February 9, 2003 - Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 40: 21-31
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Mark 1:29-39
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Raised Up on Wings of Love

A week ago on Saturday something that had become almost routine for us went terribly wrong and the shuttle Columbia was lost, with all hands aboard. For the past week we have reflected as a people on what happened, what caused it, and why did it happen? Particularly, why did it happen at a moment in time when the last thing our country needs is yet another reminder of how vulnerable we are as a free people? I suppose we could say that our world was knocked a bit out of orbit and when that happens we tend to ask the most basic questions: how, why, and why now?

The exiled people of Israel were asking themselves the same question. At the core of the passage we read today there is a lament, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God.” What the people of Israel were expressing in their worship were those basic questions. Why is this happening to me? How could a God who is supposed to love us, allow this to happen? The prophet challenges the people and answers the lament with a call to renewed faith. “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but 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.”

In light of all the things happening in our world right now the prophet’s words fly across the centuries and confront us, as well. Isaiah reminds Israel, and us, that we may certainly ask the questions, but we may not wallow in them. Our questions should lead us to challenge and, yes, even to question our own shortsightedness and mistaken focus. Isaiah holds before us the reality that the Creator is greater, God’s vision broader, and God’s love more encompassing than our own. Our questions rise out of our experience, out of our feelings, but there is more here than what we perceive. As one commentator put it:

God the Creator is more than the sum total of our experience. The creator is incomprehensible and incomparable to anything that we can imagine. Therefore it is impossible to say that at anytime or under any circumstances that our way is hidden from God, or that God might become indifferent to our situation in life even when our situation might suggest otherwise. Such a confession is radical because it evaluates all experience. The Christian faith is rooted in such a radical confession.

God knows our way, even when we don’t.

As was said, this is a radical confession of faith. Radical because it stands at the root of who we are and how we interpret our relationships, our world, and ourselves. Christian faith is, indeed, based on this radical confession of faith in a God who is more than we can see or experience, but remains trustworthy. Isaiah and all the great teachers of our faith tell us that we cannot always believe only in what we feel or perceive. Our faith calls us beyond mere feelings and perceptions.

There are times in our lives when we ‘feel’ as though friends, co-workers, even loved ones don’t care or are indifferent to us. However, given opportunities for better communication or open exchange we discover that the situation has been entirely different than what we felt. The same holds true in what Isaiah is telling Israel and continues to hold true as we confront all of the less than pleasant happenings in our world. God is not indifferent to our situation. I believe and hold to that radical confession of faith. God cares for us. How do we know this to be true?

Our Christian faith teaches us that God has sought intimacy with us from the very beginning. I came across this excerpt from the spiritual writer Henri Nouwen’s final journal. It is dated March 28, 1996 and what he reflected on that day illustrates what I am trying to say:

During the Eucharist this morning we talked about God’s covenant. God says, “I am your God and will be faithful to you even when you won’t be faithful to me.” Through human history, this divine faithfulness is shown to us in God’s increasing desire for intimacy. At first God was the God for us, our protector and shield. Then, when Jesus came, God became the God with us, our companion and friend. Finally, when Jesus sent his Spirit, God was revealed to us as the God within us, our very breath and heartbeat.

Our life is full of brokenness – broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God’s faithful presence in our lives? Without this “place” of return, our journey easily leads us to darkness and despair. But with this safe and solid home, we can keep renewing our faith, and keep trusting that the many setbacks of life move us forward to an always greater bond with the God of the covenant.

God has identified with us and with our experiences in the person of Christ, in the gift of the Holy Spirit and, hard as it is to believe, in the living community of the church.

That Divine desire for intimacy as expressed in the Incarnation, the enfleshment, is more, then, than just heady, dusty dogma. It’s the nuts and bolts – the flesh and blood, if you will – way that God says to us, “I love you. I want to know you. I want to be part of your life and for you to become a part of mine.” God, in Christ, touches the woundedness of humanity, physically, emotionally, and spiritually and experiences what we do. The emotional and physical suffering that Jesus endured was to show us God’s love in action, to show us God’s passion for us, because God has loved us until it hurts. That’s what it means to be passionate about someone -- to love until it hurts.  And God has desired this intimacy with us, identified with us simply to draw us back into relationship with God’s self and to allow us to know the fullness, the health, that we were intended to have when God created us.

For us to come to the health that God desires for us, we must learn the truth of the Prophet’s words, “but 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 be faint.” We come to participate in the Creator’s strength by learning to “wait for the Lord.” That phrase is a synonym for faith and is, one scholar tells us, “one of the cardinal expressions of the Old Testament.” Through it we are told to lean on the Lord for strength, to bide God’s time, not ours, until all is ready. And, when all is ready, according to God’s time, we will be raised up on wings of love.

To wait in this way is not easy for us, because we live in an ‘instant age.’ I don’t think too many of us enjoying waiting – I know I don’t. However, the old adage is ever so true here, “good things come to the one who waits.” I’m sure we all could supply examples of people who have shown extraordinary caring, courage, and strength because their faith, their waiting for the Lord, has lifted them up and supplied their need. The promise to us is that we will be raised up on wings of live IF, note the conditional, IF we wait for the Lord and trust God’s guidance.

Here, again, Jesus provides an example for us, because he goes to wait for the Lord. “In the morning,” Mark tells us, “while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” Jesus, who was one with the Father in the Spirit, still prayed, still sought that connection. The Fathers of the Church would say that he did this for our benefit, and so it is, but still the desire for intimacy, the need to connect is there. If we want to deal with the profound questions in our lives, if we want to make sense of our world we need to wait for the Lord. Everyone knows that a relationship is built on communication – how often are we communicating with God? How often are we listening for God’s voice?

Waiting for the Lord means that we take some time to pray and here let me remind you that prayer is more than just our monologing with God. Prayer also involves taking the time to reflect and to listen. Taking the time to read some passage from the Scripture and meditate on it can be the beginning of a rich period of prayer. Using a little devotional guide, like “The Upper Room,” can provide a good beginning for the waiting that leads to being raised up on wings of love.

We can also wait for the Lord by listening for God’s voice speaking through other people and through our daily experiences. We can also come to experience it by living our faith through concrete deeds of compassion that can make a difference in the lives of people, here in our community and beyond it. We can, indeed, soar like eagles if we have first waited patiently for love’s currents under our wings.

“Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?” The Prophet’s questions still speak to us and call us to take the time to pause, to reflect, and to act. It’s so simple, so obvious, yet so difficult unless we can get ourselves out of the way and simply let God BE God in our lives.  God is not indifferent to us. God desires to know us. God wants to raise us up on wings of love – if only we allow God to do it.