Faith and Pharmacy

By Dr Liz Young

(Based on Mark 5:21-43; 2 Cor 8:7-15)

The worship team decided I should preach today as the Gospel reading has two medical themes: prolonged menstrual bleeding and dying.  The words Jesus spoke to the woman with prolonged bleeding, “Your faith has made you whole,” are heart-warming; and they resonate with me because although discoveries in the past hundred years have changed our thoughts about doctors, from potentially being quacks to being miracle workers, I am all too aware that pharmacy can only do so much.  Unless a person wishes to be well, and trusts that they can heal, they won’t heal. Antibiotics are marvelous and cure 90% of an infection, but the body has to do the rest.

As a medical student at the end of the seventies, I spent six weeks in the Transkei in South Africa where it was accepted that if a witch doctor wanted you to die, you would, frightened to death. This belief was very effective, and I can’t help but compare it to our contemporary unbelief, our cynicisms and our rationalisations.  And then, with a twist, my thoughts move to the faith of the bleeding woman, who knew that if she could only touch Jesus’s garment, he would heal her. This story prompts me to ponder on how all our intellectual knowledge has diminished our ability to believe in irrational miracles. I find I often look for a rational explanation of Jesus miracles: like the feeding of the five thousand: did everybody who could, snatch up a snack as they hurriedly packed up to follow Jesus into the countryside?  For me the miracle was that everyone joyfully shared their picnic on that hillside. But the bleeding woman – did Jesus melt away her fibroid?  Or was it a hormonal problem such as hypothyroidism, that having been mentally restored to health her body automatically restored itself?

What links our readings today?
The importance of faith.
The phrase from Corinthians that intrigues me is, “the one who gathered much did not have too much and the one who gathered little did not have too little,” which got reflected in my commentary to, “Christ gave out of nothing, not from abundance”.  I’ve been blessed with abundance, both mentally and materially, and I try to be truly thankful everyday.  It’s a practice I use to stave off depression, and it works. As I wake I lie in bed and look out and marvel at the dawn, the sun rising out of the ocean – the point of which will be moving south each day from now on. In the evening I come in from the garden, relax with 100mls of wine and water (following Socrates and the breast cancer society’s recommendations) and watch The Chase on TV, all enjoyable habits.

When you’re down, you tend not to say thank you, because you’re so immersed in feeling sorry for yourself.
I recommend when you are feeling down, stop doing your duties for a moment.  Go outside and praise God for the beauty around you, and work out what you can do for someone else today, such as providing company, phoning someone to say you are thinking of them … this isn’t expensive.

But, to move on from thoughts of daily living to what Jairus’s daughter was doing: dying.  My most rewarding reading this month, was Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s biography. She was a highly trained Swiss surgeon who followed her husband to the States, but could only get a job in a psychiatric hospital, as she’d spent time as a student caring for refugees in Poland. And it was the McCarthy era. There, she listened to the stories of many who had probably been inaccurately diagnosed, and were dying without the support of their family, and they needed to talk. Later she wrote her book on death and dying, which I found very helpful when I was looking after children dying of cancer, when I was working at Waikato Hospital in the eighties. This experience of mine, seeing their bravery, how they looked after their parents, healed me, helped my grieving after my own mother had died of breast cancer. Grief I’d had no time to deal with, as she died a month before my first house job on a radiotherapy ward.

Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from death: again I wonder at the true diagnosis, and what Jesus did; and how this experience affected Jairus’s daughter’s life after that. My reading and thinking left me with one message for today: if someone who is close to you is dying, make sure you go to see them, and have that final conversation. Don’t visit with your mind clouded with grief, but open to what they need to say, so they can die in peace. I will always be grateful to my mother’s friend who stayed with her while she was dying, while I stayed looking after my much younger brother, Will, as in the UK at that time it was thought that one should shelter the young from the reality of death.

So, I’ve given you a homily based on my personal experiences which may have stirred up painful memories for each of you, but please leave here today aware of the power of faith, trusting that God will be with you through the hard times of life, as well as the enjoyable moments.