Healing is at the core of the Christian faith. Jesus was, among other things, a healer. Even those scholars who dispute the factual reality of much of the gospel text still acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth healed people's mental and physical distress, in a miraculous way that drew large crowds.

After Jesus' resurrection and parting from the disciples, the healing went on. It's one of the things that Jesus passed on to his followers – the conviction that in Jesus' name they could relieve other people's suffering. It was a marker of the early church that when they were sick, they prayed for one another, and they also healed people from outside their circles of faith as a demonstration of the living power of God in Christ.

The message of Christianity is a message of restoration – ultimately the healing of all things – the earth and its people – into a loving unity with the Creator. Jesus' physical healing acts were signs of this restoration, signs of what the world looks like when people are set free from their brokenness and separation, from their suffering. The word 'salvation' comes from the same root as that of health and wholeness.

This understanding of Christianity has inspired much good in the world, over the centuries – the first hospitals were set up in monasteries, and even today many Christian doctors and nurses travel miles to offer their skills to those in need, inspired by the healing practice of their master Jesus.

In our modern times, we in the church have struggled a bit with the more seemingly miraculous aspect of healing as part of Christian practice. Because of our rationalist worldview, we have tended to split ourselves into seeing healing as on the one hand a scientific practice undertaken by trained professionals, or on the other, a sudden, supernatural intervention by God that alters our physical reality. Often, prayer for God's healing has been set up in opposition to the healing that comes through medicine. If you have faith for one, you will reject the other. Many of us will have stories of being told that going to the doctor for healing is in some way a betrayal of faith in God's power to heal.

And we are probably all familiar with the excesses of the signs and wonders movement that has produced miraculous and in some cases controversial healings. Depending on your experience you may dismiss these as the products of charlatanism, or you might be willing to accept the validity of God's action in these contexts. But whatever your viewpoint, if you're like me you have something of a struggle to know how to reconcile the clearly Biblical practice of healing in Jesus' name, with access to health care undreamed of in Jesus' day. And, with our experience that there are an awful lot of things that God doesn't miraculously heal in the way we would like or expect. What does it mean to us, here and now, as Christians in 21st Century Auckland, to say that healing is fundamental to the identity and practice of the church?

I find these two readings helpful, from the Iona Community in Scotland. The first is by George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community, and the other by Kate McIlhagga, a more recent member.

Christ came neither to save souls nor to save bodies. He came to save people. Thus our whole ministry is one of healing: making crooked places straight in international issues, in class issues, and issues of sex. In Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female. He is the At-one-ment.

...Just as there is no such thing as 'Christian Truth' over against Truth, so there is no such thing as 'Christian Healing' over against Healing. All healing is of God, and the man who walks again after penicillin is just as much divinely healed as a man who walks again after a service of the laying on of hands.

(George MacLeod)

When we talk...of the Church's God-given ministry of healing, we are not talking about something for the cranky way-out few, but about an aspect of salvation history which is essential to the wellbeing of the nations and of Mrs Smith in the run-down cottage across the road. The healing ministry is first and foremost about justice and peace. But, intertwined with that divine imperative is the healing of the individual, the healing of memory, of broken relationships...

In our age, as in any other, the healing ministry of Christ's body, the church, has to engage with and grapple with the problem of suffering and pain, which is the experience of so many people in the world. We cannot trivialise it by saying, 'Never mind, your pain will make you a better person,' or bypass it by saying 'you may not understand, but in God's greater plan your suffering is acceptable.' Nor can we zap it with magic. The church is not into mumbo-jumbo...Healing is not about curing – it is about wholeness. Health is not about perfection but about reconciliation.

(Kate McIlhagga)

When we pray for healing, we place ourselves into the wider context of relationship – relationship with God, with our physical body, with other people, with social systems, and with the earth. What we trust, is that God is present to all these relationships. Christ is there to be met within it all. When we pray, we are making explicit our interconnectedness with all of life, and we are acknowledging the loving energy that sustains and binds all things together, and makes broken things whole. When we pray, then, we might ask for a specific thing. We ask for the removal of this disease, release from pain. But we need to offer that prayer not as a magic wish box where we say what we want and God delivers. Our prayers are not lists that we offer up to a cosmic Santa Claus.

Our prayers are part of a conversation between us and God and the world we live in, a conversation that is ultimately oriented to the well-being of the whole. Our prayers, like the Psalms, help us to give expression to how we feel, what we need, what we long for. They are relational. They do not instruct or bargain. They do not manipulate. Our prayers shift us out of a place where we feel we control the world, or feel helpless in the face of our lack of control, into a place where we humble ourselves in the face of a much larger reality. Prayers that are in essence an attempt to control outcomes by telling God what to do, are not really prayers at all. We spend most of our lives believing that we can make things come out how we want if we just exert more force, talk louder, manipulate better, use cleverer words, or employ a lawyer. Prayer is not an extension of that mode of being. It's not a mechanism for exerting our will even as we dress up our words to make it seem like we want what God wants. No, our prayers are simply the meeting place between us and God, the space where we come as we are with all that troubles us, seeking to attune ourselves to how God wants to meet us, and what God has to offer us in that moment.

And our prayers create the space for God to move through us to touch others.

As the hands and feet of Jesus the healer in our world today, our work of healing includes prayer, but it also involves practical action. It includes working for justice, healing the physical conditions – such as overcrowding, unemployment, addiction - that cause people to fall into illness or despair. It includes reading our culture to find out how the ways we are living are moving us toward or away from humanness, and wholeness. Our expression of healing in the world includes care for this earth, practical protection of its ecosystems and all the fragile and awesome ways that this earth supports life. It includes both aid and systemic justice, for the millions who live in poverty and die from the diseases of poverty. Our participation in God's restoring, healing actions is participation in the life of the individual, the community, the nation and the world.

I personally think that in the West today, prayer for physical healing, while valid, is probably less important than prayer for the healing of our hearts and minds. We are all of us somewhat deranged. We are living fragmented, isolated, separated lives...we have cut ourselves off from the earth and its wisdom, and are instead filling it with our pollution. We no longer know how to live in community and to find our identity in our lineage and connection to our elders. We are terrified of ugliness, aging and death. Our lack of gender and sexual wholeness causes massive damage to our souls and our relationships – whether that lack of wholeness is manifested by a repressive piety on the one hand, or enslavement to promiscuity on the other. We fill our lives with noise – silence frightens us. We abuse drugs and alcohol – an abuse of body, mind, relationship. As a society, we traumatise and kill our children. We are lost, we are lonely, we are sad, we are tired, we are sick.

My faith tells me that Christ is still a healer, and that in our world today, it is these things that Christ can and will heal – whether through an immediate touch, or through the sustained, long term action of compassionate people, or through a recovery of lost dimensions of our common lives.

As a body of broken bones, we here at Cityside are people in need of healing, and also people with healing and care to offer. There is none of us who is completely whole. All of us have something to offer by way of healing to each other. It is in community, and through the presence and action of God's Spirit, that we will come to greater wholeness, and so have something to offer our hurting world. And from time to time, such as today's service, we make that explicit by offering prayer specifically for the healing of our hurts, physical, spiritual, and emotional.

And so now, as we turn toward communion, I invite you to reflect on your own needs, or the needs of another, that you want to bring into this space of healing. There will be a range of ways that you can do that, which I'll explain after this song we're going to sing now.