Previously on The Clay Has Something to Say . . .
I’ve been thinking recently about healing. People getting sick, people getting well, that sort of thing . . .
Now, if you’ve ever seen footage of Harry Caray leaning out of the press box at Wrigley field leading the North Chicago crowd in a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch at a Cubs game, then you have a pretty good mental picture as to what the lead pastor of this particular church sounded and acted like. (If you’ve only seen Will Ferrell’s portrayal of Harry Caray on SNL, you’ve got a pretty good mental picture as well, and a pretty hilarious one at that.) . . .
"I didn’t know there was a bomb! How was I to know there was a bomb?" yelled Tony in desperation. He was trying to buy some time. See, he knew there was a bomb. How could he not? He planted it. Now he was just waiting. Waiting for the little red, digital numbers to find their way to zero . . . or five; he could never remember if the timer ran up or down. But, when it reached zero, or five it would all be over . . .
Now, it should be understood that the room wasn’t full of people on stretchers, people with missing limbs looking for them to be reattached, but rather people with aches and pains looking for relief, older people looking for relief from different ailments . . .
"We the jury finds the defendant . . . guilty!"
Gasps filled the room; they just pushed the stagnate, humid air out of their way and set up camp. Obviously the verdict wasn’t a surprise to anyone, but everyone was just so excited to show they could act surprised, they couldn’t help but be a little shocked. How could they pass up the opportunity . . .
Healing = a smearing of oil on the forehead (anoint the sick with oil can be found in the Bible somewhere) + putting hands on the afflicted area (this would prove a problem if the ailment were prostate cancer or breast cancer or something) + shouting ‘hallelujah’ at the top of your lungs whenever you feel so inclined (shouting ‘Jesus’ at the top of your lungs would also suffice) + shouting some tongue-like language also at the top of your lungs (Imagine Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on Novocain) + More yelling of anything that comes to mind (‘Look how loud I can yell!’) . . .
So, that leads me to the question: what does healing look like? Can it look like what I saw that Sunday night? Does it look like something different?
And now The Lord Our Healer Part II
Jehovah Rapha: The Lord Our Healer. That’s what the little slip of paper they handed me had written on it, and I was supposed to think about what that meant. What it was supposed to mean in the greater context of God and what it was supposed to mean in the greater context of myself.
The story is that during a mission trip to Vancouver my team and I were welcomed to worship our God with the YWAM staff. One part of the "activities" we were participating in was that we were each given names of God and asked to sit and think, ponder on what those names reveal to us about God. Being one who likes a good thinking exercise, I thought it was a good idea. I received the name Jehovah Rapha: The Lord Our Healer. Now, being the smart, alert, recent college graduate that I am, I had completely forgotten that I had scheduled myself to go to a healing service in two weeks. So, I thought nothing of the name and proceeded to write down whatever thoughts came to mind.
I asked the question "What is the role of a healer?" The obvious answer would be to heal the sick; I went with that one. I then asked "Who are the sick?" A better question with a less obvious answer to it. I concluded that we are all sick in a way be it spiritually or physically. Some have physical ailments that they would like healed, but all of us have some spiritual sickness that we need to get taken care of. Then I asked the most difficult question of the exercise "Are all who are sick healed and if not, does that make God a poor healer?"
Ultimately, this is a question that many people struggle with (including myself) in one way or another. It boils down into the question "If God is good and all-powerful, why do people suffer?" To attempt to answer that here would certainly leave some wanting a more sufficient answer (including myself); so, I’ll just focus on the healing aspect of the question.
Where I had my "ah-ha" moment was when I was focusing on the English translation of the name I was given. Now, I have no idea where this translation came from or the accuracy of the translation, but nevertheless it’s what I had. The translation is The Lord Our Healer. The emphasis and important aspect I focused on was 'our.' The Lord Our Healer is a very personal name in that it’s what a group of people who were healed by God would call God. It’s only natural is it not? If someone heals you, would you not refer to them as a healer? Therefore, The Lord Our Healer, Jehovah Rapha does not refer to God as a healer who will heal all people, but rather the source of healing for those who have been healed.
The Lord Our Healer only reveals that God has healed; never does it claim that He will heal everyone. This fails to answer the question of why God would heal some and not all, but I cannot answer why for God just like I cannot answer why for anyone other than myself. Either God is a sadist (possible) or God has a pretty darn good reason not to heal someone (also possible).
