Readings for the Day:
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As a seminarian, I spent a summer serving at Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in Atlanta, GA. Holy Comforter had a congregation made up primarily of people living with various mental disabilities and illnesses with a program designed to serve this particular population. Every Wednesday night, the church would have a Healing Eucharist where anyone who needed healing was invited to come up, receive prayer, and get anointed with oil.
One Wednesday I was sitting near the front and happened to hear one person give what he needed healing for. Now this was a particularly interesting person I had been working with a lot in the past several weeks. He had it in mind that he was a time traveler, and in the course of one conversation I remember him claiming to be Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Smith, and many others. He had a book he’d show you that he got online with instructions on how to build your own time machine too, showing once again how the world preys on the vulnerable.
For a long time, this man we’ll call “Jo”, had been trying to order some sort crystals that would supposedly help with his time travel. This week, he finally got them, and he fashioned them with duck tape to form a cross, which unfortunately only exacerbated his illness. Now he had another person he was claiming to be: Jesus. Things got a little more scary and real with that.
In this Healing Service, he went up to Alexis Chase, the vicar at Holy Comforter at the time. He started going on and on about how he was the messiah returned to this world. I was sitting there near the front listening to all this and freaking out because I had no idea what to do.
Fortunately Alexis did. After Jo had finished his rant, she just put a hand on his shoulder and said “why don’t we pray for peace then?” Then she prayed over him and marked his head with oil.
It would have been so easy to dismiss Jo as blasphemous. It would have been so easy to only see him as a mental illness. Yet when Alexis saw him, she saw a person in need of healing, someone it was our duty, as the church, to be present there for.
Recently, a colleague of mine said that the church often forgets our role as healers. That is very easy to do. It is easy to look at the stories of Jesus healing others and think that was a task for Him, not for us.
Yet in our reading from Acts today, we see Peter, not Jesus, performing a healing. Not only was he healing someone, Peter was raising someone back from the dead. That definitely seems something only Jesus would do. Yet we often forget others like Peter who raised people from the dead. We forget the stories of the prophets, like Elijah and Elisha, who did the same thing as well.
Our job, as the church, is to do God’s work in this world. That means making people whole. That means providing new life to all those in desperate need of it. That means sharing the gift of Hope, Love, and Grace to all that we meet.
In the past, the church has done this in miraculous ways. The church still uses miraculous ways still, although we often have to be open and paying attention to see them. But those are not the only ways the church provides life and healing. We help heal others by providing a place where people can be present with God, no matter who they are. We provide life by giving a new purpose to people to no longer serve themselves, but instead to serve Christ Jesus and spread the Good News of His redemptive work to all the world.
We are most ourselves as the church when we are providing life and healing to those who need it. As my colleague implored, we cannot forget this role of ours. That doesn’t mean all of us will heal someone from their ailments. That doesn’t mean that all of us will see life returned to the dead or dying. What it does mean is that we are all called to help provide others with the word of God to heal them. What it means is giving others the opportunity to remake their lives with the Faith, Hope, and Love of Christ Jesus.