Every month, on the second Sunday we include the laying on of hands for healing at our 10am service during intercessions.
What does this mean? What is it about? What is it not about? What do you expect to happen? Are you involved in it - or does it turn you off? It is a very sensitive area and one that needs carefull examination even if it is not really 'your thing'. You could have a look at our School of Faith Pages to help you with this.
Edited version of a sermon on healing given by the
Vicar of Battyeford (Roy Clements) on 9 February 2003.
You may have heard the story of the wealthy man who pleaded with God to be allowed to ‘take it with him’ when he died. God agreed to make an exception to the usual rule, but only allowed him one suitcase. The wealthy man was delighted, and proceeded to turn all his worldly goods into gold bars, which he then packed into a large suitcase. At the Pearly Gates, he was stopped by St Peter, who eventually agreed to call the boss and check whether or not he could be allowed in. “What’s he got in the case?” God asked. St Peter opened it up, looked inside, and spoke into the ‘phone. “He’s brought paving stones,” he said, incredulously. God has a way of bringing us down to earth about what really matters in life. As the poet RS Thomas put it – what you must present to God is “your need only, and the simple offering of your faith, green as a leaf.” So with God there are no exceptions – we’re all in this – and we either get it or we don’t.
Genesis tells us we are all created good and that things have since gone wrong. The rest of the Bible is about God working us back to glory, chiefly by the magnetism of Jesus. The good news of the Christian story is that there is a way to be OK, but that as with the wealthy man with a suitcase full of useless gold bars, it may not be the way we thought.
Today, we are preparing for the ‘laying on of hands’ and I want to ask you questions about the healing of your life. Like many churches, we try to follow Jesus. If we follow him, we try to imitate him. So we try to love, to forgive, to pray, to discover God’s path for us, and above all to learn about the pathway of the cross…. to live, in other words, as Christ demonstrated it is possible to live. Part of that is the inclusion of healing in the worship of the church. In my young days I don’t remember that ever happening, but as the 20th century moved on so the practice spread, and it hasn’t always been an easy matter. I would guess that although there will be people here for whom the laying on of hands is a welcome addition to our service each month, there are also those for whom it’s a difficult business to comprehend and perhaps an embarrassing addition to our worship. So I’m going to try to do a bit of honest examination and clear out some of the shoddier thinking behind it all, in the hope that I can leave a path clear for you to make something of it. Forgive me if I tread on any toes – but I don’t think much of what I say ought to surprise you, really.
We ought, first, to have a word about Jesus, because healing was part of his ministry. But one of the biggest problems is the magical nature of it all. The Gospel writers are partly to blame for this, but it’s also our fault for not thinking deeply enough about it. One problem is that we think that miracles are beyond the normal laws of physics, chemistry and biology. That’s what proves Jesus was God, we think. But that can’t be so, can it? I know the Gospels record his disciples as “believing in him” as a result of wonderful happenings – but if healings convince you he was God, why don’t they convince you others were God too, both in his time and since? Indeed, why would any loving God step outside his own laws to do anything? There would have been no point in the law in the first place, which would prove God didn’t love us, wouldn’t it? This might get too convoluted if I go on – but my point is that Jesus’s healings, it seems to me, must be demonstrations of the love of God which take us further than we thought we could go – but not further than it is possible to go.
So let’s come to the sick. The answer to the question “How are you?” is normally “fine”. And that’s usually correct, for the purposes of normal social life. Sometimes the answer, more accurately, might be “well, not so good, actually”. But that leads to more conversation, so we often avoid it. But to tell the real truth, the answer should be “fine, but…”, because everyone is sick until entirely well. To put it another way, there are those of you here who have in your lifetime suffered some form of disability, either temporary or continuing. It may be something everybody sees because it has some visible evidence, like a limp or a sling or an eye patch. For a time you can’t run for a bus, lift a kettle or read the paper. But the truth is everyone in this building is disabled in some way or other. Put me in an art class and watch me go to pieces. I feel totally de-skilled and I’m easily embarrassed. Every person here is able – and every person here is disabled. Everyone here is a potential healer and everybody here needs to be healed.
