Untitled Sermon (17)

Forests and Trees

When I was younger my Dad and I would wake up around 4am every Weekend in the Fall and Winter to go hunting. We would always get to the woods an hour or so before sunrise, so when we got to our spot in the woods it would be completely dark. One weekend we were really excited because we had found a beautiful hunting spot right next to a creek. There were deer tracks everywhere, a persimmon tree (which deer love) right next to the creek, everything was perfect. So we made a makeshift blind with branches and leaves on a hill overlooking this spot, and we created a trail with pink flagging from the spot back to the road. It was a long walk, about a half hour walk into the woods, but we knew it would be worth it.

The next weekend, when we’d been walking for about 45 minutes, however, I began to think Dad had gotten us lost. I’d bring this up to him and he’d always shush me, “No, no, we’re not lost!” and after a few minutes he’d point out some pink flagging on a tree ahead, and say, “See, we’re on the right trail”. I wasn’t sure the flagging was right though, because it seemed like we kept passing the same cliffs, rocks, and the same tree with the same flagging. After about an hour, the sun finally came up, and that made it easier to see a lot in the woods. It especially made it easier to see our truck parked on the road 100ft to our left, and therefore easier to see that we had been walking in circles for an hour!

This is a good case where my dad “couldn’t see the forest for the trees”. He was so focused on finding the next tree with flagging on it that he didn’t notice the rest of the forest, and how we’d been passing the same things over and over again.

We do this in the Bible all the time. We pass by the same things over and over, and the Bible wants us to realize how its connected to a larger pattern. If we want to really understand God’s word, we’ve got to learn to look at the big picture sometimes.

Elijah and the Widow

Often times, that means going back to the Old Testament, because this is where those patterns, the first “tree marked with flagging” usually appears. When we do this, we see that Peter isn’t the first person to heal someone or even the first to raise someone from the dead. This pattern begins with one of the most important prophets of Israel’s history, Elijah.

This prophet was driven out of Jerusalem by Queen Jezebel, King Ahab, and the prophets of Ba’al. Elijah, man of God, lived in a time when Israel had largely abandoned Yahweh and turned instead to Ba’al. So, Elijah was sent by God to the home of a widow and her son. When he arrived there, the widow barely had food to eat. Then the unimaginable happened: her son became ill, deathly ill. We can hear the painful mourning of the widow in the reading from 1 Kings this morning: “What do you have against me, man of God?” Elijah had come promising a better life, he provided her with food, but now this? Was God punishing her for past sins?

But Elijah, too, was shocked by the death of her son. He took the boy’s body up to the upper room of the house and bent down over him, weeping, “LORD, why have you done this to the boy and his mother?” And as he sobbed and prayed over the boy’s body, God was listening.

The widow’s world had become dark. There was no light, the weight of her grief dragged her heart down. Elijah’s world, too, was dark. He’d been driven out of his home and brought to this widow’s home, and was God allowing calamity and darkness follow him even here?

But suddenly, both Elijah and the widow caught a glimpse of God’s light breaking into the world. The boy sat up, and he walked down the stairs of the house, and sat in his mother’s lap.

Jesus and Jairus

Jesus was likely very familiar with Elijah’s experience, and it was almost certainly in the back of his mind as Jairus, leader of the local synagogue, came to him distressed. Jairus fell at Jesus’s feet and declared that his daughter, his only daughter, only 12 years old, was dying. As Jesus and Jairus made their way back to the man’s home, things got even worse. A man approached them and informed Jairus, “You’re daughter is already dead, there’s no reason to bother Jesus with this anymore.”

That was it. You could, perhaps, heal sickness, but not death. In that moment, Jairus’s world went dark. But Jesus kept walking towards the man’s home. When he got there, he made everyone but a few of his disciples and the girl’s parents wait outside. “Don’t worry, the girl is not dead, just sleeping,” Jesus said. And they all laughed, because they could see very clearly the girl’s lifeless body. But when Jesus spoke, “Child, get up!”, the girl stood to her feet.

Seeking the Big Picture

Peter had been there. He had grown up hearing the story of Elijah raising the dead and healing the sick, but then he had actually witnessed Jesus doing these things. Just what was it about Elijah, Jesus, and Peter that made them able to defy even death? When the room of people could clearly see that Jairus’s daughter was dead, why would Jesus claim she was only sleeping?

When Peter came down to Lydda, a Jewish city that had become very Greek, he met a man with a Greek name, Aeneas. Peter, like everyone else in Lydda, could see that Aeneas was unable to walk. He had been paralyzed and bedridden for eight years. There is a certain kind of weight that people with incurable diseases carry. You can almost feel it when you walk in the room, and Aeneas had been carrying that weight for a long time. He now saw the whole world from his bed. That’s all he knew.

And what Peter did next we might call not only insensitive, but cruel. “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you, get up and make your bed!”. You don’t tell a crippled man to get up. How hateful would you have to be to ask a man who can’t walk to stand? And yet Aeneas did stand. Aeneas, who couldn’t walk, who had been paralyzed for eight years, suddenly found himself on his feet again. For the first time in a long time, Aeneas saw the world from a different angle.

Then Peter went down to Joppa, another Jewish city that had become very Greek. He had come on behalf of a woman named Gazelle, Tabitha in Aramaic. Tabitha looked around at the city of Joppa and saw the plight of the widows there. Widows, of course, lived desperate lives in these times. It was typically just accepted that widows were destitute, and they had to rely on the charity of a few good men in the city to feed them scraps. The world was a dark place for widows. Tabitha, however, had imagined a different world. She imagined that Joppa could be a place where widows had someone to look out for them. And so, instead of waiting for men to muster up enough pity for the widows, Tabitha began ministering to them herself. In a time when it was unimaginable that a widow might have a place in society, Tabitha’s charity created a safe-haven for the widows of Joppa.

As Peter approached Tabitha’s home, all the widows proudly showed him the beautiful clothes she had provided for them. Tabitha had provided hope for these widows, and they were grateful for it. But now Tabitha was dead, and the hope the widows had was fading away. What a cruel joke it must have seemed then, when Peter approached the body of Gazelle, and spoke, “Tabitha, get up!”. They could all see the lifeless body, and they all knew what death was. But, then Tabitha did get up.

So why was Peter able to raise the dead, like Jesus and Elijah had? So often, we look at these miracle stories in isolation. We see them as “that one time God performed a miracle”. So long as we see them in that way, however, we are making the same mistake as those who laughed at Jesus. We are missing the forest for the trees. To raise the dead, you have to see the bigger picture.

Peter was not able to tell Aeneas or Tabitha “Stand up!” because he saw a lame man, or because he was focused on the lifeless body of the woman. Peter was able to see the bigger picture: a world beyond the darkness where God’s promises were taking shape. That is not to say that Peter didn’t notice Aeneas was paralyzed, or that Tabitha was dead. Of course he could see those things. But he could also see a world where Aeneas walked, and a world where Tabitha was a live and well, a world that God had promised.

Upside-Down Kingdom

What would we see if we began to focus on the forest instead of the trees? What is the bigger picture here? It is a picture of an upside down kingdom.