They were desperate people - desperate people willing to take desperate measures for desperate times.

Desperate - and I think we can understand why. Consider them for a moment:

• A grieving father - his precious daughter dead. What more needs be said?
• A woman - anaemic, listless from a constant loss of blood year after year; bitter after running into countless medical dead ends; considered a social outcast because of religious laws regarding blood flow and ceremonial impurity.
• Two blind men - unable to make their way through life, no work, no food, reduced to the humiliation of begging.

You've all, no doubt, seen the pictures of people caught in burning buildings who make a desperate leap from a second or third story window because it's their only chance to live. They're counting on the landing providing more hope and safety than staying put with flames licking at their heels. Staying put is simply no option.
These desperate people that we encounter in Matthew make a leap because leaving things the way they are is simply no option.

The leap they each make - each in their own unique way - is a leap of faith. A leap of faith straight into the arms, so to speak, of Jesus. And like a key fitting into its own particular lock, that leap of faith breaks the shackles that hold their lives.
The daughter is alive.
The bleeding stops.
Vision is restored.

Each time happening in rather unique sorts of ways -

• The ruler is convinced that if Jesus would come and lay a hand on the corpse, death would flee. And it does!
• The woman is convinced that all she need do is reach out and touch the edge of Jesus' coat - the edge wherein were sewn sections from the scriptures. And through that touch flows new life into her body.
• The blind men come calling, determined, not letting up. Following Jesus right into his house. Until he does something.... anything! And they leave the house with full sight restored.

Desperate - can you see the leap they take?
This ruler is a man of prestige and means. Upper circles of society often carry their own unique burdens of expected protocol. A death has occurred, and protocol dictated the presence of family and hired wailing women, certain rituals to be observed, respects to be paid.
But the ruler walks away from all that. Goes instead to this itinerant preacher, begging him to come and defy the odds of death, to break the 100% death rate that held sway in Palestine. Begs him to reach out and touch the corpse, knowing full well that to touch a body broke every Jewish social and religious rule in the book.
He goes out on a limb, trusting that if Jesus breaks the rules, laying on His hand, that something wonderful -- dare he hope for life - something wonderful will happen.

Desperate measures taken by desperate people in desperate times.
The woman - some sort of gynaecological problem and blood flow that wouldn't let up. Old Testament Law (Leviticus 15) dictated that someone in her condition was religiously unclean - unable to go to church, unable to join in a crowd because simply touching others would make them also unclean and forced to live as outcasts for a time. 12 years she'd lived on the fringes of society. 12 long, lonely, tiring, humiliating years.
Desperate measures - she elbows her way through the crowd, coming up from the back. Hoping no one will notice, for then she will be forcibly removed. Hoping desperately that the teacher won't notice. For if she touches Him, she will have made this rabbi unclean, turning Him into an outcast.
But she must do it.
There is no other way.
None.
And she knows it.

And those two blind guys. Bad enough to have lost one of the main senses of the body, deprived of seeing the beauty in God's world. But remember - that was a society without any social safety net. If no one took pity on them there would be no food, no shelter - just slow death.
Two blind guys, in a crowd of sick, disabled and otherwise impoverished people. Lost in the crowd. Trampled on by the rest.
So they call when Jesus goes by. And they don't give up. He enters his home - why, we're not sure. Testing their resolve? Wanting to get to a quiet place where a healing won't be a public spectacle? We're simply not told why - He enters his home, and these two desperate people stumble up to the door, feeling their way,
Rabble barging right into the home of the rabbi.

Matthew carefully records the amazing breakthrough that Jesus gives as a holy gift into their lives.
Hope to the hopeless.
Relief to the desperate.

They are carefully recorded immediately after the strange account of wine and wineskins. New wine put into old, brittle skins will burst out of them, breaking through with the pressure of fermentation. The point of that story being simply that new times call for new ways of behaving, and these times - with Jesus living in Palestine - these were definitely new times. These were celebration times, says Jesus. You can't hold back. This is party time.

And the three wonderful healing accounts are presented as though Matthew were anticipating some reader asking, "So why - why is this party time? What is it that makes this new time? What's going on that's so special?"
Bang. Bang. Bang.
One. Two. Three.
Desperate dejected people made whole and hilarious.
"Anything else you want to know?" says Matthew.

Something we need to understand about bible accounts of miracles performed. They're not presented as razzle 'em dazzle 'em magic tricks. They're not wheel of fortune-like, well at least someone wins big types of game show events.
Miracles in the gospels are signs.
Signs pointing to a new reality that is beginning to break through into a dark and desperate world. A new reality that revolves around Jesus. A reality that is bigger, stronger and able to reverse the effects that sin introduced into the Cosmos;
namely the effects of decay, suffering, frustration, despair and death.

Miracles are signs that point in two directions.
They point back to a time in Eden when physical bodies did not go blind, get crippled, or bleed non-stop for twelve years. They point to the way God originally meant life on earth to be.
They also point forward - to a time when blindness, crippling and bleeding will be evicted from creation once more; this time never to return; a time God is working and moving towards, doing so through His son Jesus Christ.

Some people see these miracles as implausible suspensions of the laws of the physical universe. As Philip Yancey points out in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew (p.182), these miracle signs serve just the opposite function. They show that death, decay, entropy and destruction are the true suspensions of God's laws. These miracles are the early glimpses of restoration.

