Four Kinds of Healing

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on October 11, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells Reading for address: Philippians 4: 6-7 When you walk into a doctor’s surgery, there’s a significant difference of expectation on your part and that of the doctor. You tend to see the doctor as the source of explanations, expertise and solutions. The doctor is quickly trying to establish if this is something very serious to be escalated to a specialist, something straightforward that medicine or some other kind of intervention or lifestyle change can address, or something that isn’t really a matter for medicine that you will have to live with or will instead go away by itself. It’s rather different when you request prayer for healing. We get an account in today’s New Testament reading. ‘Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.’ The person who receives the request for prayer isn’t like a doctor, asking ‘What can I do?’ Instead, they’re asking a rather different question: ‘What is the Holy Spirit going to do?’ I want to explore four things we may pray to the Holy Spirit, depending on what we’re going through. I’m giving each of the four conditions a name. Let’s start with the temporary. To have a temporary affliction is to experience a profound degree of pain and suffering, yet one you don’t anticipate is going to be permanent – where the cause of distress is an impersonal disease or an accident or other unfortunate setback. If you break your collarbone, in some cases it can cause lasting damage; but usually it’s several weeks of discomfort and inconvenience. In a different vein, if you learn a close relative has been arrested and is facing a prison sentence, you’re wondering if this is going to be a painful period or a life-changing moment, and you’re considering what you could do to make it less damaging for all involved. The instinctive prayer is, ‘Make it go away.’ But the things I’ve described are not ones that will simply go away. While some situations could benefit from rapid interventions, what this crisis, health or circumstance, simple or complex, makes plain is the difference between fixing a problem and entering a mystery. In a lot of cases, it’s not about solving everything and forgetting all about it; often nothing will be quite the same again. So the prayer is not so much, ‘Fix it now,’ but more like, ‘Show me how reality beyond this moment will be truer, wiser, and deeper than before. If I’m ill, make me more compassionate for others who suffer like this. If I’m out of luck, make me grateful for the countless blessings I constantly take for granted. If nothing is going right, give me patience, resilience and perseverance. Transform my feelings of powerlessness, anger, unfairness and sorrow, empower those seeking to change my situation, alleviate any physical pain, and send me companions in the darkness.’ What is the Holy Spirit doing? We can never truly know, but we can assume at the least it’s making Christ present to us in new ways and being with us even in the worst moments. We’re learning that life doesn’t go in a straight line, and the crooks in the road are at least as important as the smooth parts. Our deepest prayer is that this experience will become a defining one in our life, through which we will come to see God, know ourselves and understand others like never before. A second condition we can call permanent. This is a condition that’s never going to disappear. This can be profoundly inhibiting, like a stroke; an irreversible decline, like dementia; debilitating but episodic, like chronic fatigue syndrome or depression; or ultimately, a terminal diagnosis. To pray in this situation is often to hear conflicting voices in your head. One is tragic. It says, ‘Don’t be silly. This isn’t going to go away. You just need to find a way to accept it.’ The phrase ‘come to terms’ is a metaphor of a bargain, where you haggle with such a condition and it gives you something and you give it something and you shake hands on a deal. But chances are, it actually gives you nothing, or nothing you want. So there’s another, opposite voice in your head that says, ‘Maybe there’ll be a miracle, a medical breakthrough; here, my cousin saw something on a website that said someone in Norway ate scrapings of moose antlers for 14 years and was cured. Maybe if thousands of people prayed 43 times a day it would all be over.’ But you’re not sure you want to live in that world of half-truths and wishful thinking. There could be another voice says, ‘Maybe this is God’s will. Perhaps you deserve it.’ But these could be flailing efforts to avoid facing the randomness that life throws at us. So you may well pray to accept the things you cannot change and change the things you can. There’s a lot of overlap between temporary and permanent, but what you’re struggling with when you’re in a permanent condition is the interface between life and death. What physical, mental and emotional healing promises is a foretaste of resurrection, the restoration to life in all its fullness that we anticipate beyond the grave. But this kind of foretaste can only ever be provisional. We will eventually die either way. The extra years we may be given will themselves pass away. The fashionable phrase ‘making memories’ treats memories as commodities that so long as you look after them and put them in the fridge will be more durable than ordinary life. All that’s required is that you take a selfie and share it on social media and there you are, sir, one neatly packaged memory. No one seems to have cottoned on that the whole idea is a form of marketing for smartphones. Photographs aren’t memories. They’re