Healing Service on Sunday, April 28
On Sunday morning, April 28, our worship service will be a healing service, following the Lutheran invitation to include healing services periodically, as outlined in our ELW worship book. One of the special dimensions of this service is the invitation to come forward for prayer with laying on of hands. Here’s what our ELCA resources say about this: “In the ministry of healing, the church does not replace the gifts of God that come through the scientific community, nor does it promise a cure. Rather, the church offers and celebrates gifts such as these: God’s presence with strength and comfort in time of suffering, God’s promise of wholeness and peace, and God’s love embodied in the community of faith.”
The New Testament describes how Jesus and the early church not only prayed for the sick, but also laid hands on them. This kind of shared prayer can assure us that we are accepted and loved and can console us in our pain in a way that words alone cannot. During this special worship service, you will be invited to come up to the front of the sanctuary and sit in chairs. You need not say anything or name the kind of healing you need. You are simply invited to come forward and have a prayer said for you, while hands are laid on your head and arms and shoulders by others in the congregation standing beside or behind you, as we all join in a prayer that will be printed in the worship booklet. We all come to this ritual of prayer for healing as wounded healers, each in our own need and each of us as instruments of healing in the body of Christ for one another. I hope that you will plan to share in this special worship service.
More about the Healing Service
by Pastor Carol Tomer
During the Healing Service next week, there will be a time for us to share aloud or silently in the prayers of intercession for healing, which is an additional dimension of the service, along with the laying on of hands for healing.
Here’s what the Iona Community in Scotland reminds us about the wide variety of concerns that we might lift up in prayers of intercession:
We each stand in need of healing, but in this kind of worship service, we recognize also the social dimension. The healing of divided communities and nations, and the healing of the earth itself, have their place alongside the healing of broken bodies, hurt minds and wounded hearts, and of the hurts and divisions within ourselves. Our prayers are complementary to the work of medicine and other forms of healing, which are also channels of God’s loving and transforming purpose.
During the prayers of intercession for healing, we are invited to name particular people, places and situations in our prayers. We do this because each person and situation is known to God, not as a problem to be solved, but as a focus for God’s acceptance and love. We are not seeking to change God but to change the world, and we trust God that our prayers will be answered, although we do not know when or how healing will happen.
