Science and Healing: Series – In the World But Not Of It
April 24, 2005
Intro:
Christopher Reeve. Nancy Reagan. Michael J. Fox. Just a few high-profile individuals who have been extremely vocal in their advocacy for aggressive health research into new treatments for disease through stem cell research. We understand where they are coming from, because we see and have compassion on their pain. And as Christians, so we should. We have a God who sees our pain and responds with compassion, we have a Savior who, as He walked on earth, saw pain and responded with compassion and with healing. As Jesus sent His 12 disciples out on a missions trip, He even gave them a specific mandate: “7As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’ 8Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matt 10:7-8).
The Importance Of Healing:
Even before Jesus came, we read stories of God healing people. Namaan the leper, Hannah the barren, Elijah and the widow of Zeraphath’s son, Elisha and the Shunammite woman’s son. Scripture is clear that disease is to be fought, life is to be cherished, and health is desirable and to be pursued. That is an important part of the message of Scripture, and of salvation, and is the part I am going to talk about today. But it is not a primary message. There are things more important than our physical health, such as our trust in the goodness of God, our acceptance of the sovereignty of God, and our confidence that the ultimate healing and restoration of our whole selves, body and soul, is accomplished only when we step across the threshold of death and into the eternal life with God in heaven. At that point, we know, there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev 21:4). Death actually leads us to the ultimate healing.
Jesus The Healer:
As I read the Gospel stories of Jesus, I see this incredible compassion that He had for those who were suffering, and I see Jesus acting to restore these broken, hopeless, outcast people who were plagued by some sickness or deformity that was ruining their lives. Jesus saw the hurt, saw the pain, and saw how devastating it was and chose to do something about it.
On one occasion, Jesus was trying to get away. He got in a boat, and He and the disciples headed for “a solitary place.” But the crowds that had been following heard about it, and hustled along on foot. Matthew 14:14 tells us, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.”
Earlier in Matthew, chapter 8:1-17, we have several stories back to back:
“1When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. 2A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”
3Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. 4Then Jesus said to him, “See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
5When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6“Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”
7Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”
8The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
10When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
13Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that very hour.
14When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. 15He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.
16When evening came, many who were demon possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. 17This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.”
I have been around a number of people who have earnestly studied the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healing ministry, anxiously searching for the common principles and methods and words that Jesus used so that they might have the same success rate in healing as Jesus did. I think it is a search in vain – they will not find what they are looking for.
Looking at the healing stories, they are all over the place. Sometimes Jesus spoke a word and people were healed. Sometimes He said nothing. Sometimes He touched them, sometimes He wasn’t even there. One time Jesus spat on the ground and made some mud out of His spit, put in on the eyes of a blind man, and restored his sight. One time a woman in a crowd snuck up and touched Jesus’ garment, and Jesus felt the power go out of Him but didn’t know where it had gone. We read the one time a Roman soldier appeared and asked Jesus to heal his servant just by saying the word – he didn’t want Jesus to be inconvenienced by having to actually go. One time some men lowered a paralyzed man through a hole in a ceiling, and Jesus forgave his sins. Then he told him to get up. One time Jesus told a group of lepers to go and wash, and they were healed as they obeyed. One time Jesus asked a man if he even wanted to be healed.
All kinds of different methods, but the same result – people were healed.
What About Today?
Was that just for “back then”? What about healing today? I believe that God heals. I believe that God heals miraculously, instantaneously, and incredibly. I believe that God heals slowly, patiently, and thoroughly. I believe that God heals in places that we do not expect, in ways that we did not anticipate, and in times that bring glory to God alone. I believe that God heals through the power of the Holy Spirit and that very often God the Holy Spirit exercises that power through the hand of doctors and nurses and technicians and researchers.
I remember a little while ago someone had asked us to pray for healing, they went to the doctor, took some medicine, and got better. I remember when we heard that they were better, one of the people with me said, “praise God – God healed you.” The response came back to sort of clarify – it was the doctors and the medicine, not a miraculous healing. And this friend sort of smiled, and said, “doesn’t make any difference to me how God healed, because it all comes from Him and I’ll gladly praise Him for all of it.
When we stop and think about it, God is constantly healing each of us. All of us have skin cells that are rejuvenating on a daily basis, we have white blood cells destroying viruses whenever they sneak in, we have scratches and scrapes and bumps and bruises, and they are all being continually healed. You may not have known this, but each of us even have a group of cells, known as Stem Cells, that live in our bones and our brains and even our fat, which can change to become all kinds of different cells and can then replace cells that have been damaged or destroyed.
Stem Cells:
The discovery of those types of cells has really excited the medical research community. If we can figure out how those cells work, we can find ways to repair spinal cord injuries like Christopher Reeve’s. Or to slow or reverse Alzheimer’s like Ronald Reagan. Or to cure Parkinson’s, like Michael J. Fox.
As Christians with a strong history and theology of healing, we should be equally excited and encouraging of this research. It is new (since 1998), it is incredibly promising, and it is motivated by compassion and a desire to alleviate suffering. So why is there controversy? Why should we care? What contribution do we, as people of faith called to be involved in our world, have to make to the discussion?
The Science Behind It:
To answer that question, we need to understand a little more about what stem cells are, and as we do it should cause us to marvel again at the creative power of God.
