Friends
Friends from Wisconsin are coming for lunch today. I wish they could stay all weekend. We worked together in church in Michigan, and we've continued to appreciate their friendship. We also have friends coming for a meal on Sunday, others on Monday, still others on Tuesday. It's not our year to be with our family, but friends are wonderful!
Here are some very old words. They're part of a Christmas sermon preached by Thomas a Kempis in the 15th century. "O blessed and joyful birth, which has changed the curse of our first parents into blessing and has turned their grief into everlasting joy. This night is truly worthy of the awe and love of all people, the night in which Christ permitted himself to be delivered in order to deliver all. Blessed therefore be the holy Trinity, by whose goodness and wisdom the dignity of humanity has been restored and the cunning of the devil deceived. I bless you, heavenly Father, who sent your beloved Son into the world for our redemption. I bless you only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who to redeem us assumed our nature. I bless you, Holy Spirit, who gloriously and wondrously perfected all the mysteries of our redemption from the beginning to the end. To you be infinite praise and glory, to you be honor and empire, O supreme, eternal Trinity, by whose providence and ordering so sweet and solemn a festival has come to us. Amen."
A longer excerpt of that sermon is on Chip Stam's Worship Quote of the Week (www.wqotw.org). Chip directs the Institute for Christian Worship in Louisville, KY, is the cousin of a colleague at SIM, and is a fellow cancer traveler.
Chuck visited our friend in the hospital yesterday, and was relieved to see him looking much better, though the pain is still intense. We got word that he'd moved out of intensive care yesterday afternoon. We continue to pray. Fran's re-excision yesterday (the third attack on that miserable breast cancer) went well, and now we wait for the pathologist's report. Dear God, let this be the end! She still faces radiation and chemo, her doctor says.
Today our creative designer will upload the layout for the new magazine. We're making a few minor changes to the "look," and I'm very eager to see the new ideas applied to a real magazine.
Blessings for your day,
Carol
posted by Carol Wilson @ 6:18 AM
1 Comments:
About "risen with healing in His wings" --
At Ruth Graham's burial service in Charlotte in June, I was startled to hear one of the presiding ministers, Rev. Richard Bewes of All-Souls Church in London, pray from Malachi 4:2-3. I'd never heard that verse at a funeral.
"But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall."
He was thinking of Ruth's years of confinement to a wheelchair and eventually bedridden, now free to leap like a calf released from the stall. But it set me to studying the two verses, which are the basis of Charles Wesley's beautiful line in the hymn "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."
First of all, the text in Luke does not say the angels sang. But that's another story. More to the point, Malachi was speaking of the sun (not Son) rising with healing in its wings. That poetic expression makes beautiful symbolic sense as a description of the sun in flight across the sky, with the healing properties of sunshine and warmth and light.
We who live in the New Testament age read Malachi and in retrospect identify the sun with the Son, and the sunrise with the Son rising. Wesley did, and that connection is legitimate, but the play on words is an accident of English and not from the original Hebrew.
The King James Version familiar to Wesley capitalized the word Sun to make it representative of the divine, but that was done by translators, not Malachi. So Wesley's mysterious and beautiful line "Son of righteousness ... . risen with healing in His wings" is a marvelous depiction of Jesus' resurrection, but remains mysterious because it is not quite the symbol used by the Scripture upon which it is based.
Malachi's original word picture is so beautiful-- "Those who do not honor God will live in dark fear. But for you, sunrise! The sun of righteousness will dawn on you who honor my name, healing radiating from its wings. You will be bursting with energy, like colts frisky and frolicking."
For you Carol, I pray for a radiating healing, and for bursting energy.
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