Mark 3:1-6
Rev. Laura J. Collins
March 21, 2004
In this morning's passage Jesus' healing ministry is well under way, although it is only the third chapter. In fact, by the 20th verse of the first chapter Jesus has begun his ministry of healing. Healing is mostly what Jesus does in the gospels. If that statement is startling to you, I will tell you that as a child of the church, who grew up reading the Bible regularly and studied it diligently as a teenager and young adult, this still came as something of a shock to me when I really began to notice it. Especially for those of us interested in Jesus's teaching and his engagement with the social powers of his day, we tend to overlook that he spent most of his time healing and casting out demons. But once you begin to see how often Jesus is healing, it is impossible to read the gospels any other way. It simply takes up too much space there to ignore without trying really, really hard.
And yet progressive Christians in the West for the past 100 or more years have pretty effectively ignored this fact. Sure, we have long periods of prayer in our worship and we even have almost weekly acknowledgement from you during thanksgivings that the prayers have been helpful. But how much do we stop and think about that? My theory is that we don't, because it makes us uncomfortable theologically. We're not sure what to say about the people who don't get healed. We don't want to be confused with the charismatics or TV healers who seem to us emotionally manipulative or downright deceptive. And so, we continue to do our collective prayers on Sunday mornings, but we don't think too much about their meaning for our life of faith.
This is a terrible mistake. Prayer is the cornerstone of the Christian life. Without active, intentional engagement in prayer, we are cut off from our source and become just another social organization, open to the whims of individuals and the ideologies of the moment. But more concerning than that, we fail to become the positive power of God's grace which is our divine calling as a church. We may use the words of God's power and grace and inclusive love, but we do not actually embody those words unless we surrender ourselves, as vessels to be used by the power of the living God. We are called to bring God's power into the world through our fellowship and we can only do that by opening ourselves fully to God through the act of prayer.
I have been interested in healing prayer for all of my adult life. And still, I understand the hesitancy that Christians often feel when talking or thinking about Christian healing. Why don't some people get healed, though they have tremendous faith and many people of great faith praying for them? Is this just the mysterious will of God? But that makes God seem too arbitrary, fickle, perhaps even mean-spirited.
Or are there active powers in the world which can counter the positive power of God for a time? I think of Rochester, New York, where I lived for ten years. Every year more children growing up in the neighborhood known as Kodak Park were diagnosed with brain tumors and other neurological disorders. Year after year parents in that neighborhood took their fight to the Kodak film company, sure that the chemicals released into the air and the water by Rochester's largest employer were the cause of these fatal child-hood diseases. Year after year, the parents lost the battle to the power of the corporation. Was it the whim of God that those children suffer? No, we cannot blame God for the selfish acts of humanity. It is not simply someone's "time to go" when a drunk driver crashes into their car and kills them. It is a tragedy caused by human sin.
Or does God not heal us because we have something to learn from our disease? I have no doubt that whenever we are open to learning, we can learn from the suffering life brings us. But that is different than saying that God chooses particular sufferings for us to endure so that we can learn our lessons. The biblical witness over and over is that God desires health and wholeness for us. Do we live with the consequences of our actions? Usually. But it is not correct to say that "our sin" causes our problems. Jesus actively countered that idea in his day and I find, especially among many contemporary healing philosophies, that this idea that we are completely responsible for our own illness still holds too much sway.
So what can we say about healing? Well, today, I decided to hand out a sheet from my two favorite authors on the subject. Walter Wink is a New Testament scholar and a teacher of non-violent resistance for social change. His book, The Powers That Be, should be required reading for all Christian social activists. It may be the best book of theology written in the 20th century. I have excerpted his final chapter in that book, on prayer, for you to read at your own pace.
And the other book that I offer to you is from a pair of Methodist ministers. Tilda Norberg is a Gestalt Psychotherapist, as well as a Methodist minister, and she teaches the practice of healing prayer. Her summary of what Christian healing is and is not is the best I've ever seen and so I've copied it for you this morning.
But let me tell you about my personal experience. I have experienced the power of healing prayer both as the one praying and the one being prayed for. In at least four particular instances that I can point to in my adult life I have been the recipient of God's healing through the power of loving prayer for me by others. I'm not talking about healing in general -- feeling better about life or whatever -- the kind of healing that is hard to quantify. I'm talking about particular physical or mental problems being prayed for and being healed.
Now, I've also been on the other side. I have a physical infirmity about which I have prayed almost daily, certainly weekly, for more than twelve years now. I have asked others to pray for me. I have often felt like Paul, who prayed for his thorn in the flesh to be removed, but to no avail. I don't know why this problem hasn't been healed. If God wanted me to learn something useful, I think two years would have been adequate, but now it's gone beyond twelve. And yes, I can point to ways in which this illness has brought other kinds of healing into my life and I can, on a good day, be grateful for those things. But the truth is, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired and I want God to cure me. But it hasn't happened.
Why have some of my illnesses been cured and others not? I really can't say. As the pray-er I have had the same questions. Why can I point to some instances where a group of people were praying for health and it happened, sometimes quite miraculously, and other times it didn't happen at all? I know it isn't related to the faithfulness of the people. There are far too many examples of sickly saints to make that argument.
I do know that sometimes my email doesn't work. Sometimes it's a virus, sometimes it's an electrical glitch. Sometimes there is no explaining it. But I continue to use email.
I also know that inspite of 41 years of daily tooth brushing, I occasionally get cavities. But I don't blame the toothbrushing for not working. I still brush my teeth.
The truth is, I don't know why sometimes it seems that healing prayer gets answered and other times the answer seems elusive. Maybe it is like Jim Carrey's movie, "Bruce Almighty." In the movie, Carrey plays a selfish man who blames God for all his personal troubles. So God gives Bruce the chance to do better and hands over the power. Soon, Bruce is so overwhelmed by the millions and millions of prayer requests coming in (and he's just been given a few block of Buffalo, NY to cover) that he just answers "YES" to all of them. As you might expect, things falls apart.
Frankly, I don't really trust the easy answers people supply to the whys of prayer. I don't think any of us really know. We may have hunches or even pretty well-informed ideas, but ultimately, prayer is still a matter of trust. We pray because we trust God. And we know that human free will sometimes interferes with God's good plans. But still we trust. And still we pray.
One of the things you notice about Jesus in the gospels is how often he touches the people who come to him for healing. And when he sends out his disciples, he asks them to lay hands on people. It seems that the universe has been wired so that human touch plays a special role in God's healing work. Who among us would watch a sick or hurting child from a distance if we had the option to take that child and cradle her in our arms? We instintively know the power of touch.
So today, I invite you into an extended time of prayer. We will be using music from the Taize tradition, which is an ecumenical, international community built specifically for the purpose of praying for peace. The music that comes from that community is intended to be sung repetitively, until it seeps into your soul, and like a mantra, clears of space for God. It is music meant for healing, not just of individuals, but of nations.
In addition to the prayerful music, I invite anyone who desires to come forward for prayer. I will be offering prayer with the laying on of hands and there is a cushion here where you can stand or kneel. But I am not especially endowed with healing power because of my ordination or by any other reason. My hands are human hands. And so if anyone would like to come and join in the laying on of hands at any time, you are free to do so. Or, you may join in praying by simply joining in the prayer, which you'll find in your bulletin. Take this time to offer yourself to God and to offer your body as an instrument of prayer with God.
A page of readings on Christian Healing passed out at this service is available on this website.
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