May 6, 2001

Acts 9:36-46

When I was a little boy, probably a little older than the age Conner is now I hated it when my parents would go out for the evening. Usually it meant that I would be pretty much at the mercy of my big sister Marilee even if a babysitter was there. And my big sister loved to torment me in all kinds of ways and without the protection of Mom or Dad I would be tormented in all her ways. I also just liked it better when my parents were home. It made me uneasy to have them gone. I see the same feeling in Conner when we go out depending on who is babysitting.

Anyway one time when my parents went out and I was feeling particularly lost in their absence I took it upon myself to pray. I prayed as hard as I could for them to come back. I prayed and prayed but they didn’t return. I couldn’t understand it. I went to sleep that night uneasy in my parent’s absence with my first theological questioning going on in my mind. Where was this God when I needed help?

But in the morning I discovered that my parents had returned, my prayers had been answered only a little late. Now you may not believe this but by finding out when my parents returned home and approximating when I said my prayer I calculated the length of time it took for prayers to get to heaven and for God to hear them and for God to answer them. My love for theology was born.

Of course it sounds silly. I was a kid. But the truth is that so much of how we think about prayer is quite childish.

In one way this is so very good because faith depends on a kind of innocence. It depends on a kind of wide-eyed believing that is not natural for those of us who are not children any more. But I do not think that innocence is enough, in fact I think prayer can even be dangerous if we allow ourselves to be too innocent about it.

I don’t know if any of you saw a recent television show that examined faith healing. It was on HBO and it looked at a man I had seen on television before, his name is Benny Hinn. Benny Hinn has a ministry that is very focused on healing. He goes from city to city and fills great auditoriums with thousands upon thousands of faithful, hopeful people. It is a remarkable show and what transpires is truly fascinating. On the night that HBO filmed the Benny Hinn service some ninety healings were claimed to have taken place and from what I saw it looked absolutely fantastic. He is one of those guys who slays people in the Spirit. People approach him and he touches them on the forehead or even seems to hit them and they are laid out by some force, it seems. It is really spectacular. Then he takes his arm and waves it at the choir and they all fall down as if they have been washed over by a tidal wave and then he does the same to the audience in front of him and they all go down. While he is doing this there are screams and sounds of wonder from this huge crowd. It is captivating.

But the people doing the HBO special wanted to know how many of these people really were healed. Of the many who were claimed to be healed that night, Benny Hinn ministries released five of the names of people who they believed to be healed by Pastor Benny. Of those five, there was scant evidence that they had been healed. One man is shown dancing around after being healed by Benny Hinn of some kind of degenerative condition in his hips at that moment he seemed completely well doing deep knee bends and jumping up and down. But now he is confined to a wheel chair but believes to this day that he was healed by Benny Hinn.

Of the five all had very good things to say about the power of Benny Hinn even though none of them were appreciably better after their encounter with him. But the most heartbreaking was what happened to one young man who suffered from a brain tumor. His parents with high hopes that he would be healed brought him there. Benny Hinn prayed over this boy and even though he doesn’t often do this he laid hands on him. There was much crying and praying and afterwards the parents were filled with hope that their boy, their beloved had a life ahead of him. He died nine months later. The parents were interviewed after his death and were asked why they thought this healing had not worked. The father expressed that maybe he was being punished, maybe it was something he had done wrong or something his parents or their parents did wrong. Pastor Benny told him that sins were passed down through generations and their curse could last even ten generations. Can you imagine having to shoulder that kind of guilt on top of the grief of losing your child to some horrible fluke of disease that should never effect children in the first place?

I believe that what Benny Hinn is doing to people in the name of God and with the power of faith is unconscionable.

This is not Christian healing, this is not of God. It is a circus show and please don’t ever get sucked in. Even though it sounds like the healing that Jesus did or that Peter was involved in according to the story in Acts it is not of God because it assumes a God who would punish a parent by putting a brain tumor in the head of his or her child because of some sin or something some ancestor did. That is not the God to which I pray. And when we pray together for the healing of people I do not assume that kind of God at all.

Please remember always that it is so important to be thoughtful about what you believe because what you believe has so much to do with the quality of your life. Don’t believe in a God that would do such a thing. It might explain brain tumors in children but it will destroy any positive outlook that you might have for the future particularly if something very bad happens to you. The truth is, I believe, that God loves all of us very much. It is an assumption I make and I stake my life on it always. And I do so because I believe there is a great deal of evidence for it and I believe it is a far better way of believing than to believe in a punitive God. And I ask you if a punitive God heals is it really healing?

Ann and I have had some very bad news about Abbie as most of you know. Her condition is actually a birth defect a very rare birth defect. It is called a Lymphatic Malformation or a Cystic Hygroma. She will have to have surgery for it. I don’t think God did this to her or us. I think it was an accident. I am quite certain it was beyond our control and something God did not intend. But these things do happen. The answer to why is complicated and mostly unknowable, one of the great mysteries of life. And to tell you true I would rather have it a mystery then think that I had lost favor with God and that God because of it would do anything to hurt my little girl. Because I am quite certain that I would have a hard time getting through this without faith. I need God’s love.

And as I approach this surgery I don’t imagine God up there deciding in a kind of fickle manner who will get God’s favor and who will not. That is an anthropomorphic image of God that is not very useful to me. And does not tell the truth as far as I am concerned.

Don’t misunderstand me I have seen some incredible healings. I have been involved in some healings that seemed to fail and yet gave people exactly what they needed. I have seen attempted healings that seemed to have no effect at all. Prayer most of the time is not the ultimate determining factor but it always helps. God made us that way

It is simple, prayer has power. I know that faith affects things in all kinds of subtle and mysterious ways. It has been documented. It is scientifically proven that prayer helps. I have seen it happen. But that is not because God is up there in heaven hearing prayers and then deciding who God is going to help based on their merit. Rather it means that there is a mechanism created in us by God that can effect the healing of others and ourselves that is tapped into through prayer. Again I don’t know how it works but it does. And if anyone tells you they do know how it works be careful because usually they are the charlatans