sermons
The Way of Jesus
Let There Be… Healing
Ivy Anthony
Oct 12, 2025
This past week, I was in hospital waiting rooms for a few different reasons. And I realized that hospitals are really hard places for me. They don’t initially register as places of healing or help — they register as loss and unease. Hospitals, for me, have been marked by tragic accidents, deaths, mysterious illnesses ….I even remember, as a kid, eating handfuls of poisonous berries and the chaos that followed in the ER. The fear, the rush, the urgency in my mom’s voice. It was supposed to be this place of comfort and aid, but in my body it felt like panic, like danger.
Maybe you know this feeling, too? The way chaos and fear write themselves into our bodies, shifting our foundations of safety, dignity, and belonging. That kind of chaos doesn’t just reside within us — it reflects the world we move through. Sometimes it comes from the very systems meant to keep us safe — the ones built to heal, protect, or serve, yet can be so often shaped by the same forces that wound. These structures that promise care can also carry legacies of harm. That’s in some ways what we mean when we say “trauma.” It’s a big word, and I’ll break it down a little bit more later. But for now, I think I’m learning that healing is not the absence of chaos — it’s God’s presence in the midst of it.
And it’s not mine alone. Healing is something we experience together — restoring one another to safety, dignity, and belonging, so that love can take flesh in us, and through us, unto the just world we long for. There’s a writer, activist and therapist, Prentis Hemphill (whose work I leaned a lot for today’s sermon) who says,
“healing helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to.”
Healing orients us toward what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth dreaming toward. It steadies us to engage the world as it is, while still imagining what it could be.
We are in a new multi-week series, The Way of Jesus exploring Jesus’ healing ministry — which I think asks us in part,
- What will it take for us to heal?
- And how do we heal in the chaos of still being hurt?
- What does it take for us to reckon with the truth that we all hold the capacity to love and to hate, to turn toward one another or to turn away — And yet, even with that tension in us, still move toward change?
But there’s good news in here — and it’s not a new story — where the Bible itself begins, offers us the pattern of healing in the midst of chaos which is as as old as creation itself. In Genesis it says,
“the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.”
Creation itself starts in chaos — and into that void, God speaks:
“Let there be light.…
….and there was light.”
This pattern — something new being born out of darkness and chaos — weaves its way through the whole story of Scripture. From creation to resurrection, God keeps bringing life out of places that feel undone. And that same pattern runs through Jesus’ ministry of healing. Healing again and again seems to unfold in the midst of chaos — within unjust systems, among people pushed to the margins, carrying wounds both visible and invisible. Yet what Jesus gives them is not only restoration, but also the courage to resist letting that chaos take up residence in them. They become agents of new patterns — creators, visionaries, dreamers – ones who say with their own lives the refrain of Genesis:
let there be hope, let there be mercy, let there be healing.
Mary Magdalene is a woman in scripture that gives me an embodied story of the journey of healing. Her story doesn’t come to us all at once. It unfolds in bits — a woman who has survived much, a weeping disciple, a witness at the tomb of Jesus.
But each glimpse shows another layer of what healing can look like. This morning, I want to invite you to sit in her story with me, to pay attention to what stirs, resonates, what it makes you feel.
Let’s begin with the Gospel of Luke chapter 8:
Luke 8: 1-3 (Common English Bible)
Soon afterward, Jesus traveled through the cities and villages, preaching and proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom. The Twelve were with him, along with some women who had been healed of evil spirits and sicknesses. Among them were Mary Magdalene (from whom seven demons had been thrown out), Joanna (the wife of Herod’s servant Chuza), Susanna, and many others who provided for them out of their resources.
Ok, so our initial blush with Mary Magdalene doesn’t seem to offer a ton of information (there isn’t a long narrative here), but it does invite us to use our divine imagination. And I love it — because don’t all of our stories require the same?
What we know here is that Mary Magdalene has been healed of seven demons. Which actually is not that insignificant of a story to carry. There’s lots of scholarly conversation about what these demons could have been.
And without getting in the weeds of those opinions, I wonder if, at a baseline, we can imagine that to have seven demons — or even demon-esque thoughts afflicting you is pretty chaotic and traumatic.
