A sermon from Sunday

Before I left Cambridge, on a visit to someone in hospital I went onto the ward and as you know very often the room has various occupants. The person I was visiting was having fairly minor surgery, but all the others were being treated for fairly major life threatening conditions. At first I wrongly assumed that they would all be having similar operations for similar conditions.

Imagine my surprise after hearing a young girl two beds away laughing and joking with another patient across the ward, to see her get out of bed with just one leg, the other having been amputated the week before. She was just 23.

Across from her was a lady in her late 60 who had just moved to Norfolk from the East end of London. She was coming to the conclusion of a huge long course of treatment which had involved major operations, radio therapy and Chemo therapy. It had not been an easy journey and she had had many setbacks, but she was looking forward to being back at her caravan near her Norfolk Home for her grand daughters 15th Brirthday.

It will not have been like it all the time, but the atmosphere on the ward was supportive, encouraging, and full of life and humour. They were all getting better, they were all going home, and the young girl even left while I was there to smiles and cheers from all the ward. She had to face a long ambulance journey back to home in Cornwall, but her smile and expectation of seeing her boyfriend would certainly carry her there.

Jesus healed 10 lepers in our gospel story for today, but did you notice an important comment?

Only one was made well.

Only one returned to give thanks, only one was made whole again and restored.

The skill of the surgeon or the consultant is beyond compare but they can only mend, or try to mend the broken body. They can try to remove or destroy the cancer cells that ravage the physical body. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they do not manage it.

When they do not manage it they can only say we did all we could but it didn’t work. Believe me they feel as though they have failed. The skill of the doctor is to heal.

There is no doubting the heartache when the skill of the consultant meets its match!

Wholeness on the other hand is something slightly different. Being “made well” is a state of living, no matter how long the life may be.

I have had the privilege to know a number of people who were healed and made whole despite the skill of the surgeon meeting its match. You may have known people like this too. They make me feel so humble and full of gratitude that I have ever known them. Their life in every way becomes a source of true blessing, that goes beyond their own mortal lives. This is remarkable, and always something that causes thanks to well up in my heart.

You can go into any hospital, you can look around you wherever, and see the one out of ten people who are made well. The one out of ten that are whole again, after seeking healing.

The one out of ten who cause a blessing to fall wherever they go.

The one out of ten who have thankful hearts, which overflow and feed others.

The one out of ten who have managed to learn something of forgiveness and have met its challenge, while the rest of us may be still only at the stage of wishing we could, or hoping we might be able to.

The one out of ten who returns to find a broken relationship and makes it right again.

Our world is made a good deal better thanks to the one in ten people as we have seen.

“teach me my God and King, in all things thee to see!” (as reads the famous poem/hymn)

How wonderful to be able to reach this point. To be able to look on glass and see beyond it and not get hung up on our own reflection but to see the heavens and heavens possibilities beyond.

I know I get distracted by my own reflection all too often. The things that scare me, or the things that have scared me. The people I would like to but cannot yet forgive, and the sin that clings so closely, to use word from the letter to the Hebrews.

Our drudgery can be lifted, we in Christ can be given the spring in our step again. God reaches out to us on the road and touches us again and again

“For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for less be sold”

“Christ’s is the world in which we move and he meets us here, he moves with us, he crys with us and laughs with us. He makes a place in which we touch him and he touches us.

“Christ makes with his friends a touching place”

So we are left with the thought “what sort of friend am I?” can I be one in ten, or do I become again one of the nine others. Maybe this time we can be one in nine?