Sunday
04/07/19 - Sidney UMC
Sermon Title: “The Many Miracles”
(“The road to
the cross” Series – Part 5 of 7)
Old Testament
Scripture: Isaiah 43:16-21
New Testament
Scripture: Philippians 3:4b-14
Gospel Lesson:
John 12:1-8
Brothers and
sisters, friends, welcome again on this the Fifth Sunday in this Season of Holy
Lent. This season that we are invited to draw closer to Christ. This season that
we are invited to give up, give away, sacrifice, love, care, show mercy, and
kindness, as we journey to the cross of Christ together. Next Sunday, which is
the beginning of what many Christians call “Holy Week,” we will have Palm
Sunday. This is the Sunday that Jesus enters triumphantly into Jerusalem on a
donkey/colt. The savior of the world, God in the flesh, who came to be like one
of us. God incarnate will enter Jerusalem next Sunday to the shouts of “Hosanna!”
Four days later on the Thursday of Holy Week, Jesus will
have his “Last Supper” with his disciples. At this “Last Supper,” we will be
given the sacrament, the gift of Holy Communion. At this supper, Jesus washes
the disciple’s feet, and he commands us to love each other, as he has loved us.
Our Maundy/Holy Thursday service will be next Thursday April 18th at
7:00 pm. We will have Holy Communion, foot/hand washing, and we will hear again
the “Maundy” or the Mandate to love each other.
The next day, on Friday April 19th, we will have
Good Friday services at both 12:00 pm and at 7:00 pm. On this day, we are invited
to gather to remember, to worship, and to love one another, as we remember how
Jesus died for our sins and for the sins of the world. Jesus’ triumphant entry
next Sunday April 14th on Palm Sunday, will soon turn into a cross
and a crown of thorns. Be of good cheer though, as a resurrection will come on
Easter morning!
Today though, as I am continuing my sermon series called “The
Road to the Cross,” series I want to talk about “The Many Miracles” that Jesus
performed. I certainly can’t talk about all of them, as there are many miracles
that weren’t even recorded.
If I pray over a sick person and if God heals them, I am
not the one doing the healing. I am just the vessel that God is using to pour
out his healing and his grace. Yet as Christians, we are not only a people of
resurrection and new life, but we are also a people of miracles. We are people
that see, participate in, and experience miracles.
The other morning, I went out early to let our dog Mylee
out. As I opened the door to the parsonage, I heard the sound of geese overhead
making the “wronk wronk” noise as they flew. To me, it’s a miracle that every
year those geese know when it’s time head north. Did these geese check if
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow? No. Did they see the most recent weather
report? No. They just have a natural internal mechanism that tells them that it
is time to go home.
Our dog Mylee could be sound asleep in her crate, but if
Melissa or I crack open a banana peel or a cheese wrapper, Mylee is right
there!
In recent weeks I have noticed that the annual flowers that
grow around the parsonage every year are growing back strong. It’s a miracle to
me that every year the snow fades, the cold leaves, and life just seems to
flourish all around us.
While Jesus was both man and divine, he performed literal
miracles, but I think he also taught us see the miracles of God everywhere we
look. Before getting into this though, I want to walk through briefly our
recent parts of this sermon series.
I suppose up until now, I have talked about the struggles
Jesus had in his human part. That he was “Tried and Tempted,” that he was
indeed “Persecuted”. Jesus communicated with his divinity and his humanity that
he “came for the sins of all” on earth. That he came to live, love, heal,
forgive, and to die for us.
Last week I said that Jesus “Questioned and Challenged”
just about everywhere he went. This week, as I said, I am talking about once
again, “The Many Miracles” that Jesus performed.
As I said, miracles are always the work of God, but as
humans we have love, we have kindness, we have mercy, and we have compassion.
Our caring, our love, our mercy, our kindness, and our compassion often compels
us to want to participate in miracles. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t pray for
anyone, and we wouldn’t want to see anyone healed. Yet, Jesus so often was
filled with great love and compassion in his human part that this worked
together with his divine part to cause healing and miracles.
In
our reading for this morning from the Book of Philippians, the Apostle Paul
says again of Jesus Philippians 2:10:
“I
want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings
by becoming like him in his death,” (Phil. 2:10, NRSV).
So in addition to our gospel lesson
for this morning, what are some of the many miracles of Jesus, as listed in the
gospels? Here a few:
In Luke 8:22-25, Jesus calms the storm
that the disciples are stuck in. In John 6:16-21, Jesus walks on water. In Luke
13:11-17, Jesus heals a possessed and crippled woman. In Matthew 14:13-21 Jesus
feeds the 5,000 from five loaves and two fish. I could go on and for hours
about the miracles that Jesus performed in the gospels. In fact, the gospel of
John ends by saying in 21:25:
“But
there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were
written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that
would be written” (Jn. 21:25, NRSV).
So the gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is everything that we know that is recorded
about Jesus’s earthly life. John says that if we wrote down everything that
Jesus did that the world would not have enough books to contain it all.