Maybe you can also imagine that the intrusion of multiple demons on a human life — actually leaves little room for life at all — we can imagine that Mary has little to nothing left of herself, her worth, her belonging, her dignity. Seven — meaning “complete” can also mean overwhelming — a fullness of suffering.
I find it illuminating to imagine that “seven” could refer to Rome and its seven hills, meaning Mary carried the weight of imperial oppression in her body. Carrying the burden of empire — poverty, violence, domination, gendered oppression, fear, etc.. these could have been the demons that haunted her her whole life.
Prentis Hemphill’s recent work that I mentioned at the beginning is a book called, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, and they describe
“healing as the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.’”
The casting out of Mary Magdalene’s demons didn’t stop the chaos of the Roman Empire. However, it does seem to afford her the ability to find some sense of safety and belonging alongside a company of women/community who had also endured and survived, a taste of healing that let her stand in dignity again. A redux of this Genesis-truth that you can be in the chaos without being chaotic — that, in part, is also healing.
And in that sense, Mary’s restoration becomes a symbol of what Jesus’ healing power really does: it frees people not only from personal suffering but from the dehumanizing grip of empire. Because the empire doesn’t just exist “out there” in systems; it takes up residence in us — in our fears, our defenses, our diminished sense of worth.
Trauma doesn’t only wound — it constricts. It locks us into survival mode, narrowing our capacity to long, to imagine, to dream. It keeps us tethered to the past, and scanning, hypervigilant in the present to danger and threat, leaving little room to believe in the possibility of the future.
So can you imagine what opened up for Mary as these demons were thrown out of her? After years of being reduced to nothing — worth, love, and dignity flooding back into her being? Healing gave her the capacity to feel, to long again — and the courage to dream past the barriers. As Prentis Hemphill reminds us,
“visions are rooted in longing; we tend to long for what our bodies need in order to be whole and heal.”
And that’s what Jesus wanted for Mary and for us — not just to survive, but to live with the spaciousness to imagine again, to sense — even when the world feels formless and confusing (& BANANAS!) — that God’s Spirit still hovers and breathes possibility.
And that’s exactly why trauma is so devastating. Trauma interrupts belonging. And tells us that we and the world are not good. It convinces us that the world is unsafe, that we are unsafe, and that hope is out of reach.
And before we hear more of Mary’s story, I want to say a couple more things about trauma in our own day, in our society, in our bodies.
In some ways it may feel like what is the point really of looking closely at something that is everywhere? I mean trauma truly is everywhere. Whether we try to categorize it as capital “T” trauma or little “t” trauma, it speaks to the condition of the human experience. Trauma is the accumulation in our nervous system that creates a sense of chronic overwhelm and dissociation. Trauma
“breaks apart our capacity to experience safety, belonging, and dignity — the very core needs that let us grow, create, and engage with one another and the world. (Prentiss Hemphill).
Safety is what allows our nervous systems to quiet so imagination and expression can emerge. Belonging is what roots us in community, though trauma can twist it into isolation or supremacy (an overcorrection of belonging where we assert dominance or control). And dignity — the seat of our agency and choice — is eroded when we feel our very existence has no worth.
And that’s the state in which so much of our collective life takes place. We are, most of us, trying to repair the world even as we are still healing from it — building systems of care while carrying trauma in our own bodies. Our politics, our relationships, our families, our capacity to dream — are all shaped by this paradox.
And yet, as Hemphill reminds us, most of us come to the work of making the world new precisely because of the pain this one has caused us. Our wounds can give us the initial surge to fight back, though this energy is often still fueled by our most frightened, defended, adrenalized selves — which is not sustainable. But we can learn, in our very bodies, where the threats and fears live — and where there is also room for grief, for longing, and for vision. As Hemphill writes,
“our energy is most potent when we make room for our grief and anger, when we allow ourselves to feel, our direction becomes clearer.”
But it’s hard to do, to be honest.
“Our society has gone through too many traumas while commanding that we deny our grief and our compassion. Our feeling of it all. (67) Somewhere along the way we were taught to stop feeling instead of being taught to stop what harms us, as though the feeling were the enemy. To move forward and address the harm, we have to feel.”(68)
That’s why the work of healing can’t be only personal. The harm we feel in our bodies is connected to the harm embedded in our systems and our story together. As Prentis Hemphill reminds us,
“we can’t change the world if we do not heal what has become embodied in us — and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us don’t change, too.”
