Josh Broward
April 26, 2009
For 40 years, he sat.1
For 40 years, he either crawled or was carried.
For 40 years, he needed help to get his food.
For 40 years, he needed help to get a drink of water from the well.
For 40 years, he needed help to bathe himself.
For 40 years, he needed help to go to the bathroom.
For 40 years, he watched other people do “normal” stuff of life, while he just sat.
For 40 years, he begged.
For 40 years, he was completely dependent on the generosity of others.
For 40 years, people insulted him as one who was cursed by God – punished for some unknown sins.2
For 40 years, he sat outside the temple and watched the people go in to worship.
For 40 years, he was not allowed to enter the temple because he was not “whole.”
For 40 years, he was too dirty for human touch.
For 40 years, he was just a beggar – not a person.
For 40 years, he was on the outside of social life, economic life, and religious life.
Then, three things happened that changed his life forever.
1. Peter and John saw him. So often, we don't see. We go about our daily life. We go to our religious events. We go to Bible studies. We hang out with friends. We go to work. But we don't see the people hurting all around us. Peter and John saw! This is the first miracle.
2. Peter touched him. They got involved in his life. They could have seen him and kept on walking, but they stopped. They talked to him. They prayed for him to be healed, and they helped him to be healed.
And remember, this guy was not “clean” physically or religiously. Bathing was difficult, and he was rejected as subhuman by the temple leaders. When Peter touched the beggar, he was making a statement of faith, “Those who are unclean don't have to stay unclean. The power of life is stronger than the power of death. Jesus' power to heal and to clean is stronger than any sickness or stain or sin.”
When Peter touched him, Peter was including him into the community. Peter was extended his friendship to him. After 40 years of being an outsider, an exile right at the gate of the temple, this man was finally included.
3. God healed him. Peter and John saw him – really saw him. Peter touched him. And he was healed! He walked. He jumped. He praised God. Then, he went into the Temple. For 40 years, he had been excluded from the Temple. For 40 years, he wasn't good enough. Now, he goes into the Temple running and shouting the praises of God. He can finally enter into the heart of God's community!
Why? How can he go in now? Peter and John saw him. Peter touched him. Then, God healed him.
Let me ask you a question. What if Peter and John never saw him? What if they never really saw him? What if they just kept walking? Or what if they saw him, what if they talked to him and thought, “Oh, this poor guy. We feel really bad for you. We'll pray for you buddy”? What if they were too afraid to touch him? What if they were too concerned about their religious purity to get involved with someone who was unclean? What would have happened then? Would God have healed the man? I don't think so.
God did the healing – absolutely! But led by the Holy Spirit, Peter and John did the seeing and the touching. They saw. They touched. God healed.
Jesus' life, death, and resurrection offer healing inclusion to all who are broken and excluded. But for this miracle to happen, we need to see others (really see them), and we need to touch them (really get involved in their lives). Jesus heals, but first we see and we touch.
In Bangladesh, life is uncertain. 84% of the people in Bangladesh live on less than 2,600 won (US$2) a day. 41% try to survive on less than 1,300 won a day – just one roll of kimbap for the whole day.3
But the problems go from bad to worse for widows. In traditional Hindu-Bangladeshi culture, when a husband died, the body was burned in a funeral pyre. Traditionally, the widow was expected to join her dead husband on the fire, and sometimes even to light the fire herself. The death of a husband meant death to the wife as well.
This is horrible, but the alternative is also bad. For widows, life is almost a living death. Whatever land or possessions the husband had are divided among the husband's brothers, and the widow is left penniless and with no way to earn a living. She is forced into begging, prostitution, or slavery. Often, she is totally excluded from her family and community, as worthless, burdensome, or even evil. In fact, in some languages, the word “widow” also means “prostitute” or “witch” or “sorceress.”
The widow's children face a similar or even worse fate. Boys are often sold into child labor or abandoned to the streets. Girls are often sold into early marriages or sold as household slaves, where they have few rights and almost no protection.
Naturally, extreme depression is widespread among widows. Even though the traditional burning of widows is now very rare, many widows later commit suicide because of the extreme impossibilities of life.4
A while back, Nazarenes in Bangladesh began to help widows and their children in some beginning and basic ways. One day, Herman Gschwandtner, the South Asia coordinator for Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, visited Bangladesh and the Church of the Nazarene set up a meeting in a rice field with a small group of widows and orphans. They planned to talk about how Nazarenes could help in a more organized way.5
At first the meeting was what they expected, a small group of widows and orphans gathered with hope. But more people kept coming – alone and in small little family groups. Soon, there were a few dozen. More widows. More orphans. Finally, there were more than a hundred nearly-hopeless widows and orphans gathering on an empty rice field to talk with Nazarenes about hope. There were Muslims, Hindus, Christians – all seeking hope from the people who had seen them and touched them.
