December 12, 2010
Is It All Just Spiritual? - Isaiah 35
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadThis is a spiritual passage that I just read, is it not? Isaiah 35 is a spiritual passage. Everything in it is spiritual. The wilderness and the dry land being glad, that’s spiritual. Some animals can be glad, maybe, but not land. That’s spiritual. “Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees.” Are we orthopedists or something? That is all spiritual. “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless shall sing for joy.” All of that is spiritual, right? That’s especially spiritual. Seeing, hearing, running, and speaking are all used all the time in Scripture as spiritual metaphors. “Have you eyes, but see not? Have you ears, but hear not?” Jesus asks his disciples. Jesus is not asking if they literally see and hear, but spiritually see and hear. Before Pentecost, the disciples were mute. After Pentecost, they could speak, spiritually. The highway, in verse 8, that’s a spiritual highway. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away. I’m not a psychologist either. Isaiah didn’t really mean that physically, but spiritually, right?
You have come to Church today for spiritual reasons. I have made a routine of getting a physical every year between the New Year and my birthday in early March. I go to a physician, to a physical, medical doctor to get that done. I do not go to Church to get that done. Now if I have a spiritual issue, then I go to Church. Or, maybe I can go on a mountain-top somewhere, or I can go on a run, or ride my bike, or just close my eyes and just be “spiritual” for awhile. More and more people claim to be spiritual but not religious. Even though nobody seems to know what that means, whatever it is, it’s not physical. It’s spiritual. Even the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, some have claimed, is a spiritual thing. It is not physical. Jesus’ dead old bones, according to them, have decayed into the ground just like everybody else’s dead old bones who lived back then. It’s spiritual. It’s all spiritual. All that matters is spiritual. Questions?
So therefore I can tell Sandy Hart to get over it. Sandy went to the mountains, on a spiritual retreat of all things, with the women of our Church. On October 9th, her spiritual experience turned very much in a physical experience when she slipped and fell down and broke her ankle in three places and dislocated it. She has not walked since. She has spent a week in the hospital, had extensive and painful surgery, and has elevated it for two months. She has now started rehabilitation. Needless to say, wheelchair-bound is not how she envisioned spending the fall of 2010. But since the spiritual is all that matters, we can tell her to get over it.
A friend of mine recently came down with cancer. She’s better now, but for a while she had a really hard time. She’s only a year older than me, and she and her husband gave birth to a little boy right before she was diagnosed. She wrote in an update on her health something that melted my heart. She was recovering nicely, she said. Her treatment seemed to be working. Her older child, a three year old girl, was adjusting well, but the biggest problem was her little boy. He was only about six-months old at the time. The doctors told her that she could hold him, that he could sit on her lap, but not to lift him up, that it was too much weight. And so sometimes it happened that her son, like all babies, would cry and would want his mother. And on some occasions, he would cry when nobody else was there, and she was not able to pick him up and hold him. Does that not break your heart?
Spiritual is not all that counts, is it? It’s hard to separate those two. In fact, sometimes, the physical is the spiritual. If Isaiah 35 is just spiritual feel good stuff, then what good is it? If Christmas is just spiritual, if Jesus is a spiritual reality or if Jesus has no consequence on our physical lives, on our homes, and health, and economies, on war and peace, then what good is he? That was one of the first heresies in the Church. It was called Marcionism, which was part of a larger heresy called Gnosticism, which relied solely on what was perceived as spiritual. The physical was evil, they argued. The spiritual (absent the physical) was all that mattered.
From the very beginning, the Church rejected that. The physical matters. So what do we do with all these physical problems that we have today? It has been cold this week. We’ve had what I thought was a fairly warm fall, and then we just zipped into a cold winter. It was 13 chilly degrees on Tuesday morning. It’s one thing to read this passage in our nice warm houses with nice full bellies, but how would we read it if we were hungry and cold? There’s an old bluegrass song that has these lines in it: “The lame will walk in glory land, the blind up there will see. The deaf will hear in glory land. The dumb will talk to me.” It’s a beautiful verse, but what if we were literally blind, or deaf, or lame? Is it real? Is Isaiah 35 really real? Or, is it, as some have said, spiritual?
