8.5.07 Christian Reflections on The Secret #6 The Secret to Health
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
The Rev. Dr. David Thompson
August 5, 2007 “Christian Reflections on The Secret” #6 The Secret to Health
It was the Sabbath Day and the Scribes and Pharisees were watching Jesus. Would he heal on the Sabbath Day? If so they would have an accusation against him. According to a variant of St. Matthew, The Gospel according to the Hebrews says that a man with a withered hand came to Jesus asking to be healed. In that Gospel he appears as a stone mason and he says to Jesus: “I was a stonemason seeking a living with my hands; I implore you Jesus, restore me to health that I may not need to beg, in shame!” Jesus knowing the thoughts of the Scribes and Pharisees said to the man: “Stand up and come out into the middle.” And he came out and stood there. Then Jesus said to them: “I put it to you. Is it against the law on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil; to save life or to destroy it?” Then he looked round at them all and said to the man: “Stretch out your hand.” He did so and his hand was healed.
What a moment! And sadly, completely lost on the Scribes and Pharisees, they were furious! Here they were, pillars of a faith that mistakenly believed that not to do good on a holy day, was somehow good. But Judaism taught as Christianity teaches that there are occasions when not to do good, is to do evil. St. James long after Christ’s death adds in an epistle; “Whoever knows what is right to do and does it not, for him it is sin.” That is the controversial context of this amazing miracle.
There are some common elements in the healings of Jesus. He often says, “Your faith has healed you.” He assesses the faith of the people who come to him: a ruler of the synagogue; a centurion who he says demonstrates more faith than anyone in his experience in Israel; a woman with an issue of blood who believes that she only has to touch the hem of his garment to be healed; a leper who returns to give thanks. Look through the passages of Scripture and you will find that there are places where Jesus does not heal because there is no faith in that community. So what does faith have to do with anything?
If you are even a little like me you might have some difficulty with the chapter in The Secret called “The Secret to Health”. I think it suffers from broad generalizations that are not careful enough, that weaken its message here. But I think that we would lose a lot if we just blew it off.
Lewis Carroll is often quoted in his Alice in Wonderland for the following famous quotation: “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age I always did for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” That’s the way I felt the first time I read this section of the Secret!
From the Secret here are six impossible things to believe before breakfast.
· “Love and gratitude can part seas, move mountains and create miracles.” I am familiar with this from the teachings of Scripture so this it a little easier for me.
· “Beliefs about aging are all in our minds.” The Scriptures teach three score years and ten and four score if a person has a strong body. We do age. Is aging just in our minds? Why do we age?
· “You can think your way to the perfect state of health, the perfect body, the perfect weight and eternal youth.” Thinking can be foundational but is that all there is to it? Where is the evidence for “eternal youth”?
· “You cannot catch anything unless you think you can.” Really. What about infectious disease? We can infect test animals in labs by introducing viruses. Can’t we acquire a virus by carelessness or by touching a contaminated surface? What about hereditary disease?
· “I believe and know that nothing is incurable.” We need to unpack that one!
· “Disease is held in the body by thought, by observation of the illness and by the attention given to the illness.” There is a lot of truth here. Is it the whole truth?
But I also wonder that if we are incredulous about these assertions just what we do with the Bible record of miracles? We have the record of a hand that is withered being healed spontaneously, lepers healed, a blind man seeing after he has paste put on his eyes by Jesus, or a man with mental health problems sitting clothed and in his right mind at the touch of Jesus. What do we really make of these things? Did Jesus really walk on water and still a storm and feed five thousand people from five loaves and two fishes?
I can remember sitting listening to a sermon in a cathedral where the preacher was saying that the miracles of Jesus were signs that indicated that he was “The Son of God”. They were for his time only. “We can’t do what Jesus did today,” he said. But the Scripture written by Luke as the Book of Acts, records more than six impossible things done by the disciples of Jesus:
· The disciples heal a lame man who sat at the gate of the Temple and was well known for his disability.