So, partly because of Christ’s example, but also because love is God, healing is part of being a Christian. It’s what I ought to be about, and what you ought to be about. If you suffer, it is part of my human Christian role to make you better. Because the world suffers, it is my business to love it better. But I don’t mean the church should replace the hospital. When I think of healers, the medical professions are top of my list, and St Luke is their patron saint. I have no time at all for those dramatic healers who hype up emotions and have people throwing themselves around on the floor in paroxysms of ecstasy leading to claims that there must be something wrong with you if you don’t get better. But nevertheless it is my business, not because I am a pries, but because I am a Christian, to heal you.
We must get hold of an important idea – that healing is not the same as curing. There are things which can be cured and things which cannot. While a viral infection might be cured, a broken bone be set and a person be brought out of depression, what of someone who loses a leg, or is disfigured in a terrible fire, or is mentally beyond normal development? It would be quite wrong to dangle the false hope of a cure in front of them. But healing is another thing. Healing is beyond the reach of curing – it reaches the parts science cannot reach. Healing deals in love, in being fully human in spite of a problem, in finding the meaning of my life even when I can’t be as you are, in the why of my life and in reaching for God.
With all this background, we at Christ the King, invite those who seek it to come for the laying on of hands for healing month by month. Today I ask you to examine what it is that happens at that time. It’s a healing matter, not a curing matter. And much of what happens in reaching for God’s fullness of life is a question of the mind and soul rather than of the body. Just as many of Jesus’s healings were of the mind and of the soul rather than of the body, so we reach for God for the wholeness we lack. It’s appropriate that we do it in our intercessions, because it’s part of the whole work of the church in our pleadings for the life of the world and its citizens. We lovingly hold the world and its people before the God who is love, not in any spirit of magic and superficial expectation of the unrealistic, but in the trusting surrender to that which is beyond us, confident that we can be alright even when we’re not.
What we do here expresses a yearning of the human soul for that which is beyond the suffering inside. I want to talk at greater length about this sometime, because I think there must be questions about how we approach this matter which as yet remain unanswered. I think there could be room for development in the way we approach healing work in our church, dependent on good thinking, good praying, and above all a genuine love for one another and the world. Indeed, I’d genuinely like to know what you think, because I’m unclear myself how such concerns should develop in our life. Whether or not you like or engage in the ceremony we have each month here, can I draw you to the central fact that to follow Jesus is to attempt to heal this world and its people. It’s a saving business we are in. We engage with God and with each other to save each other. If you find you teeter on the brink of approaching this altar for the laying on of hands and then wonder what people will think – or if you think, no, in spite of the need inside you, there’s really nothing wrong with me… don’t let such things get in the way if you actually want to reach beyond yourself in your prayer. If we don’t love each other here and don’t treat each other with entire respect, then we clearly haven’t learned much about the healing love of God. At this altar there should be no prying eyes, no negative judgements, only prayer and love and prayer and love. Just present yourself as RS Thomas suggested, “… with your need only, and the simple offering of your faith, green as a leaf”.
The following note was used as the introduction to confession earlier in the service
Sickness and sin
If you are unwell, it is not because you have sinned. Such an argument would leave the people in hospital under the awful judgement of being both unwell and also branded and inspected as sinners. But for each of us sin undermines life. It leads us astray into secret worlds of selfishness – and then all the covering up which ensues. It places things on our consciences, often for years, sometimes for life. The church dwells on sin – which is right if you do it right, and wrong if you merely dwell on it. We need to get rid of it, to clean the cupboard. So we take our conscience and lay it bare before God at every service of the church in that part of the service we call confession. The trouble is we’re often more comfortable with the secret guilt than with the bravery it would require to face it, confess it – and then get better. As we face the question of healing therefore…. sin is a relevant question. But only if I face mine – and you face yours.
| If you wish to respond to any of the issues raised on this page you can contact Roy Clements on roy@christ-the-king.co.uk |