I.                    

Wednesday Lenten Service

(at First United Methodist Church)

 

I.        In the fourth chapter of Luke, when Jesus is in his home town of Nazareth, he goes into the synagogue and reads from the prophet Isaiah.

          A.       In that passage there are 4 tasks that are to shape his ministry.

                   1.       But one of them is NOT a ministry to the sick.

                   2.       That is surprising considering Luke is a physician.

                   3.       Compassion for the lame, the blind and the hopelessly ill was a priority of the prophets, even when they were hated foreigners.

                   4.       Ezekiel 34, in an infamous passage, indicts the shepherds of Israel:

                             a.       “‘you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the crippled you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought...’”

 

          B.       You and I have no idea of the horrible fate a sick person faced in first-century Middle Eastern world!

                   1.       How many would end up dead from a small infection?

                   2.       People were banned from their family home and their town to scavange the garbage heaps, to join bands of highway robbers, to starve to death if their diseases did not kill them first.

                             c.       Infant mortality was probably over 2 out every 3.

                   3.       There is no telling what disease Peter’s mother-in-law had. Should that woman’s daughter not have a husband, Simon Peter, both of them would have be outcasts,

                             a.       for a widow without a son had no source of livelihood. 

                             b.       And now she is sick! Peter and his wife are at risk.

                   4.       My father was a Presbyterian missionary doctor in northwest Iran for

9 years when I was a child.  He ran a small hospital in the second largest city: Tabriz, Iran. There was another mission doctor from the USA there with his family, Dr. Ashton Stewart.  When I was a young pastor in my first church, our congregation supported Ashton Stewart who was now a doctor and surgeon in Kabul, Afghanistan.  He came to visit our church. He told of a teenager who was found outside their hospital compound. He had traveled there on foot, he had leprosy, or Hanson’s Disease and had been thrown out of his village. In the 1970's if any Afghan person recovered from leprosy and survived, he was still an outcast and could never return home. So Dr. Stewart said they took the boy into the Christian hospital. They knew this was like a lifetime commitment, for when the boy was well, the missionary church would have to educate him, train him for a career and help him find work.  Dr. Stewart said they took in many leprosy patients in that hospital, each suffering from a very contagious and risky disease.

 

II.       Luke tells us that same day when Jesus visited Simon’s house, “even when the sun was setting, all those that had any that were sick (with) various diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many...”

          A.       When he tried to escape to a lonely place, the people came after him and would not leave him alone.

                        1.       “Compassion,” “passion” –  a well-used word in the Bible.

                   2.       In the Old Testament it is the same word for “mercy,”

                             a.       an essential trait in the character of God.

                   3.       It means more than to feel sorry for someone, to have pity;

                             a.       It means to love that individual with the all-encompassing love of God himself; to surround them with it, like the missionaries with that teenager in Kabul, Afghanistan.

                             b.       God’s own steadfast love and faithfulness.

                   4.       I became a pastor because of my father’s loving ministry to the poor and the sick in Tabriz, Iran, his kindness to beggars; and my mother’s compassion to illiterate mothers who had not heard about Jesus, but brought their malnourished infants in dirty rags to our baby clinic.

                            

          B.       There are so many unique examples in Jesus’ ministry of healing:

                   1.       a dead son of the widow of Nain being carried to his funeral,

                   2.       a self-centered paralyzed man at the side of the pool in Bethsaida,

                   3.       a woman with the bleeding wound who grabbed at Jesus garment,

                   4.       a man in the graveyard bound in chains and overcome by demons.

                   5.       How many of those were beyond help, branded as losers?

                             a.       All of them!

                   6.       Jesus himself was “bruised by the Lord... put to grief..and his grave was made with the wicked...cut off from the land of the living...”

                   7.       Truly, his passion for the sick was in his day as radical as some of his other claims: to be the Son of God!

 

III.      Do you know where hospitals came from?

          A.       “It is the same word as “hospice,” or “hospitality.”

                   1.       In the old French, it means “God’s hotel”

                             a.       -- the inn where the Good Samaritan went.

                   2.       Hospitals in the Middle Ages could serve many functions, as almshouses for the poor, overnight stops for pilgrims.

                   3.       The Crusaders to the Holy Land saw such places among the Moslems in Egypt and Arabia and they brought them back to Europe.

                   4.       I think it is interesting that in early Christianity, the sick and the dying were cared for in the home. They were taken to the synagogue or church where the congregation took care of them,

                             a.       as in the man let down through the roof, whom Christ not only healed but forgave his sin,

                                      i.        caring for the whole person.

                             b.       Today, as the church, we take our infirm outside the church

                                      to be ministered to by professionals, usually secular people.

                             c.       With the return of the hospice movement, and Stephen’s Ministry, we are once again participate in Christ’s passion among the sick.

                   5.       Picture an entrance to a clinic, like the River Valley Christian Clinic in Dardanelle. But this one is somewhere in rural India or Bosnia.  At the entrance is a grieving young mother, holding the lifeless body of her son who has died or was murdered. She has no hope.  Above the entrance are the words, “‘Come unto me.’”

                             a.       These Sisters of Mercy have “vowed to serve people who suffer from poverty, sickness and lack of education with a special concern for women and children.”

                             b.       Mother Theresa said, “Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.”

       

                   And let all of God’s people say, “Amen!”