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Richard lecture in his memoir Open Secrets tells the story of his ministry in a small town in Illinois, and describes a pastoral encounter with one of his parishioners named Amy. He talks about her as carrying the

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burden of cerebral palsy. Lister says, quote, It was as if every little ache, spasm and infirmity in the entire community had been rolled into a single massive suffering and fitted onto Amy's narrow shoulders.

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Amy had been diagnosed when she was four, and the doctors immediately gave her family a regiment of rubbing her arms, legs, hands and feet every hour , eight hours a day, 6.5 days a week

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since this was too much for her family, the church volunteered and brought casseroles and laid down on the floor rubbing Amy's muscles. Her father talks fondly about what this meant for Amy. That's where she gets

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her smile, he said. Finally, the doctors gave the community permission to stop the regiment and they began to accept her condition. But now Catherine Coleman , the faith healer, is about to come into

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town and Amy is discerning whether to go. She approaches lecture with the question the pastoral care question really of whether she should go and see this faith healer and he kind of hedges his bets. Lister says

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maybe she is from God, since she has these powers. But ever the realist, he asks, don't you think you'll be disappointed if you go and you're not healed? But Amy is actually in charge

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of the conversation and she consoles him. You've been a good confirmation teacher. She says we've learned a lot about Gandhi and martin Luther king from you, but there's something you don't understand. I think it

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will be a good spiritual experience for me, for all of us, Amy says, do we expect healing from illness? Did healing already happen with the church's care for Amy? Do you think, do

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we think that jesus takes away sickness and disability today ? I'd like to reflect on what it means to be sick for a long time and to have a body that's different because of it. So today sermon

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is about remembering the sick given the season of remembering sermons and I'm going to use what I know about disability studies to help frame the sermon. My experience with the subject is personal but not firsthand. My

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goal is to explore what it means for all of us to feel remembered by God in the experience of sickness and disability. I'm very aware with the new election that a nationwide healthcare plan, the Affordable Care

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Act might be dismantled, leading to more and more people with severe needs in our public places. But as I talked this morning, I won't be addressing the election directly, but rather a universal human experience

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of illness and disability. Jesus christ is our healing but not in an instantaneous event that takes away sickness , but rather through conversations of advocacy that help us understand how God is already present with the sick and

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the disabled curing is a one time event instigated, instigated by an expert. Healing is a longer negotiation that often involves hearing the story. The setting for today's text is from a public pool, were hurting

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people, sit outside waiting to be healed, john tells us that there were many invalids out in public . One of the things I noticed about Austin when we arrived was that area downtown by Red River where

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some people with disabilities sat out in public. As our social safety net decreases, we can probably expect these gathering places to be more and more pronounced. The pool of Bethsaida in john's gospel was a healing

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place. If you went to the water at just the right moment, you would be healed, Jesus meets this man at the pool and he knows that he's been there for a long time. How does

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he know? Well, maybe it's because Jesus visited the place before. Maybe I like to think that Jesus was the kind of person who went to these public places frequently when jesus approaches the man, he

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does not bring God to him. Rather, he meets where God already is acting within that man's story . The man had been sick for 38 years and had possibly been coming to the pool for that long

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, for healing 38 years of illness and still showing up at this place where God might be present. Risking whatever scorn there was and waiting for God's action . There are many different kinds of illnesses and we're

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not sure what this man had, as we know , there are illnesses that are caused by negligence and random illnesses. Some are genetic, others are caused by toxic environments. Some illnesses are physically painful and

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others bear the brunt of stigma. As when President elect donald trump insulted reporter Serge kovaleski is our throw drip, Asus, a condition that causes contraction in his joints or Winnie mock Charles Krauthammer for being in

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a wheelchair. Some illnesses like HIV and AIDS and mental illnesses are not talked about in public, are they? They almost never come up in our prayer requests at church meetings. Such illnesses then are hidden

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in plain sight. When people are sick for a long time, they sometimes feel vulnerable and alone. Sometimes they've had people who've tried to fix them. When jesus approaches the man and asks, do you

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want to be made? Well, he introduces a chance to respond. The man answers that he's had no one to help him get into the water and others get in front of him. We shouldn't think

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this man is making excuses and we shouldn't expect him to pull himself up by his bootstraps. The healing that Jesus provides actually starts with this interchange, where the man talks honestly about being blocked in his treatment

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, about having barriers set up in his way. Let's not think of excuses here or a sick role . The whole notion that people are making up ailments to get attention doesn't do justice to what people have

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to do to survive. Instead, the man shows up for 38 years looking for God's healing. God is present in this act of self advocacy, and Jesus goes on to heal the man asking him to

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get up and walk and he does so how do we account for the nervous feeling we feel when we approached this part of the story, the healing itself . For one thing, we know people like Amy

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who are working through whether to hope for physical cure and we know their expectations might be shattered, but we also know sick or disabled people who've been approached by those who want to pray for their healing.

