Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

7/23/06 - Proper 11B

The Rev. Scott A. Benhase

"I have seen their ways, but I will heal them." Isaiah 57:18

Today's lesson from the Prophet Isaiah provides us with a powerful vision of God's redeeming grace and forgiveness. In Isaiah, God laments the continuous sin of his people. God recounts how he's punished his people for their disobedience, their greed, and their practice of injustice. God even says that in his anger, he turned away and hid himself from his people, implying that God was so angry he might've punished them even more had it not been for his absence. It's literally an image of God taking a time out, which every parent knows is necessary from time to time. But the Bible says that the people kept turning away from God and back to their own ways. God finally simply says: I have seen their ways, but I will heal them. Let's stop there and let that sink in. God says that he has seen what humanity has done. God has seen us at our very worst. God has seen our unwillingness to love our neighbor as ourselves. God has seen our greed, our idolatry, our brutality to the poor and God says that in spite of all this, God will repay us, not with punishment, but with comfort.

This is the God you and I have come to worship this day. This is a God of infinite mercy and compassion; a God who doesn't give us what we deserve, but rather a God who comforts us with forgiveness and love. Now, I hope you hear that because it is the very foundation of what we believe as Christians. Isaiah says that God will heal us. We proclaim that in Jesus; in his incarnation, in the example of his life, in his cross and resurrection, God has healed us. So, we can now say: God has seen our ways and God has healed us. When God became fully human in Jesus, God entered every part of our alienated humanity and healed it. Jesus then took our healed humanity with him to the cross and then our healed humanity ascended with him into heaven. At his ascension, our real humanity, and not just an idealized form of it, ascended into heaven with Jesus. The fullness of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus has healed us and made us worthy to be called children of God. This same God who demands justice and is holy beyond time and space has entered our lives, justifying and sanctifying us and all of creation.  Now, we may question God's judgment in all this. After all, our healing has not prevented us from continuing to mess up God's creation. Humanity has not yet learned to live into the Good News of what God has done in Jesus.  We haven't yet learned to study war no more. We still use war quite viciously. Over 100 civilians, many of them women and children, are killed each day in Iraq's civil war. And there is no end in sight to this brutality. In our human blindness and ignorance, we continue to mistakenly believe that war will somehow solve human conflict that has existed for hundreds of years.

We haven't yet learned to love poor people. We still believe that they should be punished for being poor. The poor don't deserve to be poor any more than you and I don't deserve to be poor. Yet, our culture shows little mercy. 20% of all children in this nation live in poverty. That's one out of every five children in the most prosperous nation on earth. Now, this ought to be a national disgrace, but since our leaders believe poor people deserve their poverty, we do little more than give them hand outs.

We have not yet learned to care for this beautiful gift of creation. We still treat it as a giant garbage pit for our trash. If we want to know why it is so hot this summer, then we can learn the scientific evidence that's now indisputable. It's directly related to our human ways.

Yet, God has seen our ways and God has healed us.

So, we may pause and question God's judgment. That's fair. God can take such scrutiny.  But just because we have not yet learned to live into what God has done in Jesus, does not mean that God has not done it. God continues to keep faith with humanity. That means God honors our choices, even when they are deadly and destructive. In other words, God honors us by allowing the creation to be what we make of it. That is what God's faithfulness is all about. But it also means that God loves us too much to allow us to be left to our own devices. God's love means that God heals us and redeems us in Jesus. This is God's faithfulness and God's love wrapped up in Jesus.

As I said: God has seen our ways and God has healed us.

This is the Good News that you and I've been given to share; that, in Jesus, God has seen our ways and God has healed us. And, of course, we hold this Good News, in the words of St. Paul, in earthen vessels. We're as fragile as clay pots. We break easily. We can get worn down by all that's wrong with God's creation. We can be broken by the weight of it all. And we can begin to believe in our own selfish pursuits rather than the truth of what God has done for us.

Of course, it's always easier to retreat to the isolation of our own four walls and there try to pretend everything is just fine; that concerns like justice and mercy are issues for other people to deal with. That's what many people do. They have given up on the truth of God's faithfulness and love and decided that their personal happiness is more important; defining happiness as the absence of anything unpleasant. Happiness becomes for them the denial of what's wrong with the world. This is why our culture conceals rather than reveals the human condition.

TV shows, self-help books, and advertisements aren't based on any desire for truth. They too are also about happiness. They assure us all our problems can be solved, displaying images of happiness that we will never be able to attain. Even journalism today trivializes truth. For example, how can we take seriously the racial divide we face in this country when Katie Couric follows up such news by interviewing Johnny Depp about the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie? How can we be outraged by the news when it's marketed as made-for-TV entertainment? Is it any wonder, then, that though people are hungering for the truth of their lives, many spend their time fighting villains like bad breath, soap scum, and athlete's foot?

Never the less, God has seen our ways and God has healed us.

You see, I have learned that we can hunger for God's truth and not be fooled by our superficial, trivializing culture. I have learned that we need not get worn down by the weight of the world as it is.  I have learned that even though we hold God's truth in our fragile, earthen vessels, we can still come together week after week and worship and praise a God who has seen our ways and healed us in Jesus. I have learned that I have the strength I need to live and work for the coming of God's Kingdom on earth as it already is in heaven. I have learned this by being a part of a community who believes in what God has done and is willing to live that Good News out with one another. In other words, I have learned all this in a community called Church, and specifically, in a community of disciples known as St. Philip's Church. You have helped me learn this. And I hope that you never forget what you have taught me.

Because we are all clay jars, our fragility can affect our memories. We can forget what God has done for us.  Do not forget God's faithfulness to this beautiful and wondrous creation.  Do not forget God's faithfulness in showering you with amazing grace and abundant mercy. 

Do not forget God's love for you, which exceeds all that you can ever imagine. Do not forget God's particular love for the lonely, the lost, and the left out. And, I hope you will not forget me. But if you do, that's OK. But, please, never forget that God has seen our ways and God has healed us. Never, ever stop proclaiming and living that Good News. Amen.

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