When the Worship Committee was deciding which Sunday to hold the blessing of Prayer Shawls, I said I would take a look at the scripture lessons for the coming Sundays to see if there was a good fit. This Sunday’s reading from the 5th chapter of James, with its description of the healing ministries within the early Church, seemed like it would provide a good context for our Prayer Shawl dedication.
Between then and now, I
have come to realize the depth of the healing ministries within this
congregation, and see that the connection between this reading from James and
the symbolism of the Prayer Shawls is not just a small or coincidental
connection. The kind of care expressed
when God’s love is tangibly shared by presenting a handmade shawl, brings us
directly back to the days when the very first Christian gatherings were
learning how to be places where Christ’s companionship would form them into the
people God would have them be.
Rev. A.K.M Adam, a seminary lecturer in Glasgow, Scotland, describes our
reading from James in this way: “These verses describe some of the goings-on
one might expect to observe in the sort of [Christian] community James has in
mind….The context of the whole letter warrants our reading these verses not
just as an array of commands; we do well to read these also as a description of
what the ideal congregation behaves like. A harmonious, mutually-concerned
congregation will evince the sort of relationships James endorses here.
“A congregation under the influence of James
would be committed to sharing each other's burdens and joys. In previous
chapters, James envisions a community where class and poverty do not divide
disciples; here, he applies the same logic to grief and illness and sin. If one
member is sick, the whole congregation is weaker. Anyone who is afflicted
should feel confident to ask for help from their neighbors, and the
congregation's leaders will pray on their behalf and treat them with oil … in
the name of the Lord.”
To summarize, I’d say that
James places three wonderfully high expectations on those who gather in
Christ’s name: (1) the
congregation is to be place where healthy relationships are built; (2) the congregation is to be a place of
accountability; and (3) the congregation is to be a place of healing.
Before revisiting these
expectations, I feel compelled to offer a verbal “high five” to you folks. The reason for that is that one of the things
that really impresses me in my early days here at Ralph Connor Memorial United
Church, is how closely your sense of community aligns with these 1st
century Christian expectations. Nobody’s
perfect, but my goodness, there are some great seeds that have been sown
here.
So with that as our
foundation, we go back to the first point:
in James, the congregation the place where healthy relationships find
their source, because the congregation is intimately connected with God’s own
health and wholeness.
Most of the Christian
communities that James was writing to had emerged from a Jewish background, and
were well acquainted with the concept of Shalom. While we often think of “peace” as the best
synonym for Shalom, it is a broadly-inclusive term describing the state of
being aligned with the Holy intentions of God.
Shalom includes peace, but also prosperity, and health, and
wholeness.
Health, healing,
wholeness are all direct manifestations of God, so this place – God’s gathered
people – is the workbench where that all gets worked out. In James’ ideal congregation, healing prayer
happens here, anointing the sick with oil happens here, confessing our
brokenness happens here, Divine
forgiveness of sins is confirmed here, accountability for our actions is housed
here. The direction that James speaks
of is from God, through the community of faith, to individual lives.
Part of the problem
that we run into in current-day Canadian church life, is that our society
understands the direction to be quite different than this. Rather than seeing healing and health going
from God to faith community to individual, as James would see it, we figure we
need to create health and wholeness ourselves, in our homes, then if it needs
tweaking we might bring it to God for help, or we might just try harder to make
it right all by ourselves. The faith
community, which is intended to be the place where humans figure this in
relationship with one another and in relationship with God, gets bypassed completely
and we all end up trying to figure it out on our own. And right here, is one of those entry points
where something like a Prayer Shawl ministry is so vitally, vitally important…
because it reminds the person going through hard times that they are never alone. In those most difficult moments, the love and
prayers of the person who made the shawl, of the prayerful circle of crafters
who are committed to this ministry, and of the whole congregation are right
there in the textiles. The physical
warmth of the shawl delivers the caress of the Holy Spirit, and if human
companionship is needed the recipient knows that it is just a phone call away,
too.
Through the shawl
ministry, and a commitment to trust this faith community with your toughest
stuff, we express a belief that health is something found and maintained
together – becoming and staying healthy is not easily done on one’s own.
Second, the congregation
is a place of accountability, where sins are confessed, where forgiveness is
practiced, in the pursuit of right and healthy relationships.
I’d like to cite an
example, not from Church life, but from school life. Something I noticed a dozen years ago when I
started working at Westmount Charter School, was the way that conflict was
handled. When kids got into a fight, or
where one child felt targeted or singled out by another child, nearly all
parents had the same initial response: to storm into the Principal’s office and
insist that “THAT little monster be removed from my child’s home room.” And our founding Principal’s response was
pretty much always the same: “No, that
doesn’t solve this. We need to help these
two children find a way to work this out.
They’ve both been placed in this home room for very specific reasons,
and they’re going to be living together in that home room for the whole year,
so let’s help them build some good life skills by learning how to get along,
even if they aren’t going to be best friends.”
