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Healing Eucharist 17th June 2007 William Allberry |
| [The service commenced with the announcement to the congregation of the untimely, sudden and unexpected death of a much loved member of the congregation.] |
| Your faith has saved you: go in peace. Luke 7.50 |
| Yesterday evening we went to a concert: a brilliant performance by two local choral societies combined, of that masterpiece of Edward Elgar, his setting of Cardinal Henry Newman’s poem, The Dream of Gerontius. |
| The poem tells the story of the last moments of the old man on his deathbed – and then his waking in limbo between earthly life and the life beyond, as he travels ‘with extremest speed’, in the company of his guardian angel, speeding towards the presence of God. |
| There’s a wonderful moment of realisation as he converses with the guardian angel, who has been his unseen companion throughout his earthly life: he’s curious to have it explained how it is that he has died and yet hasn’t immediately come to judgment in the presence of God. And he apologises for asking the question, as if it is wrong to be curious. In a lovely melodic line the angel assures him that he ‘cannot now cherish a wish that ought not to be wished’: it’s a moment of complete liberation as he realises that he is free from the human predicament and its tendency to fall away from God: free now to surrender himself to God, set free from the anomie, the sense of hopelessness which we are prone to, the dis-ease, the lack of wholeness and identity with God which ultimately we are created for. And the opposite to that dis-ease is, of course, salvation. Newman’s poem explores how salvation is experienced by Gerontius, the archetypal human whom we can identify with. |
| Salvation. It’s a lovely word. It contains salve, the soothing ointment, it reminds us of the Latin greeting salvē, or be well. We echo it, although we usually forget it, when we say the everyday greeting, hello: it comes from ‘hale be thou’ – I wish you health. And ‘health’ itself is bound up with wholeness, soundness, togetherness. |
| The healing ministry of the Church is concerned with health – bodily health, mental health, emotional, spiritual health – it’s concerned with our relationship with God. This is truly holistic health, the complete wholeness of our being, leading to the salvation which God offers: the unity with God which was his purpose in creating us. The misery in the human condition comes about when we are separated from the wholeness that God offers, and our lives disintegrate. |
| When there is spiritual wholeness, when mind and body are in unity and the emotions hold them together, then we see healing, and we can often see miracles: we must all be familiar with the interaction of mind and body and the way that sometimes medical conditions can powerfully change. We don’t claim to work miracles: any Christian community that pretends to offer miracle cures for medical conditions is kidding itself, and risks doing great harm to those it is trying to cure, when the cure isn’t forthcoming. Our bodies do wear out, and there is sickness and illness which we are always prone to, and eventually we must die of something. But there are unexplained ‘miracles’ of healing nonetheless. |
| Our difficulty as human beings is that we have an innate tendency to think that we get what we deserve. We try to impose order on the world and the ways of the world, and we think that those who behave badly ought to be punished, and that those who do what is right should be blessed. And we are affronted when this doesn’t seem to be the case. |
| Simon (the host in the Gospel story, the man in whose house Jesus and his friends were eating when this extraordinary outpouring of devotion occurred) was affronted that a woman whom everyone knew was no better than she ought to be, was allowed this very intimate contact with Jesus. She was tainted, and decent people ought to shun her: but Jesus allows her not just to wash his feet, but to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. And not content with this she proceeds to massage his feet with very expensive ointment. This is not the sort of behaviour we want to witness; it goes against everything that decent, upright people believe in. |
| But what we rational human beings have to learn is that God does not think like that. We expect to be treated fairly by the law, and by our fellow beings. So it can be difficult for us to take on board that unfairness is at the heart of the Christian gospel. |
| The story is about God’s extravagant forgiveness and grace – his love freely given. The point is that God doesn’t measure us against a list of rules, so as to decide whether or not we qualify for heaven. The result of this would be disastrous: as St Paul is always saying: no one is justified by the works of the law. So God refuses to give us what we deserve, and going against our human principles of justice, makes us one with him through Christ. |
| We seem to talk a lot about sin, and sometimes I think we beat ourselves up too much about it. There is certainly something very unhealthy about dwelling on our mistakes and failings – all too evident though they may be. We know that the way to encourage someone is by accentuating the positive, not the negative. The trouble is that we think of sin as only personal failings, or defects, instead of seeing sin as also the problem of the whole of humanity – our collective wrongdoing, the ways we human beings go our own way, and fail to care for others, and fail to care for the world God has given us mastery over. We have sinned, we say together, and we need to find, together, ways of coming together to correct that tendency, becoming integrated, working together to make the world a better place. We sense that we need to come together to worship – we sense that we are God’s family, and our worshipping together unifies the body of Christ. What we are praying for in our healing services is the unity of our souls – body, mind and spirit – and the unity of our humanity, one with another. |
| If you know The Dream of Gerontius you’ll know that the work builds up to a rising crescendo as the home-coming soul passes through the gates of heaven and approaches God. As the audience, listening in to the scene, we sense the quickening of the pace, the intensity of the music and then, at the moment of the soul’s exposure to God, a silence: … followed by a crashing, discordant sforzando as every instrument of the orchestra sounds as loud as it can for a split second, and then the music falls away as the soul submits to the love of God. |
| It may be music, it may be art – the colour, the texture, or the shape of sculpture – it may be simply the beauty of the world that gives you a hint of God’s love, a hint of something much greater to come, when our human life is over. God speaks to each of us in different ways. But however it is that God speaks to you, be open and ready to receive him; don’t hide behind a sense of unworthiness, if that’s what holds you back from experiencing the full, extravagant delight of God’s love for you. As we pray together for healing today, whether you come up to receive the laying on of hands or not, just feel God’s love being poured out like the extravagant pouring out of that perfume and feel the anointing power of his love, whether we deserve it or not. And allow his healing love to make us all whole people. |
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