It is Done to You as You Believe

Well, I'm sure that many of you have heard of places like Lourdes, in France, and Medjugorje in Bosnia, maybe some of you have been to Lourdes or Medjugorje. These are places where millions of people from around the world make spiritual pilgrimages, going there in hope of receiving a healing miracle. ​

Well, I'm sure that many of you have heard of places like Lourdes, in France, and Medjugorje in Bosnia, maybe some of you have been to Lourdes or Medjugorje. These are places where millions of people from around the world make spiritual pilgrimages, going there in hope of receiving a healing miracle. 

A few years back, a group of 20 of us from Douglas UCC went to another healing place here in the United States. We went to a place called Chimayo. In New Mexico. It is known as the Lourdes of North America. One million people each year go to Chimayo with the hope of receiving a healing miracle, and when our group was there, we went into a room where there were literally thousands of crutches, leg braces, wheelchairs and canes that were left behind by people who received healing at Chimayo. 

Our group went into a little basement crawl space underneath the chapel, and each of us was able to take home some soil from beneath the chapel in Chimayo, soil said to have sacred healing qualities. People have rubbed that soil on ailments or even ingested it. And they claim to have been healed of their illnesses, even of cancer. 

So my question for you this morning is, are these places for real?  I mean, what's really going on here? 

Now I share this with you today because obviously, in our gospel reading, which I just read for you, for the second Sunday after Pentecost, we hear of two healing miracles, a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years, and a synagogue leader’s daughter who appears dead. 

These are just two of many healing miracles throughout the Gospels. We attribute those miracles to Jesus. But as we just heard, in our Words of Integration and Guidance this morning, Jesus never took credit for any of those miracles. 

Never. Not one time. 

Because Jesus knew it wasn't just about him. It was about the person asking for healing and the power of their belief. 

So let's look at some other healing miracles in the Bible. When Jesus healed the blind man, he said to him, “Man, your belief has made you whole.” He didn't say, ‘Man, I have made you whole. He said, your belief has made you whole. 

To the centurion who wanted healing for his daughter, Jesus said, “It shall be done to you, according to your belief.” Not ‘it shall be done to you according to me.’ 

According to your belief. 

And in today's story, the woman who touched the hem of His garment – he said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” 

Time and time again, Jesus says something similar. Actually, my favorite line of Jesus's, well I should say one of my favorite lines of Jesus, throughout the Gospels is this one. He said, “It is done to you as you believe.” 

Jesus understood that through the power of our belief, we could heal our lives. Now a few years ago, I shared with you a story about a woman whose name was Louise Hay. Louise Hay wrote her very first book at the age of 60. It went on to become one of the best selling books of all time. The book is called You Can Heal Your Life. Louise Hay was one of the first people to really talk about this mind-body-spirit connection. 

We understand that the mind-body-spirit needs to be in balance. They're all connected. So Louise believed that there was a disease in the body – which she spells in the book, dis-ease – and the mind, body, and spirit are all connected, that there must be some type of dis-ease in the spirit or in the mind. Maybe someone's spirit is dejected. Maybe their mind is thinking thoughts of lack or limitation, or worry. Maybe they're holding grudges, and resentments. 

Louise believed that those afflictions of the mind and the spirit would have an effect on the body. 

Now medical science has demonstrated that she was right. You may have heard of the placebo effect. It's where a doctor gives a patient a fake pill. It's just a sugar pill. It's not real medicine, but the patient doesn't know that. And in most of those cases, that patient gets better. Because it's not just about the pill. It's about the power of their belief. 

Now please don't get me wrong. I am not saying that modern medicine is bad. It isn't! We're so fortunate, we're so grateful that we are living at a time of such medical breakthroughs. But those breakthroughs happened. Because doctors and scientists and researchers believed what could be possible. Where other people thought the impossible they saw the possible, and so did Jesus. 

