Yahweh Rophe, The God who heals
My best childhood friend came from an interesting family. They had huge dogs that the family adored and pampered, but the family didn’t like other people very much. Dogs good, humans bad. These values rubbed off a bit on my friend, and when he was 12 years old, he was sent into a personal crisis. His beloved Great Pyrenees, Bear, was dying. He laid with the struggling dog for days, and he cried out to God to heal the animal. He prayed like he had never prayed before in his life. In fact, he wasn’t a very religious boy, and in the face of suffering and illness, his faith flared up in a unique way. Times of crisis can do this to people. But then, his dog died. My friend was devastated, and his faith has never fully recovered.
The bible says that God is a healer, as we will see in the name we learn about today, and it is important they we understand deeply the implications of this name. If we only understand it in a shallow way, it can leave us disappointed like it did for my childhood friend.
God reveals himself as Yahweh Rophe (pronounced Yah-WEH Rah-fa) after Moses had led the Israelite slaves out of
Egypt, and through the Red
Sea. Immediately after this miraculous deliverance, the nation of more than 1 million people was led into the dry Midian desert. They wandered for three days without water. Their throats were parched, and they wondered if they had been freed from Egypt just to die of thirst in the desert. And then Moses did something wise. “He cried out to Lord” (Exodus 15:25) and miraculously God revealed a piece of wood that Moses threw into a bitter spring that made the water potable. And God said if the Israelites followed him closely, he would protect them from the diseases of Egypt because he was Yahweh Rophe (I AM the Lord who heals you).
Now, why is it that God heals the thirsty Israelites when Moses cries out, but when my childhood friend cries out, his beloved dog dies? Well, certainly Moses was a more likely candidate for an answered prayer than my agnostic 12-yearold friend! But beyond that, God brings his healing in many different ways, and he knows the best times for healing to take place. Trust is required. In our confident, 21st century world, we think of suffering, illness and death as putting God’s faithfulness to the test. But ancient cultures, and the bible, thought that suffering and illness put our faith to test, whether we will continue to believe in God’s promises, that he is a healing God.
What does it mean that God heals? What are we supposed to believe when we say that? God is a God that delights in health, longevity, and life. Illness and death are foreign invaders in God’s creation, and they will one day be completely eradicated. Until that final day, we turn to God when we experience illness, asking for courage to face it, and if our hearts desire, deliverance from it. Sometimes God heals us of our diseases. And he does it in many different ways. It can be through a miracle, like I experienced from a medically incurable disease at age 21. It can be through repentance from sin“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (Jam 5:16). It can be through our natural immune response, which is simply amazing that
God made our bodies to be able to heal themselves. It can be through medicine, or an operation.
When praying for a sick person, I often pray, “God, you are The Great Physician, and the doctors and nurses are your helpers, please bring your healing to (person’s Name) through the medical professionals they see.”
But ultimately, because of the curse of sin and death, in this temporal life, we are fighting what J. R. Tolkien called “the long defeat.” Death will come to us all. But God is still a healer. And ultimately the healing that he promises to impart to us through faith in the death of Jesus, is an eternal, spiritual healing. When we believe, we are healed of the eternal sickness of sin, and that justification will one day manifest in an eternally healthy body at the resurrection of the dead.
So if Yahweh Rophe decides to heal us, or our loved ones, in this temporary life, we rejoice in that gift. And if, in his perfect wisdom, he decides to withhold his healing for that last day, we give thanks in hope, that even through sickness and death, God can impart his everlasting healing. Together in the journey, Father Cam Lemons
(Father Cam Lemons serves at St. Timothy’s Anglican Church. Service is at 9 a.m. on Sunday at 700 Hobson St. in Bishop. He also serves at Trinity Memorial Anglican Church in Lone Pine. The service there is at noon at 220 N. Lakeview Road. For more information, go to StTimothysBishop.com.)
What is the holiest season of the Church Year?
Perhaps that seems an inappropriate question. After all, each season in the annual cycle we observe has its distinct spiritual character. There is the anticipation of Advent, the glorious rejoicing of Christmas, the exuberant triumph of Easter, and the resounding power of Pentecost. But what season invites us more than any other to a repentant reflecting, to a changing of the patterns of our lives, to a new dimension of devotion? That season is Lent, the period of preparation for the celebration of the resurrection of our Lord on Easter Day.
Each year on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the liturgy of the Church calls us to begin “a holy season of prayerful and penitential reflection,” when “our attention is especially directed to the holy sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The words used in the Ash Wednesday rite of the Lutheran Service Book Agenda also remind us that “from ancient times the season of Lent has been kept as a time of special devotion, self-denial, and humble repentance born of a faithful heart that dwells confidently on His Word and draws from it life and hope.”
Each of the seasons of the church year is observed and celebrated, but Lent, and only Lent, is “kept.” The holy season of Lent invites us to be “keepers” – the people of God who keep the fast, keep the silence, and keep the focus throughout this singular season.
The custom of keeping the fast in Lent has been part of the holy observance of the season from its very beginnings. The biblical precedent for this custom is reflected in the very first hymn in the “Lent” section of Lutheran Service
Book (LSB). The hymn writer, Claudia Hernaman, starts with a reference to the time of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. She begins: “O Lord, throughout these forty days You prayed and kept the fast” (LSB 418, LW 92). In the final stanza of the hymn, however, she makes a thoughtful transition; she writes: “Be with us through this season, Lord.”
What Hernaman skillfully does is link the 40 days of Lent with the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness in prayer and fasting, with the inference that for those who would follow Jesus, Lent is a parallel experience.
The idea of the special nature of the 40 days is reflected in the English word quarantine, which has come to connote a time of separation from, and special attention to, the daily sequence of activity for the restoration of health and well-being. For Christians in previous centuries, the quarantine of the 40 days of Lent included going without regular meals for a period of time. That custom is still observed in various parts of Christendom today.
(Grace Lutheran Church is located at 711 N. Fowler St. Bishop. Sunday services are at 10:45 a.m. Mammoth Lakes Lutheran Church is located at 379 Old Mammoth Road, Mammoth. Sunday service us at 8:45 a.m. For more information, call (760) 872-9791.).)