 So we're going to be doing that this morning. We're going to be laying a biblical foundation for healing. And there's others among us who have quite a bit of experience in the praxis of healing ministry within parishes, et cetera. I'm going to defer to them in terms of the practical wisdom, the hochma in scripture about making a healing ministry a more active and visible part of parish life. But what I can do is use the gifts God's given me with the scriptures and lay a scriptural foundation for our understanding of the healing ministry of the church and God's healing ministry. So let's begin in prayer in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Heavenly Father, we're so grateful for this morning and for this opportunity to gather together as your sons to meditate on your word. And we ask that you implore the Holy Spirit upon us in abundance as we remain in the afterglow of that great feast of Pentecost where we're lost in wonder at the outpouring of your Holy Spirit and still feeling the after effects of that great feast. We pray that you stir up the spirit within us, and especially now as we attend to your word, which is inspired by your spirit, grant us that clarity of mind and that the burning of the heart as the men walking on the road to mayas. Grant us that burning of heart as we attend to your word now. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. The name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. So you get into the study of healing in scripture and one of the most remarkable things that one discovers rather quickly is that in the Old Testament, no one but God ever heals. And I'm searching through, I've got all my Bible study tools and my Hebrew electronic text and I could search different forms of stuff and I'm going through like, surely somebody. Surely somebody heals. Isn't there a prophet as a priest? Well, I mean, de facto, yeah, indeed, Elisha heals people, but this is interesting. The word for heal is never used with Elisha as the subject. Okay, the only time that the verb to heal has a subject who is actually doing healing, it is with God. So God is the great healer in the Old Testament and a central text that we can focus on is Exodus 1526. I am the Lord, your healer, okay, from Rafa, which is the Hebrew word for healing. Let's say that together, ready? Rafa, okay, and of course that's represented in the name of one of the archangels, Rafa El. It's simply a short Hebrew sentence. God heals or God is the healer. And indeed in Exodus 1526, it's as much as giving God a title, God is your healer. That is virtually a title for God. Again and again throughout the Old Testament scriptures, there's this emphasis that all healing comes from God. Deuteronomy 32 39 proclaims the sovereignty of God over the healing process. I wound and I heal, the Lord God says. And so all healing goes back to the Lord God who created all things. And so he is the only one who truly understands how they work and how, as it were, to put them back together. Anybody remember the bionic man? Okay, yeah, so you're old enough to remember, right? So what is it? We can't, what is it? Fix him, I can't remember. We can't rebuild him, we have the technology, right? That's what God says up in heaven. I can rebuild everybody, I've got the technology. Okay, he understands. I mean, he's the one who set up DNA. I'm being quite literal about this. He set up DNA, you know? I mean, when you, I teach a course on religion and science and this stuff is absolutely fascinating. You know, the molecules that make up our body, you know, the proteins, you know? We think of protein as just kind of like this amorphous mass of material that we ingest, you know, if you want to do bodybuilding, right? So when I was in high school, we had this stuff that we call whiter chalk by Joe Whiter. He was this bodybuilder, right? And he had this big protein powder, you know, your poor protein. We actually know what protein is. Proteins are nanomachines, okay? And they are literally put together molecule by molecule by enzymes and other machines within ourselves. And this is done at an unimaginable pace within our bodies, the way that DNA replication is taking place in the manufacture of every protein. Molecule by molecule, they'll never happen by chance. And if you study origin of life research, like the laws of physics and chemistry can't put these things together. In fact, the laws of physics and chemistry degrade the molecules of life. The molecules of life have to be built and they're all built by a blueprint at a nanotechnological level that's beyond anything that we can imagine. And God thought all that out, amen? Amen. So all of that, God is the expert in STEM, okay? You know? I'm absolutely serious about that, okay? He thought this all out. He knows exactly how the DNA go together. You read about people that have various kinds of have been healed by the Lord in miraculous ways. Some people have had visions. They've had psychological illnesses and so on. People have prayed for them. They've received healing. They go into the ecstasy and have seen angels come and open up their head and kind of rewire the brain and put that all back and go, okay? So, and then they're healed. So it is absolutely astounding, absolutely astounding. So God is the healer. He has the technology as it were. And another thing that we find when we look through the Old Testament and we're looking at God's healing power, we find that sin and sickness are closely bound up in the Old Testament. And we notice this in so many, so often, especially in the Psalms, we know this because of praying the office, right? How many times don't we see juxtaposed sickness and sin? You know, Lord, forgive my iniquities and heal my flesh. It's kind of a quintessential line from the