It was about a week before the healing service that I finally put two and two together; I finally realized that I had already prepped myself for the service with the little thinking exercise in Vancouver. So, going into the service, I looked into how I could reconcile the name The Lord Our Healer with the healing that I was going to witness.
After thinking it through and considering what I’ve seen, what I’ve experienced, and what I know, I’ve come to this conclusion. God heals people both spiritually and physically. I’ve witnessed spiritual healing in myself and in people I hang around with. I’ve heard witnesses to physical healing from people whose word I trust. What I witnessed on that Sunday night may have been healing and it may have not been healing. People who were sick may get better or they may not. What I believe my reaction to Jehovah Rapha should be is that He has healed in the past and I can only hope He will again in the future.
The passage I was given where the name The Lord Our Healer was taken is Exodus 15:26. The context of this passage is that Israel has just been miraculously led out of Egypt and has just miraculously crossed the Red Sea to escape the repercussions of miraculously escaping from Egypt. Prior to verse 26 in chapter 15 both Moses and his sister Miriam have given beautiful songs of praise to God for His saving His people from the Egyptians. Now, when we come to verse 26, Israel has started their tour of the desert and they’ve been without water for three days. They come across a pool of water, but it’s bitter with minerals and cannot be consumed. Moses cries out to God (probably because he’s thirsty) and God shows him a stick to throw into the water to make it drinkable. Then God tells the Israelites this:
He said, “If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do
what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all
his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the
Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.”
-Exodus 15:26
What’s essential about healing is that it does not matter what it looks like. God heals different people in different ways. However, what does matter is what the person who was healed looks like afterward. Israel had not changed and would not change even after God would continue to deliver them again and again from situations where there appeared to be no hope. Our ability to believe that God is a healer depends on the ability of others to act like they’ve been healed once they’ve been healed.
Guess what. We have been healed! Should it not completely change the way you view and express life? If you recovered from a heart attack, would you not be completely grateful for a second opportunity and completely overhaul your diet and exercise routine as to prevent another one from happening? If you we to just go back to sitting on a couch and stuffing yourself with cheetos and coca-cola, we’d start to doubt if you even had a heart attack at all. God has healed us from our spiritual infirmity and our lack of enthusiasm and lack acknowledgement of that healing is causing others to doubt that God can heal at all. So, let’s acknowledge Jehovah Rapha and allow others to know there’s hope that He might heal again.
05 June 2008
The Lord Our Healer Part I: Harry Caray Sings a Song
This post is like an episode of Seinfeld. Like Seinfeld is a show about nothing, this is a post in which about the subject I know absolutely nothing. I’ve been thinking recently about healing. People getting sick, people getting well, that sort of thing. I hear stories about people who know people who have some miraculous experience and I don’t know what to think about it. Obviously, I’m happy for whoever got better; I’m happy for whoever told the story, but I never know what to feel after that point. Most of the time part of me thinks the miraculous gets a little too much emphasis in the story (I know that sound heretical, but it’s honest). Here I stand; someone who claims a supernatural God yet who cannot find it in himself to believe the supernatural healing. So, I decided to pay a visit to my good friends the charismatic church; witness myself a real healing service, and I did.
For those of us who are not exposed to this sort of thing on a regular basis, we have a preconceived notion as to how the whole process works. We see a man standing in front of a large crowd with a line-up of people in front of him waiting to be smacked in the head, fall down, to be picked back up again, and to be healed. Essentially, this is not what happed at this particular healing service.
The service was held on a Sunday evening in a small sanctuary with approximately 30-40 people present. There was a box of tissue in every Bible rack on the back of every pew in the sanctuary. If you’re preparing to use that much tissue at one time during a service, you’ve got more than the Holy Spirit moving through you (try a few million microscopic bacterium). Guess what else was in the Bible rack along with the tissue. If you guessed a Bible, you’d be wrong. There wasn’t a single Bible in the back of any pew. They’d all been replaced by tissue boxes. I guess when people started blowing their noses and wiping their brows with Psalms and Proverbs, the church got the hint that tissue was a little more of a commodity than God’s word. (Just for the record, I’m not saying every church needs to have Bibles in the back of their pews; I’m not even saying churches need to have pews. But, I found it peculiar that where Bibles usually are, there were tissues.)
