a theme of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with my own wise (almost) seventeen-year old.

Quinn was feeling frustrated about the tone of much of the public conversation about the ongoing war in Israel and Palestine.

With much more awareness than I had at his age, he has been following the developments of the violence and the humanitarian crisis.

He is distraught by the plight of both the refugees and the hostages,

and also by the reactions here in the states, including the aggression against some Jewish people who are being targeted as proxies for the Israeli government.

He is horrified by the suffering and slaughter of innocents and sickened by the callous actions of the various leaders who are failing to protect civilians, while also recognizing the ways that such reactions of horror and anger don’t always lead people to productive responses.

He and I have nuanced conversations about this incredibly painful and complicated situation and the deeply fraught historical roots that have led to it.

But his frustration in this one particular conversation was about how such nuance is glaringly missing in efforts that are purportedly about advocacy for Gaza but are in fact focusing on which celebrities have or haven’t been public enough in supporting the people of Rafah.  

As a social media push it makes sense.

Celebrity lists get attention.

#Blocklist is easy to get trending and SILENT is a simple message (even when it is not technically true).

But what good does such self-righteous outrage actually do for the people who are suffering?

And if it doesn’t help the people who are hurting, then what is the point?

While the gospel story we read today may seem rather disconnected from such very current topics as trans persecution and violence in Gaza, I think it still connects to these two different reflections on how we should engage with the pain we find in the world.

In the linked gospel scenes we get an extended confrontation between Jesus and the religious leaders in his community.

The religious leaders are standing in defense of a clear, simple standard for righteousness that came from God’s own law.

Observe the sabbath and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.

In each scene of the confrontation, their critique is factually accurate. Jesus and his disciples are breaking the letter of the sabbath law.

The law against working on the sabbath had been hashed out by generations of priests and legal scholars enumerating the kinds of activities that were and were not allowed.

By this established teaching, both gleaning wheat from a field and acts of non-urgent healing violated the divine instruction to refrain from work on the sabbath.

But what this legalism missed was the explanation of the point of the law:

The people were to rest (and ensure rest for all who lived among them, even their slaves) as a remembrance of the freedom God had given their ancestors from the tyranny of constant work as slaves in Egypt.

Sabbath was meant to be a gift, not a burden. It was meant to meet a need, knowing that human beings are sometimes bad at arranging our lives in the way that meets everyone’s needs.

It was never meant to be a BARRIER to taking care of people.

And, sure, Jesus’ disciples being hungry as they walked through the field might seem rather banal (especially compared to the kinds of harm I mentioned at the start of this sermon) …

but hunger is one of the most fundamental and devastating forms of human suffering.

And whether present in the form that leads to malnourishment and eventual death, or in the form of one skipped meal, it still presents a human need.

When Jesus teaches that “the sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind of the sabbath,” he is presenting a profound truth about how we are to understand the relationship between righteousness and the need in the world, the pain and suffering that confronts us.

He is teaching us that the pain and need ALWAYS matter for how we interpret God’s law.

It’s not as simple as just pointing to the righteous standard.

We have to consider the way our righteousness will impact suffering.

We have to struggle through the nuance and consider the unintended consequences.

We have to lean into the mess to figure out what will do the most good, even if it’s not what feels the best.

This was Jesus’s teaching when the religious leaders confronted him about breaking the sabbath laws.

It’s a challenging teaching for a group of people whose vocational and religious identity was tied up in being experts of the law.

I could understand if they struggled with it a bit.

If they had questions.

If they wanted to debate with him, and pose multi-faceted scenarios with moral ambiguity, demonstrating how sometimes it is legitimately hard to anticipate what will cause the most harm and what is most likely to alleviate suffering.

But that’s not what happened.

What happened is that they watched him the next time the sabbath came around.

They saw the scene take shape, saw the person who was suffering, saw Jesus notice his need… and they watch to see if he would meet that need so that they might accuse him.

It’s there that they lose their credibility in my eyes.

It’s not in their commitment to God’s law, or even the legalism with which they express that commitment.

It’s in abandoning any interest in understanding the point of it all, and any concern for the pain and need right in front of them… because all they cared about what discrediting their opponent.

It would be almost a laughable caricature of self-righteousness if it were not so devastatingly familiar.

Because this kind of gotcha mentality is so much a part of the public discourse in our polarized, reactive, hashtag-addicted culture.

That so often seems to be about accusing whoever we think is in the wrong, rather than trying to actually figure out what will help.

There is need everywhere we look.

There is so much pain in our world.

And a lot of it is complicated, and deeply-rooted, and doesn’t have simple, easy answers.

But that’s all the more reason to focus on trying to work together to learn what might actually help, rather than how we can catch our adversaries out.

In the confrontation between Jesus and the religious leaders, they focused on the confrontation, but he focused on the healing.

We can focus on trying to be right in the various social crises facing our world. Or, like Jesus, we can focus on the healing.

Thanks be to God.

[1] Jamie granted permission for me to quote her post in this sermon. The full original post is accessible here: https://www.facebook.com/jamiebruesehoff/posts/pfbid0Cbt8kjSU2GtbvVKULohQnJoi3c313tiswmDys8zh57xNCptdqg3UTPh3j96uiyMGl