God is Creator (Father) and Redeemer (Son), but God is also Sustainer (Holy Spirit). God's sustaining nature always seeks to heal, to restore each creature and the entire creation to its original state of wholeness. Take time this week to explore with your congregation the diverse ways God has brought healing into your life together - either through other people, relationships, or the created cosmos surrounding you.

It has been estimated that nearly twenty percent of the gospel narratives are devoted to healing. Indeed a case could be made for arguing that the entire Second Testament is one long healing event performed by God - healing the rift that has existed between humanity and heaven. The universe was intended to operate harmonically, with all creation intimately and intricately coordinated into a cohesive whole. But something went amiss. The biblical narrative is an attempt to explain that "something," and to record God's creative response to a now imperfect, unbalanced world.

For humans an out-of-balance existence is most commonly experienced as a state of illness. Both our physical and our spiritual natures deteriorate when they fail to resonate with God's harmonics. Health and wholeness remain the root chord of creation, but human freedom has enabled us to pound out our own distressingly clashing accompaniment to this universal symphony. Thus we experience disease, injury, anxiety, stress, psychosis, and death.

Thankfully, Romans 8 reminds us that the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ are continually making intercession for us, and in words that are too deep to be uttered. Honest physicians realize that the only reason a doctor can produce health is because the human body is biased in favor of health. The universe is prejudiced in our favor, and its powers are working on our side. Albert Einstein used to say: "When a baby drops its rattle out of a crib, not only does the rattle fall to reach the earth, but the earth rises imperceptibly to meet the rattle." We don't have to work at seeking God's favor. God's favor is already built into the structure of the universe.

Theology used to be referred to as "The Queen of the Sciences." But modernism fell so madly in love with quantitative analysis that for a century we have denied the "scientific" validity of anything that we could not weigh, measure, or slide under a microscope. Post-modern science, however, has moved beyond the mere numbers games of modernism and now stands perched on the edge of a whole new way of looking at the universe. In many cases scientists have now demonstrated more trust in the qualitative nature of existence than have our theologians.

Often it has taken science to awaken Christians to the awesome power of thoughts and beliefs to shape our behavior and destiny. Within recent years there has been a renewed appreciation for the way ancient peoples thought of words as concrete and powerful forces, almost material entities. In the formula that Einstein believed unlocked the secrets of the universe, E=mc2, energy and matter are different expressions of the same fundamental reality. The energy of our thoughts, our meditations, our prayers and our contemplations takes physical shape: words become flesh. Thoughts and meditations and prayers and contemplations are the most revolutionary acts one can perform in life - for good or ill. "Be careful what you I pray for, " the old saying goes. "You may get it." Or in the words of the current country-and-western hit single "Unanswered Prayer," thank God for "the gift of unanswered prayer."

"It was done to them as they expected." This biblical phrase sets the stage for mindbody ("psychosomatic") medicine. Diseases of the body can often be directly related to attitudes of the spirit. Why else do the largest number of hospital deaths occur at 3 a.m.? Why else do so many people die within six months of retirement? Why else do the large percentage of accidents happen to a small percentage of the population? Why else does the same virus cause leukemia in one patient and mononucleosis in another? Why else do some die in an epidemic and others escape?

Healing, knitting together fragile bits of our fractured bodies and souls, remains God's most basic on-going creative work in the cosmos. While God continues to intervene as divine physician, God has already provided us with a universal vaccine for our ills in the principle of love and the person of Jesus Christ.