Spirituality of Healing

sermon by Torin Eikler
7th Sunday in Passionate Spirituality Series
James 5:13-16 Mark 6:6b-13

For the past six weeks, we have been exploring the power of Christian Spiritual Practices in our search for a fuller, more passionate spirituality as individuals and as a faith community. Each week, we have tried to share time-honored guidance that help us all engage these practices, or we have tried to provide the opportunity to actually experience them during worship. Sometimes, we have been able to do both. And today is no different.

Earlier in the service, we shared in a time of anointing. The service has remained essentially unchanged since the time of the early church, and as simple as it is, it displays all the wisdom of the Christian community about the spiritual practice of healing. Over the millennia, believers have accepted the power of prayer, anointing, and the laying on of hands as the soul of that practic. And yet, in modern history, we have come to see this ancient form of healing as more than a little questionable given our current understanding of medicine and the body.


There is a congregation in Connecticut that has dealt with this struggle in its own quest to embrace the ministry of healing. In the 1960s, they decided to begin holding healing services in response to the increasing despair they felt was surrounding their church. For forty years now, they have gathered every Wednesday to share in the Eucharist, intercessory prayer, anointing, and the laying on of hands. Though the results of their services are generally characterized by slow improvements in general health, over the years there have been “dramatic instances of physical or psychological recuperation.” And, the congregation has had its assumptions about spiritual healing questioned by what they have seen.

Member Avery Brook, a founder of the healing services program, talks about it in this way. “At the beginning, none of us wanted to admit that God was performing the healings which occurred in our prayer and study sessions. As sophisticated people, we preferred more secular explanations: psychosomatic mending (in other words, the power of people’s minds directing their bodies to get better), relaxation from stress, that sort of thing. [But, after awhile we realized that] when we pray for healing something always happens, even if it isn’t what we asked, [and] it is not the individual praying who is doing the healing, but God’s power working through us. We [just] needed to learn to get ourselves and our concern for results out of the way and just let God act through us.”


Brook’s last comment get at the heart of one of my own struggles with practice of healing – letting go of my concern for results. Growing up as the son of a doctor, I was steeped in the philosophy of the medical profession. And even though my father has repeatedly commented that “the science of medicine” is less a science and more an application of the gathered wisdom of the ages – wisdom gathered by trial and error (his favorite example being that even after years of study, no one really knows why aspirin works)… even with all that, I still have the expectation that a treatment should match a symptom and provide a cure. When I have an infection, I take antibiotics, and I expect the infection to go away. When I have a headache, I still take aspirin, and I expect that the headache will go away.

But the Christian tradition of healing doesn’t seem to work that way. Headache, infection, cancer, or whatever the ailment, we apply the same formula – prayer, anointing, and laying on of hands – and we can never be sure of exactly what will happen. Letting go of my desire for specific results is not only difficult, it tends to make me less eager to go through the process. When I am sick or in pain, I just want it to go away – and a quickly as possible.

I might call that a pretty straight-forward example of my desire for instant gratification, but I think there is something deeper at work. And, I am drawn back to Brook’s assurance that whenever they prayed for healing, “something always happened.” I’m not sure what that meant, but it seems like he was saying that letting go and letting God do the work, doesn’t always mean that we receive healing in the sense that we usually mean. And, I think that’s another hang-up for me.

I think of healing – for the most part – as having to do with curing the physical body. That’s the way our medical system sees it, and that’s what all of the stories of miraculous healings in the Bible describe. And yet, as we see in the account from Mark and many other scriptures, healing is often linked with casting out demons or restoring the social position of outcasts. So, the disciples were sent out to cast out demons and (almost as an afterthought) to heal the sick. Time and again, Jesus is said to have traveled throughout the country healing the sick and casting out demons. The woman with the constant flow of blood that made her unclean and untouchable received healing that allowed her to reenter society. And, the Gerasene demoniac was not only freed from Legion but also from the chains of custom and society that kept him on the edge, living in a graveyard.

Biblically – and throughout Christian history – healing is concerned with much more than the physical body. The central image is not a cure but a return to wholeness and peace. It’s the concept that’s all together in the Hebrew word “שאלמ” – which theologian and priest John Koenig describes as “a right relationship with God and our neighbors which gives birth to an all-embracing peace that spells the end of meaningless suffering.”[i] According to that definition, the goal of the Christian practice of healing is a return to Shalom and only secondarily the cure of physical ailments. That doesn’t mean that physical healing never happens. To the contrary, the experience of that Connecticut congregation along with many others across the centuries speaks to the continued gift of miraculous cures. But, it does mean that I – and most of us, I expect – need to enlarge our perspective when it comes to healing.

At its root, salvation means healing – healing in that holistic sense that Koenig describes, and the promise we have is that salvation is not just a hope for the future, it is a reality for believers in the here and now. When we look at things from that perspective, it is easier to see that healing events – physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual – happen daily and are, in some sense, a gift of reassurance that the promise of salvation is real.

The practice of healing that we have received – passed down to us across the years – is a powerful way we can enter into that promise. When we act with God to bring about healing – for ourselves or for others – we become a part of the divine plan to bring about the restoration of all creation. That is not only a beautiful prospect placed in front of us as an invitation, it is a part of our baptismal promise to live, with the Spirit’s help, according to the example and teachings of Jesus. We have been given the tools of prayer, anointing, and the laying on of hands to help us, but most of us still need to work on getting out of the way – on letting go of our fears, our doubts, and our desire to control the outcome – so that the power of God is free to work through us making something happen – something that will bring each of us … all of us closer to the restoration of shalom that God desires for all creation.

Since it’s one thing to say all of that and quite another to come to terms with it in our minds and in our lives, I would like to invite you all to spend the next several minutes with a pencil and your journal. Explore in the privacy of those pages your own thoughts, your own fears and skepticism, and the hopes that rise up within you when you think about the practice of healing. There are, as usual, some questions in your bulletins if you need them to help you get started. We’ll come back together for our final hymn – “Here I am, Lord.”

[i] Koenig, John. Healing in Practicing our Faith (Dorothy Bass, ed.) pg 150.