Mighty God

Isaiah 9:6; Mark 1:21-28

December 4, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC

VIDEO: “Bruce Almighty” clip

Bruce wanted to meet God, challenged God to “smite” him. Job, in the Bible, did something similar. Like Bruce in the film, Job wanted to plead his case with God, to show God that he, Job, knew better than the creator of the universe. In some ways, the film Bruce Almighty is a retelling of the Job tale, with one twist: Bruce is given, for a time, the supposed powers of God, but it proves to be more than Bruce can handle. But we understand Bruce’s situation, don’t we? Aren’t there times in our lives, when we simply don’t understand why things are happening, and we being to think, whether we use the words or not, that  if we could just have an audience with God, if we could just explain to him our side of things and why what he’s doing is so wrong, he would understand and change what’s happening? And yet, as Bruce learns in the film and as Job learns in the Bible, God sees so much more than we do. Through the prophet Isaiah, God put it this way: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). Or, in the words of the old gospel hymn, “By and by, when the morning comes, when the saints of God are gathered home, we'll tell the story how we've overcome, for we'll understand it better by and by.” It’s in times like these that we are reminded and, eventually, are grateful that one of the things the savior is called in Isaiah is “Mighty God.”

This Advent season, we’re working our way through the four names that the early church “borrowed” from the writings of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah and applied to Jesus. Not only did these names have some fulfillment in Isaiah’s time, the early church understood their ultimate fulfillment took place in Jesus. In Isaiah’s time, the people were celebrating the arrival of a new king, a new hope for them in the midst of a dark time, and Isaiah fanned that hope by offering this word: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (9:6). Last week, we looked at the promise of the Wonderful Counselor, the one who has good plans for us, and for the world, if only we would get on board and follow him. This week, we turn our attention to the next name, “Mighty God,” and we want to ask again, as we did last week, what this name meant to those who first heard it, and what it means to us yet today.

Last week, we talked about how these titles applied to Hezekiah, a king who was being inaugurated in Israel, and whose kingship in the end was a mixed bag of results. Interpreters struggle, though, with how a title like “Mighty God” could have been applied to a human king. Israel, after all, never believed that their kings were divine, unlike other nations (such as Egypt and, later, Rome) where the rulers were worshipped as gods. Some go so far as to argue that it should better be translated as “great hero,” which is possible, but not necessary, because even in Israel, it was understood that the king had God’s power behind him. The king could be described as a “carrier” of God’s power, and any victory the king achieved was only possible because of God’s blessing, God’s power. We see that very Hebrew notion carrying over into New Testament times when Paul reminds his readers, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” (Romans 13:1). And Paul is writing that to Rome, in a time when the government was not in any way sympathetic to Christians. He himself would soon become the victim of Rome’s persecution of Christian leaders. But Paul believed and knew God’s power in some way rested even on bad leaders (cf. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39 [NICOT], pg. 247; Brueggemann, Names for the Messiah, pg. 20). But that did not mean that the king, ruler or leader was in any way actually the “Mighty God.” The title could me that the king was to be someone whose rule pointed toward the Mighty God, whose rule was only possible because of the Mighty God.

The Hebrews were strict monotheists, which means they only believed in one God. Unlike most if not all of their neighbors, they did not believe in a god for the air and a god for the water and a god for love and so on. There was only one God. Their basic creed, repeated every day, was (and is) this: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). So what, then, does a strict monotheist do with someone like Jesus? Eight centuries after Hezekiah, a baby was born in a little town called Bethlehem. Very few people noticed, nor did they pay much attention to him as he grew up in the nowhere town of Nazareth. He was the carpenter’s son (cf. Matthew 13:55), Mary’s kid, just another rugrat running through the streets. It wasn’t until he grew up and began to preach that they ran him out of Nazareth (cf. Luke 4:28-30). And after that, he went to settle in Capernaum, a small town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee about 40 miles away.

As Mark tells it, Jesus did the same thing in Capernaum he had done in Nazareth. When the Sabbath came, he went to the synagogue for worship and he began to teach there. However, it seems that here in his adopted home, he didn’t have the barriers he had experienced in Nazareth. He was welcomed, and listened to. In our passage this morning, Mark doesn’t tell us what Jesus was teaching on this particular day, but in the middle of the lesson, a man stood up and yelled out, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (1:24). Mark tells us this man was possessed by an “impure spirit” (1:23), or as other translations put it, he had an evil spirit or a demon. Mark doesn’t tell us enough about this man to know what was really going on, and we know of other situations in the Bible where what is called possession may have been something more like epilepsy or schizophrenia. But just because we know those things today does not discount the work of actual demons, and certainly there was an active ministry or job of healing demon possession or casting out demons in the time of Jesus. There are several “cures” we know of from the ancient world that were readily practiced, one of which involved actual surgery where a hole would be bored in the skull to let the demon out of the body. The remains of bodies that have been found where this was done show that the hole was too small to be of any other surgical use; this was to provide an escape hatch, and then the patient would wear the piece of bone that was taken out of their head as a necklace, an amulet to prevent future demon possession. In another situation, the ancient historian Josephus tells us about a ritual involving a ring of secret herbs that would be placed under the nose of a possessed person. These herbs would then cause the patient to sneeze, and it was believed that the demon would be expelled through the nostrils. Then the priest would command the demon “in the name of Solomon” never to return (Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, pgs. 33-34; Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pgs. 36-37). Don’t you bet those who had a hole in their head knew about this other “cure”?