Psalm. So Psalm 103, bless the Lord, oh my soul and all that is within me, bless this holy name, very famous, very beautiful Psalm. What? Who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, right? So God is not just interested in healing our body. In fact, the healing of the body is kind of, is downstream of the healing of the soul, amen? The healing of the body is downstream of the healing of the soul. And it's backwards to be overly focused on physical healing without attending to the healing of the soul. Because ultimately it's eternal life. This present world is passing away. We can experience healing both natural and supernatural, but we are all going to physically die because this order is passing away, but the eternal life is present in the gospel. And that is in our souls and the body will be raised again. Psalm 41, four, very famous Psalm. This is the Psalm that ends book one of the Psalter. Oh Lord, heal me for I have sinned against you. David and the other Psalmists have this strong sense that we are a body soul unity. And there's this complex interaction between body and soul. And so sickness of the soul can lead to sickness of the body and the whole person needs healing. And that includes the forgiveness of sin. Another thing that we discover when we traverse the Old Testament looking at the theme of healing is how the prerequisites for healing are typically humility and repentance. So this famous passage has been set to music in different settings, some recent popular Psalms, songs, excuse me. In the past couple of decades, this verse has become very well known at different times, but let's focus on it for a moment. Second Chronicles 7, 14, it kind of sums together or synthesizes themes of healing from throughout scripture. If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, okay? So humble themselves, that's humility, turning from their wicked ways, this is repentance, right? Then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sin, that's in interior healing and heal their land. That's external healing, always united, always together in God's plan. So oftentimes we don't get healed because we're too proud, okay? We're too proud as a people, sometimes we're too proud as a parish, sometimes we're too proud as individuals. And so humility to acknowledge our need, to acknowledge God's sovereignty and then repentance from our sin. So I love one of these, this is one of my favorite healing stories from the Old Testament, and it illustrates the centrality of humility to the healing process. So we're probably all familiar, there was this Syrian general Naaman and his great military leader, but he was a leper, right? And one of his military excursions into Israel, he captured a bunch of captives, brought back some Israelite basically girls and they became servant girls in his household. And one of the little Israelite servant girls who had been captured and was serving Naaman's wife said, you know what? There's a prophet in Israel who could heal my master. I'm always touched by that because this is a little girl who had been taken captive. So you think that she'd have all this resentment towards her host family, however you want to describe that. And yet she's concerned about her master Naaman and she actually knows that there's healing in Israel. She wants him to be healed. I think, wow, that's a real expression of charity on the part of this little Israelite girl who's kind of captured and forced and serving against her will in a sense. And yet Naaman must have been, he must have been a man of virtue that he inspired some affection from his servants that they actually cared about him. So a very interesting character and he's not an Israeli, he's outside the covenant. So you know how this goes. So Naaman goes to the king of Syria and the king of Syria says, oh, okay, there's a prophet in Israel who can heal you. All right, well, I'll send a letter to the king of Israel and you can bring this over there and we'll get you healed. So the king of Syria writes a letter to the king of Israel, born by the hand of Naaman. And the letter says, this is Naaman, my general. I've sent him to you so that you can heal him of his leprosy. And the king of Israel is like, why is this guy trying to start a war? He's trying to provoke a war. He said, this guy, how am I gonna heal the guy of leprosy? And of course, the court service said, don't worry, king, go to Elisha. Send it to Elisha, Elisha can heal him. So it's like the king's five nights. So Naaman came with his horses and chariots down to the home of Elisha and halted at the door of Elisha's house. And Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean. So Naaman's a big dude. He's a general of the Syrian army. And Elisha doesn't even come out to meet him. He sends the church secretary. What do you want? Like to be healed. Ah, just go and wash in the Jordan, you'll be okay. Sends the secretary. And Naaman was angry. And went away saying, behold, I thought that he would surely come out and stand and call in the name of the Lord, as God wave his hand over the place and cure the leper, right? So Naaman's insulted. Like, yeah, what? I came here and I talked to the secretary. I don't even get to see the pastor, you know? What's going on with this? Does anyone know who I am? I'm a big dude, right? And yeah, he was expecting fireworks, you know? Maybe slaying in the spirit, fall over. So got to make statics. You'll see some visions, get a few apparitions, you know? Looking for all this. What, go wash in the Jordan? And the Jordan's not very impressive, guys. Amen. I mean, who's been to Israel? Right, the Ohio's wider than the Jordan, right? Hey, we got more impressive rivers in America. You know, there's places where the Jordan, just like this creek, you're like, wow, Jesus