Download Five Healing Sermons

Introduction

Simon asked me to preach about the Church’s sacrament of healing before oRering it at church, because it seems it hasn’t been oRered here for many years, and there may be misunderstandings about what it is and what we should expect from it. Some of the questions I’ve asked myself:

- Why do the gospels talk about Jesus as a miraculous healer?

- What are they teaching us?

- Why are the disciples recorded as healers? Can we do this?

- Will it work? Are there clever ways to make it work?

- What if it doesn’t work? (spoiler alert: we all die)

- What is the connection between illness and sin?

- What is the connection between body and soul?

The constraints for anyone preaching about healing is that they are preaching to a group of people about the most personal, intimate, and painful aspects of our being, and to vulnerable individuals who are at diRerent stages of life and spiritual maturity. We may lack knowledge, and we certainly lack time if we’re going to respect the Anglican intolerance of long sermons, but we’re dealing with an infinite mystery, which is God.

General observations don’t have the same value as spiritual conversation; and four sermons can’t cover all the aspects of healing in Mark’s healing stories – let alone the three other gospels. (I have used Mark’s gospel as a basis for our learning to complement the use of Mark’s gospel in our concurrent Christianity Explored course.)

Historical background

Despite the instruction in the Epistle of James to call for the elders for prayer if one is sick, the earliest evidence for the practice of church healing is a text for the blessing of oil for the sick in the prayer book of Bishop Sarapion c.350CE. We know that by 500CE it has become a priestly ministry. This practice of anointing with oil developed during the Middle Ages and was used particularly near the point of death: ‘extreme unction’ . The  ouncil of Trent (1545-63) codified this: ‘If anyone says that extreme unction is not truly and properly a sacrament instituted by Christ our Lord and announced by the blessed Apostle James, but is only a rite received from the Fathers 1or a human invention, let him be anathema. If anyone says that the anointing of the sick neither confers any grace nor remits sins nor comforts the sick, but that it has already ceased, as if it had been a healing grace only in the olden days, let him be anathema. ’ (Calvin said that limiting anointing with oil to a priestly sacrament is cruel and unscriptural.) Vatican 2 revisions in 1968 broadened extreme unction once again, calling it ‘the Anointing of the Sick’ . The Church of England had various societies on its Catholic wing, like St Raphael’s or Crowhurst, where the sacrament of healing was taken seriously, and Evangelical and Pentecostal Charismatic churches have always invoked the healing power of the Spirit; but the sacrament of healing was largely unregarded in ordinary parishes until a C of E report, A Time to Heal, published in 2000, which encouraged the revival and the practice of healing ministries more widely. Some favour a formal, sacramental approach, while others oRer healing using the laying on of hands and extempore prayer; others use both.

Healing oils are blessed each year in Anglican cathedrals and sent to parishes for anointing the sick. The oils are the same as those used at baptism, and the anointing is the same: every Christian who wears the sign of the cross signals that they belong to Christ. They are anointed as a new royal priesthood, and their baptism is a washing away of sin and evil by the Holy Spirit, who comes to dwell within the person.

Good and bad news about healing

The bad news is that there is no technique. We are mortal creatures. Love opens us to grief because we are give our hearts to others, over whose destiny we have no control.

There is no explanation or guarantee. The meaning of miracle is mirare to wonder. We pray for God’s healing touch to make us whole, as supplicants for a medicine that we don’t understand or own, only dimly knowing what we’re asking for.

Yes, of course we want a negative test result, or a favourable biopsy. But God’s way of bringing us to wholeness will be in spite of and through death – Jesus’s death and our own and the deaths of others we love and others we’ll never know.

We can peer into the mystery, but we can’t describe its contours.

The good news: We believe in one God, Father, Son and Spirit. We are made in the image of God, and our destiny is to have our image restored, and to share God’s life.

One of the metaphors that the scriptures use is that of sight — so we begin this meditation on healing with Isaiah’s vision of God, and a people who cannot or will not see God — a cursed people who are blind to God, deaf to God’s laws, dumb because their words are venal — they don’t praise and thank God. It’s a spiritual malaise, but it certainly brings physical, moral and. political repercussions, so from the beginning, biblical writers make a metaphorical connection between being blind, deaf, and dumb and the sinfulness and the spiritual malaise of God’s neglectful people.

This connection is bad news for people who have disabilities or who fall ill, and has led to much stigma. But paradoxically, it is Christians who first began a fight back against our tendency to marginalize, even kill, people with genetic abnormalities and disabilities. We still have to be 2careful to watch our language, but it’s important to acknowledge that body and soul have a very complex relationship.

The healing miracles in Mark’s gospel begin with the exorcism of a man in the synagogue — a small, homely-sounding incident that follows the victory that Jesus wins in the desert over Satan, after he himself has been baptized in the river Jordan. As we have seen, Mark is not teaching us about first-century mental-health issues: he is telling us that Jesus is Lord over all evils that aRect humanity and creation.

From this developed the much-misunderstood concept of ‘original sin’. In its most pessimistic,

Augustinian form, evil is a tragic curse that clings to all of us, despite our baptism. I once

complimented a young super-Evangelical mother on her exceptionally beautiful little two-year

old. She said, ‘Yes. It’s a pity that these children are all limbs of Satan, isn’t it?’ Well, it’s a view.

But the biblical origins of this concept is the idea from the Book of Genesis that our best, most

God-like traits — our cleverness, our curiosity, our aspiration — are also the source of our

downfall. That’s how, in biblical terms, Satan is able to fool us. Jews understand the Adam and

Eve story as more nuanced: the human couple must necessarily reach for God, and take ever-

increasing responsibility for the world.

Meanwhile, the Wisdom/Spirit tradition of the Bible (and Jesus was above all a Wisdom teacher)

avoids a causal link: people are not ill because they have sinned (though it’s possible: gluttony,

dependence on alcohol, the use of violence, and so forth can obviously end in illness and

injury). We become ill and feel pain because we are made of friable stuR — neurons and pain-

receptors. Our bodies grow, and, like all growing things, they will die.

But in the midst of this process, Wisdom constantly invites us to embrace her as the source of

health and peace, life and resurrection. St Irenaeus (a second-century bishop) said that the

glory of God is a person fully alive. That fulness of life must involve an exchange from mortal,

physical cells to spiritual energy if it is to grow and outlive corporeal form.

The Church of England’s words for the Laying of Hands In the name of God the Father who created you, receive Christ’s healing touch to make you whole.

May the power of God strengthen you, the love of God dwell in you and give you peace, that you may serve him now and evermore.

and for Anointing for Healing

I anoint you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. May you be whole in body, mind and spirit, and may God grant you the inward anointing of the Holy Spirit.