Binding up the broken-hearted

Isaiah 61:1

What was it like that morning when people in Nazareth made their way to the synagogue where Jesus announced his public ministry? Jesus grew up in the synagogue and was well known to everyone. There were some who remembered when he first came into town with his parents. The scandal of his birth was a story that had been told. People remembered how he played as a child, others had been his playmates. Some remembered what kind of a student he had been and how he had responded to his father’s death. Many had interacted with him in his carpentry shop, observing how he conducted himself, what kind of work he produced. The people that morning in the synagogue had eaten with him, played with him, studied with him, celebrated at weddings and grieved at funerals with him.

So there was familiarity as he prepared to read the scriptures and speak – and more than familiarity, also a sense of expectancy, wondering what he would say. This expectancy was heightened because of his growing reputation.

At some point he had left Nazareth and the carpentry shop, perhaps handing it over to some of his brothers. He had gone to his cousin John who was baptizing in the Jordan River and something amazing had happened. When he was baptized by John, (Luke 3:22)
the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

The story of his baptism spread quickly through the countryside as Jesus disappeared into the wilderness. Forty days later he came out of the wilderness a changed man. There was a new look in his eyes and a power in his speaking. He went from synagogue to synagogue speaking and everyone praised him. This word spread as fast as people traveled from town to town. “Have you heard about Jesus? He spoke in the synagogue where my cousin goes and no one had ever heard such powerful and wonderful teaching before.”

Now he was here in Nazareth, his home town, with all the people who knew him well. It was their turn to hear him speak and as he rose to read the scripture, every eye was on him. He opened the scroll and read from Isaiah 61.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

This was a well known passage that talked about the Messiah who would come and deliver Israel from the military occupation of the Romans. Israel had long asked the question, “When will the Messiah come?” and Jesus now sat down after reading the scroll, looked out at the familiar faces of people in the synagogue and said:
“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

That was amazing. For centuries rabbis had taught that the Messiah was to come. For centuries people had asked when this would happen. With the Roman occupation, Jews prayed for the Messiah to come and deliver them. And now, in their synagogue, Jesus announced that he was this person; he was the Messiah. That was not an ordinary Sabbath. Jesus announced that morning the start of his public ministry that would take him around Israel for the next three years and culminate in his death and resurrection.

In Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas, we remember the birth of Jesus for whom Israel waited so long and we remember the promise of Jesus to come back for which we have been waiting almost two thousand years.

It is interesting that when Luke recorded the part of Isaiah 61 that Jesus read, Jesus cut off verse 2 in the middle. In Isaiah 61:1-2 we read:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;

But Luke records that Jesus stopped after to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and left off and the day of vengeance of our God; In so doing, Jesus divided the role of the Messiah into two parts: the savior who would come for Israel and the risen Messiah who would return to judge the world. So in Advent we remember with gratitude Emmanuel, God in the flesh, Jesus. And we look forward and live in the light of the promised return of Jesus who will call an end to time and judge the living and the dead.

This Advent, Tracy and I decided to preach from Luke 4 to answer the question: What difference does the birth of Jesus make to our lives? We celebrate Christmas with trees and ornaments and special cookies and carols, but what is there beyond the sentimentality of Christmas that really makes a difference.

In these prophetic words from Isaiah we find how Christmas, the birth of Jesus, is good news to us.

Tracy talked a couple weeks ago about He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives. He talked about how our desires for good things can take us captive. He talked about how the world’s values can take us captive. He talked about how these things crush us, trap us and enslave us. Jesus, Emmanuel, God in the flesh is good news because he offers us deliverance from all these things that enslave us.

This morning I want to focus on a line that Luke omitted in his gospel. Luke did not record everything Jesus said so I do not think it wrong to assume Jesus also read this line.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

Bind up the brokenhearted; that is the line that caught my attention. Who are the brokenhearted?

We live in a broken world – which Eugene O’Neill knew first hand. O’Neill was an American playwright who was born in 1888. His mother was an emotionally fragile woman who never recovered from the death of her second son who died when he was just two years old. The birth of her third son, Eugene, was a difficult birth and she became a morphine addict. As you can imagine, this did not make O’Neill’s childhood an easy one.

Eugene O’Neill suffered from depression and alcoholism and married three times. He disowned his daughter, Oona, for marrying Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and Chaplin was 54 and he never saw her again. He had distant relationships with his two sons, one of whom was an alcoholic and the other a heroin addict. They both committed suicide and Eugene O’Neill died in 1953 at the age of 65.

Given the pain in his life, his quote is especially interesting.
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Although he went to a Catholic boarding school, he seemed to have faith only that we needed faith. O’Neill was unsuccessful in a pursuit of faith himself but he knew a biblical truth: We are born broken.

