“Do you want to be made well? … Stand up, take your mat and walk.”[1]
My father won a Bronze Star for bravery under fire in World War II. His citation for “meritorious achievement [at a battle] in the vicinity of Ensheim, Germany, somewhat casually mentions that he “was wounded by enemy artillery fire.”
The wound which the citation glides over so nonchalantly was actually multiple shrapnel wounds that pretty much tore up his right leg and required two years of surgeries, physical therapy, and learning to walk again. He was left with a significant limp and constant pain for the rest of his life, pain which he self-medicated. His drug of choice was alcohol. Some of my earliest memories include fetching for him a Miller Hi-Life beer from the fridge or the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon in the living room drinks cabinet.
Late on the night of March 30, 1958, while driving under the influence of that alcohol, he lost control of his car on a desert highway halfway between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Kingman, Arizona, rolled his Thunderbird convertible three times, and broke his neck. My father, though he did not die in service and was, indeed, a civilian at the time of his death, was a casualty of World War II just as surely as if he had died on that battlefield in Germany. I am certain that if, at any time during those thirteen years between his wounding at Ensheim and his death in the Arizona desert, someone had said to him “Do you want to be made well?” his answer would have been, “Yes! Hell, yes!”
Let’s have a show of hands: everyone who believes that there is a Constitution of the United States raise your hand. OK, good. Now everyone who believes in the Constitution of the United States raise your hand. Some of you might be thinking, “Wait. Didn’t he just ask us to do that?” Well, no. There’s a difference between “belief that” and “belief in.” 
Today is the first Sunday in November which means that instead of the normal sequence of lessons for Ordinary Time, we are given the option of reading the lessons for All Saints Day, which falls every year on November 1. So today we heard a reading from the Wisdom of Solomon (a part of the apocrypha in which we hear that the righteous are in the hand of God), a psalm reminding us that the saints pledge themselves to truth rather than falsehood, a bit of the Book of Revelation describing the “new Jerusalem” where God will make God’s home with the saints, and (oddly enough) to the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel.
Our Old Testament lesson this morning is a very small bit of the Book of Job, that really sort odd bit of Biblical literature that tells the story of a wager between God and Satan. Some scholars believe that it may find its origins in an earlier Babylonian work known as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, that the Jews in Exile became familiar with the older Babylonian story and adapted it to their own theology.
