Healing
Sermon
I've been interested in health issues all my life, hence my training many years ago as a physiotherapist. In those days, here in the West, patients tended to be divided up by health professionals into separate boxes. So if somebody came to the hospital with a pain in their shoulder, we were not permitted to discuss or to consider in any way a pain in any other part of their body.
A different pain was a consideration for a different health professional, and nobody ever really considered that there might be a link between multiple pains in one body. But in the wider world, people were militating against that separatist approach and in the sixties we perhaps had the beginnings of holistic thought in the flower people with their emphasis on love and peace.
Holistic thought continued, and the eighties especially saw a huge increase in fringe medicine, in many cases borrowing from Eastern medicine.
And so acupuncture, herbalism, reflexology, osteopathy, chiropractic, and all sorts of other remedies are now perfectly respectable. They filled that hole in traditional medicine which was left because traditional medicine refused to regard people as whole persons.
One of those complementary medicines is spiritual healing. Sometimes just called healing, but mostly recognised as having a spiritual base.
Patients very often believe that healers have some special power of their own, but most healers would deny that. Genuine healers usually claim that any special power they might appear to possess comes from God, or whatever they choose to call God.
And this whole branch of healing derives directly from the gospel stories of the healing of Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus not only heals people himself, but also instructs his disciples to go out and heal people. And many Christians believe that the church should offer healing services today. Indeed, all priests in their ordination service, are called to minister to the sick.
But there are problems in this whole area of healing, and some churches feel the problems are so great that they prefer not to offer any healing option at all.
Perhaps the biggest problem centres around the concept of miracles. Some very high profile healing missions, which have mostly come to this country from abroad, have made huge claims of miraculous cures, but these claims have turned out to be fraudulent and the set-up to be corrupt. This has brought the whole concept of healing into disrepute.
And with vulnerable people who are desperate for a cure at any price, it wouldn't be too difficult to persuade those people to part with large sums of money while convincing them that they feel better after treatment.
But there's another problem too. In this country we still suffer from the aftermath of the age of reason. Although I think it's beginning to disappear now, there is still a lingering feeling that anything which can't be proved or explained, simply cannot exist. Again, this attitude was very prevalent in the sixties. Fortunately, even scientists now acknowledge that there is plenty in this world which they can neither explain nor prove. Healing is increasingly accepted by the medical profession and seems to fall into this category.
So what is healing? Does God still heal people, and if he does, why doesn't he heal everybody? How does he pick and choose those whom he is going to heal? What are the criteria for healing? If people aren't healed after prayer, is it their fault because somehow or other they just don't have enough faith?
It's common knowledge that the mind can play remarkable tricks upon the body. Thus people who are deeply depressed, have very physical symptoms. And those who are dying very often die after a major event like Christmas or a birthday, rather than before it. Within the last ten or twenty years, biofeedback experiments have proved that people are able to lower their temperature or their blood pressure simply by the power of their thought.
Perhaps it's somewhere along these lines that healing works. Perhaps if it's possible to gather up and focus the love of God through some sort of channel, then people get better. Perhaps God's love kick-starts the body's own healing mechanism, so that the healing process can begin.
It may be that there are blocks to healing, if there are blocks to God's love. Perhaps if someone has a deeply hidden resentment or arrogance or jealousy, then their channel for God's love may be blocked. And that sort of deep emotional anguish, unless it's recognised and dealt with, may in itself fester and lead to illness. That's why Jesus often prefaced his healing with the words, "Your sins are forgiven." But he didn't always say that, and it's clear that many illnesses, such as Simon Peter's mother-in-law's fever, are due to external factors like viruses.
I don't believe God picks and chooses those whom he deigns to heal. I think some illnesses are too virulent and too far-gone for a cure to be possible. For instance, I don't believe that if someone had an arm amputated, the power of prayer could produce another arm. But I do believe prayer could aid the healing of that person in many deep and wonderful and important ways.
Healing is centred on prayer, and during the prayer, usually involves the laying of hands either on the patient's head, or on the part of the body which is affected. Most patients report some sort of sensation from the experience of the laying on of hands, and it's usually a very good and a very powerful sensation. It may be a feeling of warmth, or a feeling of support, or a feeling that something is happening.
Healers act as a channel for God's power, and anybody may be called by God to help in God's healing ministry. Jesus of course, was a channel par excellence, but even he wasn't always successful, for we're told that in his own town he was often unable to heal (Mark 6:5-6).
And perhaps there's a difference between cure and heal. Healing is something holistic. It's something which takes place within the deep recesses of being. It's a healing of the inner being, the spirit, the soul, which percolates through to the physical body.
Healing is never, ever wasted. It's never a waste of time, even though physical results may not always be immediately and directly visible. To receive prayer through the laying on of hands, putting you into direct contact with God, is a very special experience. And only those who have received that sort of ministry, know how it has affected them.
