I've been reading and praying and thinking about the book of James all this month, calling James's letter "Practical Christianity", both in my head and aloud. "James is practical Christianity," I've been telling my congregation, week after week, with his advice about taming our tongues, putting faith into action, taking care how we treat one another, how we treat others.
However, when I think of this week's subject, healing prayer, the word "practical" does not immediately spring to mind. Is it "practical" to pray for healing? Or is it more practical to make an appointment with your doctor? What does it mean to include this last segment in James' letter in a series about practical Christianity?
When I was growing up, we did not pray for healing, at least not overtly. There were no special services for healing in my church. There were no special liturgies for healing in our prayer book. Somewhere along the line I heard rumors that the Pentecostals did, indeed, pray for healing, but we didn't.
And then, somewhere along the line, that changed. At first, the change was just in the books for pastors. There was an option to do a "Service of the Word for Healing," if you wanted to. Who wanted to? As it turned out, some people wanted to pray for healing, maybe not exactly the way the Pentecostals did, but somehow. And now, with our more recent hymnal and prayer book, the service for healing is right there, where everyone can see it.
What changed? Is it practical?
I was talking about this with a friend one day last week, thinking about my own faith tradition, and how much our faith has become a product of the Enlightenment. We have fully embraced scientific methods and reading the Bible historically. I had the opinion that perhaps faith had become too much about thinking the right things. Perhaps a service of healing brings the heart and feeling back into faith.
Head Vs. Heart.
It seemed right to me. Faith can't stay in your head. It has to get down to your heart. In fact, someone said to me once, after a healing service that, "If was the first time he had felt anything in church in a long time." That seemed to seal the deal.
But it was not more than a few minutes later that I realized that I was wrong. First of all, I don't think that we want to "turn off our brains" in the 21st Century. And I don't think that it is the presence of feeling that makes healing prayer services so compelling.
Maybe it's this: services of healing proclaim the truth that God does not just care about our souls, but about our whole lives, including our bodies. God cares about our whole lives, and right now, not just later God cares, and we also care for one another, body and soul and strength and mind.
Faith is not a head trip. Faith is not a heart trip either. Faith is a whole-life trip, a whole-body trip.
In my last congregation, we offered prayers for healing once a month, at the close of the service. One of the pastors always went to the doors, to greet the people who were leaving. And one of us always stayed back, with words and anointing oil, to pray for people who came forward. And so often there was a long line, people who wanted me to pray for them, or for someone else they knew. There was one woman who always came up and prayed for our congregation.
We take our whole lives, and we offer them to God, and we pray for God to heal them and use them, somehow. And we pray for healing for our politics, and our families, for our inner lives, and our communities. There is not one part of us that we leave outside of God's influence.
1 comment:
I wrote a little bit about Esther in my essay this week. I wish I'd said it exactly like this. That is what the book of Esther is about: God working, not miraculously, but through people and nature. I think you're right. Good essay. As usual.
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