was baptized there? Gee, it looks like Buck Creek in the state park, you know? And, but you see Naaman, you know, we're talking about this humility and repentance. Naaman's physically, he has a physical ailment, but he's also got a spiritual ailment. He needs to be healed of his pride, right? And the prophet knows that. And so a prerequisite for Naaman's healing is that he has to give up his pride. And so the prophet, you know, led by the Holy Spirit, gives him a task that is going to humble him. And so, you know, Naaman goes on, are not Abana in Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean? So he turned away and went away in a rage. Okay, but his servants are, you know, more sober about this. And so, and again, he must have been a man of virtue because you see that his servants really like him and want him to be healed, right? So his servants came near to him and said, my father, if the prophet had commanded you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? Go bring me the tail feathers of the mountain firebird, you know? And, oh, yeah, all right. Go on this quest to get the firebird from Mount Hermon, you know, something like this. He probably would have done that, you know, because that would have appealed to his pride, but the impediment for his healing was his pride. And so going on some great quest and coming back with a dragon's claw or something was not the way that Naaman needed to be healed. So what do you not have done that? What would you not have done it? So how much rather when he says to you, wash and be clean? Okay, so this is just something very simple. So why don't you follow through? And so what does Naaman do? So he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, just kind of like a muddy creek and a lot of it's course. According to the word of the man of God and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child and he was clean. Wow, beautiful. Wow, so much to think about, so much to pray about in this, you know? Name is a Gentile, you know? So much going on here. You know, already in the Old Testament, we're seeing God's love for Gentiles and making allowance for them to, you know, receive the blessings of the covenant, even though they're technically outside the covenant, all kinds of things going on, so beautiful. And so this is a great passage for illustrating the prerequisite of humility for both interior and exterior healing, okay? To be forgiven of our sins and for our bodies to be healed and how often pride gets in the way, how often pride prevents us from doing the simple things that might lead to our healing. And this passage, I think, has a lot of applicability in spiritual direction as well because I think that when we go to spiritual direction, oftentimes we want some fireworks from our director, you know? We want our director to, like, read our soul, maybe give us a locution, you know, I don't know, whatever, you know, tell us to read some esoteric book on spirituality or something like that. Here's the book that you need, you know, something like that. And our spiritual director will just tell us, you need to pray more. I didn't want to hear that, you know? I want to hear, you know, some speculative thing, you know, that will answer all my problems. I don't want to hear just pray more, you know? But again, it's a simple thing, you know? So I advise, you know, young guys, you know, college guys that are getting into direction for the first time, somebody's kind of like, oh, my director just told me to do it, like, well, just do it, okay? Be like Naiman, just go wash in the Jordan, you know? Okay, so pray more, pray more, okay? Try obedience, okay? Try it out, you know? So, and oftentimes, you know, our director will have a grace estate, just trust, just trust, do the simple thing. And, you know, as a convert from Protestantism too, I was offended by the simplicity in kind of like the vulgarness in a way of a lot of Catholic devotions, right? Like the infant of Prague, guy like, that's ridiculous! That's a ridiculous way to get close to God. It's a little fru fru doll, you know? And one of the things I heard the Lord speaking to me in the process of my conversion is like, okay, John, that doesn't speak to your, you know, Dutch American upper middle class, whatever, cultural sensibilities. But if it speaks to the Mexicans, or it speaks to the Czechs, or it speaks to the Italians or whatever, who are you, you know? To set the requirements, like it's gotta be respectful, or you have to read at least 50 pages before, you know? No, no! So it took great humility, you know, to learn to appreciate our Lady of Guadalupe and all of the different, very simple, very, you know, appealing to the common folk, and very visceral, and, you know, appealing to children, and God, you know, the humility of God. I was offended by God's humility. Think about that. God is humble. Do you ever think about that? God is humble. Humble himself to take on the form of a servant, to take our flesh, and to touch us, and to get dirty with us, and so on. And so I had to get past a lot of pride to come into the Catholic Church, because in so many of the devotions of the Church, God reveals his humility, and is willing to meet us where we are, and where we are in different cultures. So we have to acknowledge God's sovereignty in healing. Not everybody gets healed in the Old Testament. Remarkably, look at this. This is Elijah who worked great miracles of healing. Interestingly, in the case of Naaman, let me just mention something here. It never uses the term heal with respect to what Elisha does for Naaman. It uses a verb, a Hebrew verb meaning help, okay? So Elisha helped Naaman, but the real healing comes from God. That word rafa is always connected with God, who is the true healer. But