By Pastor Mark Docken
Chatfield Lutheran Church
Root Prairie Lutherand Church
Gift:
We fail to notice the marvel of how much health we have and the mystery of how much health goes on around us and within us. Powerful industries keep us so focused on what could be wrong with us that we fail to notice the gift of how well our bodies and spirits function.
Ours is an age of wonder drugs and laser surgery, organ transplants and in-vitro fertilization. These are all wonderful gifts of God.
Task:
However, there is a very deep irony. We live in an age of unprecedented killing, of terrifying new diseases like AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19.
Our capacities to extend life have become not just a gift but sometimes a tremendous burden on the person and their care-giver.
Our extended life expectancy has not deepened our joy and peace.
Our society is engaged in a costly quest for health. President Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex. Some physicians and healthcare economists speak similar words of warning about the appetite of our medical-industrial complex, and great debates occur about how to pay for all the health care that Americans and people around the world wish to have.
We are also aware that health issues extend to mental and emotional health as we as society deal with ever increasing addictions, sexual misconduct, financial pressures, identity and role confusion, burnout, stress, and family breakdowns.
The current pandemic can be a time for us to face squarely and honestly a more wholistic understanding of health. We need to recognize that medical advances alone are not making us healthier as a society or an individual. Medical advances appear to be less and less able to protect us from new diseases and less and less able to provide for a healthy society.
God tells us that health is not just about being disease free and having a long life.
Health is fundamentally relational – having healthy relationships with God, others, and creation.
1) With God: A healthy relationship with God is a transformative relationship, in which we continually enter into my true selves, which is the love of God. We recognize that life is not about me, but about God. Thus, we are set free for living.
2) With others: A healthy relationship with others empowers one another. It is about manna for all, justice for all. I am not well if we are not well together. (“Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” Micah 6:8)
3) With creation: A healthy relationship with creation is to live as one with the earth, not above it. We care for the earth as a member of our family, receiving it as a gift from God and nurturing it as a gift to future generations.
May our sense of health begin in the gift of our relationships with God, others, and creation.