There are other miracles in the Bible, ones that don't have to do with physical ailments. For example, Jesus, as you know, turned water into wine. And he took five loaves and two fish and fed 5,000 people, and he was able to calm the seas. But notice in all of those other miracles, again, it was about belief. People came to him with limited beliefs, with fear and lack. “Jesus, we don't have enough wine for the wedding! What are we going to do?” Jesus didn't think that way. He thought of abundance, so he was able to turn that water into wine. Same thing with the loaves and the fish, “Jesus, what are we going to do? There are 1000s of people here.a and we only have five loaves and two fish!” 

Limited thinking. Lack. Jesus didn't think that way. And so he was able to multiply the loaves and the fish. 

And the storm in the boat. Remember, they're panicked, “We're sinking!” Jesus didn't think that way. So he's able to calm to seas. 

The power of belief. 

Now, I want to make sure that nobody leaves here today, thinking that Jesus was saying, ‘if you're sick, it's your own fault.’ Louise Hay wasn't saying that either. She received a lot of criticism for that. People would say I have cancer – are you telling me it's my fault? If I would only think better? That's not what she was saying. It's not what Jesus was saying. And it's not what I'm saying. 

Jesus was trying to get us to understand that healing is something that we are a part of. It's something that we take part in. It is done to you, as you believe. Now, when I spoke about this, a few years ago, someone in this church came to me and said, Pastor Sal, you know, my mother died of cancer. And she was a woman who had a very strong belief. She was such a positive person. I don't understand why this happened. And what I said to her is, we don't know that healing didn't take place in your mom. Yes, she wasn't cured physically. But curing and healing are two different things. To cure means to return to the previous state of being, to heal is to emerge into a new state of being. So yes, your mother may not have been cured physically.

But that does not mean that she did not experience healing. 

Throughout the Bible, yes, there were people who were cured physically, but there were many other people who were healed spiritually. 

Now Jesus says in the Gospel – to us – you have the power to heal every affliction and every illness. That's what he said. But most of us don't believe it. We just don't believe it. The great visionary Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you can't, you're right.”  And Albert Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers of our time, said, “There are only two ways of looking at the world. One as if nothing's a miracle, and one as if everything is a miracle.” 

You understand, it's your choice? 

How do you choose to look at the world – through which eyes? Now if you go into our Friendship Hall, you'll see that there's a plaque on the wall. It's been there since 2015. And it's dedicated to the late Joe Pearson. And Joe Pearson used to say to us, whenever he would leave, “Now go and make that miracle happen.” And so that's what it says on the plaque in honor of Joe.

Go and make that miracle happen. 

And those are the words that I'd like to leave with you. As we continue this season of Pentecost, this season where we're focusing on the Spirit at work in our lives, may we be people who believe in miracles. Let us be the miracle workers. For there can be miracles when we believe.

Namaste.

Rev. Salvatore Sapienza


Words of Integration & Guidance 
by Richard Mekdeci   
 
Jesus never took credit for any of the healing miracles depicted in the Bible. The woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment was healed without his intervention. He told her, “Daughter, your belief has made you whole.” In another miracle, Jesus tells a similar thing to a blind man who is healed: “Go, for your faith has made you well.” And, to the man at the pool of Bethesda, Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well?”- indicating that the man had to take part in his own healing. Similarly, the centurion who asked for his daughter to be healed was told, “Let it be done to you according to your belief.” In our current understanding of the nature of God, our relationship with God, and our own nature, we see that healing is not given to us by any outside power or entity. Healing is brought forth or “revealed” according to one’s belief. How does one acquire faith powerful enough to heal oneself? For healing to occur, we need only have the same faith in our own divine nature that we would have placed in Jesus himself. Jesus said, “These and greater things YOU can do.” He knew his job was not to heal but to inspire healing by his example. The healing miracles in the Bible are possible to anyone who has the same faith in themselves to heal as those in the Bible stories had in Jesus to heal them. We are not made whole by some mystical outside power, but by the power of our own belief.

What did you think?

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