Today's Sydney Morning Herald has a sad item (http://www.smh.com.au/world/mother-of-dead-girl-sickness-was-test-of-faith-20090729-e0eh.html) about a woman whose 11 year old daughter died of diabetes while her parents prayed. They believed the girl's sickness was due to a bad relationship between themselves and another couple from the church.
I am horified when I read such things.
I have seen a small number of dramatic healings after focused prayer in my 45-odd years as a Christian.
- My brother recovered overnight from an infection which had been scheduled for scarring surgery the next day.
- Our former church secretary was on his feet two days after surgery expected to keep him off his feet for ten days.
- I began recovering from pneumonia the night when our church prayed for me at a specially scheduled meeting they forgot to tell me about.
- A woman with diagnosed advanced bladder cancer was found to have no tumours when she presented for surgery the day after extensive prayer for her. She was not a believer herself.
Of course, we have prayed for people and been pleased that their recovery seemed to speed up, but that's not something you can measure. We still pray, trusting that the Lord who loves us will do something good.
Sometimes the "something good" has not been physical healing, but perhaps confidence to get on with life despite the illness, or a better diagnosis, or a seemingly coincidental link up with a different specialist.
Often the only thing we see is that the person feels supported, knowing that people care. I don't think that's an unimportant consequence.
But this news story is an example of lethally evil religious wrong-headedness.
First, why should the child, who had no role in the parents' conflicts, be the one who suffers? Surely the disconnect between supposed cause and consequences should have made the parents think twice!
Second, how could such serious symptoms be proportionate to the offence of bad blood between two families? Why didn't the parents ask themselves this?
Third, even if the relational problem underlay the child's illness, and the parents were convinced that dealing with it would have a bearing on their daughter's recovery,why didn't they contact the other family, make arrangements to meet and sort out the conflict, and take the child to hospital?
A faith which does not include trusting in other people, including professionals, seems to me to be a pretty hollow and meaningless faith for people claiming to be Christian, for all its appearance of "spirituality". Surely the whole idea of the incarnation is that God was manifest in a human being, and our faith is in that human being. Christian faith is not airy-fairy, but about a real human, coming into a precise period of history and being God with us. It is a human faith.
But I can't avoid going further and wondering what role the State itself has in this whole sad issue.
With the woeful state of public health care in the US, do people turn to "faith healing" cults out of fear that they will not be able to obtain proper health care through the system when they need it? I certainly see too many on the religious right in the US who are so vehemently opposed to universal health care that I do wonder where the bottom line lies: who stands to gain and who to lose if such a system comes in?
If my guess is right, that people take to religious answers when the state fails to provide basic common care, then the US itself has to take some responsibility for the death of Madeline Neumann of Wisconsin.
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