In the gospels
then, Jesus did all manner of miracles. The question though is this, why did
Jesus do these “Many Miracles”? Was he simply an army medic that entered the
battlefield of this world? By this I mean, did Jesus come just to heal and
perform miracles? Was Jesus trying to “whoo” the crowds? Was he a David Copperfield
or a Siegfried and Roy? Was Jesus just trying to get famous? What was Jesus’
motive for his “Many Miracles”?
Now before I
jump into our gospel of John reading for this morning, I want to look at the
previous chapter first, to better explain the questions that I just asked you.
Our gospel lesson for this morning once again, starts after Jesus raised Lazarus
from the dead. Just to review a little bit about Jesus performing this miracle
of resurrecting Lazarus though, it says in John 11:32-37, after Lazarus had
died:
“When
Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him,
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw
her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly
disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They
said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See
how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of
the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
(Jn. 11:32-37, NRSV).
So I am only
giving you a piece of the resurrection narrative of Lazarus in John 11. It says
though that Jesus:
“was greatly disturbed in spirit
and deeply moved” (Jn. 11:33,
NRSV).
So Jesus,
being fully God and fully human on earth, had all the power, grace, love, and
divinity of God. He could raise life up, heal, fed, and transform. Yet, in the
human part of him he felt what we feel. He was disturbed and deeply moved. In
fact, in the next verse, Jesus began to weep or cry.
The mission of
Jesus Christ was to come to earth to die on a cross for our sins, but he taught
us so much along the way. Often in the gospels, the reason Jesus healed someone
was due to their faith. Jesus would often tell someone that he was about to
heal something like what he says in Mark 10:52:
“Go; your faith has made you well” (Mk. 10:52, NRSV).
Jesus did
miracles primarily so that people would have faith that God sent his only son
to earth to die for our sins and to transform the world, but he had perfect
love, compassion, empathy, and caring.
Has anyone
here ever looked upon someone who was suffering and wanted to heal them and or
take away their suffering? If so, Jesus gets that, and he gets you!
Imagine how he, God in the flesh
saw the brokenness of the world every day. He saw a broken world and a broken
humanity and performed “Many Miracles”. He didn’t perform these miracles for fanfare,
for fame, but did so, so that everyone might believe that the Heavenly Father
had sent him to earth for the mission he came for.
If you see a
broken Sidney, a broken world, suffering people, hurting people, and have a
heart, have compassion, have love, have kindness, and have mercy to heal and
help them, then you understand more the very heart of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. If you want heal the broken, love the lost, then Christ knows all about
that. For became one of us.
In looking at
our gospel of John reading for today once again, we enter after Jesus raises
Lazarus from the dead. It says once again:
“Six
days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he
had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and
Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly
perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with
the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one
who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three
hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He
said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he
kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said,
“Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of
my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
(Jn. 12:1-8, NRSV).
So in this gospel
lesson once again, Jesus had just raised Lazarus from the dead, and now Jesus
is at a dinner with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. At this dinner, Mary took a
costly bottle of perfume, made of pure nard, or spikenard, and she poured it in
on Jesus’ feet. She then wiped the perfume off Jesus’ feet with her hair. The
house smelled great, and Judas complained because he really wanted the money that
he could get for that perfume.
You might be
asking, “Well ok Pastor Paul, where in this gospel reading for this week did
Jesus perform a miracle?” The answer is, is that it mentioned Jesus raising
Lazarus from the dead, but I think what Mary did was a miracle. She took a
bottle of perfume that on some accounts would cost a years’ worth of wages, and
anointed Jesus feet with it. I wonder where she learned that kind of love,
compassion, caring, mercy, and kindness. I think we all know that she learned
all of this even more from Jesus.
You see while
Jesus performed “Many Miracles,” he has also empowered us his people to love, to
heal, and to show kindness in his name. Granted only God can perform the
miracle, but Jesus has asked us to be like him. He has asked us to go into a
broken world and love it and heal it, the way he has taught us to do so.
So yes, the
Geese migrating, the flowers of spring growing, and the birds chirping this
time of the year are miracles to me. Have I cured a person with my own power?
No, but I have seen people healed with God’s power. Jesus has called us to
love, to heal, and to forgive, the way he did. In Jesus’ humanness he gets what
it’s like to see suffering and want to heal it, as so many of us do.
Jesus came to
earth to become like one of us, and gets us, and this is what makes him such a
personal Lord and savior. He suffered, he healed, he loved, and we all
experience all of these things, as well.
I want to close this message with a really
good quote by Saint Francis of Assisi. Here it is:
“We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen away, and
to bring home those who have lost their way. Many who seem to us to be children
of the Devil will still become Christ's disciples”.
http://saintquotes.blogspot.com/2009/05/suffering-helping-others-who-suffer.html).
http://saintquotes.blogspot.com/2009/05/suffering-helping-others-who-suffer.html).
Jesus performed “Many Miracles,” and
we are called to be like Jesus. Amen.
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