Wholeness and Peace

October 2009

Kathie Bender Schwich

Throughout the ELCA, St. Luke’s Sunday in October is often the occasion for healing services. In addition, many congregations offer healing services as a regular part of their healing ministry throughout the year. With the words, “In the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, be strengthened and filled with God’s grace, that you may know the healing power of the Spirit,” Christ’s people receive the laying on of hands, anointing with oil, and the intercessions of others through the church’s ministry of healing.

The introduction to the Healing Service in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) states: “This ministry is offered, not as a replacement for the gifts of God that come through the scientific community, nor as the promise of a cure. Rather, the church’s healing ministry is an offering and celebration of the gifts of God’s strength and comfort in times of suffering, God’s promise of wholeness and peace for all people, and God’s love embodied in the community of faith.”

That may at first read like a disclaimer. This healing service does not claim to replace the care provided by your physician and it does not guarantee a cure for what is ailing you. So what does it offer? Much more. The healing ministry that the church offers in Christ’s name provides us with comfort and strength when we are suffering, a reminder that God promises us wholeness and peace regardless of our physical condition, and tangible evidence of the love of brothers and sisters around us during troubling times. It also opens to us the vast network of healing resources that are there for us in times of need.

The congregation to which I belong offers healing services on a regular basis. As worshipers come forward to receive forgiveness and renewal through the sacrament of Holy Communion, they are also offered prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing for healing. Throughout the years, more and more people have come forward for this rite as they have come to realize the many parts of their lives and their world that are in need of healing and the many forms that healing can take.

Often when we think of healing, we think of the healing of our physical bodies: the curing of illness or the mending of broken bones or surgical incisions. But the healing that people seek can be as varied as the individuals themselves. While some seek relief from the illness that wracks their body or the body of a loved one, others come seeking release from the addiction that has taken hold of their life, the healing of a broken relationship, or freedom from the sorrow that comes from acknowledging that they are participants in the ills that burden our world. People come for varied forms of healing but all come longing for wholeness.

To be restored

The hospital in which I serve was founded by Norwegian Lutheran deaconesses and nurtured over the years by faithful leaders who held a vision of promoting healing and providing care that encompasses physical, emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual needs. This hospital values the rich resources that the patient’s personal faith and faith community can provide in concert with the practice of medicine.

Certainly the primary reason most people come to the hospital is to seek physical healing. But at any given time, spiritual concerns are also being addressed as prayers for healing can be heard in waiting rooms where families await the word of a loved one’s surgery, in the newborn intensive care unit as families and staff members pray that the delicate new lives before them will thrive, and at bedsides in the oncology unit as patients and their families seek healing of soul and spirit in those for whom death draws near.

Sometimes the healing they seek doesn’t come in the way they hope it will. There is a beautiful wooden altar in our hospital’s chapel. Engraved all around the edge of the circular altar are these words from Psalm 103: “Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases.”

One day a chaplain walked into the chapel and encountered a distraught and angry young man whose critically ill baby had died. With jaw clenched and tears streaming down his face, the young father pointed to the inscription on the altar and exclaimed, “That is an outright lie. If Jesus heals all our diseases, then why did my baby die? Why was I praying all this time for a miracle to happen when I was being ignored?”

Throughout Scripture, we read about Jesus healing those who come to him in faith. Yet each of us has experienced times when we prayed for healing that did not come in the way we had hoped it would. Does that mean that God was ignoring us? Author Ron DelBene in Near Life’s End (The Upper Room, 1988) writes, “I do not think we can ever say prayer is wasted. Although prayer may not change a situation and give us the miracle we want, prayer changes us. Through prayer, we become more aware of God’s presence. Through prayer, we find inner resources and strength we didn’t know we had. Through prayer, we are no longer facing our fears and pain alone; God is beside us renewing our spirit, restoring our soul, and helping us carry the burden when it becomes too heavy for us to bear alone.”

Several months later, that man and his wife returned to the hospital chapel to attend a memorial service for their baby and other children who had died that year. At that service he was able to speak of the healing in his life since his baby’s death: healing that came from his renewed awareness that God loves him and is walking with him through his pain, that God is shedding tears right along with him, and that God continues to offer strength and comfort to get him through the days ahead.

The prayers that we offer and are offered for us in our time of need remind us of God’s ongoing presence and healing power in our lives. In the midst of physical illness, whatever the outcome, we experience healing in the knowledge that God’s comfort and strength are sustaining us.

On a journey together

You and I also experience the Spirit’s healing power through God’s love embodied by the community of faith around us. The dedication of caring people who walk with us on our faith journey, especially during difficult times, is a tangible reminder to us that we are not alone in our pain and anguish.

As the pastor’s hands are laid on our head in the healing service, we are once again reminded of the support of God’s love and the love of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

When I was a parish pastor, I witnessed the ministry of faithful Stephen ministers, trained lay caregivers who are there in times of confusion and loneliness to listen, to care, to offer support and encouragement, and to be Christ to another in their time of distress. Now as a member of a hospital staff, I daily witness the spiritual healing that comes about as patient and chaplain journey together through prayer, through reading of Scripture, and through sharing faith stories, sorrows, and struggles.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., writes, “People have been healing each other since the beginning. Long before there were surgeons, psychologists, oncologists, and internists, we were there for each other. The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships; the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as you are and finding in you an unsuspected goodness” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 217, Riverhead Books, 1996).

Marked with the cross

We also experience healing when we hear God’s promises of peace and wholeness. As the oil is placed on our forehead at the healing service, we are reminded that God has promised peace and wholeness to you and me through the death and resurrection of God’s son, Jesus. Even when our physical ailments cannot be cured, we are assured that we will be returned to wholeness and lasting peace.

We are marked with the cross of Christ forever. That is healing news! God also has promised peace and wholeness to all people.

You and I experience healing when we confess our complicity in the brokenness and disease of others and seek to bring healing into their lives through our prayers and our acts of justice and healing.

“In conflicts that destroy our health we recognize the world’s disease, Our common life declares our ills. Is there no cure, O Christ, for these? Grant that we all, made one in faith, in your community may find, The wholeness that, enriching us, shall reach the whole of humankind” (ELW 610, vv. 3, 4).

In the Affirmation of Baptism service, you and I promised to “serve all people, following the example of Jesus, and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.”

Through the ministries of congregations, synods, institutions, and agencies throughout this church we are doing just that.

You and I experience healing in our own lives as we get involved and work with these brothers and sisters in Christ to bring healing, justice, and wholeness to our communities and throughout the world. We are blessed to be part of a larger church that embodies God’s promises of peace and wholeness, not only in its healing liturgies, but also through all that it does each day.

When we pray for healing in the name of Christ, the great healer and reconciler of the world, we entrust to God ourselves and all who are in need of healing, confident that through God’s promises of peace and wholeness, God’s comforting presence and empowering strength, and God’s embodied love, all will be made whole.

Empowered by God’s strength and confident of our own healing, we are blessed to be participants in the healing of the world.

The Rev. Kathie Bender Schwich serves as vice president for mission and spiritual care at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Park Ridge, Ill. She previously served as executive for synodical relations and assistant to the presiding bishop at the ELCA churchwide office in Chicago.