Elisha was, you know, the instrument of healing in so many cases, also in one case, raising a dead child, an anticipation of our Lord's ministry, but then Elisha himself falls sick. So II Kings 13, 14. Now, when Elisha had fallen sick with the illness of which he was to die, okay? So this is the great prophet to whom others went for healing, but he himself falls sick. And Joe actually, the king of Israel came to him and cried out, my father, my father, Elisha dies and they buried him. And as a man was being buried, the man was cast into the grave of Elisha. As soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood on his feet, okay? So how ironic is that, okay? So the prophet who cures other people, he gets sick and he dies, but even in his death, he raises other people to life, you know? What's going on here? But we have to acknowledge God's sovereignty. So the healing process is not something that we can manipulate. There's no formula that we can make God heal whom we want. Later, our Lord will reflect on this himself in Luke 4.27. There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha and none of them was cleansed, but only naming the Syrian. So God is sovereign in the process. We can't twist God's arm and make him heal whom we want to. We can dispose ourselves to healing. There's things that we can do. We can obviously repent. We can pray. We can open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, but God always retains that royal sovereignty over the process. And for his good reasons, sometimes he declines to heal. When we move on in the Old Testament, we begin to see more and more the promise of healing become associated with God's servant, the servant. Ultimately, we're gonna say the Messiah that God promises, especially in Isaiah. Here is a key passage about healing that is quoted several times in the New Testament from Isaiah, Isaiah 6,9. This is from Isaiah's call vision when God commissions Isaiah and says, Go and say to this people, Keep on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull and their ears heavy and blind their eyes lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and turn and be healed. So what? God doesn't want his people to be healed? No. This is one of the earliest examples of reverse psychology. In Western civilization. Okay, it's a complex, because it's full of irony because Isaiah is actually commissioned to go and preach this to the people of Israel. So get the paradox of this. Isaiah is gonna go out, he's gonna stand in Jerusalem. He's gonna stand like the squares of Jerusalem with hundreds, even thousands of Jerusalemites, his contemporaries in the eighth century BC and they're gonna gather around and he's gonna say hey, God sent me to you to preach to you and God told me, go make their eyes blind and make their ears deaf and make them lame so that they don't hear what you're saying and don't turn to me because I would heal them if they did. Yeah. All the levels of, you know, paradox going, I know how ironic that is. as if you're like, oh yeah? Is that what God told you? Well, just despite you, I'm gonna believe. Just this complex thing of layers of communication but kind of provoking the people, trying to poke the people into believing and repenting and wake them up. And Jesus quotes this passage, of course, in Matthew 13 to explain why he teaches in parables. But let's stick with this for a moment in the context of Isaiah. This is what Isaiah is commissioned to do, to go and preach this people who are blind and deaf and heart of heart. And he's not very successful in his own day but when we get into the second half of the book, we start getting oracles and promises that this servant of the Lord is gonna come one day who's gonna be successful where Isaiah was not. And so in Isaiah 35 we read, say to the fearful, be strong, fear not, behold your God, he will come and save you. Then the ears of the blind shall be opened and the ears, I'm sorry, the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf are unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap like a heart and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy. Now we often read this passage, Isaiah 35, and too quickly we jump to the ministry of our Lord and we think, oh yeah, this is talking about the physical miracles that Jesus will perform one day. And yeah, it definitely is. There's definitely that connection. But in the context of the book of Isaiah, this is metaphorical, okay? Nowhere earlier in Isaiah did the prophet identify the problem with the people of Israel is that they had too many physically challenged people among them, right? Your problem, oh Israel, is that there's too many handicapped amongst you. If you had just have a better healthcare system, you know, then God would restore your fortunes. No, no. And in fact, the blindness and deafness and other kinds of physical challenges that have been referred to earlier in the book were, as we saw in chapter six, okay? Were metaphors for interior unresponsiveness to God. So what Isaiah 35 is saying primarily is, again, these are metaphors for spiritual revival among the people of God. Spiritual sight, spiritual healing, you know, the removal of spiritual paralysis. That's actually the literal sense of the text, okay? Isaiah is using metaphors to speak of a time of spiritual revival that's going to occur in the future under the ministry of God's servant. But Jesus, in order that we get the point over fulfills, okay? If our Lord does this frequently in his ministry, he over fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. So our Lord does physical healings, okay? Which is not actually what the prophet speaking of here. Prophets being metaphorical, but our Lord actually does it literally. Just like too in Zachariah 9.9 