30th Sunday of Ordinary Time - October 23, 2021

When I hear stories like the one about Bartimaeus, I often think those people who walked with Jesus on earth were the lucky ones.  They only needed to have faith and call out to him to be healed.  But as I sat with this Gospel for the past several weeks to prepare this reflection, I began to realize we might be the luckier ones.  To explain this, I want to explore with you what it meant to ‘have faith’ then versus now and the power of modern-day prayer.   
First, let’s explore the notion of having faith during Christ’s lifetime.  You and I know ‘the rest of the story,’ as Paul Harvey would say.  We know about the resurrection – but those living between 4 BC and AD 30 did not have that benefit.  They had to have faith based on one rabble-rouser’s interesting deeds but agitating ideas.
And we must remember, Jesus was a radical.  He intentionally made people uncomfortable as he confronted their understanding of God.  This was a man who had the audacity to walk into synagogues and challenge their religious traditions and beliefs.  He walked among the down-trodden, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the contagiously ill, all the while rebuking the spiritual guidance of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  His protests weren’t just comments like ‘hey, you might consider making this change in your rules . . . .’  No, he flat out told them they were wrong – actually, hypocritically wrong.  He criticized their ostentatious garb, their habit of putting themselves at the head of the banquets, their insistence of being treated like royalty, and their temple rules and practices that exploited the poor.  He made outrageous claims, turned the laws upside down, and chastised their trusted hierarchies and politics.
Would you just blindly follow the word of someone like that?  If someone burst through our church doors or hopped onto our Zoom meeting and interrupted our beloved spiritual guides of Marty or Corein during their homily to tell us that we were getting things wrong, would you turn and follow that person out of our faith community?   
True, Jesus performed miracles – but not many in the grand scheme of things – not one a day or one in every city he visited.  And what if you lived at that time but didn’t have the opportunity to see an actual miracle?  What if you only heard the rumor that some drifter over in Jericho helped a blind beggar see again? Would you be quick to believe?  
Let me illustrate my point by modernizing the story.  Imagine with me that a Muslim woman known to be roaming the earth recently entered St. Paul, MN and news stories and rumors are spreading that she can turn rocks into bread, heal Covid 19 patients by simply gazing into their eyes, and purge hatred from a racist riot by merely passing in their midst, to name just a few of the stories surrounding her. But you haven’t seen any of that with your own eyes and now you are hearing her say that Muhammad believes today’s Christians are misinformed and misguided elitists, and if they will just mend their ways and journey with her, she can promise a time of great peace and everlasting joy will be forthcoming.  Will you try to gain an audience with her so you can learn more?  Will you study what she has to say?  Will you drop everything to follow her?  It’s not that easy, is it?  Bartimaeus and others like him must have needed a profound and unwavering faith in Christ’s lifetime.
But we are fortunate today because we do know the rest of the story.  Christ’s death and resurrection puts the entirety of his story with all his words and deeds combined into a clear perspective for us.  We don’t have to wonder.  We’ve seen the outcome.  We can have faith.  
Still, having faith isn’t always easy.  In fact, in a tired and hurting world where so much seems to be going poorly right now, our faith can be tested daily.  Plus, we can’t just approach Jesus as Bartimaeus did.  He only had to call out loud to get Jesus’ attention and he got instant satisfaction in the form of a miracle.  All you and I have is prayer – a whisper in our hearts – and we’re not always sure it works – or at least works with the speed or desired outcomes we prefer.
But again, I think we are lucky because you and I do know more about that too.  Actually, since the early 1990’s scientists have studied the phenomena of prayer to see if it works. From prestigious hospitals in India and Israel and South Korea, to the stateside Mayo Clinic, Duke University, Columbia University, and a host of others, teams of researchers have used both double- and triple-blind studies to see if intercessory prayer, or praying on someone else’s behalf, has a positive effect. 
This week, I looked at 10 such published studies.  Though each study examined an isolated medical situation (like pre-medical intervention or post-surgery recovery) or a specific medical condition (like addressing infertility or healing blood diseases or repairing cardio-vascular ailments), all investigations followed strict protocols so we now have the results of studies that have included thousands of patients over a 30 plus year span.
Let me explain how this works.  In a randomized, controlled double blind study, patients who receive the same medical treatments are divided into 2 groups, a control group which does not receive intercessory prayer and an intervention group which does receive the intercessory prayers and neither the patients being prayed for nor the doctors treating them knew who was in which group.  A triple blind study is like a double-blind study, but it adds the dimension that the researchers themselves don’t know which group is which, so they are analyzing raw data for group A, B, and C, for example, without the preconceived notions of what they might find. 
I found all of the studies to be fascinating.  Here are just a few conclusions from those reports:

