The Basic Category of Healing is Not Miracle. It’s Sign.

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part II of our series on Healing and Comforting

We kicked off this series by noting how deep the connection between salvation and hospitality is, ending with the question: How do salvation and hospitality relate to healing and comforting?

The answer is found in the beginning. Or a few chapters after it, to be more precise.

Sin entered the world through Adam. Or, put differently, Adam hosted sin. And as a result of that hospitality—which we call “original sin”—all human beings throughout all of history have hosted things we were never designed or intended to host.

There’s a word—and a cost—for hosting what one is never designed to host: disease.

Disease, sickness, illness: we don’t typically think of these as hospitality problems.  That’s why it’s hard for us to understand Jesus expelling them, often with explicit reference to demons. But we need to come to grips with this important biblical truth: Humans host illness and death involuntarily. It’s not a natural process. It’s a forced occupation that gradually incapacitates us physically, socially, and spiritually.

And ultimately it’s fatal: we all die. As playwright Noel Coward puts it, we live on a “death-sentenced planet.” So remember these two principles about illness and death, because you’ll see them in Scripture in every story about illness:

  • First, illness and death are forms of involuntary hosting due to original sin. They’re not natural parts of what it means to be human.
  • Second, illness and death are involuntarily hosted in every part of the human frame. Illness is physical (i.e., it infects the body), social (i.e., it infects the soul) and spiritual (i.e., it infects the spirit).

But here is the Good News: Christ’s death and resurrection signal the eviction of sin and death!

Christ is the true host and the true guest of every human being. Human beings are created in order to be hosted by him on earth and in heaven–and we are created to host him, too: in our spirits, which will manifest his presence in our souls and in our bodies.

We bear his image to the world: that’s our purpose in creation.

So for Christians, the basic category of healing is not miracle. It’s sign.

Healing points toward something: hospitality set right.  Human beings hosting God, bearing his image—all made possible because Christ first hosted us. If you miss that each healing is a signal of Christ’s eviction of sin and death, you end up with the idea that each healing is an end in itself–a miracle, a kindness that Christ grants against the backdrop of a cruel, evil world. But Christ isn’t about granting kindnesses. He’s about making all things new.

Does that difference really matter?  Why or why not?

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What Do Healing and Comforting Have to Do With Hospitality?

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part I of our series on Healing and Comforting

There’s a fascinating story about illness and healing in John 9:1-7.  This story is dripping with insight about how God views illness and what he has in mind through the Work of Mercy called healing and comforting:

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him,”Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him,”Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.

Before we dive into this amazing story, we need to get a few other Scriptures on the table to orient us. The first one comes from Paul in Galatians 4:9-10. Though the Galatians “have come to know God, or rather to be known by God,” Paul says, they have “turn(ed) back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world” and they “observe days and months and seasons and years.”

Their discipleship, in other words, has gone off track.

Certain practices—which Paul calls “weak and worthless”—have turned them to a “different gospel” (Gal. 1:6). So in this moment, in Galatians 4:19, Paul gives us a crystal clear picture of the purpose of discipleship when he says:

“…my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!”

The goal of discipleship? “Christ in you, the hope of glory”—that’s what Paul calls it in Colossians 1:27.

It’s the principle we come back to again and again: God creates human beings to bear his image. When sin and death enter the world through Adam, that vocation is lost because the image of God is distorted. Christ, the second Adam, comes to restore that vocation by living a sinless life and offering himself as what John in 1 John 2:2 calls “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Through Christ’s death and resurrection, he creates a way for God to dwell in the human spirit.  As he says in Revelation 3:20,

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”

Christ opens his home to us, on earth and in heaven. And he comes to us through his messengers, seeking hospitality. Those who receive him and those who don’t are repaid accordingly.

Oh, the deep, deep connection between salvation and hospitality! 

It may not be obvious yet–this deep, deep connection. But hang with me through the next two posts while we examine the theme together. What we’ll see is that one of the reasons we Christians have such confused theologies of healing…is because we don’t understand hospitality very well either, and the two (as we’ll see this week) are joined at the hip.

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Don’t Give to Fund-Raisers. Become One.

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part IX of our series on Visiting and Remembering

I want to close this series on Visiting and Remembering with a few comments specifically related to financial giving.

When we maintain a regular visitation schedule, it changes how we think about financial giving. Once we are in the habit of personally visiting widows, orphans, the sick, and the imprisoned in the name of Jesus, we become a lot less likely to give by making donations online or by dropping money in the offering plate so that the church can hire someone to visit these people. Instead, we become more likely to buy an extra carton of milk when we are at the store, or to try to figure out how to schedule and pay for a clinic appointment for someone in need, or to pick up a study Bible and have it engraved with the initials of a new believer in prison. We gradually stop thinking about these gifts as charitable donations and instead start to think about them simply as family expenses.

In fact, as we visit people in person, we stop giving to fund-raisers and instead become fund-raisers. As John Wesley says:

You might properly say in your own case, “To beg I am ashamed;” but never be ashamed to beg for the poor; yea, in this case, be an importunate beggar; do not easily take a denial. Use all the address, all the understanding, all the influence you have; at the same time trusting in Him that has the hearts of all men in his hands.

What can you do, today, to transition from giving to fund-raisers to becoming a fund-raiser?  If you’re at a loss, perhaps the answer is simply this: visit someone.

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