Epiphany: Bind Up

 Isaiah 61:1-4 is our Epiphany study. We’ve seen that we are anointed to proclaim the good news. God’s spirit, indeed God’s heart, is within each of us to work to bring about God’s dream of one family.

It’s not enough to simply announce We are the Family of God. We are to actively bind up the broken-hearted, according to Isaiah 61:1. The Hebrew word translated to bind up means to wrap firmly or to stop. I am reminded of the swaddling clothes used for generations to wrap infants, and the burial wrappings of bodies. I am also reminded of the way a parent will tightly, yet lovingly, hold an out-of-control child so they don’t hurt themselves or someone else.

Psalm 147:3 says God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. We each carry wounds, whether we are aware of them or not. What we (I) too often forget is that others are also wounded. Let us set aside our own pain to reach out to those who need held (virtually or in person). Let us bind up one another’s hearts, holding them safely.

How is that done? By love. In a sermon at Washington National Cathedral in 2020, David Brooks, NY Times columnist and author, said, “On one level, acts of beauty and pure gift and loving care are radically illogical. They are vulnerability in the face of danger. They are gentleness in the midst of bitterness. They are compassion in the midst of strife, but these are the acts that have the power to shock. These are the acts that have the power to open hearts.”

On Epiphany we saw acts that shocked us to the core as individuals and as a nation when an angry mob stormed the US Capital. Whether they acted from loyalty or loss, ideology or ignorance, privilege or press, the result was destruction, desecration, and death. It was the opposite of what David Brooks talks about. He says that loving care, gentleness, and vulnerability are the real things that have the “power to shock…the power to open hearts.” They are the Way that Jesus taught. Jesus, remember, quoted Isaiah 61 at the beginning of his ministry (Luke 4:18) and it defined all he did. As followers of the Crucified One, we are called and anointed to do the same.

This poem by Howard Thurman sums it up for this second week of Epiphany:

After Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled, 

when the star in the sky is gone,

when the kings and princes are home,

when the shepherds are back with their flocks, 

the work of Christmas begins: 

to find the lost,

to heal the broken,

to feed the hungry,

to release the prisoner,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among the people, 

to make music in the heart.

Our work this Epiphany is to be radically open. Our call is to act out of pure gift and loving care in order to bind up and open hearts—our own and others. This is not easy, and can only be done when we take God’s hand and step out in faith to listen, to heal, to restore—to love one another as we are so completely and radically loved by God.

Start by bringing to God your own fears and angers and feelings of powerlessness. Let God comfort you, so that you can, in turn bind up the brokenhearted.