• In a July 2000 publication of an Israeli study that included 3,393 hospital patients with a bloodstream infection between 1990 – 96, researchers concluded “Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.”
• In another study, researchers studied 219 consecutive infertile women, aged 26-46 years, who were treated with in vitro fertilization embryo transfer in Seoul, South Korea. For ½ the group, prayer was conducted by remote prayer groups in the USA, Canada, and Australia. The patients and their providers were not informed about the intervention. The investigators, and even the statisticians, did not know the group allocations until all the data had been collected so the study was randomized, triple-blind, and controlled in design.  In that study, researchers found that the women who had been prayed for had nearly twice as high a successful pregnancy rate as those who had not been prayed for.
• In yet another study, researchers tried to remove the potential placebo effect of someone thinking others might be praying on their behalf, so they studied how well and how fast wounds healed in 22 animals called galagos in the East African Bush.  For 4 weeks, ½ of the wounded animals were prayed over and half were not.  The team of researchers concluded that the prayer group animals had a greater reduction in wound size and a greater improvement in hematological parameters like their red and white blood cell counts and hemoglobin concentration than the control group animals.
• I even remember a study I read long ago that monks did with wine to remove the feature of living creatures altogether from the outcome.  As I recall, monks in a European monastery prayed over ½ of the vats of wine during the fermentation phase and then invited unsuspecting guests to taste test from both groups.  The wines that had been prayed over repeatedly won the taste test, but I was unable to find that study to confirm my memory of it today. 

As you might expect, not every medical study ended in positive results.  Some found that prayer made no difference, but in those cases, researchers highlighted the challenges with studying prayer:  was everyone doing the praying remaining vigilant in the process?  Were their petitions the same?  Did their personal beliefs, religiosity, kindness, or integrity influence the effectiveness of their prayers?  Did the personal beliefs, religiosity, kindness, or integrity of those being prayed for matter? Does it matter if they pray for a group versus an individual within a group?
As in every quality scientific study, the findings always generate new questions to be explored in future studies.  Even the wide array of studies with positive results has new questions to explore:  does it matter if a patient knows in advance they are being prayed for?  Is it possible that someone’s belief that they are being prayed for automatically influences the outcome positively?  Does it matter if the one praying knows the one needing prayers?  But overall, of the 10 medical studies I found, the vast majority found significant benefits to prayer when it was anonymous and remote.  I can only imagine the benefits of telling a loved one you are praying for them, so that it’s personal and close. 
Unlike Bartimaeus who had an immediate answer straight from the source, our modern struggle is to know that the answers to our prayers might not come in the form we most expect.  I’m sure we’ve all heard the contemporary parable of the man who prayed for God to save him from the flood waters.  He rejected the help from 3 different individuals, always insisting that God would be his rescuer.  Having thwarted help from everyone, the man drowned.  When he reached heaven and asked, “God, why did you not save me? I believed in you with all my heart. Why did you let me drown?” God replied, “I sent you a pick-up truck, a boat, and a helicopter and you refused all of them. What else could I possibly do for you?”
We might not recognize the answers to our prayers as quickly and as clearly as those who walked with Christ did, but the good news of today’s Gospel is still our good news too.  This is our story.  Like Bartimaeus, we too can call out for help and have the faith that God will hear us and answer us.  We might not get what we want and when we want it, but we are heard.  Our challenge is to accept the results and still maintain faith along the way.  So, let us use our power of prayer to make the world a better place.  We have so many global challenges to tackled in 2021.  Together, we do, in fact, make a difference.