The service started out like any North American church service would start, with upbeat, somewhat repetitive praise music. Now, if you’ve ever seen footage of Harry Caray leaning out of the press box at Wrigley field leading the North Chicago crowd in a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch at a Cubs game, then you have a pretty good mental picture as to what the lead pastor of this particular church sounded and acted like. (If you’ve only seen Will Ferrell’s portrayal of Harry Caray on SNL, you’ve got a pretty good mental picture as well, and a pretty hilarious one at that.) Honestly, if you gave the guy a pair of big, black rimmed glasses and stood what little hair he had up on its end, you couldn’t tell the two apart. So, at least that was entertaining and if I lost it in laughter, I’d have plenty of tissue.
After the mandatory, Spirit-lead praise music, some guy came up to preach. He wasn’t Harry Caray and, to my knowledge, he wasn’t someone who regularly attended the church (made me wonder why they didn’t ask me to preach), but rather some guy who, since he kept asking if he’d told this or that particular story before (no you haven’t! Just move on! (It wasn’t annoying or anything)), I can only assume had been to this church to speak before. He talked about John 5 and the man who would wait by a pool that was sporadically stirred by the angels; when it was stirred, the first one in was healed. His point was that the man was good in his desire to be healed, but his method was a little off. Instead of seeking for the pool to heal him, he should have been seeking Jesus. Now, I agree that Jesus can heal people (it’s mentioned a few times in various texts), but if someone doesn’t know that Jesus can heal, why would that person seek him out to be healed? This then tied in of course to everyone who was at the service to be healed. It was used as an encouragement to say you’re in the right place.
Now, it should be understood that the room wasn’t full of people on stretchers, people with missing limbs looking for them to be reattached, but rather people with aches and pains looking for relief, older people looking for relief from different ailments. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to see any blind people see or deaf people hear or lame people walk. So, after the preacher quit his preaching (It should be noted that the preacher was looking for healing as well. He had pain in his shoulder.), people were invited up front to be prayed for by the pastors and elders of the church that were present. This is where the show took off.
I had never found the formula for healing in all my Biblical studies (this is not to say there were or are a lot of them, that is Biblical studies, but there were some), but apparently it goes a little something like this. Healing = a smearing of oil on the forehead (anoint the sick with oil can be found in the Bible somewhere) + putting hands on the afflicted area (this would prove a problem if the ailment were prostate cancer or breast cancer or something) + shouting ‘hallelujah’ at the top of your lungs whenever you feel so inclined (shouting ‘Jesus’ at the top of your lungs would also suffice) + shouting some tongue-like language also at the top of your lungs (Imagine Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on Novocain) + More yelling of anything that comes to mind (‘Look how loud I can yell!’). Calling upon God for the removal of the ‘spirit of infirmity’ is a popular method as well. What is a ‘spirit of infirmity’? In all seriousness, is it suppose to be some kind of demon? At any rate, this is what healing looked like for this particular healing service. And despite all the obvious distractions, the band continued to jam through the whole thing. As if all the shouting and the yelling weren’t enough, there was a little background music in case it ever got awkwardly quiet.
To be completely honest (and you know when I do that, there’s going to be trouble), after attending the healing service, I had no idea what the hell I had just done. Is this what healing is? What really gets me is that this event that just took place would never leave the walls of the church. No one who acted like they did in the service would act like that around other people they know. No one’s down on his knees with his hands over someone’s foot yelling at the ‘spirit of infirmity’ to get out. If they are, people think they’re mentally deranged and they throw change at them. So, that leads me to the question: what does healing look like? Can it look like what I saw that Sunday night? Does it look like something different?
To Be Continued . . .
For those of us who are not exposed to this sort of thing on a regular basis, we have a preconceived notion as to how the whole process works. We see a man standing in front of a large crowd with a line-up of people in front of him waiting to be smacked in the head, fall down, to be picked back up again, and to be healed. Essentially, this is not what happed at this particular healing service.
