Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Job, poor Job.
Wretched, grieving, despondent, and
very, very sick old Job.
You know the story.

Why did he have to suffer?
Why did his innocent family have to suffer, and die?

Why must anyone suffer and die?

In the Old Testament, there are
a number of stories of miraculous healing.
Remember Elijah bringing the widow’s dead son
back to life.

Elisha raises the Shunammite’s son from the dead.
Naaman and Uzziah and others are cured of leprosy.

The Old Testament has a lush,
rich lore of healing
miracle stories.

It is interesting for us to ask,
did the people of Israel, knowing these stories
from their Scriptures handed down,
did they believe in healing by the power of God?

Bear in mind
that the stories are often accompanied
by expressions of amazement, even disbelief,
among the onlookers.

It seems it wasn’t automatic
that people would believe in
healing miracles,
or miracles of any sort!

Even in that time of superstition and
mythic tales and
fantastical folk beliefs
it was so much, maybe too much
to believe that God would reach down
and heal a sick one,
and harder by far to believe that
a fellow tribesman, even an elder,
or a shaman,
could cure miraculously.

And hard it was to believe in Jesus’ day, too.
The New Testament stories of miracle healings
are SO numerous that it simply astonishes us
to consider the list:
 
The Gospel stories tell us that
Jesus had the power to heal, to cure,
to give sight to the blind,
to make the lame walk again,
to restore hearing,
to heal the worst, raging diseases
and yes, to beat death.

Like Elijah and Elisha,
so too, Jesus raised the dead.
And then he gave this power to
his disciples,
and in the Acts of the Apostles,
we see them performing
some of the same miracle cures.

All these miraculous healings.
And did the people around them
– most of the people? – believe?
That God was doing the healing?

Let’s just say the skepticism has
been very, very strong,
all the way down through the centuries.

For example:
Do YOU believe in healing miracles?

Enough to pray for them,
in your own life?

Enough to EXPECT them?

Or do you consider them a sort of
quaint, old, anachronistic belief,
a kind of make-believe?

Do you inwardly doubt –
not so much perhaps,
that God could,
but rather, that God would
reach out, reach down, enter into our world –

this world of physical imperfection,
and disease, and injury, and decay,
and decline –
that God would come here and fix . . . .
you?


Watch TV – the religion channels.
You’ll see faith healers working their “miracles”
one after the other,
people shuffling and limping onto the stage,
the preacher laying hands on them,
sometimes roughly,
and calling on God – shouting for God
to do what God has promised –
to heal the one with faith.

And maybe the person suddenly SPRINGS
to new life, proclaiming her faith,
and walking merrily away.

And you, and I, maybe
will roll our eyes, and shake our heads
at the spectacle of fraud
which seems to be taking in
all the tearful chanting rubes in the audience.

But, why shouldn’t they believe,
as those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles believed?
As the widow believed Elisha?
After all, the modern televangelist is doing
this ministry in the name of Jesus,
and claiming empowerment by him,
by his Gospel, by his own words.

How is Benny Hinn different from
Peter or Paul
or the other disciples of Christ
sent out to perform a healing ministry?

We really don’t know what to make of it, do we?
What’s real, what’s not?

IS God doing healings, ever?

Or is the universe God created
simply moving along at its own created pace,
including the decay and eventual death of
every living being?

Another way of asking this is simply:
Does God care?
Does God get involved?
Is God really listening to our prayers?

People suffer. People are in pain.
People die.

We wanted a miracle, and it didn’t happen.
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
WHERE IS OUR MIRACLE, GOD??!!

And we wonder – did we not have enough faith?
Is it like the TV Evangelists say,
that you have to have enough faith,
or it won’t work?

I wonder:
Why do we fail to notice
that there has been healing going on
all around us,
all along?

In Jesus’ day,
the practice of “medicine”
was barely worth the name.
 
Yet down through the ages,
steadily, bit by bit,
science and knowledge and skill,
and now, technology,

has advanced so far,
that we do not see the countless
miracles taking place
every day,
in every hospital in the world.

People who would have died,
don’t.

We all live longer than ever any civilization
could have dreamed.

People, many thousands of people,
are actually cured, really cured,
of diseases.

Doctors and nurses, pharmacists and therapists,
social workers and chaplains,
professionals dedicated to healing body and mind and spirit
go about their work every day.

Not on the televangelists’ stage,
but in the operating theatre,
at the bedside, in the clinics,
in the counselor’s safe office,
at the pharmacy counter.

There is such incredible healing
every day.

And we don’t see it.
Even while we ask God,
where have you been?
Still God is intervening, hearing our prayers
and answering them.

Have you ever thought to wonder,
why am I not dead yet?
Have you ever thought to answer,
miracle after miracle after miracle,
courtesy of almighty God.

Have you thought to reckon it this way:
that I don’t know why some people die the way they do,
why others seem to suffer so terribly,
why so live in such horrible poverty and filth and hunger,
why it must be so unbelievably hard for so many
of my sisters and brothers in humanity.
But I desire to be able to desire to desire to be willing to try to attempt
to believe that
God knows what God is doing,
and why the universe, all of it, goes and flows
the way it does.

I am willing to begin to take notice
of prayers answered,
of God’s decisive miracles done,
of the special healing disciples
that God has chosen and given such
remarkable powers to,
these health care professionals.

I am willing to begin seeing,
with eyes willing to see,
with ears willing to hear,
all that God has done
is doing
for us.

God has a plan for me,
and it’s apparently still a work in progress.

So I shall go on noticing
and giving thanks for,
the miracles which make it possible
for me to go about my day,
the best I can,
God willing.

Amen?