23rd Sunday Ordinary Time - September 4, 2021

23rd Sunday Ordinary time Sept 4, 2021 When I was a new chaplain student, I was preparing to take my first on-call shift. I was a nervous wreck, I could barely find my way around the hospital, how could I possibly support people in crisis or end-of-life!? A seasoned chaplain, sensing my anxiety said, “Look for the angels.” That day and the initial weeks of my ministry, I discovered that there were angels everywhere: ● The nurse who caught my eyes when I was trying to find my way to my first consult and showed me the right hallway. ● The nursing assistant who showed me where to get Kleenex. ● The security guard who was kind and patient with me when my badge wasn’t working. ● The doctor who knelt down to a distressed patient and helped her breath and taught me to do the same. There were angels everywhere. There are angels everywhere. Not long after that advice, I found myself in the early hours of the morning kneeling at the bedside of a dying patient and their family. I’m sure I still blundered over my words and I probably would do a better job today than I did then but you know what, I showed up. I was calm. I helped them celebrate rituals and say goodbye. I had become one of those angels. I often wonder what would have happened if that seasoned chaplain hadn’t shared that bit of reassurance with me. I’m sure the angels would have still been there, but would I have noticed? I’m sure I would have still done an adequate job as a new chaplain but would I have been able to be as present and connected to that first family? We need to be reminded of the angels often. We need to be reminded of God’s presence often. We need to practice being open to hear God speaking, to see God acting and imitate him. In our reading from the prophet Isaiah and our Gospel we are presented with stories of God showing up in the world. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap. In these instances we see God acting in very noticeable ways and we call them miracles. They are beautiful and wondrous but sometimes it leads us to believe that that is only where God shows up or worse yet, if the miracle doesn’t happen we wonder if we have failed in some way in convincing God to show up. Working in critical care, I don’t get to witness a lot of those kinds of miracles. I have experienced them. I am so grateful for those moments, when all felt lost and then there was healing and recovery. It is beautiful and deserves all the celebrating in the world. But those times, well we all know, they aren’t the norm. But I assure you, God shows up even when the physical miracle alludes us. God shows up in amazing, beautiful, miraculous and heart wrenching ways when someone takes their last breath and we say goodbye. But God, it is hard. We want it to go the other way. We want the physical miracle. I think particularly as we continue to navigate a global health crisis and as we are also facing an immense amount of grief as a community. We are crying out, “How long God? How much more must we endure God?” The people who the prophet Isaiah were speaking to shared those same cries. They were the exiled people, they were called God’s chosen but it didn’t feel like it. And they were understandably losing faith. Their elders and ill were dying in captivity not in God’s promised land. But Isaiah tirelessly sought to bring them back from the brink - he told them this wasn’t forever, endure one more day, one more night, God has not abandoned us, God’s glory will come, we will be healed, this land will be healed. The Gospel story of healing is intentionally linked to this story. The word used for mute is the same in both stories and it is not a common word, not often used to describe the inability to speak. The Gospel writers did this to intentionally link Jesus to the prophet Isaiah, to tell the very early church the same thing Isaiah was saying but not just about waiting for God’s glory but to realize God is already here, Jesus has walked among us, God’s healing has taken physical form and has journeyed beside us and continues to journey with us. The miracle today in the Gospel is one of the last that Jesus will perform before his death. The trajectory of Jesus’ story will shift. In next week’s Gospel, Jesus will tell his disciples that he is going to be handed over and killed but in three days he will rise again. He will again ask the disciples who do they believe he is and they will finally state, You are the Messiah, the Chosen One. Today we are witness to a pivotal change from Jesus as the miracle worker to Jesus who walks to the cross with us. We will miss much of the point of today’s Gospel and quite a bit about life in general if we only see the physical miracle of a deaf person hearing and finding speech for the first time. This story is about all of God’s people, including us, opening the ears and eyes of our heart to God’s presence. It is so easy for us to succumb to spiritual blindness and deafness. To stop seeing the angels around us and God moving among us.