The service was held on a Sunday evening in a small sanctuary with approximately 30-40 people present. There was a box of tissue in every Bible rack on the back of every pew in the sanctuary. If you’re preparing to use that much tissue at one time during a service, you’ve got more than the Holy Spirit moving through you (try a few million microscopic bacterium). Guess what else was in the Bible rack along with the tissue. If you guessed a Bible, you’d be wrong. There wasn’t a single Bible in the back of any pew. They’d all been replaced by tissue boxes. I guess when people started blowing their noses and wiping their brows with Psalms and Proverbs, the church got the hint that tissue was a little more of a commodity than God’s word. (Just for the record, I’m not saying every church needs to have Bibles in the back of their pews; I’m not even saying churches need to have pews. But, I found it peculiar that where Bibles usually are, there were tissues.)
The service started out like any North American church service would start, with upbeat, somewhat repetitive praise music. Now, if you’ve ever seen footage of Harry Caray leaning out of the press box at Wrigley field leading the North Chicago crowd in a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch at a Cubs game, then you have a pretty good mental picture as to what the lead pastor of this particular church sounded and acted like. (If you’ve only seen Will Ferrell’s portrayal of Harry Caray on SNL, you’ve got a pretty good mental picture as well, and a pretty hilarious one at that.) Honestly, if you gave the guy a pair of big, black rimmed glasses and stood what little hair he had up on its end, you couldn’t tell the two apart. So, at least that was entertaining and if I lost it in laughter, I’d have plenty of tissue.
After the mandatory, Spirit-lead praise music, some guy came up to preach. He wasn’t Harry Caray and, to my knowledge, he wasn’t someone who regularly attended the church (made me wonder why they didn’t ask me to preach), but rather some guy who, since he kept asking if he’d told this or that particular story before (no you haven’t! Just move on! (It wasn’t annoying or anything)), I can only assume had been to this church to speak before. He talked about John 5 and the man who would wait by a pool that was sporadically stirred by the angels; when it was stirred, the first one in was healed. His point was that the man was good in his desire to be healed, but his method was a little off. Instead of seeking for the pool to heal him, he should have been seeking Jesus. Now, I agree that Jesus can heal people (it’s mentioned a few times in various texts), but if someone doesn’t know that Jesus can heal, why would that person seek him out to be healed? This then tied in of course to everyone who was at the service to be healed. It was used as an encouragement to say you’re in the right place.
Now, it should be understood that the room wasn’t full of people on stretchers, people with missing limbs looking for them to be reattached, but rather people with aches and pains looking for relief, older people looking for relief from different ailments. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to see any blind people see or deaf people hear or lame people walk. So, after the preacher quit his preaching (It should be noted that the preacher was looking for healing as well. He had pain in his shoulder.), people were invited up front to be prayed for by the pastors and elders of the church that were present. This is where the show took off.
I had never found the formula for healing in all my Biblical studies (this is not to say there were or are a lot of them, that is Biblical studies, but there were some), but apparently it goes a little something like this. Healing = a smearing of oil on the forehead (anoint the sick with oil can be found in the Bible somewhere) + putting hands on the afflicted area (this would prove a problem if the ailment were prostate cancer or breast cancer or something) + shouting ‘hallelujah’ at the top of your lungs whenever you feel so inclined (shouting ‘Jesus’ at the top of your lungs would also suffice) + shouting some tongue-like language also at the top of your lungs (Imagine Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on Novocain) + More yelling of anything that comes to mind (‘Look how loud I can yell!’). Calling upon God for the removal of the ‘spirit of infirmity’ is a popular method as well. What is a ‘spirit of infirmity’? In all seriousness, is it suppose to be some kind of demon? At any rate, this is what healing looked like for this particular healing service. And despite all the obvious distractions, the band continued to jam through the whole thing. As if all the shouting and the yelling weren’t enough, there was a little background music in case it ever got awkwardly quiet.
To be completely honest (and you know when I do that, there’s going to be trouble), after attending the healing service, I had no idea what the hell I had just done. Is this what healing is? What really gets me is that this event that just took place would never leave the walls of the church. No one who acted like they did in the service would act like that around other people they know. No one’s down on his knees with his hands over someone’s foot yelling at the ‘spirit of infirmity’ to get out. If they are, people think they’re mentally deranged and they throw change at them. So, that leads me to the question: what does healing look like? Can it look like what I saw that Sunday night? Does it look like something different?
To Be Continued . . .
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