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"Jesus Will Never Let You Go"
Lent 4 (Healing) March 22, 2009 John 3:14-21 In the Name of Jesus. Amen. Even when everyone else has let you down,
Jesus will never let you go. Once there was a family that lived on a farm. It was a remote farm. No neighbors lived nearby, and they seldom went to town, so the family did most things together. With no other children nearby, the young son and daughter played and worked together. They rode horses and built a tree house, read stories to each other, and simply enjoyed one another’s company. They didn’t know how much they loved each other until one day the young girl became very, very ill. The family got into their truck and drove the long distance into town where there was a small hospital. The children had never been in a hospital before, so this was a frightening experience for them. The doctor was very kind, and he spent a long time examining the girl. Her brother sat in the waiting room, praying “Please, please don’t let anything happen to my sister. Please make her better.” When the doctor came back, he looked very grave. “She has a rare disease,” he said. “She needs a blood transfusion right away, but we have no blood of her type available to us in this small hospital.” They soon discovered that the blood type of the young boy was the same as his sister’s. “The solution would be to use Johnny’s blood,” the doctor told the family. And looking at Johnny he asked, “Would you be willing to give blood to your sister?” The boy hesitated and tears welled up in his eyes. “Well, I don’t know,” he stammered. “Think about it and let me know,” the doctor said. “Hurry up, though. We need to know quickly!” Johnny buried his head in his mother’s lap and cried very, very hard; and then ran out the door of the hospital. “Why he is so hesitant and so frightened?” his parents asked. A short time later, the boy came back into the hospital, and with clenched teeth managed to say, “I’ll do it.” They laid the boy on a table and strapped his arm down. “It won’t be painful,” the doctor assured him. “You’ll only feel a little prick as I put the needle into your arm.” Very quickly the blood began to fill the container. The boy’s eyes were overflowing with tears, but he didn’t cry out loud. The doctor, smiling at the young boy, didn’t understand his fear or anxiety until he heard him ask, “Doctor, how soon will I die?” This story lifts John 3:16-17 right off the page. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…that we might not perish…” The Scriptures are like that. Our God is like that – never content to simply lay on the page, a collection of temporarily inspiring words, a rule book or collection of morality tales, easy to forget as soon as we shut the book and get on with life in “the real world” of sin and hard knocks. In the Opening the Book of Faith class, we’ve learned that God’s Word comes alive to us in three different ways: the Bible is the written Word of God; preaching or other means of talking with another about our faith is the proclaimed Word of God, and Jesus is the living/in-person Word of God. If you want to see what God looks like, translated into “the real world” of sin and hard knocks, look at Jesus. And, if you want to see what “the real world” of sin and hard knocks, transformed by the word and will of God, looks like, look at Jesus. This morning, in roughly the middle of Lent, we have healing on our mind. In this Lenten season of self-examination, it doesn’t take a spiritual master to realize that sin, suffering, and death were among us before Jesus came, it surrounded Jesus while he was here among us, and it continues even after Jesus’ death, burial, and Easter resurrection. John refers to that as “the darkness.” Sometimes, we experience that darkness when it comes upon us from outside ourselves – in the form of mental or physical illness, suffering, and death; the loss of a job; destruction by a fire or flood or storm. The darkness assaults us, waging war in our very bodies and minds, pushing us to the limits of our ability to cope, perhaps to the very limits of our faith. The witness of Scripture suggests that these assaults are not from God, but from God’s enemy. God doesn’t strike his children down with disease and disaster just to see if our faith is strong enough, or to express his condemnation of us. John confirms this in this morning’s gospel reading when he says, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” The Greek word “sozo,” translated here as "to save," is also often translated "to heal." God did not send the Son into the world to condemn us, but that we might be healed through him. Paul writes in Romans 8:28 that God works for good in all things – which means that when we suffer these assaults, God is the one working to bring hope, health, healing, life. With post-resurrection eyes, we know that even when we are assaulted by death, God has already fought that battle and emerged victorious, so that even death, our final and ultimate enemy, God has transformed into the doorway to eternal life with our Lord. John 3:15 is the first time "eternal life" is used in the John’s gospel. Notice that he says not “will have” but "may have" – present tense in Greek. It is something believers have now. It began when you were baptized, and lasts forever. We don’t receive eternal life when we die; we are gathered into God’s eternal kingdom when we were baptized, and live in that unending reality even now, even as we suffer illness, crisis, doubt. Sometimes, we experience that darkness when it comes from within ourselves, from the consequences of our own sinful nature – uncharitable thoughts towards others, even others of our own church family; gossip; envy; greed; hard-heartedness; misusing the name of our Lord, abuse of creation – all the things which break our relationships with others, creation, and God. Jesus comes that we may have eternal life now and into the future. Just what is "eternal life"? The New Interpreter's Bible writes: “‘Eternal’ does not mean mere endless duration of human existence, but is a way of describing life as lived in the unending presence of God. To have eternal life is to be given life as a child of God. To speak of the new [life] available to the believer as ‘eternal life’ shifts [expectations from the future] to the present.” We say at every baptism: “We were born children of a fallen humanity, but through water and God’s Word, we are reborn, children of God.” And what do we mean by “healing?” The most obvious meaning, of course, is to be freed, cured, from physical or mental illness. Sometimes, God provides that kind of healing. But there are other forms of healing – and because this can sometimes sound rather glib to someone who is suffering, let me tell you a true story. A friend of my husband’s, the wife of a former director of the Holden Village retreat community high in the mountains of Washington state, became ill with cancer. Her name was Mary. Word went out to people all around the country to pray for her healing. After several months, word came that said two things: 1) the doctors said she was now terminal, with probably two or so weeks to live; and, 2) Mary told everyone, “Stop praying. I’ve been healed.” How could someone possibly say both things in one breath? She explained: Her cancer had given her the opportunity to face and eventually accept the fact of her mortality. She was going to die. It also gave her the opportunity to discover, staring at suffering and death nose to nose, that she really did believe in the promises of God, because she was seeing God’s life-giving hand even in her struggle with cancer. And here’s how: She had a number of relationships – among both friends and family –which were strained or had even ended, due to one misunderstanding or another. Over time, she had pretty much written these people off, after waiting for them to apologize or to try to reconcile, which they didn’t. She realized she didn’t want to die with that burden of heartache. And she wondered why, all this time, she had left it up to them to make things right. So, she set about contacting each of those people, with the goal of restoring those relationships as best she could. We were never given the details, only that she had had time to set things right, and she was at peace with both her past and her future. In her eyes, she was healed, and could die with a peaceful, joyful heart. In Luke chapter 4, Jesus quotes this morning’s first reading from Isaiah when he begins his ministry, saying: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God [vengeance not against us, but against the powers of darkness]; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.” Can there be any better news among us than that God loves the world, that God doesn't want to condemn the world, and that God desires to save, to heal, the world? The good news today is this - God loves the world, loves the world so much that God refuses to let the darkness stifle or destroy us. The light of God has dawned upon us in Jesus Christ. Jesus shines in the darkness, our darkness, and sends it running. Jesus, the light of the world, seeks our good in all things, and one day will bring us home. Even when everyone else has let you down,
Jesus will never let you go. Amen. Rev. Joan Gunderman, Senior Pastor Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa, Minnesota |
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