February 8, 2009 Sermon

Resting, Restoring, Re-tuning
(Isaiah 40:21-31; I Corinthians 9: 16-23; Mark 1: 29-39)

Reverend Sally Harris

It is somewhat reassuring that even in these ancient texts people needed to be reminded of how to rest, restore and re-tune their lives so as to be in harmony with the One who sits above the circle of the earth. These favorite verses of mine were written in the context of chaos and busyness. I think that is why they speak to me of wholeness and well-being. These verses challenge the very context in which we find them. They invite the hearers to reevaluate their relationship with self, others and God. These verses invite us to rebalance our relationships by taking note of what story we take time to read, what reflections we take time to share, the prayers we take time to pray and the witness we bear in our lives and through this community to the God we choose to worship. And so to face the chaos of our world, to bear witness to a different reality we come together singing our hope and listening to ancient words that reveal a present day truth;

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is God who sits above the circle of the earth…

The Jewish exiles in Babylon were in chaos. There had been yet another war and conquest. The Babylonian Empire, which had existed for only sixty-six years, fell before the invading Persian army. They had swept down from the mountains of what is now Iran and captured the splendid city of Babylon. The conquering leader, Cyrus wanted nothing to do with these Jewish exiles, this foreign minority, so they were sent home to their devastated city of Jerusalem and its temple ruins. To address their anxiety the prophet Isaiah spoke bluntly to the people of God: “What kind of a god do you think we have?” The answer comes from a striking series of rhetorical questions ending with a solid and mature response of faith: those who wait upon God shall renew their strength… they shall mount up with wings like eagles.

This kind of waiting; this kind of resting; this kind of restoring is not passive, but an intentional concentration inward, rather than outward. It involves pondering and listening, hoping and trusting, and committing ourselves to God’s action within us and through us. The Hebrew word for “wait” originally came from a word used to mean twisting or binding together, like making a rope. Waiting upon God, resting in God, is not a state of passivity, but one of tension where we are being woven into God’s reality. Where we are strengthened to live boldly and faithfully, connected to a reality truer than the world’s.

The times were also chaotic when the gospel of Mark was written. It was the time leading up to the Jewish revolt - when the people could "feel the war drums beating" as the Roman armies marched toward Jerusalem. The story of Jesus is told against this backdrop. A story woven with the truth of how God breaks into the chaos of our lives. How with praying hands this beloved of God lifted up the chaos illness brings into a home. How this One named Jesus walked the countryside protesting the illnesses of his day by naming the demons and casting them out. Where did he find the strength, the courage to face all that crowded into his life? Jesus was full of the noise of his day – the Roman occupation, the poverty, the injustice, the sick… so much to do… He chose to engage the noise in his own time and in his own way – a way of prayer. In the silent moments Jesus was able to maintain a sense of the reality of God even in the noise of life. In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.

We are called to wholeness and healing. We respond to this call in various states of disrepair. Some of us are broken, battered, and world-weary. Others show a little road wear, while some appear pristine on the surface. The truth is that all of us bear the scars of this life in some form or another. Even the people who look so calm and perfect on the outside often deal with deep wounds the world doesn’t see.

The promise of our story is that the hand of Jesus is always outstretched, as it was for Peter’s mother-in-law. Jesus waits for us to grasp his hand so that we, too, can be lifted up to realize our full potential as disciples, as people of God. And we also know that healing doesn’t often occur as it did for Peter’s mother-in-law. In fact we know that Jesus didn’t heal everybody he met. Of that crowd who stood at the door of the house, he healed many but not all. And even for those who were healed, it was only temporary. The lame that danced may later have become deaf, and the deaf who heard may later have become blind, and all of them were destined to die. But healing is not just about disease processes – making us disease-free. Gospel healing, gospel preaching is about restoring God’s presence upon a world that has broken loose. Jesus’ claim that the realm of God is upon us is about witnessing to a different reality; a reality that claims a God who is re-centering a world that has lost its true centre, a world whose balance and equilibrium is out of kilter. And the author of the gospel of Mark declares that suddenly all that is disordered and amiss in God’s world is being put right. Strongholds of evil are being overthrown as God’s realm takes hold through the person of Jesus the Christ. Healing in the gospel is not simply about taking away pain. It is about God in Christ reclaiming, restoring God’s world from other forces that seek to take it over.

So how is God’s world restored? Well the answer we want is obvious. Healing happens when symptoms are taken away. The blind see again. The deaf hear. The grieving are comforted. The troubled find peace. And that may of course happen - through wonders of medicine or through the unexplained intervention of the divine. But healing and wholeness may also be a defiant refusal to be dominated and ruled by the reality of our suffering and the actuality of a chaotic world. As Desmond Tutu declared: “It is a moral universe, where good is stronger than evil, where love is stronger than hate, where light is stronger than darkness.”

There is freedom in this statement. It is the freedom that Paul writes to the church in Corinth. ‘I am free from all people.’ And that makes him wonderfully free of his external circumstances. ‘To the Jews I behave like a Jew; to the Gentiles like a Gentile… to the weak I become weak.’ He will not be ruled or dominated by anything. He has been liberated from external conditions and constraints by the reality of Jesus’ outstretched hand. Paul lives ‘as if’ the whole world is restored in the harmony of God’s presence - nothing else is going to rule it - not his suffering; not the chaos in the world, not even the constraints of the brokenness and vulnerability of the human condition. Paul lives ‘as if” all is restored. Resting in the presence of God, living life in the restoring work of God’s presence we find a way of re-tuning our life song.

Someone explained it this way: when a guitar is in tune you hear a harmonious sound. But when a string goes out of tune it sounds jarring; off key, dissonant. There are two ways to restore harmony. You can re-tune the string; putting right the thing that is wrong. Or you can re-tune all the other strings around the offending one. That way you strum it and once again you hear a different but no less harmonious sound. [Rev. Dr. Lance Stone]

And so it is with us. Healing may be a case of putting right the thing that has gone wrong, and that’s great. But it may be a case of re-tuning our lives around our loss, our suffering, our sickness so that our lives are restored to God’s presence of harmony. Perhaps you can think of examples where you have witnessed that - people who are afflicted and assailed and yet somehow their lives are re-tuned around their affliction and they exhibit that extraordinary, almost defiant harmony. It is beautiful to behold.

Indeed our world, our church, our lives may be in chaos but as D.H. Lawrence wrote, "The great virtue in life is real courage, that knows how to face facts and live beyond them." May we live in the promise of God’s harmony where the light is stronger than the darkness – resting, restoring, re-tuning … Amen

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