· Peter is sprung out of Jail miraculously;
· Peter cures a paralytic at Lydda.
· Peter raises Tabitha back to life at Jaffa.
· St Paul blinds an attendant of the Proconsul Sergius Paulus with the following words: “You enemy of all true religion. Why don’t you stop twisting the straightforward ways of the Lord? Now watch how the hand of the Lord will strike you: You will be blind and for a time you will not see the sun. That instant everything went misty and dark for him and he groped about for someone to lead him by the hand.” What do we make of that?
· St Paul is bitten by a poisonous snake that attached itself to his hand. The inhabitants of Malta expected him to swell up and die but St Paul was just fine. So they thought he was a God…
Let’s remember that St. Luke was a trained physician and recognized a disease and six impossible things before breakfast when he saw them. I think that it is patronizing if we say that these were primitive people who lived in a magical world. I think they knew a miracle when they encountered one just as we would today. Sure the physicians’ treatment methods of that day were of course quite different from ours and today to us would be either bad medicine or just incredible for their naivety, except possibly for two factors, that still remains with us: Faith and the placebo effect.
Bernie Sigel in his Love Medicine and Miracles has one of the best documented cases on record of the placebo effect. A man dying in the hospital with cancers that are both inside and outside his body some the size of oranges is given a drug that he is told is a new cancer fighting drug. He takes the drug and is miraculously cancer free. The tumors all disappear. But then the man happens to read a medical magazine that debunks the new drug saying it had no effect on cancer. Once again the man believed what he was told and the cancer reappeared and he died.
Dr. John De Martini of The Secret Team, a Chiropractor and a bachelor of science says: “The placebo sometimes has the same effect, if not a greater effect, than the medication that is supposed to be designed for that effect.” The Secret Team does not in any way want to negate medicine, only to enlist the power of the mind to heal.
One of the best and simplest things The Secret Team says comes from Dr. Ben Johnson physician. He says: “We have a thousand different diagnoses and diseases out there. They are just the weak link. They are all the result of one thing: stress. If you put enough stress on the chain and you put enough stress on the system, then one of the links breaks.” Rhonda Byrne says: “All stress begins with one negative thought. One thought that went unchecked and then more and more and more came until stress manifested. The effect is stress; the cause was negative thinking…”
What I think we need to do here with this chapter is not blow it off even if some of its content appears farfetched. What I think we need to do is to qualify it. What we might decide to take away from this chapter is the following:
· The mystery of faith in God and the power of mind over our bodies to heal them.
· The importance of stress reduction and the power of intention to heal.
· Whatever the cause of our disease the power of the mind seems to be able to be enlisted in the healing arts. The mind and the immune system are linked through belief and feelings. I think that there is lots of evidence for that.
Study after study shows that faith and prayers do make a difference. That is why here at Westminster, we practice the arts of healing once a month. We also take St. James words literally: “If one of you is ill, he should send for the elders of the church, and they must anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord and pray over him. The prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up again.”
Dr. John Demartini of The Secret Team says, “The word incurable means curable from within.” He says: “I believe and know that nothing is incurable.” What an incredible statement that is! Is there even a grain of truth in it? The problem with this statement for Christians is that we have similar statements in our tradition. Let me just cite one; “With God all things are possible.” For those of us who have difficulty believing this I want to leave it right in the middle of the highway and not rationalize it away. If we deal with it honestly it could change the world! There is an amazing article called Against All Odds by Stanley Englebart from Westport Connecticut that is all about so called “incurable disease”.
This article documents the work of Dr. Steinberg chief of hematology at the Lahey Hitchcock Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He runs gatherings that document cases where the incurable are cured. He asked over a twelve year period of every patient who did so well against formidable odds: “Why do you think you did so well when the medical odds were so against you?”
