Scriptures:
Jeremiah 1: 4-10
Luke 13: 10-17
I watched the movie The 3:10 To Yuma the other day. What struck me about the movie is that it’s so hard to tell who the good guy is. Every adult character is either just plain bad, or has been so weighed down by wounds and sorrows from the past that the fabric of their lives is run through with strands of bitterness that colors their actions and motivations. As dark as things in the movie were, however, there was also a strand of redemption and restoration. A father and son’s sacrificial love for one another begin to change things even in the darkest heart.
As I pondered the movie when it was over, I thought that though extreme in their violence, the people portrayed were pretty realistic. There is a lot of suffering and sin in the world and everybody’s touched by it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who the good guy is. But just as the love of a father and son changed things in The 3:10 To Yuma, the love of our Heavenly Father and His Son bring redemption and restoration to our dark hearts.
We have an interim pastor right now at First Presbyterian, and he’s been giving us three words every week to spark our memory as we meditate on his sermon during the week. It works pretty well for me, so I’d like to give you three words this morning that you can use this week to remember the scriptures we read and think about what God may up to in your life. The first word is brokenness, the second is healing, and the third is restoration.
Brokenness: The woman in the synagogue in Luke 13 was certainly living with brokenness. She’d been “crippled” by a spirit that kept her bent over for eighteen years. She walks around every day facing the ground. Getting a view of anything but people’s feet required a great effort on her part – a craning of her neck. And there she is in the synagogue with Jesus, so used to her condition that she doesn’t think to seek him out and asked to be healed.
Many of us are “bent over” and crippled just like the woman in the synagogue. Weighed down by sins and wounds that we’ve carried for years we must strain to see ahead of us – never mind enjoy the view from above! And sadly, like her, we are so used to our condition that it never occurs to us that we could be free from our brokenness. No one is exempt from this. No matter how together or perfect someone appears, if you look below the surface of anyone’s life, you’ll find some degree of brokenness. And because families, churches, and organizations are made up of broken people, all of those relationships and systems are broken too.
While there’s no direct mention of sin causing the woman’s condition, it’s important to point out that there is a rich interrelationship between sin and brokenness in the Bible. If we do not recognize the ways that we walk away from God and others – sin -- then we cannot truly search for wholeness. All of us are sinners and victims of sin. Only by dealing with our own sin can we be open to God’s grace to make us whole.
Healing: Though the woman does not seek out Jesus for healing, he sees her and calls her over. First he tells her that she is “set free” from her ailment. Then he reaches out and touches her. Jesus could have healed her with merely a word as he did for the man with the withered hand in another Sabbath healing story. But in this case, Jesus reaches out and touches the woman, and then she stands up straight and praises God. The woman’s infirmity – her uncleanness - had isolated her from the community. Jesus, however, calls her a daughter of Abraham, and touches her showing that she is not marginalized but accepted.
You know, it seems to me that brokenness has a way of marginalizing us every bit as much as it did people in the first century. Maybe we’re not shunned by the community, but the effects of our brokenness keep us on the sidelines. Now when you hear the word “brokenness” you may be thinking about the big things like addictions or diseases or mental illness. But the truth is that many of the things that leave us broken are small, unacknowledged things: bitterness, resentment, destructive patterns in our relationships, or negative things we believe about ourselves that are simply untrue. Brokenness is anything that keeps us from living a full, free, and unfettered life in community and before God.
Whether we admit it or not, those burdens that keep us bent over are often a source of shame in our minds. We’d rather folks not know about our fears and insecurities or dysfunction. It’s much better to have it together. But Jesus knows who we are and what we fear even when we appear to have it all together. And he reaches out to touch us too, offering healing. He says that we are sons and daughters of Abraham, fully accepted and loved members of the community, and that he wants to heal us – to make us whole.
Restoration: Jesus restores the woman. He brings her back into her rightful place in the community. Healing miracles in the Bible are signs of the reign of God. Where Jesus is, the Kingdom is. His ministry provides a foretaste of the coming Kingdom where the world and His people will be restored. All of the wrongs will be made right: people made whole, relationships restored, justice and righteousness established forever.
God’s has always blessed His people so that they would be a blessing to others. He redeems and heals us so that we are able to freely partner with Him as He brings restoration to the world. Our lives have a purpose, a calling to partner with God in His work of restoration.
In our Old Testament Lectionary reading from this morning, we read of Jeremiah’s call. God tells Jeremiah that He knows him and formed him. God designed Jeremiah for a purpose. God tells Jeremiah that he has appointed him to “pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.” Some of that doesn’t sound so good – destroying and overthrowing, plucking up and pulling down… But let’s admit it, there are things that need to be destroyed and pulled down: oppression, racism, abuse, and the machinery that makes poverty a way of life for so many. And there is much that should be built up and planted: love, reconciliation, justice, and peace. There is a lot of Kingdom building to be done, and as disciples of Jesus Christ we are to be about doing it.
In this morning’s passage, Jeremiah demurs when he hears God’s call. He’s not up to it. He’s too young. He doesn’t know how to speak. Jeremiah’s fears of inadequacy mirror our own. We never run out of excuses: “I’m too young; I’m too busy with work; with raising a family; I’m too old…” At every stage of our lives we have an excuse. Our sense of brokenness plays into our excuses too: “ I’m afraid; I’m sure I don’t have what it takes; the work will overwhelm me…”
God, however insists that He has a mission for Jeremiah. He will be Jeremiah’s companion on the journey; He’ll put His words in Jeremiah’s mouth; He will deliver Jeremiah. God promises the same for us too. If you’re a Christian and you’re alive, then you have a call on your life to be about the business of restoration. As we reach out and touch those whom God sends to us, we participate with Him in healing, restoring, and Kingdom building. As grateful recipients of God’s love, grace and healing, we become generous dispensers of that which we have received. May God grant us a vision of His work in our lives, the lives of others, and in the world.
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