Ramadan Mubarak to my Muslim family. We Christians are on a Lenten Journey that ends at Easter, April 20. Passover begins April 12. These Holy Days make me wonder what it means to live Holy lives; what does it mean to be whole? Sacred. Connected to Source. Loving neighbor and self. Do we want to be holy and whole? Do we want to be well?
I’m taking us back to a story in the Christian scriptures — John 5 — about Jesus healing a paralyzed man.
2 Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew[a] Beth-zatha,[b] which has five porticoes. 3 In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people.[c] 5 One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” 7 The ill man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am making my way someone else steps down ahead of me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” 9 At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
This pool had bubbling water thought to have healing powers, and sick people came to the pool, believing that whenever the waters were stirred up, the first person to enter the pool would be cured of whatever sickness they had.
Related: Fierce Love This Lent: Love is Calling Us Home
The text doesn’t say how long this man has been there, waiting to get into the healing, churning water, but it does say that he has been there “a long time” John 5:6. Nobody helped him get in the water. Nobody gave him a hand. Can you imagine the pushing and shoving to go first?
It turns out the man did not need to get into the water to be well!
Jesus asked him if he wanted to be well. Jesus told him to pick up his bed and walk. He did not need to wait on a sick system, one in which there was a competition to get in the water. He needed an intervention. I’m going to call that a system intervention. A clarifying question that required a truthful answer, and a prescription. In other words: Do we want wellness?
We can’t get well in a sick system. How you gonna get well in a system in which your disability — you inability to see, to walk, to hear, to stand, to be understood; your compromised immune system, your chronic asthma, your thyroid condition, what have you — is seen by the system as a sicknesses to be healed, to be cured, from which you MUST be “saved” in order for you to be perceived as “ABLE.” Sadly, the church has too often taught us disability is caused by sin: it’s your fault or your mama’s fault, a condition to be fixed by Jesusm and if Jesus does not fix it, and I mean RIGHT NOW, YOU ARE NOT just, righteous, or good enough to belong to the system. That system is sick and will not make you well.
If the system still low-key thinks God designed whiteness as superior, or being gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, or questioning is a mental disorder OR a condition from which you CAN be cured and SHOULD be cured, that system is sick and will not make you well.
If the system thinks wellness is for the rich and the poor be damned, the system is sick.
Our system is not well. Let’s look at birth for a moment: With an average of 20.1 maternal deaths/100,000 live births, the U.S. is the most dangerous developed country in which to give birth. For Black women, the most frequent victims of our crisis-level maternal mortality rates, the odds are even worse. According to the most recent data, the maternal death rate for Black women is more than double that of white women: 44.0 deaths per 100,000 live births compared to 17.9. It was also more than three times the rate for Hispanic women at 12.6.
Is this what we want? Do we want to be well?
Our nation is not well. There are many contributing factors. Our nation is built on land on which, despite Laura Ingalls Wilder’s observation, there WERE people living here, people erased, massacred, removed, dispossessed, whose land was stolen, tilled by stolen bodies. White supremacist ideologies, capitalism that believes poor children are acceptable collateral damage for the wealthy to become wealthier, white Christian nationalists believing they are the chosen ones…we have a world view problem.
That stuff is in the water; troubling the water is not going to make us well. We need to empty the stagnant polluted pools, we need to run the fresh rivers of vivid imagination, of wild equality, we need a tumult of fierce love, a cascade of justice, we need a new river running through a new city, a fierce clear river disinfecting our dis-eased and poor imaginations about who is human and who deserves love and live.
Do we want to be well?
I’m going to be writing about healing practices this year.
The first?
Truth. Speaking truthfully. Looking straight on at our culture, our society, our family systems, and being honest about what we see. Don’t squint and pretend. Don’t cover your eyes or look away. Let’s be honest. Because the truth will set us free.
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is senior minister and public theologian at Middle Church in New
York. Celebrated internationally for her dynamic preaching and commitment to justice,
she champions racial equality, economic justice and LGBTQIA+/gender rights. Featured
on MSNBC, PBS, NBC, CBS and NPR, she is the author several books, including Fierce Love” and the “Just Love Story Bible.” Countless individuals and communities have been inspired by Lewis’ transformative work on her podcast, “Love Period;” in columns and articles; and on stages, in churches, on the street and in digital spaces around the globe.