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The implication might seem to be that physical sickness lying on the ground by the pool is on the side of sin and walking is on the side of salvation . Many of us sense that this equation is wrong

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somehow and we want to resist it. I think what makes stories of healing strange is that they awaken hope and we worry that this is a false hope , This is kind of hope can feel like longing

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or vulnerability. On the other hand, it helps if we separate the physical healing from the notion of cure and we see that it was that whole conversation with jesus that had a healing effect. Also,

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God was present in the man's life before Jesus came giving him the courage to come to the pool day after day. That hope and healing hope for healing and strength to continue another day. The pastoral theologian

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James did us, longtime professor of pastoral theology at Yale and author of many books, died recently of Parkinson's disease. Towards the end of his life, he was invited to contribute to a volume on teaching

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Freud that explained the relevance of Freud's teaching for religion in the study of religion. He did this by summarizing Freud's thought into several key points. One of the points was, vulnerability is inevitable. Do everything

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you can to avoid being vulnerable. I think he was already getting sick when he wrote this, relying on his wife and friends for basic daily activities. So he crystallizes a key point. Vulnerability is inevitable

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part to do everything you can to avoid it. This is a human sentiment that we can easily identify with right, but faith helps us not have to avoid the vulnerability associated with sickness and disability, but

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instead face those fears. The paradox is that the Gospel calls to the vulnerable to the vulnerable places with the promise of presence. Being sick frequently makes us depend on one another. And this is part of

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Grace. My former colleague and friend mary jo koto wrote poignantly about watching her mother care for her father with dementia at the end of his life, she said it gave her a whole new notion of what

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it means to be human that went beyond independence and interdependence. Instead, what she saw, she said was just dependence. Yeah. What does it mean in a culture that prizes success, achievement, self

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reliance, hyper cognition for people to become so dependent on one another. David, for liquor and Penelope Boyd coined the term temporarily able bodied to describe all of us, Many of us are going to face

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disability at some point in our lives. The american College of Rehab Medicine says that most of us will spend at least eight years of our lives with a disability. Little wonder then that temporarily able bodied has

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been taken up into popular culture. Even conservative columnist George will wants approvingly used the phrase to describe how we should all reflect on our potential to become vulnerable to one another, reflecting on this might be frightened

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, but it might also deepen our empathy when we become disabled, we might become vulnerable to one another in ways we never expected. This isn't sinful, but it's part of grace. It's human to need

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help to ask for care to show up at the water's edge. Day after day needing help is not sinful, what's sinful is always needing to win or thinking that you're only okay if you're perfect. What

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sinful is our difficulty identifying with our own vulnerability and our need for help from others? The christian theologian juergen moellemann says that were born weak and helpless and we die that way. The only paradoxes that we

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think we're anything else in between. When we hear the man's story, the fact that he tried to get into the water, we hear his profound loneliness and his hope, perhaps his family and friends deserted

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him because of his disability or maybe he drove them away regardless, Jesus, here's a profound and lonely story that's also a testimony. The man needs healing not from physical illness but from social isolation and stigma

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that comes from being disabled when he tells jesus his testimony. This is part of this healing because it describes his own self advocacy. The theme of this sermon series, as we've said, is remembering when

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we remember the sick and disabled, we must remember the barriers they face to treatment and the isolation they feel disability activists tell us that the Affordable Care Act has literally been lifesaving for many in their community.

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We also remember that healing does not mean God is only present in able bodies. God was already present in the fact that this man went out and sat looking for healing by the portico. When jesus came

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. He recognized God there in this man's life and engaged the man in conversation about his deepest hopes. Remembering the sick and disabled means engaging them in conversations about illness and hope, faith and despair. So

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what about Amy? Do you think she went to the faith healer? Yes. Do you think she was healed physically? No, but she said it was a good spiritual experience and it didn't ruin her

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faith. She has plans to be a counselor at a rehabilitation center. But maybe the healing started a long time ago in the life of that congregation as they brought casseroles and massage your muscles as they cared

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for her body. They became a body knit together by the tough sinews of daily practices of care, spurred on by their hope for healing. Yeah, maybe what we need is to be healed from them

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from the sense of perfection and our claims for self reliance. It's isolated individual selves, afraid of ever becoming vulnerable. That jesus christ came to heal when he reached over the divide of incarnation and became flesh

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, he sought to heal our fears of vulnerability and disability, theologian nancy Iceland reminds us in her book disabled God that when God raised jesus from the dead , his wounds of crucifixion were still on his body

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, he showed us that will never live in perfect human bodies. Jesus stops to ask the man if he wants to be made. Well. When we hear that question directed to us, we can see

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how we need to be healed of our fantasies of perfection and health learning instead to honor the ways that were deeply dependent on one another. Oh man.