idealised images of the past. ‘Making memories’ can’t stop the march of time. Decline and death is in the DNA of our existence. Permanent conditions mean we experience death by increments – our faculties are diminished, our mobility inhibited, our consciousness more fragile. It’s a brutal thing to say, but perhaps the only way to receive this as a gift is to allow it to puncture the fantasy that we would otherwise live forever. Massive life challenges are anticipations of death. They’re invitations to live within a smaller physical or mental space, and learn to explore that space as still precious, still full of wonder, still valid. And in doing so, perhaps to be more ready for death when it finally comes, because death starts to seem not so much a monstrous and unjust deprivation of a right, but the end of a natural process of taking away things that were once pure gift. The challenged know that those who have a diagnosed terminal illness are not a different breed; because we all have a terminal illness – it’s called life – and we only begin to live when we realise existence is not a right to defend, but a gift we need to enjoy, knowing we’ll one day have to give it back. These are all aspects of grief. I recall a therapist who said of her work, ‘In the end, it’s all grief.’ Grief is the learning to live without what we cannot imagine being without. It’s a training in living without everything. So when we’re challenged, we pray that, as we inch our way through the jungle of pain, loss, anger and dismay, we may even more than previously treasure those things and people that remain, that, limited as our life may be, we may not feel isolation but know God and others deeply with us, and that, when our last hour on earth eventually comes, we’ll have been prepared so well that we’re ready to cross the threshold to live with God forever. A third condition we may call hurt. To be hurt is not just to be impacted by something painful, distressing or uncomfortable, but to know that what you’re experiencing is the result of the action of someone else, who has, for clear or mysterious reasons, of malice, selfishness or neglect, damaged you significantly. To cope with hurt, you need to let go the control that refuses to accept you’ve been wounded, yet find a way not to let it hijack your whole story; you need to work out if holding the person to account publicly or privately is possible or helpful, if the person has any conception of or remorse for what they’ve done, or if any kind of restitution or reconciliation is desirable or achievable; and you need to begin to inhabit a bigger story in which this raw episode is just one element, which you never let become the central truth about you and the world. When we’re hurt, we may pray that the Spirit will tend to our wounds, healing some and integrating others into the texture of a wider if sadder view of the world. We may ask God to steer some process of justice, not under the illusion that a public process will give us what we want, but in the more modest hope that it may provide a necessary statement of harm done and rectification of injury inflicted. We can look to the Spirit not to let our heart harden, that this grievous event or relationship not damage us so deeply that we struggle to engage in our own life or the lives of others with trust and confidence. We can pray, ‘If it can’t be happy, please God, somehow, make it beautiful.’ And finally, closely related but very different, is being wrong. Being wrong means finding yourself in a predicament significantly of your own making – because you’ve messed up, and no one can fix it for you. This is the hardest of the four to talk about, because once, talk of guilt and shame and sin permeated our culture, but now we’re inclined to deny we make terrible mistakes, insisting our parents or the media or our biological make-up are the real culprits. Just as healing can happen, but we need first to accept we’re sick, so forgiveness is always part of how God approaches us – but to receive it, we’ve got to admit we’re in the wrong. That means neither to exaggerate and make the story entirely about us and overstate our responsibility; nor to falsify the story and deflect and pretend we can wriggle out of it. Here our prayer is that we find grace to accept the truth about ourselves and who we are and what we’ve done, because we’re in the end not looking into a mirror to behold shame and disgrace, but gazing into the face of Christ who already knows and still loves and whose Holy Spirit is already working to turn our failures into God’s glories. Those are four kinds of prayer for healing. The temporarily afflicted, the permanently challenged, the deeply hurt, and the undeniably wrong. When we come before God in prayer, we begin to disentangle them, but also sometimes to see the overlaps and elements of one condition appearing in another. Most of all, our prayer is saying, ‘This is the closest thing to my heart; I want to know it’s the closest thing to your heart, O God. My trust is that it will make you closer to me rather than more distant. And my longing is that this not be pointless distress but that it may become part of the story of how you are being with me, others and the whole world.’ Healing isn’t simply about snapping our fingers and asking the Holy Spirit to fix it. It’s about opening our lives and our hearts in expectation and hope that the Holy Spirit will do something new, will show us something true, will give us a glimpse of who we really are and who God will always be, will bring us companions so we are not alone, and will reveal what our life was created to be. And most of all convince us that God is not finished with us yet; and never will be.