A sermon on healing and wholeness

Tuesday in Holy Week 2014 - Eucharist with prayers for healing

The kingdom of healing

What would you say is the key message of Jesus?

Some might say it is about loving neighbour, loving God and loving ourselves.  That’s a good foundation.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?  OK, helpful life advice.

God so loved the world.  Yep. I like that too, and the verse that follows!

Well, if we were to go by the number of times a word or phrase is mentioned then the ‘kingdom of heaven’ or ‘the kingdom of God’ or ‘the kingdom’ must come pretty high up the list – mentioned a wopping 105 times in the stories and teaching of Jesus in the Gospels.  Money is mentioned 25 times, the poor 11 times, hell (or rather gehenna  or sheol, outer darkness, fiery furnaces etc) 12 times – each in a story I might add and sexuality, well, um, not at all.

But this kingdom, this is the heart of the Gospel.

It’s important to remember that when Jesus talks in terms of Kingdom he doesn’t mean a physical place located in this world or the next.  Nor does the word ‘heaven’ mean somewhere beyond this life.  The kingdom is perhaps better described as a way of being – and more accurately described not using the word king (which has lots of other often unhelpful connotations) but talking of the reign of God.  The reign of God is when we allow God to live within and through us, when we seek to align our hearts and minds with God’s values, when we open ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit and when we become Christ-like.

So though we use the words ‘kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven’  There is much more to it than that.  It is a concept much more in line with the Hebrew concept of ‘shalom’ – another multi-faceted, multi-layered word variously translated as ‘peace’, ‘wholeness’ and ‘healing’.  The idea of the kingdom of shalom is a place – not physically located, but based in the hearts of human beings – where there is harmony and the broken things of this world, of our lives, of all creation, are put back together again.

It’s not a destination, but a calling, not a one off but a lifetime journey. It’s a state of being to which we relate, and one into which we are growing.  It is a place of resurrection and renewal, integrity and wholeness and the deepest healing – where we find ourselves in loving relationship with our true self, with God and with others.

It’s a kingdom of healing.

Everytime we gather to celebrate the Eucharist we are proclaiming and celebrating this kingdom.  Every time we pray ‘your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ we are commiting ourselves and expressing our yearning for this kingdom. 

And here this evening we are again opening ourselves, intentionally, carefully, prayerfully to this hope, this desire for healing.  Not just for ourselves – that our past hurts may be healed, that our bodies and minds might be made whole, that our spirits receive the balm of Christ-life.  But for the whole world, that all might know their part within the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of healing.

When we talk about salvation we often think about being ‘saved from eternal perdition’ or ‘rescued’ from something.  The very root of that word is, though, a kingdom word – coming from the same root as salve, in the same way that we place a salve upon our wounds.  Salvation is the ultimate healing – and salvation comes through God’s reaching out to us in Christ and offering us his own salve for our troubled souls, and for the world which he embraces.

Here this evening, as a symbol of our hope for healing – both for ourselves and for our loved ones, for the church and for the world – we are invited to receive, just for a moment, the laying on of hands at the altar rail, an anointing with holy oil as an echo of the oil of healing and forgiveness talked of in scripture.  It’s a symbolic act – and if there are other issues you would like to talk about and seek prayer for I would encourage you to make use of the gift of our healing ministry team and seek one of them, or indeed one of the clergy should you so wish, for specific prayers for healing.

More than anything what we celebrate here today is a hope, and a longing, for healing.  For ourselves, for friends and neighbours, for our society and for all creation.  We seek the deepest healing –and I would encourage each one of us to receive this act of laying on of hands anointing.

May we continue to enter more fully into the reign of God in our hearts and minds, and know the wholeness, integrity and life of the kingdom of shalom. Peace be with us all.  Amen.

St Luke

This last Sunday Morning's sermon was on St Luke. Here's what they got...

St Luke (2009)

Acts 16.6-12
Luke 10.1-9

St Luke the Evangelist…

When I lived in London, which was some time ago, there was a visit from an American Evangelist to Earls Court Arena. He was coming to bring his ‘healing ministry’ to the UK – his name was (and I assume still is) Morris Curello. London was plastered with huge posters which had pictures of abandoned wheelchairs and dropped crutches, and various medical impliments discarded in the wake of this man’s healing campaign.

