2 KINGS 4:8-37

PSALM 142

1 CORINTHIANS 9:16-23

MARK 1:29-39

Sermon – February 5, 2006

Our Scriptures this morning are about the breath-taking, unilateral generosity of God – in redirecting someone’s life, in offering healing, even in giving life and in bringing life back from the dead.

Let’s start with St. Paul, who himself is the recipient of God’s breath-taking, unilateral generosity. Paul is going, you could say, 80 miles per hour in the wrong direction with his life, zealously persecuting followers of Jesus, until he has his dramatic encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Instead of getting destroyed when he “hits the wall” after going 80 m.p.h. in the wrong direction with his life, God turns Paul’s life around and makes him a disciple of Jesus – one with the hard task of spreading the message about Jesus where the message has never been spread before.

So Paul reaches out to the clueless, the confused, and the unconverted with the life-changing news of Jesus as the Savior who offers forgiveness of sins, healing, “life-coaching” and a new community in his name in which people can be included who never before have been in the same community as equals in the history of the world.

As an apostle, Paul expects people to listen to him but not to treat him like a pampered grandee. He is, he says, under “an obligation” to preach the Gospel and so he does it “free of charge”: no limo rides like the UMDNJ trustees, no dinners at fancy restaurants like members of Congress, no trips to Scotland to play golf at four-star resorts – you get the picture.

Paul is aware of God’s breath-taking, unilateral generosity towards him: instead of getting crushed, or damned, because of his previous behavior, God offers Paul a second chance in life.

Therefore, Paul goes to great lengths to be generous to others, not only waiving his right to be treated royally, but also reaching out to others where they are rather than expecting them to come to him, either literally or figuratively.

Paul concludes, “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” Unilateral generosity.

Jesus exercises breath-taking, unilateral generosity all the time. In Mark, Jesus is described as almost constantly active – except for crucial prayer breaks like the one described in today’s Gospel. But before that, Jesus opens up God’s breath-taking, unilateral generosity to the whole village where he is staying.

First he heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. (Anybody learn in C.C.D. that the first pope had a mother-in-law? Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The story makes a point of telling how she gets well and immediately begins to serve them, proving both that she is really well (not just “walking wounded”) and also that she wants to say thank you to Jesus by serving.

Then, to prove that God’s breath-taking unilateral generosity is not reserved just for relatives of the well-connected, Jesus then holds “office hours” for “the whole city” of Capernaum. (They start coming at sundown because after the Sabbath is over, people can be carried on stretchers without violating the prohibition against working on the Sabbath.) So, Peter and Andrew’s living room is suddenly turned into the city’s E.R. that night – though the only “equipment” needed is Jesus. “He cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons” – which makes the point both that illness is contrary to God’s ultimate will (which is healing and wholeness) and that Jesus was (and is) more powerful than illness.

After that late night in the E.R., and his pre-dawn time of prayer in a deserted place, Jesus is ready to go again. He says, “Let us go out to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.” So he travels all over the province of Galilee, “making house calls” – not setting up shop and expecting people to come to him. He meets them where they are. Unilateral generosity.

Usually, when I follow a theme like this through the Sunday Scriptures, I start with the Old Testament, but this story from the Hebrew Scriptures is so extraordinary I will talk about it now. Elisha is a “spiritual Hall of Famer,” one of the great prophets of ancient Israel in his own right, and the disciple and heir of the great Elijah, to whom miracles of healing are also attributed. When Jesus healed, people probably said, “This is like the great prophets of old, working here in our own time.” This story is of the most spectacular miracle wrought by Elisha by the power of God working through him, offering an anonymous woman two huge helpings of God’s breath-taking, unilateral generosity.

Elisha is a major figure who travels widely through Israel with his aide, Gehazi. The unnamed well-to-do woman from the town of Shunem, in northwestern Israel 15 miles from Mt. Carmel on the coast, unilaterally offers hospitality to Elisha and his servant, and then goes far beyond hospitality by building an extra room onto her house for Elisha and his servant to stay in. (She considers them to be too holy to stay in her house proper.)

Elisha then offers to do something for her – like maybe get her taxes lowered – but she says she is content as things are as a member of her clan living in her home area.