If we follow Mary Magdalene’s story, I think it helps us understand how attending to feeling, embodying grief and love can be part of the healing, even in the midst of a society that had named and condemned her as a “sinner” and had written trauma into her life.
A brief note about Mary Magdalene before we read the scripture. The thing about Mary Magdalene is that she’s surrounded by controversy and ambiguity in the scope of Christian commentary. She’s tangled up with at least six different women named Mary in the gospels, which leaves a lot of debate about which threads really belong to her story and which don’t. (New Yorker) Still, I’m inclined to see the woman in this story as Mary Magdalene.
So with that complexity in mind, let’s hear the story as Luke tells it:
Luke 7:36–39, 44-50 (Common English Bible)
36 One of the Pharisees invited Jesus to eat with him. After he entered the Pharisee’s home, he took his place at the table.37 Meanwhile, a woman from the city, a sinner, discovered that Jesus was dining in the Pharisee’s house. She brought perfumed oil in a vase made of alabaster.
38 Standing behind him at his feet and crying, she began to wet his feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and poured the oil on them.
39 When the Pharisee who had invited Jesus saw what was happening, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. He would know that she is a sinner. *
*44 Jesus turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I entered your home, you didn’t give me water for my feet, but she wet my feet with tears and wiped them with her hair.
45 You didn’t greet me with a kiss, but she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet since I came in.
46 You didn’t anoint my head with oil, but she has poured perfumed oil on my feet.
47 This is why I tell you that her many sins have been forgiven; so she has shown great love. The one who is forgiven little loves little.”
48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
49 The other table guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this person that even forgives sins?”
50 Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”
Now there are ways that you might imagine this setting would have been excruciating for Mary Magdalene. She walks into a Pharisee’s house — a space where she decidedly does not belong, where she is already branded a ‘sinner.’ Where everyone is watching her hypervigilantly for failure, for any opportunity to heap shame. It could have been a crushing trigger if Mary hadn’t already been freed from the chaos of those systemic demons. Instead of coming in carrying the weight of empire — she comes carrying oil and her tears. She carries grief, too — the ache of knowing that Jesus’ own path is leading toward suffering. But she doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t edit or contain her emotion to make others comfortable. She lets it all pour out — her love, her lament — in FULL VIEW of those who have demanded her invisibility. Mary lives out what Prentis Hemphill calls the risk of healing —
“when we are able to tolerate, feel, and express something in our relationships that before was out of our reach, reinstating our abilities to choose something other than what our fear dictates.”
And the continued healing here is that Jesus doesn’t just “permit” her to enter the house or his presence — he welcomes her in fully — he sees her in all her fullness. She is not saved here by erasure, or being shushed — but by recognition.
She is named a “sinner”, but Jesus looks at her and says to Simon:
‘Do you see this woman?’
And then names her actions, her tears, her kisses, her oil — as love. And he says,
‘Your sins are forgiven.’
Not to mark her with shame, as so many have read it, but to free her from the story that shame/trauma has told. Here forgiveness is release. It is healing from the story others have written about her. Forgiveness here is not about tallying up a record of wrongs; it is continued healing — restoration of that dignity, safety and belonging.
Prentis Hemphill puts it this way:
‘Forgiveness and grace are not weak, pitiful emotions… they are the generous gift of people who know their worth cannot be diminished. When we offer forgiveness, we invite one another back into our highest selves, back into our commitments. We acknowledge the hurt, but we extend the possibility of [a new way forward].”
That is exactly what Jesus does in this moment. He doesn’t deny that she has been hurt, or that she has done things out of her hurt. But he restores her to herself. He refuses the false story that her worth could ever be diminished. And then he tells her:
‘Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.’
Words that indicate not the end of her healing, but the beginning — words that give her a future.
The church has unfortunately often sided with the Pharisees — centuries later, Pope Gregory would label Mary Magdalene a prostitute — collapsing her into a caricature of ‘sin’ — a distortion that marginalized women in the Church for the next 1400 years. This is what happens when we make sin only about individual failings: we scapegoat the vulnerable instead of naming the systems that deal the deeper wounds. If we are going to call someone a sinner, then we must also tell the story of the sin they live within — the systems and powers that convince us — or even force us — to be less than who God created us to be.
