Starting in Lent, on the third Sunday of the month we will be starting at 9:30 AM a healing rite before church begins. I cannot stress how many people over the year and a half that I have been your Pastor have come to me seeking prayers for healing. Many of your fellow parishioners are going through varying degrees of illness. Many of them have made successful surgeries and treatments and now enjoy their lives. Others are still on that road of diagnosis and treatment. The church has an answer for those who seek prayer for their infirmities and the answer is a healing rite.

The healing rite is the church’s answer to those seeking God’s loving hand to come upon them and comfort them and even grant them hope in their sufferings. Included in the rite is prayer, anointing with oil and laying on hands. These symbolic gestures invoke very old traditions as well as comforting with very earthly elements. The use of holy oil to anoint our foreheads invokes the smells of creation; the oil is olive oil infused with a scent, usually balsam. The laying on of hands invokes the feeling of power. Laying on of hands is an ancient tradition used not just by the church but many traditions to symbolize the transfer of power from one person to another. In this case it is the transfer of healing power from God to the sick person. Finally, prayer grounds us. Asking God to give us hope and to sustain us through our suffering is the prayer we lift up to God in the healing rite.

The entire healing rite is a means of inviting God into our hearts and our minds when we are suffering and when we feel weak. Inviting the Spirit to dwell in us gives us hope; it gives us hope that we are loved by God and it gives us hope that even come death we know that salvation ultimately is ours through our Lord Jesus Christ, who both restored the sick to health and who even gave life to the dead.

The Anointing of the Sick is not a rite reserved soley for those who are suffering from the most serious or gravest of illness. It is not even reserved for those who are sick; the rite is open to any who feel in need of healing for any reason whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. This ancient rite had been going on in the church as early as the first disciples of the church. We read in James 5:14-15; "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven." The Lutheran church has been disciplined to carry on through its traditions the biblical tradition of Anointing of the sick.

As we gather together before worship on the third Sunday of the month, let us gather in silence and at 9:30 come forward to receive the anointing so that we too may receive the prayer of faith and the forgiveness of sins. Pastor Weber

Blessings!

Pastor Weber