where it talks about the prince of peace coming into Jerusalem seated on a donkey, on a colt, the full of a donkey. Well, that's just poetic repetition. Doesn't really mean two animals. But you look at the triumphal entry in Matthew and Jesus actually gets two animals, okay? Why? Because we're blind, okay? He's got to overdo it so that we get the point. So we sit there watching him march into, right into his like, why does he have two animals? That's ridiculous. Oh, on a colt and on the full of a donkey. Oh, I get it. All right. So this is a key passage in Isaiah 35 here. And we move on further into the second half of Isaiah and we begin to see how healing is more and more associated with the servant. And then we start getting into the sufferings of the servant and how our healing is gonna take place through his sufferings. Surely he has borne our griefs and cared our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. Yet he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole. And with his stripes, we are healed. So again, observe how forgiveness of sins, iniquities and healing are associated here with the ministry of the servant who we now discover will endure great sufferings on our behalf. And that's a good way to segue into the New Testament. And so we open up to the first gospel and we don't get very far into it. And already we start seeing the healing ministry of our Lord. He went about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity. And when Matthew says that healing every disease, he's quite consciously evoking Psalm 103 and similar passages from the Old Testament. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Forget not all his benefits who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases. How many? All, that's right. So God is the only healer in the Old Testament. We saw that and here comes Jesus and he's healing everybody. So who is Jesus? He's God. That's right. Yet another implicit sign of our Lord's divinity. If you read the gospel like a Jew, you can see the Lord's divinity on every page, not just the gospel of John, but all four of the gospels. And likewise, as in the Old Testament that prerequisite for healing. Here we also get faith, humility and repentance. We saw already in the Old Testament, faith was implicit there. Naaman had implicit faith, right? But faith becomes more explicit when we look at the healing activity of our Lord, Mark 534. He said to her daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease. So we see how in the ministry of our Lord, faith as it were opens up, the healing power of our Lord and lack of faith can close down the healing power of our Lord. So when he goes to his hometown of Nazareth and they hold him in contempt, Mark 6, 5, he could do no mighty work there except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them and he marveled because of their unbelief, okay? And sometimes those who have been involved in healing ministry will find that they have more success healing, non-practicing or unbelievers. And less success in healing churchgoers. And why is that? It's because a lot of the churchgoers have been taught that the healings don't take place anymore. But, you know, Joe Schmoe who's working at Burger King or whatever in un-churched, he's got no inhibitions. Nobody's ever told him that Jesus doesn't heal anymore. All right, so you pray with him? Oh, what do you know? Okay, it's just like going to the hometown, right? Hear our Lord's, can't work here. These people have been taught that I can't do anything. So you have to think about that. So again, prerequisites for healing, faith and humility. Here's an example of how humility comes into play. You know, and we have this troubling account where our Lord, you know, is trying to, apparently, you know, get away from the Syrophoenician woman or shut her down. And it looks like our Lord is rude to her, right? She keeps asking for healing for a daughter and he answered, it's not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. They're like, oh, Lord cringe, you know. That's not nice. That's not the nice Jesus. Like what's going on here? Okay, but actually, you know what's going on here? It's the same thing as Elisha and Naaman. He knows that for the healing power to be unleashed for this Syrophoenician woman, she's got to have humility. And so he gives her a little test of humility just like Elisha gave Naaman a test of humility. And not, you know, it's no coincidence that they're from the basically the same area. You know, they're both connected to Syria here. And so our Lord is the new Elisha as it were. And so he throws this challenge to the Syrophoenician woman to see whether she will exercise the humility that's necessary for the healing to take place. And she does. Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. She's willing, she's willing to be humble. And then our Lord's heart just melts and he says, go and your daughter will be healed. You know, she wins that healing through that expression of humility. Again, so often we're too proud to be healed. It's interesting too that when we look in the New Testament evil spirits are something that you are healed of. Again and again in the Gospels people are healed of the spirits. So in Luke eight and also some of the women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. That's exactly how it's described in the Greek. Mary called Magdalene from whom seven demons had gone out. And again in Luke a little bit later in this same chapter those who had seen it told him how the demon possessed man had been healed. So healing is used for describing the freedom that persons receive from the afflictions of evil spirits. And we observe how Jesus bestows on the apostles his own healing power so that they can continue to heal in his