There was some controversy over these posters because a number of people said they degraded those who were wheelchair bound, and in the Church there was an adverse reaction to what was derogatorily referred to as ‘Faith Healing’. Derogatory because faith healing seems more to do with the person that has such a ‘ministry’ than the God who Christians believe is the great healer, or Christ who is referred to as ‘the Wounded Healer’. And for Curello the greatest criticism levelled at him was that he emphasised the work of the Holy Spirit in performing astounding ‘tricks’ of healing at the expense of those firstly who weren’t healed and secondly of the God who we describe in Trinity.

That sets the scene for today! You may be wondering why this reference to healing ministry to begin our thoughts for this Sunday service this morning. Well, today is St Luke’s day, St Luke writer – according to tradition – of the third Gospel, St Luke who, tradition (and a late 2nd Century document) also says was a healer, a doctor. St Luke, companion of St Paul who is also patron saint of doctors and all those in the medical profession.

So I thought it worth kicking off my thoughts today on the theme of healing. Even though the writings of Luke – commonly accepted to be both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles – don’t make a particular issue of healing in themselves. They don’t show a particular bias towards healing miracles at the expense of say, parables, or other teaching, or even other miracles. It seems that to Luke healing was a wider issue, of which we will say more later!

Whilst Luke talks of Jesus healing and writes of the miracles of Jesus they always have a meaning, a depth behind them. At the start of his ministry, in Chapter Four of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus having been thrown out of the synagogue for speaking with such authority then goes on to perform an exorcism and the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law which proves that he has authority over demons and sickness. In Chapter Six of the Gospel of Luke Jesus has a debate about the Sabbath, then proceeds to heal a withered hand on the Sabbath, showing himself to be Lord of the Sabbath.

In Chapter Seven Jesus heals a centurion’s servant to show that even those outside of the Jewish people are able to share in the life of God. In Chapter 10, today’s reading, Jesus sends out disciples to preach the Gospel and heal, not as a magic trick but to show and to share the presence of the kingdom, the reign, of God.

I could go on, and often do, but the accounts of healings and miracles we have in our Gospels don’t exist for novelty or to impress people into the life of faith, but as signs of God’s work in the world.

There are arguments in the Church today about whether such miracles are still possible today, or whether they were only for what we would call the age of the apostles, the early Church. I believe they are possible and indeed happening, but I’ve not seen any, or as someone said a day or two ago on Twitter – a website I use – “I believe miracles are not only possible but happening, but I can't attest to any with confidence.”

Actually, the miracles we see day to day are those we take for granted. The health and healing that comes through the skills of our medical staff, doctors and surgeons. The freedom from depression and loneliness that comes from love and support given by both professionals and communities. The everyday miracles of generosity and grace and love and faith that take place in a thousand unseen ways in our parishes and in towns and villages and remote places in our land and throughout the world.

And I believe healing is not just about feeling better, or having a miraculous experience, God’s healing as well as coming about through the work of inspired medical practitioners can take place at the deepest level. I have seen people healed of their fears and bereavements and brokenness through prayer and through the love of Christ. People may not necessarily get better, but that doesn’t mean that their brokenness is not healed, or being healed. And in some cases I have seen people embrace death as healing, longing to meet God and to let go of the pain and suffering that comes from sickness and disease.

We confuse healing at its deepest level with the spectacle of the Morris Curello’s of this world. God is at work beyond the brokenness of our bodies and though there may be times that he does act in an obvious and visible way God is at work constantly in many ways we cannot see. In our healing services here in the Five Alive Mission Community we would welcome God choosing to act miraculously and spectacularly, but most of us know God to be infinitely more subtle and gracious than that.

So on this St Luke’s day we give thanks for the one who shared the story of the greatest healing of all, the healing of all creation in Jesus Christ, in his death and resurrection. As Christ has restored us to the fullness of a relationship with God our loving heavenly father and as he has brought us new life through his own suffering and new life, we give thanks that he continues to work in us is more ways than we can imagine or fully know.

And we give thanks that for St Luke his concern was to share the good news with us, to let people know about Jesus and to inspire us to do the same. And we can do that in all sorts of ways – they may not be spectacular, they may be subtle, they may feel understated or even ineffective, but every act of love, forgiveness, grace and mercy that we perform through the inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit is another way in which Christ is made known and in which the kingdom of God is made real in, through, because of and for us.

May we be those who continue to know God’s healing in myriad ways, and may we know the love of the wounded healer Jesus Christ, and may we share that healing with those we meet, and live with, and whose lives we touch. Amen.