PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Rom. 4^13-25Matt. 9^{9-13, 18-26}                          The Sense and Non-Sense of Faith-Healing

Sermon June 8, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            These two scripture lessons today present us with some stories we know well, but there's a part of each story that we've learned to ignore:  the healings.  Abraham was a hundred years old, Sarah was ninety, and they had a baby.  Jesus raised from death the daughter of a ruler, and while he was on his way there a woman with a hemorrhage for twelve years who touched his cloak and was healed.  What I would usually do with these stories is pass by the healings and get at the theological meaning of the healings.  I'm not going to do that this morning.  Instead, I'm going to share with you a personal question I've been chewing on for the entire thirty eight years of my ministry—a question about the healings themselves.  Is there a possibility of Christian healing today? 

 

            I first encountered these stories as a boy.  My boyhood church was serious about the Bible, but they taught us to interpret the Bible using what we might call "sanctified common sense"—that is, we live in the modern world, not a world of superstition, so use your common sense when you come to things in the Bible like healing.  What I was taught is that there really was an age of miracles, the age of the apostles—before they wrote the New Testament they needed something to prove their message; but miracles ended when the last apostle died; and now we use modern medicine.  That meant that we could be very literal about the way we read these stories, and still not need the miracles today.  During my growing-up years Oral Roberts was about the only faith-healer on television, and I found his shouting and slapping foreheads to heal people off-putting, even offensive.  My church and my family agreed with that assessment, so I  learned more or less to ignore the Pentecostal and Holiness churches and preachers the same way I ignored the preachers who said that Jesus was going to return next week.  It didn't make it with common sense.  So that was my teaching as a youth.  I suspect you had much the same training. 

            When I went off to college in Nashville, the winter of my freshman year, I had already met Harriet, and we were both members of an organization called "Hospital Singers"—every Friday night we would get on a bus and go across town to a county nursing home that had taken over a hospital.  Our people would divide up into small groups and walk through the various floors singing hymns and greeting the patients.  They seemed genuinely glad to see us, but nobody got healed—we just brought a little comfort to them.  I especially remember Pearl, whose arthritis was so advanced that she couldn't get out of bed; but her smile healed us.  There was, however, one miracle:  riding back to campus through the streets of Nashville on the bus, Harriet and I had our first kiss. 

            Our college German teacher was a former missionary named Don Finto.  He went to be the minister of a church smack in the middle of Record Row where he started a revolutionary church renewal program, and within just a few years there were people in his church who were laying-on hands and conducting a healing ministry.  It was still off-putting. 

            So then I went to seminary, where we studied the Bible intensely in the original languages.  There I learned to think about healing in a completely different way:  Jesus outlined the purpose of his ministry in his home synagogue, quoting Isaiah 61:[1] 

 

 

So Jesus did four things in his ministry:  he preached, he taught, he healed and he cast out demons.  And all four are about the same thing:  they are about the new kingdom of God that was breaking into human history for the liberation of humankind from all that dominates us—spiritually or physically.  But about the possibility of Christian healing today my seminary professors said not a word.  The message was:  interpret the healings and exorcisms as literary symbols of complete redemption in the kingdom.  Well, that reinforced what I'd been taught as a boy.  Up to this moment I was sure that the age of healing is past:  we are living by common sense and science. 

 

            Then I began my ministry, and a part of that is visiting people in the hospitals, nursing homes and the home-bound:  visiting people who have grown weak as they have grown old, people who have cancer, mental illness, deformities; visiting people lying in hospital beds in pain so bad they couldn't talk to me, people dying.  And as I visited, as I talked, as I prayed with them, I discovered a little wish growing in my heart, a small desire that somehow I might be able to do something for somebody to ease their suffering.  Of course it was just a passing thought:  all my training and experience confirmed that the age of miracles ended with the death of the apostles.  But sitting beside those hospital beds, my heart wouldn't listen to common sense anymore.  Is there a possibility of Christian healing today?  I didn't dare ask the question out loud.

            But I continued to study the Bible in my own devotional life as well as to teach and preach; and there were some Bible verses that began to bother me.[2]

 

 

The first text is from the Gospel of Mark, but it wasn't part of the original text of Mark:  these words were added sometime in the second century—the surprise is that in the second century the church was still talking about healing.  The second and third texts are from very late in the first century, long after the apostles had died—and they knew "the power of religion" to heal.  How could this be?  As a matter of fact, the ministry of healing continued to be practiced in Christianity until the European Enlightenment, about four hundred years ago.[3]  Even the leaders of the Protestant Reformation believed in the ministry of healing, although John Calvin wouldn't use oil—Calvin hated the feel of oil.[4] 

As I learned all these things, my faith in modern common sense began to look more like I had been taught to blank something out.  Throughout my thirty eight years in ministry that little desire in my heart has continued lurking about, and I have kept denying it.  But I did keep praying for the sick.  You can see by the worship bulletin insert that I believe in the power of prayer.  And seven years ago when our first grandson Blade was born so sick, we had a circle of prayer for him that stretched around the world and included Muslims and Jews, Unitarians and Catholics.  There was something there—I knew it; but I couldn't grasp it. 

 

            So I have continued to ask the question:  Is there a possibility of Christian healing today?  After next Sunday I will be going to Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, a UCC school, for a week of continuing education; and the courses I have chosen are on Christian healing, and on death.  I've had some reading to do before these classes, and the reading has stirred that secret desire again. 

            Over the years I have learned that there is a whole other healing tradition in Christianity besides the one that put me off so instantly when I was a boy.  Ruth Carter Stapleton is a Baptist—the sister of President Carter.  Dennis and Matthew Linn are Catholic Jesuits.  Agnes Sanford was the wife of an Episcopal priest.  Francis MacNutt was a Catholic priest.  Morton Kelsey was an Episcopalian, and Bruce Epperly is a Disciple teaching at Lancaster Theological Seminary.  They all say there is such a thing as Christian healing.  Might it be about time I stopped hiding from it. 

            Yes, absurdities abound with this issue of Christian healing—you can see them all day every day on cable television.  So there is a sense and a non-sense about Christian healing.  But now I remember that my mother's grandmother was a healer:  she really healed people.  My spiritual director several years ago in Cleveland was a Benedictine monk; we talked about this subject one day, and his question to me was, "Why do you think you can't heal?"  You and I together have seen the power of Christian healing in our quarterly anointing with oil and prayers for healing, and in reports from people on our prayer lists. 

            Is there a possibility of Christian healing?  I'm beginning to let myself see that there is.  It's actually part of the identity of People's Church, along with worship and hospitality.  I'm not talking about the absurdities, I'm talking about the tradition and the promise.  I know it doesn't come from a single person:  it comes through the fellowship of the church—we heal together.  I know that there are many angles of vision, including churches that have a parish nurse ministry, churches that operate free clinics, churches that conduct a ministry to HIV/AIDS victims, and much more.  We have a gym and a bowling alley:  do these not figure into a Christian ministry of health? 

            Jesus showed us that redemption is both spiritual and physical.  God plans for you to be as healthy and able to bless others as you can possibly be.  I think we just need to figure this out—together.  So as I go off next week for my continuing education, I ask you to pray for me:  I'll be working on this question, and I'll get back to you.  Is there a possibility of Christian healing? 

AMEN