Risen With Healing In His Wings Isaiah 35:1-10 Malachi 4:2 Psalm 146 Matthew 8:1-17, 11:2-6 December 11, 2016 Third Sunday of Advent Dr. Edwin Gray Hurley If you were a philosopher and someone asked you, What is the most important ingredient to understand yourself and enable you to relate to others? What would you say? If you were a professor of ethics and someone asked you, What is most essential value if people are to learn to live with one another? What would you say? If you were, as most of us are, an ordinary person trying to cope with life s disappointments and successes, hurts and hopes, hardships and healings, and someone asks you, What one attitude is most important for you to get and keep your life together? What would you say? i Questions like these move us beyond vague generalities to what is underlying and motivates us. During Advent we hear these texts of people s and nature s longings, yearnings, looking for that answer. What is it that enables us to keep it together through dark days such as our son Peter in San Francisco experienced recently losing three friends in that awful fire that killed 36 young adults in Oakland, or that arsonist fire set by a couple of teenagers in Gatlinburg, which killed 14 people, or the fire that destroyed our friend Max Garza s apartment and claimed his little puppy, or struggles with cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer s that a number of us face? The texts we hear point to caring as that answer. Call it empathy, compassion; others who care, God who cares. Our son, Peter was helped last week by gathering with friends who cared. Max has felt your care since his fire. When we care, healing is on the way. I In a desert of exile, a dry barren wilderness, suddenly the crocus blossoms into a garden, because God cares. Shaky hands and weak knees receive strength; strength, because God has come. Here is your God. Because God cares: blind eyes are opened, deaf ears are unstopped, cripples leap, and speechless sing for joy. John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus, has been arrested and put in prison. In his grim circumstances he is having second thoughts. Was all his harsh preaching, calling for repentance, the right thing to do? With Jesus now on the rise, he wonders, is he really the one I thought? Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? This is the same John who, in his mother Elizabeth s womb leaps for joy when pregnant Mary walks into the room carrying prenatal Jesus in her womb. This is the same John who, when Jesus appears at the Jordan River as a young man presenting himself for baptism, says, It is I who should be baptized by you, but now, in his difficult circumstances, John, wonders? Jesus answers simply, Go tell John what you hear and see. Look around, listen. Experience the caring. Healing is happening. Broken people are being made whole.
2 The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Just before Jesus answer, Matthew s Gospel records a series of nine miracles one after the other. We heard three of them. Interestingly these miracles come right after Jesus finishes his Sermon on the Mount, which we studied this fall; Jesus core teaching. It is as if after having told the words of kingdom caring, Jesus now demonstrates the actions of kingdom caring. He shows them what caring looks like when God and God s kingdom show up. We hear how he cares for three distinctly different persons, each of them an outsider - a leper, a servant of a Roman soldier, and a woman. Because he cares, Jesus touches and heals a leper, considered an untouchable outcast. Jews had very strict laws against touching lepers. Lepers had to live separately, outside the gates of all towns away from all people. Jesus cares enough, and is courageous enough to reach out and touch this man, and instantly he is healed. Because he cares, Jesus speaks healing words upon the servant of a Roman soldier, a centurion who is so convinced that Jesus is the real thing, and who knows all about the chain of command and obedience, so he knows all that is necessary for healing to occur is for Jesus to say the word. Jesus does and, even though the Gentile outsider servant is in another place, healing occurs then and there. That very hour the servant is healed. Finally, because he cares, Jesus enters the house of Peter s mother-in-law, yes, Peter was married, and women had little standing in that culture. Jesus finds her lying on her bed, sick with a fever. Jesus reaches out and touches a woman - her hand and the fever leaves her and she arises and begins to serve them, doing what disciples do. The Bible at its essence tells us there is meaning and purpose in the world and the universe because there is a God who cares, who orders all things. We may, like John, be in the midst of great difficulties, but hold on, God cares and has people who care. Isaiah says in another place, Thus says the Lord who created the heavens (he is God), Who formed the earth and made it. (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited!) There is no other god besides me, a righteous God and Savior; Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. ii II Advent is a time to look and listen for this God, to seek signs of his coming and presence among us; a time to show through our actions that we care. Stories of Jesus coming and birth are filled with mysterious heavenly messengers called angels who come to announce what God is