As we talked about last week, life begins at conception. Two cells – one from the male and one from the female – come together and life begins. Packed into those two tiny cells is all of the information, all of the potential, all of the basic building blocks of every part of us as individual, eternal persons. Our eyes, our bones, our heart muscles, our brains, our nerves, even our baby toes all come from those two original cells. That is pretty amazing!
About four to five days after conception, those 2 original cells have grown and now include a group of stem cells – cells from which all of the other tissues and cell types and structures of our bodies will grow. These cells are unique in that they are not yet any of those different types of cells, but are capable of becoming any of them. They are also able to divide and renew themselves for long periods of time.
It is at this point that scientists get really interested in getting these cells into the laboratory to do research and to search for potential cures and treatments to disease. But there is just one, really big, problem: removing the embryonic stem cells destroys the embryo. It kills the life.
So Now We Have A Problem:
Many in the scientific community see no problem with this. They argue that embryos are not human. They argue that in vitro fertilization has left us with hundreds of thousands of un-used embryos that could be put to good use to cure some awful diseases. And they argue that aborted fetuses should also be able to be used for their stem cells for the same reasons.
It is here that Christians like you and I need to enter the debate, because it is here that we must raise and answer the question of the moral status of the embryo. Here I borrow the words of theologian Gilbert Meilander, from his submission on behalf of Protestant Christians to the American National Bioethics Advisory Committee, (ETHICAL ISSUES IN HUMAN STEM CELL RESEARCH, VOLUME III Religious Perspectives. June, 2000. http://www.georgetown.edu/research/nrcbl/nbac/stemcell3.pdf)
“We have become accustomed in recent years to distinguishing between persons and human beings, to thinking about personhood as something added to the existence of a living human being—and then to debating where to locate the time when such personhood is added. There is, however, a much older concept of the person—for which no threshold of capacities is required… a person is not someone who has a certain set of capacities; a person is simply, as O’Donovan puts it, a “someone who”—a someone who has a history. That story, for each of us, begins before we are conscious of it, and, for many of us, may continue after we have lost consciousness of it. It is nonetheless our personal history even when we lack awareness of it, even when we lack or have lost certain capacities characteristic of the species. This is, as I noted, an insight that grew originally out of intricate Christological debates carried on by thinkers every bit as profound as any we today are likely to encounter. But starting from that very definite point, they opened up for us a vision of the person that carries deep human wisdom, that refuses to think of personhood as requiring certain capacities, and that therefore honors the time and place of each someone who has a history. In honoring the dignity of even the weakest of living human beings—the embryo—we come to appreciate the mystery of the human person and the mystery of our own individuality.”
I believe that we have a God-given responsibility to care for and advocate for the weakest members of our society. We even have Biblical examples of where God has turned against His covenant people when they join in exploiting the weak (see Isaiah 1). We are to care for the poor, work for justice for those exploited by the powerful, and to stand up for “the weakest of living human beings.” We need to oppose embryonic stem cell research.
There Is An Alternative:
This does not mean we give up on the promise of new treatments that can come from stem cells. As I mentioned earlier, embryos are not the only source. From the scientist’s perspective, they are the easiest source, and possibly the best source from which to start, but the cost is too high, especially when there are alternatives. As I mentioned earlier, there are adult stem cells. There are stem cells in placenta and in umbilical cords. Though it takes more work, scientists can use these cells to the same goal, if only we as members of our society will make a hard moral stance in opposing embryonic stem cell research. Here again I quote Dr. Meilander: “only by stopping, only by declining to exercise our will in this way, do we force ourselves to look for other possible ways to achieve admittedly desirable ends. Only by declining to use embryos for this research do we awaken our imaginations and force ourselves to seek other sources for stem cells—as may be possible, for example, if recent reports are to be believed, by deriving stem cells from bone marrow or from the placenta or umbilical cord in live births. The discipline of saying no to certain proposed means stimulates us to think creatively about other, and better, possibilities.”
So What Does It Matter To Me?
You might be listening and thinking that this all doesn’t really apply to you. Consider this: if we allow society to destroy embryonic life, why shouldn’t we allow it to destroy the life of the elderly? Or the life of the terminally ill? We will talk about those issues in more detail next week. Or the life of people who are more of a drain on societal resources than a contribution? Of the life of people who are declared to be “inferior” in some way? That might sound like a long way off, but if we learn a lesson from Hitler’s Germany we see that such a road is not as far off as it might seem. Martin Neimoeller (1892-1984) lived through that time, and once famously wrote,
“When they came for the communists, I was silent, because I was not a communist;
When they came for the socialists, I was silent, because I was not a socialist;
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not protest, because I was not a trade unionist;
When they came for the Jews, I did not protest, because I was not a Jew;
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest on my behalf.”
It might also apply to you if you are, at some point in your life, offered a treatment for your disease that has come about as the result of embryonic stem cell research. Knowing that a life was involuntarily destroyed, will you accept the treatment?
Conclusion:
Jesus came to bring life and to bring healing, and so that is a noble and Christlike pursuit. I believe that those of you who are doctors and nurses and technicians and researches reflect the priorities of God and are most often the people through whom God chooses to heal today. Yet there are limits to what we should do and should allow, and when we begin to destroy one life in order to heal another, we go too far. And as Christians, we need to stand up for those innocent lives.