Jesus sent his friends out to tell the world that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. As they carried that message they were to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. And they were to do all that without pay (Matthew 10:7-8). I wonder whether it's time we here in south Norfolk, began to take those words seriously.
A different pain was a consideration for a different health professional, and nobody ever really considered that there might be a link between multiple pains in one body. But in the wider world, people were militating against that separatist approach and in the sixties we perhaps had the beginnings of holistic thought in the flower people with their emphasis on love and peace.
Holistic thought continued, and the eighties especially saw a huge increase in fringe medicine, in many cases borrowing from Eastern medicine.
And so acupuncture, herbalism, reflexology, osteopathy, chiropractic, and all sorts of other remedies are now perfectly respectable. They filled that hole in traditional medicine which was left because traditional medicine refused to regard people as whole persons.
One of those complementary medicines is spiritual healing. Sometimes just called healing, but mostly recognised as having a spiritual base.
Patients very often believe that healers have some special power of their own, but most healers would deny that. Genuine healers usually claim that any special power they might appear to possess comes from God, or whatever they choose to call God.
And this whole branch of healing derives directly from the gospel stories of the healing of Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus not only heals people himself, but also instructs his disciples to go out and heal people. And many Christians believe that the church should offer healing services today. Indeed, all priests in their ordination service, are called to minister to the sick.
But there are problems in this whole area of healing, and some churches feel the problems are so great that they prefer not to offer any healing option at all.
Perhaps the biggest problem centres around the concept of miracles. Some very high profile healing missions, which have mostly come to this country from abroad, have made huge claims of miraculous cures, but these claims have turned out to be fraudulent and the set-up to be corrupt. This has brought the whole concept of healing into disrepute.
And with vulnerable people who are desperate for a cure at any price, it wouldn't be too difficult to persuade those people to part with large sums of money while convincing them that they feel better after treatment.
But there's another problem too. In this country we still suffer from the aftermath of the age of reason. Although I think it's beginning to disappear now, there is still a lingering feeling that anything which can't be proved or explained, simply cannot exist. Again, this attitude was very prevalent in the sixties. Fortunately, even scientists now acknowledge that there is plenty in this world which they can neither explain nor prove. Healing is increasingly accepted by the medical profession and seems to fall into this category.
So what is healing? Does God still heal people, and if he does, why doesn't he heal everybody? How does he pick and choose those whom he is going to heal? What are the criteria for healing? If people aren't healed after prayer, is it their fault because somehow or other they just don't have enough faith?
It's common knowledge that the mind can play remarkable tricks upon the body. Thus people who are deeply depressed, have very physical symptoms. And those who are dying very often die after a major event like Christmas or a birthday, rather than before it. Within the last ten or twenty years, biofeedback experiments have proved that people are able to lower their temperature or their blood pressure simply by the power of their thought.
Perhaps it's somewhere along these lines that healing works. Perhaps if it's possible to gather up and focus the love of God through some sort of channel, then people get better. Perhaps God's love kick-starts the body's own healing mechanism, so that the healing process can begin.
It may be that there are blocks to healing, if there are blocks to God's love. Perhaps if someone has a deeply hidden resentment or arrogance or jealousy, then their channel for God's love may be blocked. And that sort of deep emotional anguish, unless it's recognised and dealt with, may in itself fester and lead to illness. That's why Jesus often prefaced his healing with the words, "Your sins are forgiven." But he didn't always say that, and it's clear that many illnesses, such as Simon Peter's mother-in-law's fever, are due to external factors like viruses.
I don't believe God picks and chooses those whom he deigns to heal. I think some illnesses are too virulent and too far-gone for a cure to be possible. For instance, I don't believe that if someone had an arm amputated, the power of prayer could produce another arm. But I do believe prayer could aid the healing of that person in many deep and wonderful and important ways.
Healing is centred on prayer, and during the prayer, usually involves the laying of hands either on the patient's head, or on the part of the body which is affected. Most patients report some sort of sensation from the experience of the laying on of hands, and it's usually a very good and a very powerful sensation. It may be a feeling of warmth, or a feeling of support, or a feeling that something is happening.
Healers act as a channel for God's power, and anybody may be called by God to help in God's healing ministry. Jesus of course, was a channel par excellence, but even he wasn't always successful, for we're told that in his own town he was often unable to heal (Mark 6:5-6).
And perhaps there's a difference between cure and heal. Healing is something holistic. It's something which takes place within the deep recesses of being. It's a healing of the inner being, the spirit, the soul, which percolates through to the physical body.
Healing is never, ever wasted. It's never a waste of time, even though physical results may not always be immediately and directly visible. To receive prayer through the laying on of hands, putting you into direct contact with God, is a very special experience. And only those who have received that sort of ministry, know how it has affected them.
Jesus sent his friends out to tell the world that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. As they carried that message they were to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. And they were to do all that without pay (Matthew 10:7-8). I wonder whether it's time we here in south Norfolk, began to take those words seriously.