absence and where he cannot personally be. So he called to himself his 12 disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every disease and every infirmity, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. This in a sense is the beginning of the sacramental ministry because the sacraments heal. They heal first of all the interior person but the body is downstream of the soul. So the sacraments are also associated with the healing of the body. And so this healing ministry of the apostles when they cast out the demons, the sacraments have exorcistic power as well, especially we think of baptism and reconciliation. They're very powerful in terms of spiritual warfare. And so this healing authority in the Holy Spirit that's given to the apostles and they spread out and preach and perform these acts. This is continued in the sacramental ministry of the successors of the apostles. And we read in the epistles how gifts of healing are included in the church's ongoing charisms. In 1 Corinthians 12 to each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good to one is given through the spirit, the utterance of wisdom and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same spirit to another faith by the same spirit and to another gifts of healing by the one spirit. Now this is not some kind of mechanistic process. We can never claim Lordship over the healing process and just like know that we've got some kind of formula that's always gonna heal everybody and we can say when it's gonna happen or when it isn't because God retains sovereignty over that process. And just as Elisha got sick and couldn't heal himself of that sickness even though he had healed others. So we see something very similar with St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12. He says to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations. A thorn was given me in the flesh a messenger of Satan to harass me. This is often understood to be some kind of physical affliction that St. Paul had. Three times I'd be sought the Lord about this that it should leave me. Remember this is St. Paul who was so powerful in healing that handkerchiefs that were rubbed on St. Paul's body could be taken to the sick and people were healed by St. Paul. So he had been the instrument through which God had healed many others. And here he is ill with some kind of physical affliction himself. But God says to him, my grace is sufficient for you and my power is made perfect in weakness. So here it was not God's will to heal Paul of this. God had his purposes in this affliction and this happened sometimes. And so not everybody is going to be healed. Sometimes God is working out his purposes by allowing us to experience the weakness of sickness or physical infirmity. And so Paul says, I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Nonetheless, other passages of the epistles continue to emphasize the healing ministry of the church which is closely bound to the ministry of the presbyters. So healing and forgiveness go tightly together, the healing of the body and the forgiveness of the soul and then the ministry of the presbyters who continue the ministry of the apostles. Now I know that more typically in theological discourse, we talk about the apostolic succession with respect to the Episcopoid, the bishops. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not questioning that at all. It's true, the Episcopoid have the fullness of holy orders. They are the primary successors of the apostles. Nonetheless, both in the New Testament and in the early fathers, you get the language of the apostolic ministry continuing in the work of all the presbyters. So as late as St. Augustine, when St. Augustine talks about why he remains in the Catholic church rather than joining the Donatist or the Rogatists, St. Augustine says, one of the things that keeps me in the bosom of the Catholic church is the succession of presbyters back to the apostles themselves and even St. Peter and the seat of Rome. And so the presbyters are collaborators of the Episcopoid. And so the apostolic ministry that resides in its fullness in the Episcopoid is nonetheless shared with the presbuterite. And so we read in James, is any among you sick? Let him call for the presbyters of the church. This translation says elders here but the term is presbuteroi, right? The priests of the church and let them pray over him anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. This is the early form of the sacrament of anointing of the sick. And the prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. And this is the entire passage. And then verse 16, therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Now we don't have time to talk about this morning, brothers, but this passage was a key piece in my conversion to the Catholic church because I was a young Protestant pastor full of zeal in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And I was in urban ministry in the downtown area. I had very little oversight. So I had a free hand to do basically whatever I wanted. And I was like, we're gonna preach the pure gospel and we're gonna restore the New Testament church. I'm gonna preach every week and we're just gonna literally do everything that the scriptures say. And it's gonna lead to great revival. So that worked fine as I preached through Ephesians and I preached through Philippians and preached through Galatians. And I thought, maybe I'll preach from James. So I start preaching through James, goes all right for James one and James two and James three and James four. And then I start working on a sermon on James five. And I'm like, how am I gonna preach this? Okay, is anyone you sick? Okay, well, I could get by, we did have elders in the church and pray for him anointing them with