Sunday 26th August - 12th Sunday after Trinity

Answered Prayer

May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Whilst on holiday on the Greek Island of Kos I persuaded the family to take a walk down a steep hill to a natural sulphur spring. When we arrived there lots of people were bathing in the rather smelly pool.

Fixed on a rock by the side of the pool was a sign claiming that ‘These springs cure the following diseases: skin diseases, respiratory disease, muscle disease and eye problems.

Being up for most things on holiday, I plunged myself into the pool as my rather bemused family looked on.

Which was fine until they had to endure the smell for the rest of the morning until I could take a shower!

The Greek islands are littered with places where miracles are believed to take place on a regular basis. Whilst I believe that miracles do happen, I am rather suspicious of specific places claiming healing for specific diseases.

A God who knows our needs before we ask him is hardly likely to require us to plunge ourselves into a sulphur spring in order for him to be able to heal us.

In our Gospel reading this morning we are faced with a situation where Jesus heals a woman who was not seeking healing at all – and their encounter gives plenty of food for thought.

Imagine the scene. It is a Saturday morning in the Jewish synagogue, the Sabbath day for Jews, and Jesus is teaching the multitudes, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a crippled woman appears. Stooping at the waist, hunched over like the hunchback of Notre dame, she had been this way for 18 years. She doesn't ask Jesus for anything, she doesn't beg him for a miracle, like so many of the New Testament figures do. She just appears there, her twisted, crooked self.

But Jesus felt compassion for her and calls her to come up to the front of the synagogue, and he placed his hands on her.

"Woman, you are set free from your ailment."

And immediately, the woman stood up straight, something she had not been able to do for 18 years, and she began to praise God.

The woman came to the synagogue to listen to Jesus. Despite her ailment, she just sat down and listened. She makes no demands. No “only say the word and I shall be healed” or “ touch me and I shall be healed”. Instead she just turns up to listen. Jesus then takes pity on her and the miracle happens.

The passage describes physical healing – but when studying the passage I was left wondering about how many people would have had their lives transformed by just listening and responding to what he had to say.

My daughter, Hannah, and I recently sat and watched a DVD. We watched a comedy called Bruce Almighty, the prequel to this summer’s comedy release, Evan Almighty. Bruce Almighty tells the story of a man who blames God for everything that goes wrong in his life. God gets so fed up of hearing these complaints that he gives Bruce his godly powers and tells him to have a go at being God. In one scene Bruce has a massive headache from hearing the deluge of prayers – he thinks he’s is clever by turning the prayers into emails and then becomes lazy about responding to the millions. Instead he does “reply to all” and simply says, “yes”-answering everyone’s prayers in one go.

This leads to chaos and anarchy as everyone’s prayers are answered on mass – civil disobedience breaks out when hundreds of thousands of people win the lottery to discover that their prize is worth just a few pounds.

As the real God tells Bruce, “always giving people what they want isn’t necessarily the right answer”.

Listening to the prayers in Bruce’s head made me think about my own prayer life and how easy it is to deluge God with a list of demands.

In the stress of wanting something to happen - someone to be healed, a job to come along, a prize to win – It’s easy to forget that Jesus told us that our Father in Heaven knows our needs before we ask him. Prayer does not work like a vending machine: insert request, receive answer.

Living in faith means being able to let go and trust that God has a plan for each and every one of us. God doesn’t do reply to all. He thinks about each and everyone of us and our own unique needs.

I suggest that sometimes we need to be like the crippled woman. Prepared to listen to God’s word, prepared to accept that in our limited view of things, we can never fully understand what God, who is infinite Love, may have in store for us.

We need to be open to the possibility that he may want to restore something in our own lives even if, like the crippled woman we don’t bring this to him.

In the first few weeks of my ministry I have spent time with a couple of people who have had serious physical impairments. One, who I visited just a few weeks ago, can barely walk but was keen to speak about how blessed he is. Blessed by the love and support from many members of this church.

Another, who had a very little time to live, only in his final weeks could begin to recognise a loving God, a God who was not fully revealed to him in his 70 years.

These for me were true miracles. Miracles of transformation. Miracles of true healing.

And yet there are many unanswered questions about why some prayers appear to be answered, and some not. I wonder, for example, how many prayers have been offered up for young Madeline McCann?

And yet there doesn’t appear to an answer.

I don’t pretend to have any answers but what I do know is that even God, who became human and got acquainted with grief in person, knows our suffering but God who is spirit knows our spiritual selves and therefore sees the beauty within. No physical ailment can prevent God – or even dare I say us – seeing and recognizing the real beauty and worth within each other.

In Jesus’ time people with diseases would have been considered sinners, or paying the price for the sins within their families. Everybody would have known the crippled woman and her appearance in the synagogue would have caused unease.

But Jesus often related to the down trodden the marginalised. Probably because, like his Father, he was able to see the real person within.

Jesus commands us to pray to our father, to make our supplications, give him our lists but to be open that he may have different plans for us. Paul said that we should ‘pray without ceasing’, “give thanks in all circumstances”, and like the bent over woman praise God.

Dietrich Bonhofer said "It matters little what form of prayer we adopt… or how many words we use. What matters is the faith which lays hold on God, knowing that He knows our needs before we even ask Him. That is what gives Christian prayer its boundless confidence and its joyous certainty."

Amen

Renos Pittarides Aug 2007

Posted: 30/08/2007