It is springtime in New York. It beautiful and brilliant everywhere you look. I
wish you were here. Praise the Lord for the way He decorates the earth with His
majesty and splendor. Praise the Lord for the garb of spring. The Spring flowers
are in full bloom. Forsythias, daffodils, tulip trees, magnolias, and many and
divers flowering trees are full and luxuriant. Only our Lord can make all things
so beautiful. We have planted several fruit trees in the beautiful parsonage
grounds. They are starting to blossom. I picked some wild mustard greens from
the back fields and mixed them with other greens the other day, and had them for
supper. My family forces me to go vegetarian and eat greens. Praise the Lord for
His bountiful and beautiful blessings.
Those
who live in the region join us for weekly TV ministry this eve at 7 PM on Time
Warner Cable channel 4. We will be gathering for a special time of worship and
witness tomorrow at 5:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church, 53 McKinley
Avenue, Endicott. The worship service will be followed by a special Spring
Banquet with some international cuisine. We have ample reasons to celebrate and
give thanks at all times and in all seasons. May be Jesus be
praised.
I
have been looking at Luke 13 that records a healing miracle of the Lord Jesus.
Jesus is preaching and teaching. There is a woman in the crowd who was
afflicted. Jesus
noticed this woman, who was bent over. We are told that she had been suffering
from this infirmity for eighteen years. An "evil spirit" was responsible, one
translation says. Another translator uses the words, "a spirit of weakness." I
cannot imagine what it would be like to be unable to stand up straight for
eighteen years.
Jesus saw the bent-over woman, but then He did
something most of us would not do. He focused His attention on her. When you or
I see somebody who is obviously handicapped, do just the opposite. We look away
because we don't want to be impolite and stare. It is, of course, rude to keep
staring at somebody who looks different. We even teach our children not to do
that. Yet, the habit of quickly looking away is, in its own way, terribly
hurtful. It devalues the one who is being looked-away-from feel not worthy of
attention or value, almost as if invisible. While that is not our intention the
result is the same.
Our Lord was teaching and, right in the middle
of his lesson, He saw the bent-over woman, interrupted the lesson, and called
her over to Himself. Our Lord said to her, "Woman, you are set free from
your ailment." He then placed His hands on her and she stood up straight and
began praising God.
The religious leaders were incensed, deeming
this to be inappropriate. In current lingo we would say that they were "bent out
of shape". After all, they argued, the problem is that this healing should not
take place on the Sabbath because our Lord won't stand for it. Jesus brought
refocused the incident saying, "You hypocrites! You give water to your work
animals on the Sabbath. Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan
bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath
day?"
Jesus called her "a daughter of Abraham", the
only person in the whole Bible to be called by that name. Abraham, of course,
was the great father of faith. He was the one who, many years before, received
God's promise that a great nation would be created out of his descendants, a
people through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. This woman,
says Jesus, was a daughter of Abraham, and nothing less. As such, she should not
be shunted aside, or given a label to keep her in her place. As a beloved child
of Abraham she was part of God's great plan of salvation and blessing for the
whole world.
Love just pours out of him, almost as if He can't
help it. He can't help noticing the invisible ones, can't help loving them,
can't help healing them. Jesus reached out to heal this poor woman without even
being asked. He saw her! He looked past the obvious to see whatever spirit had
been keeping her life bent. He saw the totality of her suffering: the
humiliation of her ailment, the way it has set her apart into a prison of
loneliness. He saw how other people looked away when she came into their line of
vision. He saw the emotional as well as the physical pain she suffered. He saw
the whole picture, and knew that she was too timid or too afraid or too hopeless
to ask for healing.
In just the same way He sees the same things
about each of us, and so He sees deep into our need, sometimes things we cannot
even see ourselves. He sees that our anger at other people is so often really
anger at ourselves, that we're often afraid to look inside ourselves because we
know there's a lot of garbage there that we'd rather not deal with. He sees that
the good front we sometimes put on when we're out in public, is often a cover-up
for the hurts we have suffered over the years — the rejections, the
disappointments, the betrayals, the failures, the losses, the fears. He sees the
ugly inside us — ugly things others have done to us, ugly things we have done to
ourselves, ugly things we have done to others, ugly things that were nobody's
fault, but just happened.
He sees it all and, just as he did to the
bent-over woman, he calls us over to Himself. He says to us, "Come here to me.
Let me put my hands on you and heal you. Let me take all that is bent and
crooked in your life and make it straight and strong. Let me wipe away all the
ugliness inside you. You are a child of Abraham. You have been forgiven
restored, renewed and forever loved."
In
Christ,
Brown
