“Waiting for the Light:
Healing and Hope in Dark Times”
Healing Service –
Brothers and sisters in Christ, Grace and Peace to you from our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It might seem strange to you that we are having a healing service a few days before Christmas. It might seem strange to you that we are having a healing service at all. The ministry of healing is something of a forsaken ministry in this church and many others.
Yet fully 20%, one fifth, of the gospels are concerned with Jesus’ healing ministry. In Luke alone there are 17 episodes of Jesus healing all kinds of peoples from all kinds of ailments, physical and spiritual. An important part of Jesus’ equipping of his disciples was to empower them to heal in Jesus’ name.
I would submit to you that a strong case can be made the reason for Jesus’ birth, for the incarnation of God as the Word made flesh, is for healing.
We often hear John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish, but have eternal life.” And we hear that to mean God’s eternal life is the reason for the incarnation; it is how God embodies his love for us.
There is a cause and effect connecting two present conditions -- God’s love and our faith in what God did in Jesus cause a future condition, namely, eternal life in this same God.
But there is another cause and effect relationship between God’s love and the incarnation. Here the effect occurs in the present. It is called healing. And Jesus did so much of it because it is an intimate and important part of who Jesus is and why he was born in
Now healing foes by other names such as salvation and reconciliation. Notice that the word salvation sounds very much like the word salve (spell out) which means not only an ointment for healing, but the act of healing itself, to salve somebody’s wounds, to bring them comfort and health.
Reconciliation means “to bring a person again into relationship to or with another after an estrangement.” For estrangement, read “original sin”. For reconciliation read the incarnation. Another way to look at reconciliation is as healing.
The greatest theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, titled his four volumes of writing on Jesus Christ, The Doctrine of Reconciliation. That, in four words, describes why Jesus came and what he was about. Jesus is how God reconciles the world to himself after the Fall in the garden. The Christmas carol, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” puts it this way “Peace on earth and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled.”
The mighty act we celebrate on the 25th is the movement of God coming to us after we had turned away from him. He is coming to us, to be with us, but even more than that, to be one of us. The act of reconciliation of healing the brokenness for which we are responsible, the healing is all God-driven.
In Jesus Christ God poured himself out like a powerful salve on a festering wound. And that salve has become the source of all healing – for you and for me. And this healing reflects the incarnation – it is healing of body and soul. It is incorporates (which means include in the body) an integration of body and soul, a wholeness that nurtures healing of the physical ailments that plague us and the spiritual woes that lead to despair.
Tonight, you offered the opportunity to hear the words of forgiveness and absolution of your sins, through which reminds you of the death and resurrection you received in your baptism – dying to sin and rising to new life.
You will receive the laying on of hands and be anointed with healing oil reminding you of Jesus healing ministry and that, with the imposition of the oil in the sign of the cross on your forehead, you have sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.
Finally, you will be offered the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, means of God’s grace to eaten and drunk, taken within your bodies as a holy meal to nourish and heal your body and your soul.
There is no surgical procedure, no diagnostic test, no prescription for this healing that is offered here tonight – there is only your need and God’s desire to heal all in your life that is broken and painful and distressing in your life. If you want an image, it like God’s arms reaching out to you, inviting you into his holy and loving embrace, healing you body and soul, and giving you hope.
Amen.
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