oil. Okay, we actually did that. But verse 16 was the problem. Confess your sins to one another. Ooh, how are we gonna do that literally? So I was preparing a sermon on this. It was like 1996 in the summer. I was preparing a sermon on James five. I'm thinking, how are we gonna, I'm like, okay, well, maybe we'll pass the mic. It's confession of sin time. Who's first? I just went through all the permutations gentlemen thinking of ways, small groups. Oh no, that's not gonna work, right? There is no confidentiality in the neighborhood where I worked. Well, we said everybody be in everybody else's business. That's how we described it back in the hood. I was doing urban ministry. No, small groups, anything you said in a small group would be all over the streets by Monday morning. I was like, oh geez. And then I thought, I began to contemplate Catholic practice, drawing on all the formation I had received about Catholic theology and practice the sacraments which I got from the same source as most Americans, movies, right? Yeah. All right, those movies that had confession. Anyway, I began to realize, wow, Catholics have a way of confessing their sins to their pastor in privacy and the pastor kind of spiritually represents the whole church and so they're kind of confessing to the church spiritually and yet in a confidential way. And I was like, wow, that's really a great way to do things. Anyway, that's for another time. But confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. Thank God for the sacrament of reconciliation that we really have a practical way of doing this. And the sacrament of reconciliation is so important in healing because again, the body is downstream of the soul. Okay, so sickness is a great time for us in our Christian life to do an examination of conscience. Not that every sickness comes from sin, but throughout scripture those are bound up and so sickness becomes a good opportunity just to make the examination of conscience go to reconciliation, become right with God and open ourselves for God's healing. But God is always sovereign. And as we learn from John 9, not all sickness is tied to sin as Jesus makes explicit with respect to the man born blind. But again, bound up with the ministry of the presbyters. So powerful. So let's wrap up and kind of synthesize what we have seen here. So God is the one and only healer. That's proclaimed from beginning to end in scripture. Yes, prophets, yes, the presbyters can be the occasion. Yes, the apostles, but it's always God working through them, it's not in their own power. Humility, repentance and faith necessary for healing. True also for interior healing. Okay, I know we've kind of emphasized healing of the body as we've been looking through this, but interior healing and that's what spoke to me from James when I was struggling with that passage back in 1996. I knew I needed interior healing and I knew it wasn't just physical healing that James was speaking about. We talked about confessing sins and praying for one another that we need interior healing to make further progress in holiness. And I felt like I was plateaued in my spiritual life. Indeed, I was plateaued in the spiritual life and I needed to get beyond that and I started to hunger for the sacrament of reconciliation. I even contemplated going to my local Catholic parish and sneaking in, but I was too scared that my own parishioners would see my car parked in the parking lot of the Catholic parish that was three blocks down the road. So I never got the guts up to actually go, but I'm at all seriousness, this was, jeez, what is that? That was like five years before I converted. I already had this hunger for the confessional and I was secretly plotting ways like how could I do that? Could I get in there? Anyway, so sin and sickness tightly bound in scriptures, forgiveness and healing tightly bound together, Jesus' healing ministry continues in his church and the sacraments are the front lines of that healing ministry. Jesus continues to heal and I'm sure that most of us here could tell stories of times when we have seen the healing power of Christ revealed in remarkable ways. In my own ministry in downtown Grand Rapids, we had a notorious criminal, a man who had been in prison for over 10 years and had been released and come back to our neighborhood where he had grown up and he was up in the local hospital and he had only weeks or even days to live. He was on his deathbed essentially up in Butterworth Hospital, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Those are from that area you know what I'm talking about and he was up there and my co-pastor went up and baptized this man in the hospital on his deathbed. He was dying of cancer. His abdomen was bulging with tumors. Just full of cancer all through his body and just that days to live and my co-pastor went up and baptized him on his deathbed and about four days later, they came back and they could not find cancer anywhere in that man's body. Amen, yeah, give it up for the Lord. And this was witnessed by hundreds of people. I mean, the whole community knew this guy and he was notorious and he spent 10 years in prison, learned to drum in prison they gave him some utensils and stuff like that, some sticks and so on. He would beat on books and he became a drummer and after his healing came down, he was our drummer at our little church there in the downtown area and he would praise God and drum away and just give glory to God. It was just the most remarkable thing. And it's like, well, don't think, well, how do we square that with Catholic theology? Okay, because nobody was credentialed there. No ordination, no proper procedure, no nothing. So how do we understand what happened there? Was that really a sacrament? What took place? First of all, okay, the