Healing Eucharist – 18 October 2018 (St Luke) Isaiah 35: 3-6; Luke 10: 1-9

Fr James Harris

 

We gather today with a particular intention to ask for God’s healing.

 The healing power of God is all at once complex to understand, multi-dimensional, wonderful, transformative and mysterious.

 Healing is primarily a work of God the Holy Spirit – the Spirit that brooded over the waters at the moment of Creation; the Spirit that alighted on Jesus at his baptism, that empowered his ministry and teaching and that raised him from the dead; the Spirit that emboldened the disciples and apostles of the early Church; and the same Spirit that enlivens the Church today, that makes Christ real and enables us to call God Father.

 

The healing work of the Spirit is about straightening out and making right; it is about unfolding and loosening; about unlocking, unblocking and setting free; regenerating, reviving; soothing and embalming.

It takes place in individual lives, in churches, in communities, nations and universes. It is at once physical and material, spiritual and relational – just as God is Creator, Incarnate One and Bond of Love.

The words for healing and salvation, as holy Doctor Luke would have recognised, are closely related in Greek, and so there is also an element of healing which is about repairing the separation that exists between us and God because of sin.

 As such, God’s healing is a historic event, an ongoing process and a future hope. As one commentator writes: ‘Jesus has saved us from the penalty of sin, Jesus is saving us from the power of sin and Jesus will save us from the presence of sin.’

 Or, put another way: ‘Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.’

 When we pray to God for healing – for ourselves, for others, for our communities and our world, we are opening ourselves and offering ourselves s channels of his saving power and conduits of his divine, regenerative energy in all these many and diverse dimensions.

 For all this complexity, the healing power of God is not something of which we need be afraid…but it is something we should approach with a genuine open-ness to , and acceptance of, the real possibility of lasting change and transformation for ourselves and others.

 I invite you now to spend the next few minutes in silent, private prayer, as we each call upon the Holy Spirit to reveal to us our own need and the needs of others and prepare ourselves to receive that transforming healing touch.

 Some music will accompany our prayers – a Taize version of an ancient prayer: Veni Sancte Spiritus (Come, Holy Spirit).

 

Let us pray.