3 planning to do. Uncle Zechariah, mother Mary, earthly father Joseph, shepherds in the fields, all receive mysterious visits by these heavenly angels who tell them God is coming near. For God does care and has not forgotten his creation. Angels call them to get ready and be receptive. We do not know what an angel looks like. They are usually described as awesome fearful semi-divine beings with wings. When the angel appears to the shepherds in the field they are sore afraid! Terrified! There are those cherubim angels God commands to stand sentinel over the Ark of the Covenant in the Wilderness Tabernacle, guarding, the tablets of the Law given to Moses that were placed in that Ark. As time goes by, it is not enough for God Almighty to be up there remote, removed in his Tabernacle. The Psalmist in Psalm 80 cries out, O Thou who art enthroned upon the cherubim, Shine forth, stir up your might, and come to save us! Come here where we are hurting and broken and in pain! Come and help us! Come and save us! This past week I ran across a little verse in Malachi. I knew the verse more from the carol, Hark the Herald Angels Sing than from the prophet Malachi. In the carol set to Felix Mendelssohn s music, Charles Wesley includes in the third stanza, Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings. iii Healing in the wings of the newborn Savior King. The phrase jumped out at me. That is what this season and this visit of God to our planet brings; light, life, healing in Jesus wings. Wesley drew this image from the last chapter of the last book in the Old Testament. In Malachi 4:2, three verses from the very end, we hear, For you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. It is a delightful image of leaping and dancing and frolicking, once the wings of the sun s healing have reached God s people. Think Chick Fil A and Dancing Cows! A wonderful, playful, joyous image. Dr. Greg Chapman was kind enough to text me a picture of a cow dancing frenetically! In Malachi the word is sun as in s-u-n, not s-o-n. The prophet is speaking initially of simply the coming of light. In Egyptian and other ancient Middle Eastern religions images of light and the rays of the sun in the sky are associated with the presence and power of the Divine. Darkness equals danger and death. Light equals safety and salvation. Christians later looking back on this prophecy saw here an elusive image of the s-o-n, Jesus. III Here is my point: in a world of suffering and sorrow, sickness and sadness, we hear the promise of a Savior, One coming who cares. The prophets point to him. They offer up these wondrous images of wholeness, well-being, and healing wings, because Jesus is coming. Then in the Gospels, with these healing miracles, Jesus touches sick, wounded, broken people, and they are made well. Matthew quotes Isaiah 53, He took our infirmities and bore our diseases. Not just our sins but our diseases. Jesus takes our diseases, our infection. Ultimately he takes our death and through him death dies. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
4 Our bulletin cover today portrays an original painting Dr. Larry Michael painted of an angel he saw in Lviv, Ukraine last May. It is a jarring image. Not the sort of chubby cherub or tall noble guardian with bright wings we normally imagine. This broken wounded angel, hidden in the bell tower of a church for 200 years, is lacking legs, feet, hands, and wings, no wings, and has a damaged face. This is an imperfect angel. This is an angel like us, in need of the healing wings only Jesus the Savior can bring. Only through him can we walk, and leap and dance. Only through him, lepers are healed, sick servants made well, mothers-in-law are relieved of their fever and enabled to serve the community. Only through Jesus our brokenness is made whole. Only through him healing comes. In Graham Greene s classic novel, A Burnt Out Case, an eminently successful famous man gives up on life. He becomes cynical about his success and achievements. His marriage fails. He wants to escape as far away as possible from everything and everybody. He ends up at a leper colony, as far from civilization as he can get. There he hopes to end his days in oblivion. Then on that colony a leper unintentionally brings this man a sense of meaning. The leper hobbled about with no fingers or toes, unable to speak any language other than his tribal dialect. Because he was useless to anyone, the man in this story takes the leper as a kind of companion, and, out of this strange caring relationship for one less fortunate than himself, comes to a renewed sense of his own identity as a human being. In the story, the leper s name is Deo Gratias. No explanation is given why the leper is named Deo Gratias, but by the end you recognize this speechless, toeless, fingerless leper is in truth The Grace of God following around this burnt out old cynic. iv Here this leper, actually the Grace of God, finds and follows this broken shell of a man until he recovers his sense of worth and dignity and value as a human being and a child of God. Angels announce God s care, God s compassion; God s coming to save us with healing in his wings. When we open our hearts and eyes and ears and minds to welcome and receive this God, this Savior who cares, who takes on himself our diseases, a great transformation occurs. Deserts become gardens. Sadness becomes joy. Sorrow and sighing flee away. In the middle of winter Martin Luther once cried out in an Advent sermon, Summer is near, the trees want to burst forth in blossom. It is springtime. Healing wings are fluttering all around us, because of a God who cares. Can you hear them? Can you see them? Can you feel them? Do you care? Praise ye the Lord of hosts, Sing his salvation, Bless his name, Show forth his praise in his holy house! Rejoice ye heavens, be joyful on earth Rejoice in the face of the Lord,
5 For he cometh. Alleluia v i David B. Watermulder, in The Days of our Years, raises these questions, p.241 ii Isaiah 45:18,22 iii The Presbyterian Hymnal, Charles Wesley, stanza 3 p. 31 iv David B. Watermulder, ibid. p. 243 v Christmas Oratorio, Camille Saint-Saens