Healing Service

Date:21st June 2009

Preacher: Revd David Carpenter

‘I do not think prayer is something I do, so much as it is something I am.’

In the name of God: our wisdom and our truth.

Someone once described prayer as ‘adult letters to Santa Claus’. It’s a good phrase because it quite succinctly tells us what prayer isn’t, or shouldn’t be.

At the Passover seder Rabbi Brian said that if a Jew were travelling along the road and saw a fire tender coming towards him, he was not permitted to pray, ‘Lord please don’t let that fire engine be going to my house’. The reason should be obvious: it’s tantamount to praying for someone else’s house to burn.

So if I can’t pray for a substantial lottery wins, even though it would mean I could retire, and give more time to the Lord’s work: and tithing ten percent would be a substantial boost to the Lord’s house (note the subtle way of softening the selfish) would it be alright to pray for healing? What about a prayer for that painful knee, the wonky hip, or an end to the general sense of feeling unwell?

Personally, and I speak for myself here, I can’t subscribe to a kind of divine health service lottery. Why should my bunion get zapped while the child next door dies of leukaemia? And I just can’t see that it’s sufficient to say: its mystery, the Lord’s will is inscrutable, one day it will all make sense.

I just can’t find it in me to believe in a God that is so apparently arbitrary in his dealings.

In trying to grapple with the idea of prayer I find myself inspired by some words of Bishop John Shelby Spong, the radical former Bishop of Newark in the United States of America. He writes,

‘for me prayer is communing with the holy, that which is transcendent, the power of life, the consciousness of the divine.’

He goes on,

‘I do not commune with God in order to seek divine favour or to engage in religious flattery, that people call praise. I commune to discover God within me and to be more open to that presence. I do not separate prayer from life. I do not think prayer is something I do, so much as it is something I am.’

I would want to affirm this for myself. For me, prayer is not about firing either praise or request at an entity up or over there. I pray in an attempt to be more open to that ultimate reality, that which is transcendent: God.

For me, that which lies at the heart of things, the ground of my being, my origin and my destiny, the source of love, is also the ultimate source of wholeness and wellbeing. And resting in this wholeness I discover what it is to be complete. This, I would want to say, is true wellbeing.

This has nothing to do with being able to run a marathon, or to once again have the energy and agility of the teenager; neither to escape what it is to grow old and frail and the consequence of my body wearing out.

What I can tell you, as I look back over my life, is that the painful times, the times that have hurt, the times when, like St. Paul, I could easily have prayed for the cup to be taken away; and I’m not just taking of physical pain here, rather mental anguish and difficult situations, these have been the occasions that have had the greatest impact on my life. These have been life defining moments. These are the times from which, I believe, I have emerged a better person.

But think about it. Isn’t this at the heart of our understanding of what it is to enter into the mystery of the life of Jesus? Jesus himself, wondered if it were really necessary to drink from the bitter cup, wondered whether or not there was an alternative way; asked indeed for the cup to be taken away: but in the end decided that life had to be embraced in all its fullness, not just the joy, but it’s bitterness also. This was the answer to his prayer.

Paradoxically, it is the way of the cross that we define as the way of life.

So what are we asking for in a healing service: Just that we get better, or that we may bear what we have to bear with courage, unbowed and un-embittered?

Is the prayer to discover an acceptance of what cannot be changed and the grace to live with this in a spirit that brings dignity to us and perhaps hope and encouragement to others, as Jane Tomlinson did in her fight with cancer?

You know of her not because some heavenly lottery was won, rather that her courageous fight brought, and brings, hope and courage still. In achieving this, a rather profound prayer has truly been answered.