Healing Marks. Bruce G Epperly
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of Jesus have always been a part of my life. As a young child growing up in the Salinas Valley of California, I often sat with my mother on Sunday afternoons, watching television and enthralled by the sensual voice and diaphanous gowns of Kathryn Kuhlman as she purred, “I believe in miracles.” I was often startled by Oral Roberts as he slapped people on the forehead and shouted “Be healed.” From these early television healers, I heard testimonies of bodies healed and lives transformed. I learned that God was concerned with healing, and that God was most powerful when we were most vulnerable.
In an era before HIPAA regulations regarding patient privacy, I often accompanied my father, the local Baptist minister in our small town, on his pastoral calls and hospital visits. I was my “father’s boy” and in the course of our pastoral visits or in sitting in hospital waiting rooms, I overheard stories of pain and anguish and listened to my father praying for God’s healing presence to be made manifest in the lives of vulnerable people. Sometimes those prayers were answered and his congregants returned to their previous lives with vigor and purpose; but other times it appeared that God had turned a deaf ear to our pleas or, as we often rationalized, had better things in mind for us. After all, we believed that this life was the front porch to eternity and death was the doorway to everlasting life. But, such explanations didn’t make sense, even to a child, when people survived serious illness and the “better things” involved paralysis, pain, senility, and death. Even as a young child, I wondered how God could be so powerful, and let bad things happen to people I loved.
As a preacher’s kid, I lived in world of celebration and desolation. Looking back at over thirty years of ministry, I now realize how much death and illness defined my father’s pastoral work and how often as a pastor and friend I have sat at the bedside with people facing surgeries and incurable illnesses. In my childhood church and home, we rejoiced in the birth of children and mourned at the sudden death of a young parent, a fatality from an automobile accident on Highway 101, or a cancer diagnosis that meant only one thing in those days – a slow and painful death.
When I was eight years old, my mother began to suffer from depression and what later would be called obsessive compulsive behavior and obsessional ideation. She sought medical treatment, received electro-shock treatments, was hospitalized on two occasions, and struggled bravely, personally and professionally, for the next three decades. Although mental health issues were in the closet in those days, I heard my mother cry out to God in her emotional pain and vulnerability. I still hear echoes of her plaintive cries for a miracle that others – at least on television – seemed to regularly receive with very little effort on their part. I suspect that as the years went by, my mother saw her delicate mental health as being similar to the apostle Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” and like Paul, she soldiered on, returning to college to update her degree and then elementary school teaching for twenty years before retirement. I believe that my mother received a healing – the ability to go on despite her fears and anxiety – although she never experienced a cure or respite from the inner conflicts and phobias that shaped her – and my – day-to-day life. Maybe with Paul, she came to realize that in our weakness we can experience God’s sustaining companionship and strength (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). I know now that only by prayer and trust in God did my mother get up each morning to face the voices of unruly children and her own inner chaos. Though I didn’t realize it at the time – and few children do – my mother was a hero of faithful persistence, fighting her “demons” by the grace of God with all the courage she could muster one moment at a time.
I heard of miraculous cures – described as dramatic and supernatural – from the testimonies televised on Sunday afternoon religious programs. My father even claimed to have taken the diagnosis of a second hernia to God’s “mercy seat,” prayerfully asking God to deliver him from pain and hospitalization. Although he didn’t publicly claim a cure, my dad revealed to me that the pain ceased and the hernia was healed. He gave thanks to God when his physician pronounced that there was no longer any need for the surgery that would devastate our family’s finances and, in those days, debilitate him for several weeks.
As I said earlier, the life of a pastor’s family and pastoral ministry in general is punctuated by occurrences of illness, debilitation, and death. As a young boy, already inclined toward theological reflection and mystical experiences, I pondered in my own naïve way the perennial questions of faith: “What did it mean to say that Mr. Clemons was living on ‘borrowed time?’ Why did the rifle go off just as my classmate Billy Thompson was pulling it out of his father’s car after a day of hunting? Why did the school custodian recover from surgery while a neighbor lady died ‘under the knife?’ Why were our prayers answered in one case, but apparently rejected in another?” I was not content with the typical answers I heard from adults – “it was God’s will” or “God answers our prayers with ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’.” They seemed either evasive or insensitive to my young theologian’s mind. Still, I prayed and continued to be intrigued by the antics and miraculous claims of the Sunday afternoon healers.
In the wonderfully direct way of children, I prayed about everything and often my prayers led to tests of faith, especially as I prayed for concrete events such as retrieving lost baseballs in my backyard, my team’s victory in the World Series, a Sunday school teacher’s recovery from surgery, and for my Mom to feel better. My prayers in those days were simple and without guile, “God help the Pittsburgh Pirates win” or “God help Arnold Palmer make the winning putt,” “Let Mom be happy,” or “Make Mrs. Beebe get well.”
While I never tabulated the results of my prayers, I remember that I was disappointed on a regular basis when my prayers weren’t immediately answered. I hadn’t yet learned to be patient with prayer and to recognize that our prayers are seldom answered in a linear cause and effect manner, but fit into a larger context of what scientists call “quantum entanglement” and ecologists call the “interdependence of life.” Nevertheless, I kept on praying. I couldn’t avoid thinking about prayer, because prominently affixed to our refrigerator door was the motto, “Prayer changes things.” Every time I searched for a snack, I was encouraged to consider the power of prayer! Even to a young child, the kitchen motto begged the question: does prayer have any power at all to transform human life in its painful complexity?
I suspect my experiences mirror those of many other Baby Boomers raised in evangelical and Pentecostal environments. Our lives were saturated with prayer and images of Jesus’ healings. We sang songs like “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “Amazing Grace,” “Just as I Am,” and later “He Touched Me.” Even when we rebelled and left the faith of our childhoods, as many of us did to follow the pathways of Asian religions, countercultural lifestyles, and political protest, we still had a fascination with mysticism, prayer, and paranormal experiences. You might say that my interest in healing was bred to the bone in that Baptist parsonage, and that regardless of how far I wondered from my childhood faith, I was still a God-believing Baptist child at heart. Although my personal and professional desire to understand Jesus’ healings would evolve in the context of learning spiritual practices related to traditional Chinese medicine, yoga, Transcendental Meditation, alternative and complementary medicine, and reiki healing touch, every step in my global healing adventure led me closer to claiming as an adult the importance of Jesus’ healing ministry and the power of the New Testament healing stories to transform peoples’ lives.
As I entered graduate school and prepared for the ministerial and teaching professions, I no longer viewed the healings of Jesus from the perspective of televangelists like Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman or their successors Benny Hinn and Richard Roberts. While I began to doubt the integrity and veracity of many of the televangelists and their accounts of miraculous cures, I knew that some of the vulnerable and simple people in their healing lines experienced temporary, if not long term changes, in their overall well-being. In contrast to the spectacular claims and gaudy sets of the televangelists, I rediscovered the importance of Jesus’ healing ministry in simple acts of compassion, prayer, and healing touch. The healing stories of Jesus’ ministry came alive to me not as supernatural violations of the cause and effect processes of nature or as magical changes we could instantly call upon by our prayers or force of will, but as images of hope that inspired me day after day to seek wholeness and healing for myself, those whom I loved, strangers, and world