A mentor and friend tells a story of jogging on campus when a car stopped to ask for directions. Its occupants were a family in distress—a member was having a health crisis of some sort. My friend gave them directions to the hospital and then offered all he had: “I’m a minister.” They responded with an earnest question: “Are you a healing minister?” No, not that kind. “Well, then what good are you?” And they sped off to the actual healers.
When we or someone we love is in need of healing, another kind of minister will not do. Thankfully, our healing minister is Jesus Christ, the great physician, who heals every ill. In many languages the words for “salvation” and for “healing” are either cognates or identical. What it means for Jesus to save is that he heals, and vice-versa. Jesus’ healing miracles are not mere magic tricks. They show the world Jesus wants, and is bringing: one without disease, one with fullness of healed/saved life for all his people.
Mainline churches have, in the last century, relearned practices of praying for healing from our Pentecostal brethren. Scripture directs us:
14 Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.
This raises more than a few questions. If you pray for the sick for any length of time you’ll find that some seem to improve while others do not. As earnest and heartfelt as our prayers might be, sometimes they seem, to us anyway, not to “work.” A US senator was recently pilloried for a media appearance in a cemetery where she indicated that despite whatever health efforts, that would be our final destination. She might have been tone-deaf politically. But she was not wrong. None of us gets out of this life alive. And as the hackneyed joke puts it—you never see a moving truck following a hearse to the graveyard.
So why do we pray?
Because God does long for health for his creatures, and will grant it in full one day. As with all our prayers, we don’t know what these prayers “do,” where they “go.” But we know they are heard by a God who is all the healing there is. And sometimes he grants it here, now. Other times he seems to withhold it, for reasons no one knows. So we pray. We give thanks when we receive the answers we hope for. We lament when we do not. But we still give thanks. Life, healing, community, God: they are always good. Even, or especially, when we suffer loss and tragedy.
This long-winded introduction is actually an invitation to our (one!) service Sunday, June 22, where we will pray for healing. We have done this before to great response. The only question or complaint was that we didn’t advertise it more widely so folks could be there. Here then is that act of promotion: we’ll pray for healing Sunday. Bring yourself or others you know who need extra prayers for healing. We’ll lift those desires high, knowing that God above all desires for people life: health, salvation, abundance of joy. Gracious God make it so for all your humanity, now. Amen.