Homily for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany 7 February, 2021
Isaiah 40:21-31
I Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39
Psalm 147:1-12,21c
“Hi! How are you feeling this morning?”
NO, really, I’m serious!
“How are you feeling this morning?”
I’ve asked that question hundreds of times.
I learned years ago that after a review of all the results and sophisticated diagnostic studies, if things are still puzzling, the best and most accurate assessment of the situation is likely to be the patient’s response to that simple question!
One of my revered old professors used to remind us, “Listen to your patients. They’re trying to tell you what’s the matter with them.”
(Now, this is not a zoom consultation……but…..!)
“How are you feeling this morning?”
Goodness knows, each of us has reasons why we might have trouble answering that question in a positive and reassuring way.
We’re in the grips of something that feels very serious, maybe even life threatening! We’re frightened and maybe we’re not quite sure how we really feel!
There’s this pandemic which has radically changed almost every aspect of our lives. There’s the constant awareness of avoiding getting “the virus”.
We’re isolated, unable to have close contact with some we love.
The list goes on and on: schools closed, small businesses folding at an alarming rate, unemployment, rising political gridlock, international conflicts, to say nothing of violence in the most sacred halls of government, confusing issues like the claims of “alternative facts”, and absurd conspiracy theories which seem to issue out of minds which have stopped functioning somewhere in the dark recesses of the pre Enlightenment!
And………
Here we are again this morning “doing church”, as we’ve done it for months, via zoom. (I’m preaching this morning to a church building which is completely empty except for two other people.) As I’m preaching, I’m trying to keep some eye contact with a little red light on a box mounted in the ceiling at the back of the church 50 feet away! That light tells me that you can see me even if I can’t see you!
So “How are you feeling this morning?”
I’m not going to fear for your health if you have to admit that you’re “not feeling so hot!”
But let’s be honest!
These are difficult times!
It turns out, of course, things have been really difficult many times in the past! There have been pandemics, coups, revolutions and civil unrest.
Take, for example, the situation that is the setting for our reading from Isaiah this morning.
The nation was in exile in Babylon, shipped off from their homeland to serve a pagan nation’s cruel and despotic rulers. The people were angry, desperately poor, yearning to return, to have some hope.
They would not have been able to answer the question in the affirmative.
They had always known the stories of God’s deliverance of their nation from Egypt and their settlement in the Promised Land.
They knew, or thought they knew, that their God would somehow look after them.
But they were seriously stressed and discouraged.
They were finding it hard to have hope and to assure their children that things might get better.
“Where is this God of ours when needed?” they wondered.
Why doesn’t God “show up?”
Turns out there were some folks called prophets among them!
These were men, and some women, who seemed to be kind of “tuned in” to the strange ways of this God of theirs!
And one of those prophets, responding to the urging of God, delivered a message of hope to those suffering people in their confusion and distress:
“Listen up, people!”
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?”
“Has it not been told you from the beginning?”
“Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?”
“Whoa! What’s this? “We need help, not a lecture!”
What they got was a history lesson; a recital of who this God of Israel is and what great deeds God had done throughout their history.
So the lecture began: “Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God?”
A stunned silence surely followed that embarrassing question. But the prophet wasn’t finished but continued with words of comfort, hope, and reassurance:
“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 be faint.”
So ………How are you feeling this morning?
Would you claim that you are feeling pretty good?
Would you say you are running as fast as you can but sometimes it seems like you will never catch up?
Would you say you are just going along as best you can, trying to deal with things as they arise but often feeling that you are just not keeping up with what it seems to take?
Or might you say you are just barely moving along; trying to put one foot ahead of the other?
God promised God’s people in exile in Babylon that if they flew, they would mount up like giant eagles…..
If they were running as fast as they could, they’d not get tired….
And if they were just shuffling along, doing the best they could….. they wouldn’t get faint or falter!
God is still there as God has always been! (remember those words we heard a couple of weeks ago “even in my mother’s womb you knew me…”)
“How are you feeling this morning?”
Whatever your answer, remember:
“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.”
Thanks be to God!
