The church is a hospital

Are you ever uncomfortable in a hospital? It’s natural to be. You walk down the halls past countless rooms, and through the open doors you see so much sickness, so much hurt, so much pain. You see broken limbs, wrapped in casts. You hear the quiet whirr of machines that are helping people to breathe. You see IV bags dripping antibiotics into patients to help cure them of, well, who knows what awful sickness they’re battling? It’s natural to want to get out, to pull away.

Jesus’ heart is so different than ours. He saw a world of sickness, hurt and pain, and he didn’t want to get out or run away. He drew closer (Matthew 9:35-10:8). What was that world like? A place where you could hear the cries of people who were filled with guilt, and only told of a God who would hate them for their sins. He could see lepers whose decaying bodies didn’t bothering them as much as the loneliness and rot they felt in their hearts. He walked among people with healthy limbs but breaking and broken homes and lives. And he drew closer. He had to – he loved them.

This Sunday compels us to ask ourselves, Do we feel the same way when we look at the world? There’s an old – but fitting – quote, first spoken by Abigail Van Buren: The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. It’s a place – an activity, really! – where through the ministry of the Word, God draws near to the sinful, the broken, the hurting.

And that’s the ministry he gives to us. Encourage others to consider it today, but don’t lie to them about it. It’s an ugly business sometimes. It brings you face to face with those who cry. It sets you up against those who boast. It sends you running to those you’d rather run from.

But you can’t preach that message simply by pointing to the suffering of the world – at worst, the suffering would make us run away; at best, it would send us in as would-be saviors. Rather, preach the Jesus who heals us each and every day, the Savior of the Jews who would shed his blood to heal every gentile. And through that preaching, may God grant us a heart like his – a heart that breaks so that it might heal.