On that day, they talked and dreamed. They prayed for God's guidance and help. Later, with the help of a generous donation, the Nazarene church bought that field, and now they are converting it together into a village for widows and orphans. Two widows will live in each house, caring for five to seven orphans. Each house will have its own vegetable garden, and the whole village will share a farm and school.
What happened here? The Church of the Nazarene in Bangladesh saw. They saw the widows as real people needing their help. They touched. They got involved. They didn't stay on the sidelines. They reached out a hand to help. And God is healing. God is forming them into a community of love that gives life and hope to the hopeless and excluded ones. What would have happened if they didn't see? What would have happened if they didn't touch?
Jesus' life, death, and resurrection offer healing inclusion to all who are broken and excluded. But for this miracle to happen, we need to see and we need to touch. We see them as real persons, and we get involved.
(By the way, this is one of the candidate projects for a long-term partnership with our church.)
Teresa Navos is from a small mountain village named Guinsaugon on the island of Leyte in the Philippines.6 On February 17, 2006, 13 year old Teresa was in the next village over attending school. A huge storm blew in, and it rained so hard that the sky was dark. While they were having class, they suddenly heard “a loud and deep rumbling sound.” This was followed by the sounds of people screaming.
All of the kids rushed outside. Teresa watched in frozen horror as a huge chunk of the mountain collapsed and buried her village. The screams did not last long because no one had time to escape. The entire village was buried under 15 meters (49 feet) of mud and rocks. About 1,500 people died, including Teresa's mother and siblings.
In the aftermath, Teresa raged against God: “Why did you let this happen, God? I thought you were supposed to love and protect us!” Teresa felt empty and confused. She began to hate herself. She was falling slowly into a deep pit of sadness.
But Teresa was not alone. Christians saw her need, and they got involved. They kept visiting Teresa and her father and the other survivors. After a few months, Nazarene Compassionate Ministries started the St. Bernard Nazarene Child Development Center to help care for the children who lost parents and siblings in the mudslide. Stephen, a Philippino Nazarene, says, “The church became the hands and feet of God to restore their hopes and begin life anew.”
Now, Teresa is 15 years old. She leads a Bible study for younger kids in the St. Bernard center, and she plans to major in education so that she can be a teacher.
But what would have happened if the church had not really seen these people? What would have happened if they had only prayed and not touched? Would this miracle have happened? But they did see. They did touch, and God healed. Jesus' life, death, and resurrection offer healing inclusion to all who are broken and excluded. For people to experience this healing, we have to see, and we have to touch.
One last story. When I was in seminary, our young-adults group sometimes had older people from our church come in and share their testimonies. Once, a woman named Linda talked to us about her divorce. On the day of her marriage she remembers thinking, “This is either going to be great, or this is the biggest mistake of my life.”
It turns out that it was a the biggest mistake of her life. Their marriage was rough and rocky, and finally they decided to call it quits.
This was a big no-no for a conservative Nazarene family, and many people in her large church openly rejected her. Others gave her those disapproving sideways looks and gossiped about her when they passed her in the church hallways: “She's that woman who got a divorce. They didn't even last a few years.”
Linda didn't handle her divorce all that well. She responded to the pain and loneliness with a lot of drinking and sleeping around. But amazingly she didn't quit going to church. Somehow she couldn't let go of that.
In her adult Sunday school class, there was one core group of people who loved Linda and wouldn't let her go. Three or four married couples invited Linda into their intimate circle. They loved her and hugged her and joked with her and cried with her. They invited her over for dinners, for holidays, for games, for picnics, for just about everything.
They knew how she was spending her time away from them, and sometimes they would gently nudge her toward a healthier life. But here is the key part. They never made healthy living a requirement for their friendship and acceptance. They accepted her just as she was. They loved her with all of her weaknesses and poor choices.
Eventually, Linda began to face the emptiness inside her, or maybe the love from her friends and from God began to fill some of the emptiness inside her. She started making better choices. She recommitted her life to God. She found hope and peace again. She eventually married a not-so-famous Christian actor and became a significant leader in our church.
But it wouldn't have happened if a small group of Christians hadn't seen her – really seen her – as a person with real needs. It wouldn't have happened if they hadn't touched her and got involved in her life. They saw. They touched. God healed.
Jesus' life, death, and resurrection offer healing inclusion to all who are broken and excluded. May God help us to see – to really see those around us. May God help us to touch – to get involved in the lives of others, to reach out our hands to help them. May God work miracles of healing grace through us.
1See Acts 4:22 for his age.
2See John 9 for a similar case.
3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty downloaded 4.20.2009.
4“Widows in Third World Nations,” http://www.deathreference.com/Vi-Z/Widows-in-Third-World-Nations.html, downloaded 4.20.2009.
5Hermann Gshwandtner, “A Kingdom Imagination Has Come Alive,” NCM Magazine, Spring 2009, 10-11.
6Stephen Gualberto, “From Tragedy to Transformation,” NCM Magazine, Spring 2009, 8-9.
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