Contrast those accounts with the way Jesus works in this passage, and in other places in the Gospels. Jesus doesn’t wave a magic wand. He doesn’t get out his surgical equipment. He doesn’t make up a paste of herbs and water. Jesus simply speaks. He commands. He says to the demon, “Be quiet! Come out of him!” (1:25). Literally, he says, “Be muzzled.” It’s the same language he will use in chapter 4 when a demon-inspired storm is threatening the boat he and the disciples are in. He will say to the storm, just as he does to this demon, “Be muzzled!” (4:39; Card 36). In both cases, the response is immediate. No sneezes. No magic amulet needed. The demon leaves; the storm quiets. And, interestingly, in both stories, the response of the people around Jesus is the same. Here, in chapter 1, the people ask, “What is this?…He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him” (1:27). In chapter 4, the disciples ask, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him” (4:41). In both cases, and in many others, the issue here is Jesus’ authority. Where did he get it from? And how far does it extend?

The early church wrestled with this, to be quite honest. Good monotheists, all of them. And yet, here is this man who was able to do things that only God was supposed to be able to do. Not just the powerful works or miracles, but this rabbi Jesus said he could forgive sins. In fact, in the very next chapter of Mark’s Gospel, we find an exchange between Jesus and the teachers of the law over a paralyzed man. When the man comes to Jesus for healing, Jesus doesn’t provide that immediately. Instead, he goes to the core of what the man really needed when he says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The religious leaders are outraged. “Why does this fellow talk like that?” they ask. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And to prove that he has the authority to forgive sins, Jesus ends up healing the man’s paralysis. Then, the religious leaders become like everyone else in this story: “We have never seen anything like this!” (2:1-12). This happens over and over again, but the difference people note in Jesus’ teaching is centered around that word “authority.” Most rabbis of his time would teach what this rabbi said or what that rabbi said—much like we do today. But not Jesus. He didn’t have to. He taught directly, with his own authority. His power was not grounded in someone else’s authority; it came directly from him (cf. Brueggemann 24; Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 11).

The disciples wrestled with what that meant throughout Jesus’ ministry. Even when they recognize him as the “son of God,” that didn’t mean that they completely understood who he was right away. After all, the emperor was also known as the “son of God,” and so that language was familiar to them and their culture. It could mean something as simple as someone especially used by God. After all, Paul refers to us as “sons and daughters of God” (Romans 8:19). It wasn’t until after Jesus’ resurrection that they began to realize Jesus was more than another emperor, another rabbi, another man. In fact, you may remember that after Jesus appeared to the disciples the first time after the resurrection, Thomas was not there. And Thomas didn’t believe Jesus had been raised. He wanted proof, so a week after the resurrection, Jesus appeared again at a time Thomas was there, and Thomas falls to the ground, without seeing the proof he demanded, and cries out, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:19-29). Calling Jesus “Lord” was not a big deal; it simply means he was their master, their rabbi. Calling him God was something else entirely. It was the first step toward what we know today as the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit—one God, three persons. Jesus wasn’t just a “son of God” like the emperor. He is God. He is the mighty God, one who doesn’t just possess some of God’s authority, but one who is the authority of God. What he says is what God says, because that’s who he is. Even more than the king of Isaiah’s day, Jesus is the Mighty God, the one who has power and authority over all things—even death itself.

In the book of Acts, forty days after Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples and return to the Father, but there on the Mount of Olives, he gives them one more set of instructions. First, he tells them wait until the gift of the Holy Spirit comes. When the Spirit comes, Jesus says, they will receive power, the same power he has had, and they are to go “to the ends of the earth” doing what he has done (cf. Acts 1:4-8). Until he returns, that instruction is still in play; we should be still following Jesus’ final orders, to do what he did “to the ends of the earth.” As the Mighty God enfleshed, Jesus spent his time teaching, pointing others toward God, and performing acts of healing, and while the church has historically done a pretty good job at the first two, we’ve not always succeeded at being places where people turn for healing. So I want to focus on that ministry as an extension of this name, “Mighty God,” for the rest of our time this morning. I believe if we can truly recover the ministry of healing, our world would be changed in ways we can’t yet imagine.

