I was sick and you cared for me

6:30pm Service

Sunday 15 January 2017

St Mary's Church, Bury St Edmunds

Preacher: Dorothy Haile

This evening we continue with our series based on the panels in our beautiful West Window. This time we are thinking about ‘I was sick and you looked after me’ from Matthew 25 v 36. As I have been thinking about what to say I have been surprised by some new ideas, so I hope and pray that we shall all learn something new from these familiar words.

Our reading was from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. Phil 2:25-30

I suspect that if you or I were asked out of the blue what we know about the Bible character Epaphroditus we would probably look a bit blank. As far as I can tell he does not appear anywhere else in the New Testament, and we don’t know much about him. He is mentioned again in chapter 4 of this same letter, as being the person who had taken gifts to Paul from the church in Philippi.  Apparently he came from Philippi and had travelled to Rome to visit ‘their missionary’, Paul, who was in prison, and to take care of Paul on their behalf. This was a journey of about 700 miles, and somewhere he became very ill and almost died. We are not told the circumstances of his illness; perhaps he became ill on the journey or perhaps he caught a Roman bug and did not have resistance to it. Paul presumably prayed for him to recover, and did not necessarily expect miraculous healing, in fact his illness and recovery took long enough for news of it to get back to Philippi and cause them concern. So Paul says he is sending Epaphroditus home, to reassure the church that he has recovered, and to take back the report of how Paul is doing.

I don’t know about you, but this paragraph shows me a different side of Paul’s character. Earlier in this same chapter he had written of Jesus in the most profound terms: … “Christ Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross! Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” We tend to think of Paul as a great intellectual with the ability to express deep Christian truth, a strong missionary who has plans and is determined to fulfil them. And so he was. But he was much more than that.

In our reading Paul is expressing his concern for a sick colleague and for the worry other friends are feeling. This is a much gentler side of Paul, it seems to me, not the important apostle but a man who has personal needs and cares deeply about others. Here is a man whose friend has had a life-threatening illness, and a man who is also sensitive to the concerns of his friends back in Philippi, so much so that he sent Epaphroditus back to Philippi rather than keeping him alongside to care for Paul.

We take it for granted that caring for people in need in general and for the sick in particular is a core expectation of our faith. Jesus gave us that example and the early church followed it. But we shouldn’t take it for granted. In the days of the early church one of the things that shocked onlookers was that Christians looked after people who were sick, beyond their own families, even when it meant giving their own lives. Here is a quote from the writer Tertullian, who lived between 155 and 240 AD, “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of lovingkindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. Only look, they say, look how they love one another.” That is all very well, you might say, just the Christians blowing their own trumpets. But what did their enemies say? In the 4th century the Emperor Julian, who hated the Christians, calling them ‘the Galileans’, wrote ‘I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence’, and ‘ the impious Galileans support not only their poor but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us’. This Christian behaviour happened because the teaching of Jesus clearly told Christians to love God and to love each other. When a Jewish teacher asked Jesus which the greatest commandment of the law was, Jesus did not hesitate:  ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself’. Even though this kind of relationship between disciples and God was a core part of the Jewish faith it was completely new to the non-Jewish world of that day – followers of Greek religion had to offer sacrifices in order to please their gods, but there was no personal relationship of any kind. The Christian teaching that there is a relationship of love between God and his people, and that their love for him expresses itself in love for other people, was completely foreign to the pagan world. In the second and third centuries of the Christian era two great epidemics struck the Roman Empire, perhaps first smallpox and then measles. Death rates were very high, as we know happened in situations more recently in history when diseases like these came to populations that had no previous exposure to them. In these catastrophic circumstances many of the pagans fled to places they assumed were safer, and many Christians in contrast stayed and cared for the sick. Bishop Dionysius wrote at the height of the second great epidemic that ‘most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ’. This did lead to quite a number of deaths among the carers, though overall it seems that the death rate was much lower among the Christians. They had the hope of eternal life, and they had the teaching of Jesus, both of which seem to have stimulated them to sacrificial caring. One writer suggests that this was one of the reasons for the rapid growth of the church in the first few centuries.

The history of the church makes it clear that caring for the sick has been a characteristic of Christians for more than 2000 years, and it still is. We believe that God loves us as whole people, body as well as soul and spirit. God sees us as whole people and cares for us as whole people.

In the past monasteries cared for sick people, and hospitals still do. I was born in St Bartholemew’s Hospital in London – Barts – which was founded as a monastery in 1123 and re-founded as a hospital in the reign of Henry 8 after the monastery had been closed. Much more recently the hospice movement was started by Dame Cicely Saunders so that people in the last stages of their lives could be cared for with Christian compassion. Christian mission around the world has always included healthcare ministries, ranging today from primary and preventative care in communities to specialised surgery and surgical training. These healthcare ministries are often very significant in helping people see God’s love in practical compassion. I recently read a book about Dr Ruth Watson who was one of the pioneers of Christian mission in Nepal in the 1950s and 1960s. The Shining Hospital at Pokhara where she worked as a surgeon was greatly used by God in healthcare, and also in the growth of the church in Nepal. In the Ebola crisis in West Africa a couple of years ago the Christian hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, was the last health facility still functioning in that country. Now, the church in Liberia is still sharing Christian love, especially to orphaned children who are shunned by the community at large because people fear that the Ebola epidemic was caused by spiritual forces and curses.

So our West Window panel is completely consistent with our faith. ‘I was sick and you cared for me’ has been demonstrated through the centuries, and Jesus said that if we do it to the least of them we are doing it for him. In these days of challenge to our NHS and social care arrangements, I believe that we shall continue to see Christians follow the Lord who loves us and calls us to love others, in responding with Christian compassion to the needs around us. May the Lord help us to play our part in helping to meet the health and care needs of the people around us.