Thoughts on health and sickness and Psalm 139

 *** Der deutsche Originaltext wurde heute morgen eingestellt, bitte im Blog eins runter scrollen. 

Due to the posts from the current live Bible Dialogues in Berlin, our blog-system has gotten a little less predictable and part 2 of Klaus-Dieter Ehmke’s lay sermon on psalm 139 had to wait until today to be posted. Klaus-Dieter is a doctor for internal medicine at the dialysis-centre and in addition to his great commitment to the church and the Bible Dialogues, he contributes a doctor’s perspective. I posted part one on August 5. Part three will follow tomorrow.

Even the darkness is not dark to You. And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are the same to You. (Psalm 139,12)

I like this verse in particular. Not only because of photo-trip on Island one summer, where there was practically no sunset, or because I remember the time when my friends and I turned nights into our days and with lots of red wine, came up with the perfect way to make this world a better place. Not only because of that, but it does play into it. Nights ar part of our lives as well. We should rest and know - and accept - our natural limits.
But what about health and sickness, healing or salvation? “Higher, further, faster!” suddenly that can become no more than a distant dream. But courage and hope may also grow. Many people consider sickness, dying and death to be the darkness per se. “As long as you are healthy!” And health is what we wish each other, particularly now. And do we remember the cynical remarks a few weeks ago about people, who would have died anyway in a few weeks even without this virus that saddled us with mouth-nose coverings? And there are even people who think that God must be behind this pandemic or they know exactly which evil persons or evil deeds are the cause of all this. As if God held a list of infringement penalties in his hands waiting to hand out tickets mercilessly like for traffic offences. But all this casts a light on us who require a reason for everything, how we sometimes think we know it all and all the causes. And how ready we are to declare how some sickness was self-caused. It is not our search for cause and reason that is a problem, on the contrary, but the moral condemnation that throw love and truth off balance. Remember the condemnations with regard to sexually transmitted diseases or mental illness in medical history. And too often I still experience this medieval mindsent even today. He or she must have “done something” tob e so sick. This connection is terrible, but I am not free of it either: “What did I do to deserve this?” such painful questions can drive us insane. I would like to lead you on a way out of this kind of mindset and I claim to have found some good arguments in psalm 139. There is the change of perspective:

„My bones were not hidden from You when I was made in secret and put together with care in the deep part of the earth. Your eyes saw me before I was put together. And all the days of my life were written in Your book before any of them came to be. (Psalm 139, 15-16)

On a casual glance, one might think that nothing really matters. “It is all predestined anyway, what will happen will happen!” And in one thing, I can agree with patients: Once a person is born, it is quite clear that s*he will eventually die – in seventy or, if we are lucky, in 80 years. Whether we will have become wise by then, is very much up to us. Our genes, our education, and our social environment all dominate who we become and we all have a better or worse starting point. But before all that, there was love, no matter what it might have been like. For some, that is hard to contemplate. For some, the preliminaries do not look good, but in the God’s Book of Life there are many lines and many pages still waiting to be writ upon. At best we rejoice: “I praise you because I am wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139,14) But our rejoicing may fade quickly when pain and the all too familiar question WHY are back to torment us. From God’s perspective, we need courage and hope to face our lives.

Part 3 of the lay sermon will be posted tomorrow