March 4, 2001
A sermon by Rev. Dr. John K. Luoma
I spent this
last week with an organization called Christian Healing Ministries. It is located
in Jacksonville, Florida. It was established some twenty years ago and is led
by a former Catholic priest and a highly educated man named Francis McNutt.
His goal is to teach people how to do healing prayer. He wants to restore to
the church the full ministry of Jesus, which is preaching, teaching and healing.
I was paired for the week with an experienced prayer minister. Each full day was spent preparing for prayer or in prayer. And we spent two hours each day praying with a man who had come to the center for healing prayer. It was an amazing experience. It was amazing first of all because I couldn't imagine how you could spend a full hour praying for a single individual. We prayed for spiritual healing, i.e. the healing of his relationship to God. We prayed for inner healing, i.e. healing in relationship to his memories. And we prayed for physical healing. Perhaps my greatest learning was that there is tremendous divine power released when you pray for a person intensively over an extended period of time.
There is so much evidence piling up these days that prayer can have a tremendous healing effect. At Christian Healing Ministries I learned about a study done recently by a physician who is associated with their organization. Dr. Dale Matthews wanted to do a study to assess the effect of healing prayer on arthritis sufferers, people with class II or III arthritis, people who had been on anti-inflammatory drugs for an extended period of time. (Southern Medical Journal, Dec. 2000) The patients received six hours of intensive prayer (soaking prayer) by prayer teams from Christian Healing Ministries. They were evaluated at three month intervals over the period of a year by a team of physicians. The result? 78% experienced significant reduction in the number of tender and swollen joints. Christian Healing Ministries made a video of the prayer session and the visits with the physicians as the patients went through evaluation. The healing that took place in regard to two of the patients was remarkable. They were almost completely healed. One of the physicians doing the follow up evaluation broke down into tears. She was overwhelmed by the extent of improvement in her patient.
Of course, physical healing is only one kind of healing that can be experienced through prayer. Another kind of healing that can take place is spiritual healing, i.e. healing in our relationship to God. One of the things that limits us as God's people is false ideas that we have of who God is. Often these are ideas that have been passed along to us by the behavior or teaching of our parents or people who function as parental figures. Parents are probably the primary way we develop our image of God. For example, in my home my father's language was particularly bad, especially when he was angry. It was God damn this and damn that and damn you. Now over the years I have realized that my dad did love me and I bear no grudge against him, but I know this language had an effect on me. When things like that are repeatedly said to you , it does something to your mind. You begin to think that maybe God does bear that kind of ill will toward you, that he is an angry God waiting for you to do something that is punishable. As parents we have got to be very careful about the language we use around our children or toward our children. I also remember another damaging image of God inflicted on my brother by a Sunday School teacher. My brother was about six years old at the time. Growing up, we roomed together. One night I awakened because he was crying. A Sunday School teacher had told him that little boys who do bad things go to hell. What a message to share with a six year old! I did my best to reassure him that God wasn't like that.
Our image of God is significantly influenced by our parents and the parental figures around us. If such figures are physically or verbally abusive, we begin to think that God is like that. And if I believe God is like that, what is going to be my attitude toward God and how am I going to feel about myself?
How do we overcome such negative experience and such negative images of God? We do it by editing our memories. We share the memory with someone we trust. We pray about that memory. We invite Jesus into that memory and ask him to heal it. We submit to Jesus who is the perfect image of God. In a sense, that is why we gather here every Sunday. We gather to submit ourselves to Jesus and learn from him God's disposition toward us. And what do we learn from Jesus this morning? What is the disposition of God toward his children?
In our Gospel today Jesus says that God is so loving and so good that he causes his sun to shine not just on good people but on evil people, and he causes the rain to fall not just on good people but on evil people. Which is to say that God is favorably disposed to even the most evil person and that God is constantly working for the best interests of every person. That is what we call the gospel. That is the good news. We have this wonderful God who is always seeking to do what is in our best interests.
Of course, all this raises the question that is at the heart of our Fifty Day Spiritual Adventure for this week: If we have this kind of incredibly loving God, how should we behave toward others? Quite simply, our goal should be to be like God. Our desire should be to share the love of God with others. And Jesus sets the standard of love pretty high. He says that this isn't just about loving our friends and neighbors, which is certainly an important duty. It is also about loving those who don't love us. It is about loving our enemies, i.e. those who set themselves against us. It is about loving those that society rejects and casts aside. I think that is why the Fifty Day Adventure says that at least two of the seven people you single out to love over the next few weeks should be non-Christians.
How exactly do we show this kind of love? In our Gospel today Jesus suggests that we do it in secret, that we do it anonymously, trying to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible. One of my favorite stories in this regard comes from Tony Campolo, a Christians sociologist and evangelist. He tells of a time when he had a speaking engagement in Honolulu. Because of jet lag, he found himself up at 3 A.M. in the morning and went to find something to eat. He wound up at a sleazy diner in Waikiki.
After a few minutes the place filled up with a group of prostitutes. They were noisy, provocatively dressed, and crude. He overheard a conversation between two of them. One of them said, "Tomorrow is my birthday. I'm going to be thirty-nine years old." Her companion responded, "So what do you want from me. A party? You want me to get you a cake and sing 'Happy Birthday'"? "No, but why do you have to be so mean? I don't expect a party. I've never had one before, why should I have one now.?"
At that moment Campolo made a decision. He would throw a party for her the next night. He got the manager of the diner to cooperate, decorated the place and bought a cake. As the woman, Agnes, came in that next night he had everyone ready to say "Happy Birthday!" When it happened, her mouth fell open and she became so shaky that they thought she was going to faint.
When the birthday cake came out, she was crying so hard that she couldn't even blow out the candles. She asked them if they would allow her to take the cake home so that she could show it to others. She promised to return quickly. In the time that Agnes was gone, Campolo asked them if he could lead them in a prayer for Agnes. He prayed that God's goodness would touch her, that her life would be changed, that she would know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. It was a strange scene: a Christian sociologist leading prayer for a bunch of prostitutes at 3 A.M. in the morning.
When he was finished the manager said, "You never told me you were a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to? " Campolo replied, "A church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3 A.M. in the morning." The man replied, "No you don't. There is no church like that. If there were, I would join it."
Our challenge during this Spiritual Adventure is to be a church like that, by anonymously lavishing the love of Christ on someone in need. If you want some advice on how to do that, read your Adventure materials or listen carefully to the people in the interviews that were done on the street and appear in the video to be shown in the narthex this morning.!
copyright 2001 by Rev. Dr. John K. Luoma