Jesus, Healing Ministry, and Me II: A Sermon: "Rise Up and Walk!"

The following sermon was preached in a slightly different form (mid-March 2010) to Trinity College's Prophetic Preaching Class taught by Prof. David Jacobsen. Preaching is one of my favourite parts of what I've been doing in the last couple of years.

The Reading: I read Acts 2:42-3:10 in the English Standard Version. The text includes two pericopes (small stories). The first emphasizes the communal aspect of Jerusalem's early Church. The second is a healing story, in which Peter and John encounter a physically disabled man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple and offer him, not alms, but the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

Let us pray:

Come, Holy Spirit: fill this place with your presence, incline our hearts to know and love you more, and help me with this foolishness of preaching; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” I love this story, but I have to tell you: it scares the living daylights outta me.

When I was twelve years old I met a man named Billy Smith, a large, tough-talkin’ Texan who clearly had gifts of healing. He prayed for my irregular heartbeat, which was healed instantly, and for my cerebral palsy, which was not. At the end of the weekend, he blessed me, pointing his big Pentecostal finger at my heart and said in his booming voice, “You start layin’ your hands on people and prayin’ for them!” I did! It’s been an amazing journey, but it hasn’t been easy.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve encountered images of people like Benny Hinn, in his white Gucci suits, knocking people flat by the power of suggestion—or is it really the power of the Spirit? I’m sure, like me, you’ve heard stories of people whose lives were changed for the better by a single prayer—emotions healed, relationships restored and even—so some claim—cancer fleeing with a word.

Yet, there’s a flip side. Sometimes people feel wonderful for awhile, but it’s obvious they’re still sick. When healing doesn’t happen, often people are told, “You’ve let the demon remain,” or “you don’t have enough faith.” Or even, especially in mainline circles: “God doesn’t usually cure, anymore.”

We like the picture, I think, of the alternative and egalitarian justice represented in the first part of our reading from Acts: no one has any need, we are eating together, praying for each other, worshipping together, welcoming each other… It sounds almost too good to be true, almost Mennonite! Or Marxist.

“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” This is the statement that strikes fear into my heart—and I think into most of our hearts. We don’t know what to do with the signs and wonders bit.

For example: I’m disabled. If someone were to say to me, “Be healed!” what would happen if I wasn’t? What would happen if I was? Would people’s expectations suddenly overwhelm me? Would they tell me to make writing my hobby, get a real job, learn to drive, and become a good little acquisitive capitalist?

What would happen if I were the one praying, and nothing happened after such a dramatic statement? Would the person feel condemned, or deeply loved? Do I even believe that lameness, deafness, blindness can be healed instantly? Even if I do, does that mean I am trying to erase people by expecting them to look like me so that they’re easier to love? If someone wasn’t healed, would I be angry with God, with myself? Do I even have the courage to face that anger?

So I—we, I think—turn to exegesis and to hermeneutics to “solve” the “problem.” We may conclude that Jesus and the apostles did not actually cure bodily, organic illnesses. We might console ourselves by noting that, after all, healing is about changing someone’s status in relationship with the Powers that Be, allowing freedom of choice and resistance in the context of an alternative community. If we do take the story literally, we might say that God did all kinds of crazy things back then because we were ignorant about bacteria and viruses, about mental illnesses, and good nutrition; but now we have advanced biomedicine—we don’t need such obvious displays of power.

Oh, really? Are we so sure?

We might say, Peter and John touched the man, brought him into the community. They fixed their gaze on him, not to make him the abject outside of the Beautiful, but to show him that he was beautiful and that the Temple system was the problem. And in this kind of restoration, we say rightly, here is the very finger of God breaking chains off the captives and giving voice to the voiceless. Here is an alternative to the system that keeps people bowed beneath oppression’s load. So Peter and John offer what they have: faith in the name of Jesus. We might ask ourselves, how can we go beyond money to offer grace to the oppressed, to enable them a dignified life full of God’s praises, so that all who see them are amazed at such a change? It’s a good question. All of these options contain important insights. But liberal or mainline Christians often focus on healing as a matter of adjusting systems.

But when you have sick people in front of you, sitting with us in the pews, what do we do then? Where is the "good news" if we don't believe that people can't get healed? In such a situation, I want to tell you frankly: These answers don't cut it.

Jesus knew it, the apostles knew it, Paul knew it, even Walter Brueggeman seems to know it: We don’t build the Kingdom by persuasive words; we build it by the demonstration of the Spirit’s power. Do we realize how much of the Bible we relegate to the margins when prayer for the sick and demonized is not part of our prophetic ministry? Do we realize how much more effective we might be, just trying the experiment of faithfully praying for the sick? We may learn when to say, “Rise up!”

Will we love ridiculously if people aren’t healed, or if we “get it wrong”? Will we pray for people again and again and again and again until the Spirit says to stop? And are we really willing to experience the prophetic agony of still living in the middle of Romans 8, in the middle of a creation that groans as we wait for the redemption of our bodies? Are we willing to fall on our faces in our anger and say, “God, why haven’t you healed [name] yet? Why does she still have cancer?”

But imagine with me for a moment: what would happen to our ministries, to the persuasiveness and graciousness of our message, if just every so often, someone did get healed? What if someone’s cancer fled? Or blind eyes opened? Or their migraine headache stopped screaming and never returned? What if someone with Cerebral Palsy, someone else with HIV, danced for joy because their bodies have been loosed from their bonds?

This story challenges what we consider normal Christian experience, what we consider effective ministry; and it challenges how much we long to see the beauty of Christ breaking out of our lives. Our social justice work and our resistance to systems and structures is wonderful. Our preaching and our invocation of God’s dream for the world is beautiful—and it must continue. But there is something about standing in prayer with someone, watching the Holy Spirit work, that builds our confidence, enlivens our prayer lives, sets our hearts aflame to know and love them—and Jesus—more.

And when people do get healed—I declare to you in the name of Jesus that it is when, not if, whether few or many—we see with eyes of faith that the Powers are broken and that in this moment, right now, we have a taste of the victory of Jesus Christ. And the next time we pray, and the next, and the next, our faith grows, perhaps to the place where we can say with Peter and John, knowing it shall be so: “I don’t have silver or gold, but what I have I give you…”

Missionary anthropologist Charles Kraft outlines a very simple experiment in his book Christianity With Power: Pray for anyone who wants healing, and ask anyone you see who needs healing if you can pray for them. If we pray fifty times in a row without seeing any noticeable change in peoples’ conditions, he says, we can stop and never offer another healing prayer. But if there is even once a noticeable improvement, we have to start again from zero. Since beginning his own journey into healing prayer, he claims that no one he knows has ever gotten to fifty, and that a great many people don’t even get to ten!

My brothers and sisters, people of God: I dare you to try. I dare you to trust God’s ridiculous generosity and love. I dare us to believe that not only can structures change quickly, even miraculously, but also the lives of the people in our care, just because we are willing to open our hearts to the compassion of Christ, and pray.

I don’t have any silver or gold, but what I have I give you: “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”

Let us pray.

Living God, let our hearts burn with the compassion of Jesus. “And now, Lord…, grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” Shake us with your presence, give us love for one another, and fill us with the fire of your Spirit to heal the sick and to speak your word boldly. In Jesus’ Name: Amen!