I believe that it is real. We’re not there yet and I cannot explain why we’re not there yet, but I do believe it to be real. I’ve never been sick before. I get a few colds on occasion, and maybe a stomach bug here or there, but I’ve never really been sick. I’ve never even had the flu. I have, though, been around a lot of sick people. One thing that I have learned is that there are not any quick fixes. In fact, in some cases, there aren’t any fixes. In some cases, medical doctors can give you a certain diagnosis, but no cure. There are some people who will never walk, or see, or hear, or speak. There are some children who will never know their parents, who cry and cry and cry and nobody comes to pick them up. They will never know a warm embrace, or a good education, or even proper nutrition.
The Church has a specific, God-given mission to help people physically. Room in the Inn, Gary, WV, shoe boxes, the missionaries that we support are all glowing examples of that. Do we ever do enough, though? I heard a story this week of a Methodist conference that decided, back in the 80s, to pass a resolution opposing abortion. It passed overwhelmingly. So one of the delegates stood up and said, “I’m so glad that we’ve taken a stand against abortion. Now that we’ve done this, I propose that we resolve to feed and clothe and house and educate every child in this state now. If we’re going to bring them into the world, then we’ve got to take care of them when they get here. At the very least, our children’s home should not be struggling for money.” The room went silent. The physical matters, doesn’t it? Can we ever do enough?
Yet, we are not in the business of fixing people. We may can help others, we may can bring joy and even Christ into their lives, but we cannot make Isaiah 35 come true. Regardless of how much we do, of how much we labor, the world will always be full of hurting people, including ourselves, whom we cannot fix. I have at times felt completely useless in a hospital room. We’re all useless in there. Doctors must feel useless, too. How do you tell somebody that the bad news is you have terminal cancer and there’s nothing that we can do, but the good news is…, well there is no good news?
What I can do, and what Isaiah does here, is to give us some hope. The day is coming when the Isaiah 35 comes true, physically. In fact, if Advent tells us anything, it’s that. The world’s Savior is coming. The world’s Savior has actually already been born, and even though that salvation is not completely known to us, obviously, because the world is still in dire pain, and you may be in dire pain, but redemption is just around the corner. It is not something that we earn, or even that we understand. It is not for the privileged few, or the righteous, or even the faithful. It is a gift, and it’s coming.
If that’s not true, if Advent is not true then I don’t know what to say. What does the “spiritual but not religious” crowd respond to somebody whose body has been invaded by cancer? If hope is not real, if hope does not spring eternal, if Isaiah 35 is not physically real, if the Gospel makes no difference on the world’s physical pain, then I have nothing at all to say. Yet we do have something to say, the same thing, actually, that Isaiah said. And that is that God has done something. It’s not what we have done. If it is, then it’s nowhere near good enough. Yet, the Gospel is something that God has done, and is doing, and will do. We do not see that yet. We do not understand that yet. We see lots of things contrary to it, but God is active.
“I was standing by my window on a cold and cloudy day, when I saw a hearse come rolling, for to carry my mother away. Well, I told the undertaker, ‘undertaker, please drive slow, for that lady you are hauling, Lord, I hate to see her go.’ I followed close behind her, tried to hold up and be brave. But I could not hide my sorrow when they laid her in the grave. I went home. The home was lonely since my mother done went on. All my brothers, sisters crying, with the house so sad and alone.” That’s another bluegrass song that you all know called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Why those words are played so quickly is beyond me, but to my knowledge those are the original words. Sometimes you’ll hear them changed around to be more, well less depressing.
But aren’t they true? And doesn’t it pose a brilliant question that humanity has always asked? Will the circle be unbroken? Is this all there is? When you’re standing at an open grave and putting someone that you lived very much in that hole in the ground, is this all there is? Will this pain, will this limited, sinful, broken body ultimately define me, and us? Isaiah says no, that it won’t. It can’t. Only God can define us, and, despite our own sin, and our on rebellion, and our own determination to have it our way regardless of the rest of the world, despite the world’s deep pain and brokenness, that’s not the end of the story. God is. And God is also the middle of the story, and the beginning, and the side and the top and the bottom, and everywhere. God is. And that is indeed a very good thing. So have some hope, and rejoice, look ahead to this new thing that God has promised.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