Out of nowhere, Elisha then makes her the breathtaking promise that in a year she, who has no son and whose husband is “old,” will give birth to a son in a year’s time. The birth of a son was the ultimate hope in ancient, traditional societies and this couple, like the parents of the prophet Samuel and later like the parents of John the Baptist, may have given up hoping, so her reaction may have been like “Don’t be mean to me by making such a wild promise.”

But it is God’s idea, obviously, that Elisha make this extravagant promise, and God delivers, with breath-taking unilateral generosity.

And then, when the child is stricken with a sudden, devastating affliction – an aneurism, perhaps? – the woman does not give in to despair or cynicism, she goes right back to Elisha and demands the he bring the boy back to life – which he does!

Once again, as with Jesus, prayer is crucial. Elisha’s staff (the symbol of his authority) has no effect. The boy’s being placed on Elisha’s bed is intended to have Elisha’s power rub off on him, but Elisha has to show up in person. So Elisha makes an extraordinary “house call.”

And the boy comes back to life.

God’s breath-taking, unilateral generosity.

Now, you may say these are just fanciful, ancient folk tales. How much credence should we really give them?

Based on what I have seen with my own eyes and touched with my own hands, I give these stories a lot of credence. I have seen someone in a diabetic coma come out after her sugar was so high the hospital technician took it twice because she’d never seen a number that high before. That same person had an apparently gangrenous leg restored so that nothing had to be amputated.

I have seen people with advanced, metastasized cancer have it reverse course and then be able to leave the hospital. I have seen someone who went blind have the most dramatic recovery some of the best retina surgeons in the world had ever seen, to go from being blind, to driving a car.

I have seen someone who was the only person in the history of OSHA to survive a certain type of construction accident – survive, and heal well enough to become an E.M.T.

I have seen someone who was not expected to live through the weekend without open heart surgery be sent back to his room because suddenly, his coronary arteries became clear.

And trust me, I am no Elisha. But the person who Elisha worked for is still intervening in people’s lives, still offering breath-taking, unilateral generosity.

Does God heal people, still? Absolutely! Should we still go to doctors? Of course – God gave human beings minds and hands to learn healing, St. Luke (the author of that Gospel and the patron saint of Christian healing) was himself a physician, and God can and does work through medical professionals to heal. But medicine is not all there is. Community – notice the importance of community in these stories – faith, hope and love are also important. Science and faith can be two sides of the same coin.

Does healing happen as much as we would hope, here and now? Certainly not. Tragedies and heartbreak abound, as they have since the beginning of time. But stories of healing from the Bible tell us that the time of tragedy and heartbreak will not last forever, that God is acting in God’s world for healing, wellness and life, and that ultimately this broken world will be healed and transformed by the power of God.

And those times when we sense something wonderful or extraordinary happening – that time when someone with a grim prognosis gets a new lease on life, that time when the supposedly “hopeless” drunk starts experiencing sobriety, that time when someone reaches out with love and friendship when a person is “at the end of his or her rope” just because the person was guided to do so – those times are like the first crocuses of spring.

Crocuses are those little white flowers that pop us first, sometimes through the snow. Sometimes there may be storms after the first crocuses appear, just as there will be tragedies and sorrows even after we realize that some people experience healings. But once we see the crocuses, we have a reminder that, even if there are more storms yet ahead, that spring will come.

God’s ultimate “spring” – the inbreaking of the reign of God, when all terrors and tragedies shall end and healing and holiness will fill the earth – will come. The incidents I’ve mentioned are just some of the “crocuses” I’ve seen that make it easier for me to believe that the ultimate spring will come. To use Paul’s phrase, “An obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” “How can I not tell of what I have seen and heard?”

God lives. God loves. God heals. Perhaps you’ve experienced God’s wonderful, unilateral generosity in your life, or in the life of someone you know. I have, far, far beyond anything I deserve.

Spread the Good News of God’s breath-taking unilateral generosity. Look for “crocuses.” Celebrate them. In the world we live in, we need to “take time to smell the flowers” – especially these “flowers”.

If the miracles I’ve mentioned are mere “crocuses” poking up through the “snow” of sorrow and pain, imagine what spring will be like!

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church