It’s no secret that we have a broken and hurting world. People are broken, institutions are broken, economies are broken, and we’ve seen just how much this year the political process is broken. Healing doesn’t always mean physical healing, though it certainly includes that. But in the Gospels, Jesus used his authority as the Mighty God to bring healing in ways that would remove the obstacles between a person and God. It wasn’t healing for healing’s sake; healing took place to enable reconciliation between a person’s heart and the heart of God. So what areas of our world today need Christians, followers of the Mighty God, to step in and bring healing, hope and wholeness?

Let me mention a couple of areas that Mount Pleasant is already leading the way in our community, and one of those is in recovery ministry. Addiction is a huge problem in our community and in our larger culture; that’s no secret. It might be drug addiction or alcohol addiction; it could be an eating disorder or an addiction to internet gambling or pornography…or the list could go on and on. Hurts, habits and hang-ups all have the potential to become a variety of addictions, and addictions not only hurt our relationships here (resulting in divorce, arrest or other forms of brokenness) but they also destroy our relationship with God as the object of our addiction takes God’s place in our lives. That’s why Celebrate Recovery has been such an important part of the ministry here for many years, setting people free from those addictions through the power of Jesus Christ, the Mighty God. Healing from addictions takes place as people encounter the grace of God.

We also have a ministry we take part in this time of year called Angel Tree, a simple idea that starts with a gift. It’s run nationally by Prison Fellowship, and the idea is this: churches are matched with men and women in prison who can’t buy Christmas gifts for their children. So people in the congregation become surrogate parents, providing those gifts in the prisoner’s name, and kids who might not have had a Christmas are reminded of the love of their incarcerated parent as well as the love of the Mighty God. So last Sunday and today, we have had Angels out on the tree in the lobby, angels that begin to guide you to being a blessing to a family in need this Christmas season. I love projects like Angel Tree for two reasons: one, it allows us to be an angel of healing in a broken situation and two, it reminds us again that Christmas is not our birthday. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and we should celebrate by giving to those who are close to Jesus’ heart: the least, the last and the lost.

Another way healing happens here is through the ministry of Grace Unlimited, our special needs ministry. As far as we know, there is not another ministry like it in our area, reaching out to those with special needs and, in creative ways, reminding them that Jesus loves them and they can experience his grace, too. Special needs folks are often a forgotten population, and yet I’ve watched in the short time I’ve been here as Grace Unlimited has begun to grow and blossom, touching lives from our church and others. As I said a couple of weeks ago, I think one sign God wants to use that ministry in profound ways to bring healing is that we were chosen for the Night to Shine special needs prom. That is going to be a great night, a time of healing and hope and happiness. If you haven’t signed up to volunteer, I hope you will do so soon. You won’t want to miss it, because I believe it’s one more place where our Mighty God is going to show up and transform lives.

One more avenue of healing I want to mention this morning, and then I’ll direct you to some other ideas. This time of year, the “most wonderful time of the year,” is not always as wonderful as we think it is. This is a time when, for some folks, it’s a reminder of loss, or of a life that hasn’t turned out the way they hoped it would, or of some other brokenness in their lives. Behind some of those holiday smiles and cheery decorations are broken hearts and shattered spirits. Traditionally, the church has used the night of December 21, the longest night of the year, the darkest time of the year, as a time of healing and providing hope. So as we again seek to be agents of our Mighty healing God, we’re going to be offering a gathering on that evening called “Getting Through the Holidays.” It’s open to anyone who has a difficult time coping or anyone who just wants to find a little peace in this crazy season. My wife, Cathy, will be leading that group, and I encourage you to come, to seek hope on the longest night of the year, and to invite someone who needs healing like you do to come with you.

We are sent in the name of our Mighty God to bring healing to our broken world. There’s a great website listed on your sermon outline this morning that is simply a list of creative ideas for families to do simple acts of service to others during this time of year. We so often get so focused on what to buy and what to plan that we forget we’re called to look beyond ourselves. It’s not our birthday. It’s Jesus’ birthday. And he, as the Mighty God, calls us to look up, see the places that need healing, and be his agent in this hurting world. And so, to commission you all as agents of healing this morning, we’re going to share in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Usually, we see this bread and this cup as a “memorial” of a death. But it really is an image of life, hope, healing and forgiveness. It reminds us of the cross, through which came our hope of salvation, and it reminds us of the empty tomb, though which came our promise of eternal life. Isaiah, in foreseeing the cross, said that it was by the servant’s stripes, by Jesus’ wounds, that we would find healing (cf. Isaiah 53:5). And so, this morning, as you come to receive the bread, and as you dip it in the grape juice, may you not only find the hope of healing for your own brokenness, but may you also know that you are being sent out as agents of healing, representatives of the Mighty God who loves this world enough to come and save it. Let’s prepare our hearts for Holy Communion as we pray.