The Healing Church

For my book group at church we are reading a wonderful selection of sermons by Barbara Brown Taylor. I am continually stirred and amazed at the power of her words, at their potent simplicity and remarkable insight.

I just finished her essay Hands and Feet and saw a clear nexus between this writing and our deGruchy chapter reading, A Christian. His description of God’s calling to the Christian community to form a church body that “does not exist to promote its own institutional interests but the gospel of Christ’s peace that reconciles those divided by enmities, both ancient and modern” is in essence Taylor’s model of the new humanity inspired and engendered by the appendages we take for granted in labor and feeding and holding, our hands and feet. She writes that Jesus healed with his hands, walked into the lives of those starving for promise and wrapped his love around the unlovable. As a church community, the appointed body of Christ, we must also grow calluses from giving our hands over to healing and wear our soles thin and raw by spreading the good news near and far. In the vision and reality of the new humanity the church must play the role of healer and reconciler. What we do with our hands and our feet will determine whether or not the church becomes, as deGruchy states, “an anticipatory sign of a true globalism of justice and peace, a globalism in which people who are different from each other find themselves at home together, a celebration of God’s jubilee.”

Establishing the reign of God, reviving human wholeness, is the sole end of the church and therefore it must “challenge all forces and processes that are dehumanizing and depersonalizing, and especially those that are blatantly crimes against humanity.” This becomes clearer to me everyday and with every lucid articulation of our prophetic role. In the case of torture, currently being debated in regards to the President’s recent attorney general nomination, churches, synagogues, mosques, should cry out that in this deliberate act of dehumanization we all fall further away from God, from our humanity, thus our salvation.

What does the smoothness and unmarred condition or perhaps the cracks and scars on my hands and feet have to say about my care for this new humanity? What of those extremities belonging to the church? “Where have they been, whom have they touched, how have they served, what have they proclaimed?” In the end, like Jesus, it is the state of our collective hands and feet that will tell the story.

Amen.