- Patriarchy. Oppression. Whiteness. Poverty. Violence.
These aren’t just external; they get inside us. They write false, harmful, wounding stories about our worth. Demanding we
“adjust ourselves to unjust conditions, or shrink to fit inside containers someone else has created for us (42).”
Stories that pull us back toward chaos, toward the undoing of what God at the very beginning called “good.”
Jesus wants Mary to reckon with the powerful possibility that she – her life – is of worth. And not for
“some distant redeemed potential — but for NOW, for what is, for what is in the ordinary sacrament and potential of today.” (162, O’Tuama).
And that’s the hope in healing: not just that harm is removed or that we return to ‘normal,’ but that a new way forward is carved.
“It’s often a risk to stretch beyond the norm, beyond the visions that others have handed us. The visions we inherit, the visions others impose on us, can only re-create the world as it is.” (19)
Within those limits, our capacity to heal and to love is stunted. Jesus knew Mary needed something bigger, wider, more connected — the kind of vision that could carry the love of the resurrection to others — long before Mary would be the one to see it first.
And she practiced it — she had to. Traveling with her posse of women, Joanna, Susanna, others who had also been healed, pooling their resources and their lives together. Grieving and laughing and naming what scared them, angered them. In community is where vision grows — because to repair what has been broken, we have to dream something together that is whole — a world where safety, belonging, and dignity are not luxuries, but the foundation of life itself.
And it’s from that shared ground that courage rises.
Which is why mainstream healing so often falls short — it puts the pressure on the individual to ‘get well,’ when the very systems we live within are the source of the wound.
Healing itself is courageous — and courage, in turn, is what sustains healing. Prentis Hemphill writes,
“It’s courage when we insist on being ourselves in a world set against us. And it’s through courage that we become ourselves.”
Healing invites us, like Mary with her alabaster jar, to so deeply feel that we are brimming over with emotion and pour out what has been held inside — all of it. It is a risk to pour ourselves out in a world that has hurt and still hurts us, yet that very act becomes the first step toward reclaiming our agency.
Courage, in its truest form, asks us to risk again — to place our safety, belonging, and dignity in service of something larger: a vision of wholeness, of justice, of love made flesh in community. It is love at work in motion, refusing to give up on what could be made new.
And that’s what Jesus sees in Mary — love made courageous.
Jesus saves us with love, and he tells this woman that her faith saves. So what if courage looks like that? What if the way we live — our willingness to pour ourselves out in love — could inspire others to act as though their lives are worth saving, too?
And that courage carries her forward.
The last time we hear of Mary Magdalene in Scripture, it is — fittingly — at the resurrection.
And maybe that’s why it’s her — not Peter, not John — who is the first to witness it. Because she herself has already lived a resurrected life. She has known what it means for life to return where there was once only emptiness. Her life becomes its own resurrection story — a living echo of creation’s first dawn.
When Mary runs to the disciples and says,
“I’ve seen the Lord,”
she is speaking the language of creation. In Genesis, God spoke into the void —
“Let there be light”
— and the world took shape. At the tomb, Mary speaks into the chaos of death and grief and says,
“I’ve seen the Lord.”
And in those words, a new way forward, a new world opens..
Maybe that’s where resurrection still meets us — in the places that don’t yet feel like healing. In the hospital ERs and waiting rooms that still smell like antiseptic and old memories; in spaces where fear and loss seem to have had the last word. Even there, the Spirit hovers. Where there can still be the refrain of
“let there be….”
“let there be something I cannot yet see …..”
The good news is that Jesus keeps showing up —- the same way he showed up for Mary — with her demons, her tears and her steadfast love….
Not to erase chaos, but to be with us in it.
So every time we take Mary’s words on our own lips —
“I have seen the Lord” — ,
we join that same creative pattern — speaking into the chaos of our time. And we become participants in God’s ongoing creation — voices that echo through the void and say:
Let there be light.
Let there be mercy.
Let there be grace.
Let there be healing.
Amen.
Source: Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (2024).
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