Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-11, 20c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39
Let us pray. Speak Lord, for your servants are listening. Amen.
The waiting room at Children’s Hospital is filled with interrupted dreams and fragmented expectations. Wherever you look, wherever your gaze lands there is a child engaged in some kind of medical struggle and parents who cannot for the life of them make it better, but can only bring them to this place where they seek the guidance and healing of the doctors and nurses and therapists and others who care for their child.
With every child’s challenge, whether it is that they cannot hear or they have a heart defect or they cannot walk or talk or they have cancer or they have a neurological defect, with every single challenge there is that interrupted dream. The dream of a mother and a father that they would spend their days with their child playing ball or building blocks or learning to read and instead they are here in this place that holds both fear and cheer together waiting for their pager to go off, as simply as if they are waiting to be paged to their table at a restaurant.
It is worth noting that the children carry the hope that perhaps their parents are afraid to carry. Smiles and giggles and gurgles fill this place and even overcome the tears of both child and parent.
The Psalmist writes that the LORD heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. That the LORD counts the number of the stars and calls them all by their names. Surely, we ask, if the LORD can call every star by its own name, the LORD also knows and calls every child, and us by name, too.
It is a fearful thing to live without hope. Some days, most days, hope is that thing that enables us to continue on with whatever it is we are doing, whether we are going to work, or to school, or to play, or whether we are embarking on something much more frightening. Hope is that thing that empowers the alcoholic to go for one more day without a drink or the addict to go for one more day without using. Hope is that thing that makes it possible for us to see one more specialist even when the diagnosis looks certain. Or , perhaps it is more true that hope allows us to see no more specialists but to live with what we have been given, and to accept the outcomes that seem unacceptable.
In our first reading today, the people of Israel have given up. They have no hope. And it is up to the prophet to remind them that they have every reason to hope. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” Isaiah asks. They are rhetorical questions, just like when your mother asks you “Didn’t I tell you to clean up your room?” She doesn’t really expect an answer and neither did Isaiah. The Israelites did know, they had heard, it had, in fact been told them from the beginning, that God, the same God who loves them, was the Creator of the entire world. Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and who puts earthly rulers in their proper place.
The Israelites were cast out of their homeland, living in captivity. They wondered, had God forgotten them? The prophet had heard them say “My way is hidden from the LORD and my right is disregarded by my God.” And the prophet reminds them of what they already know…the LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, who does not faint or grow weary; whose understanding is unsearchable.
In 2009 it was estimated that the African nation of Liberia had 340,000 orphans. Children from birth to age seventeen who had been orphaned due to causes that included an AIDS epidemic and violence in their nation. There is a group seeking to provide an education for these orphaned children, called the African Christians Fellowship International. Their work has been ongoing for many years. In 1998 they sponsored a group of ten young Liberian men who sang together on a two year tour of the United States. The proceeds from the offerings taken on their tour and the sale of their CDs went directly to the educational funds for these orphaned children. Six of these young men in the choir were blind. They had been told that they were of no use to their families or to society. They had been told that “anyone who is blind is in darkness.” The title track of their CD is “We Still Have Joy”
We still have joy, we still have joy, after all the things we’ve been through we still have joy.
Like the Israelites, these young men from Liberia had grown up with oppression, with hardship, with difficulty. But that had also grown up with the stories of their faith. Truths about God that they had heard and known and understood from the foundations of the world. And what they knew, what they remembered, was that God who had created both the heavens and the earth had not forgotten them. That God gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.
The Gospel reading from Mark today is the continuation of the story of a very busy day in the life of Jesus. Jesus had called Andrew and Simon and James and John to leave all they had and follow him, which they did. And in today’s story they have all gone to have Sabbath dinner at the home of Simon and Andrew, where Simon’s mother in law is ill.
It is unsettling to have a member of your family who is ill, whether they are infants or children or whether they are blind boys or whether they are your mother in law. It is unsettling to get this news and the responses we see are as varied as the situations.
Simon and Andrew bring Jesus to Simon’s unnamed mother in law. The text says they told him about her at once. They didn’t know for sure what Jesus would do, after all at this point they had only seen him cast out an unclean spirit in the temple. There had not been any healings, no sight had been restored, no dead were raised. But they knew that they needed to tell Jesus about the sick woman at once.
Simon and Andrew brought Jesus home to the people they loved.
Beloved community, whatever it is that we struggle with today, whatever it is that threatens to rob us of hope or take away our joy, we can, as Simon and Andrew did, tell Jesus about it. We can offer it to him because sometimes, that is all there is left to do. Whatever we are facing today, or whatever someone we love is facing, we can tell Jesus about it. We tell him every Sunday here in the Prayers of the People when we name before him that long list of people we love collectively. God knows who they are before we even name them. We call them out before God by their baptismal names and God knows who they are before we even name them, because God knows the name of even the stars, every one. We trust that God will mend our broken hearts and bind up the wounded places in our lives.
Have we not known? Have we not heard? Has it not been told to us from the beginning? Oh, we do know. We have heard. It has been told to us. But it’s scary to trust all of these unexpected places and spaces and situations we find ourselves in to God. Because like the Israelites we have forgotten that God’s love for us is beyond our imagining. We have forgotten that God loves us even more that Simon loved his mother in law or even more than a parent loves a child.
Isaiah tells the hopeless Israelites that those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Those are words for us, too. Whatever it is that is ahead, offer it to Christ, the one who loved us enough, every one of us, to die for us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
During the Hymn of the Day you are invited to come forward for prayers for healing and anointing. The prayers of this community surround you as you come. I invite you to remain seated for the Hymn today and to join your prayers with ours when the hymn comes to an end.
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