Fannie Tourinhoe came to the clinic 22 years before this article was written. Diagnosis: Multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow. Survival at the time was a few months to a few years at the most. Her reaction to the prognosis was this: “God will see me through. Last night I read in my Bible: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart… he will direct thy paths.” Steinberg knew that his patient knew little about the physiological nature of her disease, and her faith, though touching, was hardly grounded in reality. But then she added something that startled even him. She said: “And another verse in my Bible said; “It shall be marrow to thy bones.” So you see the Lord is directing this.”
The doctor gently explained that chemotherapy treatment might be able to give her another year or two to which Fannie replied: “However long God wills me.” Twenty years later when Fannie arrived at the conference there were a few who thought that the original diagnosis might have been wrong. Steinberg was ready for that and showed them the x-rays the pathology slides and the lab reports. So a resident doctor asked her; “How then did you mange to beat an unbeatable disease?” 72 year old Fannie replied: “Through faith and religion, simple as that.”
Steinberg says we do see many extremely religious people who do not live beyond medical expectations. But no matter what the outcome I do think faith makes it easier… Instead of being sullen and angry they see it as part of a greater plan.
Lori Greatoprex had a stroke on her wedding day, where a blood clot destroyed part of her brain. Her prognosis was extremely bleak. Surgery was tried but the doctor said, “I am not sure it made any difference”. But Lori worked relentlessly to regain her speech and comprehension. Doctors did not believe that she would recover movement in her right side. Cat scans and MRI’s showed too much damage. Each day she got up and headed for the exercise room where she worked for hours lifting weights and stretching, faster than anyone dreamed possible she regained movement in her fingers and toes, her hands and her feet and finally in her legs and arms. What drove her (and this line could be right out of The Secret or the teachings about keeping faith in the Bible,) she said, “I never thought about the negative. I kept thinking this is going to get better. This is going to get better. In my mind I was going to be fine. It was just a matter of time.”
Three months later she returned to work. In 1994 she ran the Boston Marathon finishing in four and a half hours, raising $2,000 dollars in pledges for stroke victims. Dr. Russell says “I can’t prove Lori’s attitude made a difference, but I believe that there are intangibles at work that no one fully understands.” Faith, The Secret at work, The Power of intention? With God all things are possible? There is no such thing as incurable? Incurable means cure from within?
Dr Steinberg’s favorite case is an elderly man who seven years before was diagnosed with large cell lymphoma. His survival prospects were extremely doubtful. But this elderly man kept beating the odds. On his eighty first birthday there was no sign of a tumor. Yet he still showed up at the hospital to ask if he could do any favors for the staff. “Can I wax your car Doc?” “But Sal you just got over a serious illness. You should be home taking it easy!” “Don’t worry.” came the reply; I’ve got faith in the doctors—and faith in God. What more do I need?
Right after this sermon we will perform a healing service. We follow the Scriptures exactly. Everyone here can help, through our prayers. When people come forward for healing let us all focus our intention in prayer for their healing. Send these prayers from your mind and heart, filling them with your love and gratitude. With God, distance makes no difference. You can come before God on your own account or on behalf of another person who is unable to be present. I am sure from the feedback I and Pastor Garry receive that good things happen at the healing service that we will never understand. I believe with Dr. Russell that there are intangibles at work here. I am sure that healing from God is made possible from our faith and gratitude.
I came across this passage this week from the writing of Alan Cohen that I leave with you: “When nothing else you have done seems to be helping you to walk through a fear, there is always one method to which you always have recourse: Ask God for help. Simply say to God: “God I don’t see any way that I can do this by myself. I open my mind and heart to invite you to step into this situation and do through me and for me what needs to be done to bring about real peace for all concerned.”
Cohen writes: “I can assure you that a prayer like this, sincerely spoken, must be heard and answered.” You are admitting that you need help and acknowledging that God has the power to do for you what you cannot do for yourself, which he most certainly can do. God cannot fail to come to the aid of one of his children whose heart is open to receive healing.
May God heal and bless us all.
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