Yes, there were times when repeated incidents led to more formal
discipline and structural consequences, but the process always started the same
way, whether it was conflicts between students, or conflicts between a parent
and a teacher. No tattling, no running
directly to the principal, no handing off your problems for somebody else to
solve. The importance of developing
community-building and conflict-resolution skills far outstripped a need to
determine who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s to blame and who gets to point the
accusing finger.
Churches everywhere
could learn a thing or two from this. Over the years, laypeople and clergy
alike have said and done some pretty hurtful things, have over-responded and
under-responded to people’s needs, have broken confidence when a hurting person
just needed one person to listen and understand, have judged and blamed and
excluded when the grace of Christ would demand better, and have just flat-out
gossiped. Laypeople and clergy need to
confess these things, if we hope to have credibility amongst ourselves and within
the general population. We need to
become one of the first places that
someone would turn if they want to break free from behaviours that are
destroying their lives or someone else’s, rather
than one of the last places that someone would think of turning. That’s hard to do, because it’s partly tied
up in our actions, and partly in another’s perceptions of us, but it starts
with trustworthiness: being a place
where honesty is assumed, where graciousness and gentleness are everyday practices,
where accountability comes without shame or ridicule. We need
to be able to confess our sins here, with the confidence that God always
forgives, and our sisters and brothers in Christ will always hold us in love.
And third, the
congregation is to be a place of healing, which includes specific healing practices
such as healing prayer and anointing with oil.
Many years ago, the
late Rev. John Branton, a wonderful spiritual director, counsellor and United
Church minister, led a spirituality workshop at the congregation I was serving. He made a really important distinction
between HEALING and CURE that has stayed with me ever since.
I think we’re all
familiar with what it is to be cured.
You are suffering from an illness – then you are the illness is gone;
you had a disease, now you are disease-free or at least symptom-free.
Healing, however, is
more complex than curing, because being un-healthy is all about brokenness. There
are any number of circumstances where there is brokenness: relational brokenness where there is a
long-held grudge, or low-intensity unspoken conflicts; emotional brokenness, often typified by
addictive or compulsive behaviours, or long-held mental illness; and physical or medical brokenness, where
disease or chronic conditions separate one from the fullness of life. To go one step further, sin of all
sorts also fits under this heading of “brokenness,” for sin is defined as
anything that separates us from God. In each of these states of brokenness, God
is involved, because the God of Shalom is all about wholeness, not
brokenness. Wherever wholeness is
compromised, so is our relationship with God.
When we pray for
healing, then, we pray for the brokenness to be repaired. We pray for Shalom to be restored. And along with that, the person who needs their
brokenness to end may also be cured,
but the healing and the cure are two separate things.
John Branton shared
with us the most poignant venue where the difference between healing and cure
is seen, that being the example of people in palliative care. He had seen many, many people be healed, even
though they still died of their illness.
For in their last days, their relationships were repaired: with family
members, with old rivals or enemies, even with God. The energy that had been wasted for years,
harboring and encouraging those thorn-infested places of brokenness, were now
being spent in the fertile fields of harmony. Their brokenness was healed, and
healed completely, even though their disease was far beyond cure.
It is noteworthy how
many Christian congregations have returned to such ancient practices as healing
prayer and anointing with oil. At
present, there are 33 United Church congregations within the province of
Alberta with active healing pathway ministries, including here at Ralph Connor.
Healing
practitioners see themselves as conduits of God’s own healing power, aligning
themselves with God’s own desire to restore wholeness, and carrying on the great tradition of
healing ministries that goes back to the very founding of the Church of Jesus
Christ .
Earlier in this message
I said how pleased I was to see the kind of healing community envisioned by the
letter of James at work in this place, and every week I see more evidence of
it. Your commitment to a ministry of
healing and wholeness, quite apart from anything that a minister might do with
you, is both broad and deep. There is this vital healing pathways ministry
available four days a week; the Evensong services provide a community of
blessed silence, worship and prayer each Wednesday; the prayer shawl ministry
models selfless service and ecumenical cooperation; and after Sunday services, I see the little
informal pockets of people listening to and caring for one another. There’s also a unique sense of joy here that
you may not even see, because it is so much a part of who you are. Each Sunday I see folks greeting one another
as long-lost, well-loved friends. Maybe
it’s because so many people in Canmore are here for part of the year then gone,
and you really are seeing someone you
rarely see because your times in Canmore don’t overlap much; but I hunch that
the Holy Spirit is pretty invested in that joy as well!
The letter of James
underlines the responsibilities that faith communities have, in bringing and
restoring wholeness in people’s lives.
It is my prayer that together, we will continue to embrace and further that
ministry, trusting that God is the source of healing, wholeness, and life in
abundance. Amen.
Reference
cited:
Adam, A.K.M. in http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=9/27/2009
For a list of healing pathways ministries, see http://www.naramatacentre.net/programs-healingpath.asp
© 2012 Rev. Greg Wooley, Ralph Connor Memorial
United Church, Canmore AB
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