Healing Affluenza: A Sermon on Mark 10:17-27‪.‬

I got a terrible puncture wound once while hiking off trail at Holden Village. The scar on my leg still reminds me of that life-threatening wound, of those weeks of recovery, and also of the skill and care of medical people who got me down off the trail, washed my wound, bandaged me, and brought me back to health with their healing touch--laying on me the nation-healing leaves from God's tree of life, to use the image from Revelation 22:2-3, which has become my favorite passage in the Bible. What are your wounds? Most of us are wounded--serving, as Henri Nouwen says, as "wounded healers." What are yours? Are you bent over like the woman in Luke 13? Do you live with some other chronic disease like the apostle Paul with his thorn in the flesh and so many characters in the Gospels? Is your problem diabetes, HIV, addiction? Are you paralyzed by something like the man whose friends carried him to Jesus in Luke 5? A relationship that is broken? A terrifying demon--mental, spiritual or physical--that won't let you go? The early chapters of any of the Synoptic Gospels are practically a catalogue of our wounds and of Jesus' healing.