From the beginning, even in the womb, life is not safe. For some children, just as they are being formed, their world is invaded by a powerful vacuum that tears their body to pieces or salt is used as a poison to kill them. I don’t intend this to be a sermon about abortion, but whatever position you take on a woman’s right to choose, an abortion is at least a great sadness and a life is cruelly taken away.

But most children come safely out of the womb and many of these enter a world where they are loved and wanted. Others enter a world where they have to be disposed of. A friend of mine was walking down the streets of Rabat a few years ago on a cold day in January and found a newborn baby wrapped in newspapers lying on the street. The baby’s mother had to get rid of her child so she could one day be married. That prospect trumped the baby’s welfare.

Some children are taken into homes where there is warmth and protection and abundant food, others enter homes where there is not enough money to provide these basic needs. Some children are loved and cared for, others are abused, even in their early months.

For those fortunate enough to be born in homes where they are loved and cared for and there is sufficient money to provide them with basic needs, the world is still not safe. It may not be the case that these children are sexually abused as they grow up or physically abused, but there are other ways for us to be broken.

My daughter Elizabeth was a bright, talented little girl. She began to read at the age of 4 and was at the top of her peers in pre-school and kindergarten and first grade. When she was 4 or 5 she had a speaking part in a community Christmas concert with all the churches in town participating. When it was time for her to speak, she came up, stood in front of a packed church and confidently and clearly recited her lines without a shred of nervousness.

She was full of innocence and confidence and there was nothing she could not do. But then as she went along from grade to grade, there was an erosion to her confidence. She still did very well in school and had friends, but she was aware that people did not always act fairly.
Children in schools fit into groups with one group competing against another group. There are girls and boys who are ranked as most popular and those ranked as least popular and everyone else takes a place in between.

When we moved from Massachusetts in the northeast of the US to New Jersey in the central east, Elizabeth entered into a new school system. She started in the new school in the middle of December and two months later it was Valentine’s Day. The boys in her 6th grade class gave teddy bears and roses to girls in the class. The boys gave Valentine’s Day cards and candy to the girls in the class. Elizabeth came home with nothing. Not a single rose, piece of candy or even a little card. She was crushed and devastated and I spent time with her on her bed that night talking with her and encouraging her. I told her she would one day be loved by a very special man and that has been the case. In another couple weeks she is expecting her second daughter. But on that day, her heart was broken.

You send your son or daughter off to school with a clean outfit and a bright smile and then at school an older kid pushes your child off the slide and your child wonders why someone would be so mean. As your child ages he or she discovers that not everyone can be trusted. He or she discovers that the world rates us on our abilities. There are children who read better, do math better, draw better, run faster and throw harder. It becomes apparent that there are standards of beauty and some are more beautiful than others. Popularity enters your child’s world and now your child’s identity is not wrapped up in knowing he or she is your special child, what matters now is how your child fits in the popularity ranking at school. School bullies and social cliques work against your children.

No matter how hard we try as parents to protect our children, the world seems intent on breaking them. And sometimes it is the parents who unintentionally break their children.

My mother was a vivacious brunette who was leading a conga line at a church party in Boston when my father first saw her. He was dating a woman from Finland at the time and he asked someone, “Who’s that brunette leading the conga line?”

He asked her out and had to wait in line as my mother slowly dropped the other men she was dating until it was just the two of them and then they were married. My mother had promised a soldier in the army she would wait for him to return from fighting overseas during WWII and sent him a letter telling him she was marrying someone else, switching from a soldier in the army to a sailor in the navy.

When things were going her way, my mother was a sparkling woman. But unfortunately and inevitably, things did not always go her way and when there were some cruel disappointments in her life, she turned bitter.

Growing up with my mother was unpredictable. She could be passionately caring for me and then be coldly furious with me. She suffered the betrayal of a woman she considered her best friend and she never recovered from that injustice. For a long time she had to work to help feed the family and she resented that. So she was unhappy. She had what some call a narcissistic personality. She was not able to accept that her unhappiness was her problem so she transferred her unhappiness to her husband or one of her six children. At various times one or more of us were in the hot seat. The year and a half before I came to Morocco it was my turn and my mother did not speak to me for that time, even though we lived only twenty minutes apart. She was furious with my father for coming over to our house.

On December 22, 1999 we went out to dinner. I was leaving in just a couple weeks for Morocco so she decided I had been in the doghouse long enough and let me out. Two nights later, Christmas Eve, we were sitting next to each other at a family meal and I had stomach problems. She was as passionately concerned for me at that meal as she had been coldly angry with me just a week earlier.

Because of this I learned at an early age to protect myself. I build a wall that created distance and protected me. I remember eating cereal at the breakfast table with the boxes of cereal arranged in a semicircle around me. I lowered my head and ate within the protection of the boxes. There was a corner in the house where I put up pillows and then would hide behind them to read books.

