In the name of the Creating, Redeeming, and Sustaining God who loves you beyond all measure.
Amen
Today you are invited to bring all that troubles and pains you to this rail for healing prayer and the laying on of hands. God loves you and God’s healing power promises to make you whole. Today on healing Sunday, we embrace the mystery of healing, sometimes in the face of our own doubts.
The laying on of hands is an ancient practice in our tradition; it’s roots in Judaism. Hands in the Hebrew Scriptures were used to convey blessing, and touch helped the person praying to identify with victims. Hands were also used to anoint and consecrate priests, just as was done yesterday in Antonio’s ordination to the priesthood. In the stories of the Talmud, laying on of hands was also a healing practice. The actual source of healing was always acknowledged as God, affected through intercessory prayer.
Why the laying on of hands? We are embodied beings—body, mind, and spirit. We need not only rituals, but also sacraments that involve our whole being, in order to further our journey towards wholeness. We need the good and permissioned touch of others, to help us integrate and to know God’s healing power and love. Today’s ritual is a sacrament in our Anglican tradition that was present in the first prayer book of 1549. The laying on of hands is an outward sign of the internal reality of God’s grace and desire to make us whole.
The message in today’s gospel reading is very clear. Jesus, like all human beings, needed to know his belovedness to God, in order to be made whole. Jesus needed to wash away all that clouded his ability to see himself as God saw him. He needed God to winnow the wheat—his belovedness—from the chaff. Some of the chaff might be familiar to us–the voices from within and without that qualify our worth or cause us to feel shame. Those voices might have led Jesus to seek power and glory through admiration, rather than entrusting to God the meaning and importance of his life. Instead of seeking power over others or financial wealth, Jesus followed his calling to become a teacher and a healer. Jesus needed to know God’s “no matter whatness”, as Father Greg calls it, the “no matter whatness” of God’s love for him, and that held him fast, even through suffering and death. Through the hands of another human being, and the practice of baptism, Jesus knew the wholeness of being loved and cherished by God. Would he have become the powerful healing presence that he was without this experience of his belovedness to God? I think not.
We all need healing. We need the prayers of others for us, and we need God to help us grow toward our belovedness. We all need loving touch that we give permission for. But, it’s not always easy to be open to God’s healing presence. I remember when I first came to the rail for healing prayer, I felt hesitant and very uncomfortable. Having grown up in a different tradition, this was a foreign practice to me. I felt self-conscious and a bit embarrassed. I was trained in science and philosophy, and schooled in a post-modern “hermeneutic of suspicion” that made me skeptical of mystical experience-even my owand doubtful of non-scientific healing. I was also uncomfortable acknowledging in a public way that I needed healing. But I did, and I needed someone to know it and carry it with me. I needed prayer and the hands of God through the hands of another person; to help me experience the mystery of God’s healing grace. So I came to this rail, and I’ve been coming ever sense.
My journey into the acceptance of mystery and the development of trust in God progressed. After I became ordained, our then rector, Ed, asked me to become the director of healing and health here at ASC. I expressed my hesitation about the healing part. I felt afraid of the messiness of it all. I believed that God can and does heal us, through medicine and therapy, and the Eucharist. I believed that God could heal us completely and would do so completely, at some point when we see God face to face. But there was so much suffering and healing that did not occur. My mother had told me of faith healers who had visited our area and the anguish she felt from knowing people who had gone to them with high hopes, and had left with illness or disability still in place. But with encouragement and the promises of the prayers of other people, I accepted the position.
I delved in to exploring the world of healing prayer and touch across faith traditions, medical settings, and health research. I was intrigued to learn that the rich tradition of Judaism had always distinguished between healing and cure. God always heals; cure, a medical concept may or may not occur with healing. And cure does not guarantee wholeness of being. I read about the practice of healing touch, developed by the nursing field over 30 years ago. And I found lots of research on healing touch from Harvard medical school and the Mind, Body, Health Institute at Mass General Hospital, and from other universities. The more I studied I was astounded by the amount of research on the importance of healing presence and touch, and the health benefits of meditation. Finally, I found a practice developed by an Episcopal priest who had been a research fellow at Harvard, and her collaborator was a clinical psychologist, like me. It was called Healing Partners. They expand the Anglican tradition of healing prayer to include the wisdom of medical science. God knew I needed some convincing and graciously met me exactly where I was! With full vestry support, we were able to develop a healing partners ministry at ASC.
And then——-another thing happened! I broke my ankle roller-skating with my daughter. The fall took me by surprise. I had ice-skated and roller-skated and skied since my early childhood, and yet I fell, playing the simplest stop and go game. As I waited in the emergency room for x-rays, I decided to pray over my own ankle. Now this was not with great faith or expectation of healing. But I had been learning a lot about healing from other traditions and people, including people in this congregation. So I prayed and laid my hands very gently on my own ankle. I asked God to remind me of Her presence and to send Her healing power through my body. (breath)
I left the hospital, with a broken ankle, a boot, and significant discomfort.
Six weeks later, when I was given the ok for physical therapy, my therapist asked me to bring the original x-rays from the hospital. I did and after viewing them, she returned to me and said, “I’m sorry, I need the original x-rays, these must be the recent ones from your orthopedist.” She checked and verified that they were the x-rays taken in the emergency room right after my fall. She shook her head in disbelief, and said, “There are healing fibers already present in this first x-ray. That process never begins until many days after a break.”
I was humbled, awed, and left immersed in mystery. I knew that my prayers were not greater than others, and I know that it has nothing to do with anything I have done or left undone. It certainly didn’t have to do with the greatness of my faith that I would say barely reached the level of a mustard seed. And painfully, I have prayed for physical healing that has not occurred this way, and been anguished when suffering doesn’t change. But, I am now on a place in my journey, where God has helped me accept the mystery.
God is both known and beyond all knowing. Albert Einstein wrote, “There is a reality beyond which human understanding is impotent and helpless. Human life is a mystery.” God is beyond comprehension to both science and religion. Yet our faith calls us to trust God’s integrity even when we can’t put all the pieces together; to respect our God given intelligence and the reality that exists beyond human grasp. When we align ourselves with God’s healing energy, and open ourselves to God’s healing and loving presence, there is always healing if not always cure. God always answers our prayers for wholeness, with healing love, meeting our prayers with the energy that dances at the heart of all that is. God promises to melt away all that obscures our sense of belovedness. As God let Jesus know at his baptism, we are always held by Her all-powerful love through all our life and even death. We are not alone.
Accept the mystery and bring all that burdens you to this rail. God promises always to meet you here.
Amen