baptism was valid, right? Because my co-pastor, even though not ordained by a holy mother church was nonetheless a baptized believer himself, baptized in the name of the Father and so in the Holy Spirit with the intent to do what the church does. So the baptism was valid. And then furthermore, there is a, like the baptism of desire, okay? Just like you can receive forgiveness of sins if you have perfect contrition, right? But thanks be to God, we had a sacrament of reconciliation because perfect contrition is so hard to attain but some people do, okay? And what I'd say here is that man experienced last rites of desire, essentially. And was healed through his baptism and the healing power of Christ was unleashed because of the purity of intention. And we know that. The grace of certain sacraments can be received when there is a perfection of intention even if there's a defect in form or in rite, et cetera. So how much more so when we do it in obedience to holy mother church, amen? So there's all kinds of potential for making more available to the people of God the healing ministry of our Lord. And there are men among us who are much more experienced than I in how to do that practically. But this morning we have just laid the foundations from holy scripture. Let's go to the Lord now in prayer in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we're so grateful for your word. We're so grateful for your loving heart, the loving heart of a father that you desire to heal us more than we desire to be healed. And so often Lord, we hold on to our impediments. We hold on to our challenges because for certain reasons Lord, we've grown to like them or we've become accustomed to them. Lord, you ask that man at the pool of Bethesda that profound question, do you want to be healed? And so often Lord, the real answer is no. Lord, so often we recognize I'm kind of comfortable in my iniquities. I'm kind of comfortable in my weaknesses. I don't wanna be healed and then challenged to do more and to plunge farther into discipleship. I'm comfortable where I am. Heavenly Father, give us that spirit of humility. Give us that spirit of repentance that we can just let go and allow you to take away from us everything that's holding us back from plunging so much deeper into the ocean of love that is yourself. Lord, help us all to be healed ourselves and to make ourselves more available, to be instruments of your healing in the body of your people and beyond the body of your people to those who don't consciously know you and receive you. And but deep in their hearts are being drawn to you and drawn into the body of your people. We ask this through Christ our Lord in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Brothers, I just wanna mention that there's a bunch of resources out there. This is a little housekeeping thing. If you want to purchase some of the books here, all the books at this conference are being sold by the St. Paul Center. So the St. Paul Center actually has a table for book sales. It's over on this side of that atrium and the bookstore is just selling basically clothing and religious goods. And so check out some of those resources. You might enjoy this book, Jesus and the Old Testament Roots of the Priesthood that I originally wrote back in the year of the priest. Just come out in the past couple of years on the theology of the priesthood, talking about the sacraments and talking about receiving sacraments through desire and so many other things. I have so appreciated the ministry of Dr. Larry Feingold who's an expert, so many aspects of theology and has a series on the sacraments. I myself did not get good sacramental theology because I went to a Protestant seminary, okay? And some of you went to seminaries that probably weren't much better than my Protestant seminary, okay? And so we got some remediation to do and Dr. Feingold is so great. I just love listening to him. He speaks at some conferences and he's check out his books published by Emmaus academic on the sacraments, their pastoral and speaking of the sacraments, speaking of the sacrament of matrimony. Somebody was asking if I was gonna give stick figures today. Sorry, there were no stick figures in this talk but my latest stick figure book has come out Love Basics for Catholics. This is great for doing matrimony preparation and for formation of young people. Really we should get this in the hands of kids before they start dating because it gives good ideas about love and marriage throughout scripture and they really need to know that before they begin that courtship experience. And many of you are probably familiar with the Word of the Lord series. My commentary is in all the Sunday readings for cycles A, B, C and most recently now the celebrities and feasts. So the whole series is out on there and you can pick those up. And people have been asking me when's the sequel to this coming out, okay? So if you've not seen this before Catholic introduction to Bible Old Testament it's kind of like all you wanted to know about the Old Testament, but we're afraid to ask. Those are the for the North you can buy a couple of them and put them in your trunk for traction in the winter. Down in the South not so much, but yeah. But yeah, we're hard at work. Dr. Petrie my co-author is about 80% done on the New Testament sequel to this. So, and he's got two semesters off from teaching at the Augustan Institute just to work on finishing that off. So pray for Dr. Petrie that he'll finish that draft and we'll get that out. But we are hard at work. It's always been the plan to have those two books. So, fathers it's been great. We'll see each other again later this afternoon. And I don't know if we will have some. Okay, Deakin's gonna come and give us a few words. Thank you Deakin.