This wall continued to develop to protect me at school from unpleasant experiences and as I came into adulthood, I came with a well-developed wall that allowed me to function effectively in a world that is not always safe.

I talked about all this when I had the luxury of meeting with a counselor during our visit to Thailand. As we talked through the traumatic events of this past year in Morocco, I came to some clarity about the wall I created and why I created it.

I once heard an interview with Roger Lundin, professor of English literature at Wheaton College, where he was talking about the poet Emily Dickinson. He said a poet was someone with a soaring imagination tethered to a rotting corpse. A poet sees the world as it should be but is constantly being smacked by the reality of this imperfect world.

I identified with this and told the counselor in Thailand that I thought this was a root of my problem. I want to see the ideal but am always disillusioned by the reality of this world. My relationship with my mother reinforced this. In an ideal world, a mother is supposed to be a safe haven, not an unpredictable open sea.

My relationship with my mother and other experiences in life taught me that the world is not safe and left me a broken person.

The wall I created to protect myself has worked well and allows me to function well, but it prevents me from being open and present in relationships. I have a strong pastoral heart and want to have intimate relationships with people and with God but the wall I built to protect myself keeps a distance that works against my heart’s desire. And sometimes I have gotten in trouble by overreacting in trying to fight for the ideal world.

I realize that I am a broken person needing to be mended.

The reason I have shared all this is to allow you to think about your own life and what defenses you have created to protect yourself from the injustice in this world.

Some of you were physically and maybe sexually abused in your childhood and those memories may be very present or you may have pushed the experience into the far recesses of your mind. In some way you have had to deal with that trauma and developed a defense that allows you to function. Others of you have suffered deeply traumatic experiences such as rape or assault. Some of you have seen your parents divorce and have had to deal with the insecurity that results from that. Some of you have been hurt by your marriage partner. Even those of you with very loving parents have had to deal with the realities of living in a sinful world.

We enter the world with bright eyes and end up wearing sunglasses to protect ourselves from the harsh glare of injustice. We are the broken-hearted.

So this is why the birth of Jesus is good news to us. Jesus came to bind up the broken-hearted.

To bind up is to bandage. The image is of someone who is wounded being cared for with the wound being cleaned, antiseptic ointment put on to encourage the healing process, and a bandage put over the wound. It is an image of tender care and healing and that is what Jesus came to do, to make the sick well. Jesus came with love and compassion to bind up the wounds of the broken-hearted.

I came away from the week of counseling in Thailand with clarity about my problem, but where does that leave me? My wall protects me well, serves me well, maybe this is just the way I will live the rest of my life. Maybe I should just let things ride and trust that God will heal me when I come into his kingdom. But if I say that, then I am discounting the work of God in my life to bring wholeness.

Jesus sat in the synagogue that morning and announced that he had come to, in part, bind up the broken-hearted. If I had been there that morning, would I have said to Jesus, “Good luck! I have carried this wall for years and don’t think you will be very effective in taking it down.”

I don’t think so. Jesus came to bind up the broken-hearted and he continues this work through the Holy Spirit. Jesus came to save us and to make us whole and there is no reason why we should resist his work in our lives. Yes, complete healing will be ours when we come into the kingdom of heaven at the end of time, but the kingdom of heaven has already come and is daily making greater and greater intrusions into this world. Being made whole is part of God’s work in the here and now.

It is necessary that we learn to protect ourselves from the injustice and unfairness of life – but we need to be healed of the hurt that caused us to create those defenses in the first place so that when it is appropriate to put up the defense we can do so and when it is not necessary we can let it down. My counselor in Thailand said I need to put the wall on hinges so I can swing it open when the wall is not needed and swing it shut when it is necessary.

To tell you the truth, I am not sure where to go with this insight. I understand the analogy but how do you make the wall moveable? I have carried this wall for so long it is difficult to know how to take it down or swing it open.

But I do believe Jesus came to bind up the broken-hearted. Jesus came to heal and I need healing for the brokenness in my life. I have been talking with friends who want to pray for inner healing and plan to do that by Skype. It seems a bit strange to me, to do this over the internet, but I suppose God can work through technology. I will give this a try because I want to be made whole. I want to be more alive in relationships with people and with God.

In what way are you broken? What are the experiences and relationships in your life that have hurt you and caused you to construct a defense to protect yourself?

We don’t easily see the hurts each of us carry. The defenses we create are effective in hiding our hurts. But they also stand in the way of having those hurts healed by Jesus.

What are the hurts you carry that you have covered up? Jesus came, in part, to heal those hurts. That is good news. We are never without hope. We never have to settle with the status quo. God wants to bring healing. Why put up with being wounded for the rest of your life.

Will you also work with God to experience healing in your life? Whatever has caused the brokenness in your life, Jesus came to bind up your wounds and make you whole. That is why the birth of Jesus is such good news.