Miracles are the first blips on the radar screen of history that something new, radically new, is coming.
These miracles recorded in the gospels are the first blips. And we need to understand that they are only that. For reasons that remain agonizingly unapparent to us, and beyond our human ability to comprehend, Jesus didn't empty out all the hospitals in Palestine. Not all lepers were cured. Blind people still roamed the streets. Funeral workers still had employment.
But some were touched. Given new hope, release from desperation.

And down through the centuries people continue to be touched. Blips continue to appear on the radar screen of history reminding us that this new order of reality IS coming. Our heavenly Father hasn't forgotten about what He began in Jesus. He ISN'T content to allow Satan free reign to work total havoc in the cosmos.
The apostles after Jesus worked miracles.
Their followers saw miracles performed.
Down through the centuries they continued. Through Reformation times. Some amazing stories are told about John Knox and miracles that occurred in his gatherings.
And they continue today.
They continue - as blips on the screen. Little glimpses, little foretastes of what will finally come when Jesus returns to fulfil Rev 21: "There shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying; and there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away."

Glimpses. Meaning that there will continue to be funerals among followers of Jesus. Cancer will continue to rear its horrible head. Disabilities and chronic suffering will continue to stalk us. And tears will still flow.

But sometimes -
Sometimes, at times and in ways that only God in His hidden, sovereign way understands........
Sometimes there are breakthrough moments, when the dark course of events that we have come to expect as natural are shown to be completely unnatural and are reversed.

Do you believe that?
Do you believe that the God who, as the song says, is our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
that our God who is the same yesterday, today and forever
still reaches out His holy hand and heals, works miracles, and compassionately touches the lives of people in need?

Believe it, my friends.
Believe it, fellow worshippers.
Believe it, desperate people.

Believe......

Did you notice that this is the one element that shows up again and again in the miracle signs that Matthew presents?
Faith, I'm talking about.

Take heart, your faith has healed you (v.22)
According to your faith be it done to you (v.29)

What is this thing called "faith"?
C.Peter Wagner puts it this way, "It is a willingness to come before Jesus and expectantly ask for His healing touch while releasing ourselves into His loving care, trusting Him to do what is best for us. [It is not] a tool for coercing God to heal. Nor is it a level of credulity heightened by excessive emotionalism which seeks to deny the reality of symptoms." [How To Have A Healing Ministry without Making Your Church Sick p.266]

Faith is a desperate person reaching out an empty hand to Jesus, trusting that He has the power and the means to fill it, and seeking for Him to do so.

Faith - the central element of the Christian life.
It is with faith that we reach out empty hands, asking Jesus to fill us with forgiveness for sin and the gift of adoption into the Family of God.

It is with faith that we reach out hands that will one day die, trusting that Jesus will make good on His promise of John 14, "In my Father's house are many rooms.... I go to prepare a place for you, and... will one day take you to be where I am".

And it is with faith that we can reach out with our broken, upset moments of life today and seek an intervening touch from the finger of Christ. We can pray in faith, asking for healing. We can pray in faith, seeking a job. We can pray in faith while we look for a life partner. We can pray in faith, while desperately wondering if there can ever be relief from anger and disruption in the family home.

Let me say it again - out of hard personal experience - we understand that miracles before the second coming of Christ are given as signs. Blips on the radar screen of history; foretastes of something better coming.
Why God sometimes restores, and other times decides instead to give a person strength to cope within the difficulties,
I simply don't know.
I have absolutely NO idea.
I wish I did....... but I don't.

It remains as it did when Jesus was here. Funeral directors still have work. Hospitals are full. Chronic suffering from disease still occurs.
But sometimes - when people in simple, humble, asking faith reach out empty hands to heaven; when they do that as individuals, and when they do that as a church community -
- sometimes amazing miracle answers to the prayers are given.

We need to learn to recognize them. To give thanks when they come.
And to dare in faith to ask.
Remembering, of course, that if God chooses to answer differently than we hope or desire, that is His divine prerogative. He knows best.
But we may ask - in faith we may ask.
I would like, then, to simply encourage each of you to take a moment or two this morning to do a self-inventory.
To ask if you can see yourself as one of these three people we considered today. Do you see yourself as needy, desperately in need of the Holy Hand of Jesus working in your life? Or are you self-made? Self-confident? Jesus power and gracious miracle-working peace comes to the desperate, the empty-handed ones.

I also want to ask you to recommit to a belief in a miracle-working Jesus. Too many of us have silently given in to the lie of the science age which scoffs at this sort of thing, saying that at best it is something from a by-gone era. It certainly doesn't happen today.
That's simply not true, my friends. The power of God from all ages past is the power of God today. It continues to flow.

Sometimes quietly giving believers strength to endure hardship.
Sometimes giving a miracle blip, a foretaste of eternal glory when all will be healed.

Various passages of the Bible encourage us to pray and seek for such flowing in our lives. Let's take God up on that encouragement. I want to publicly pledge to each of you this morning that if you are in a situation where you'd like me, another member of the pastoral staff, or an elder of this church to pray with you and perhaps to anoint you with oil in the name of the Lord, seeking His sovereign flow of power in your life -- we will come....... without hesitation.
Just call.

That is also why we have a prayer team available each Sunday morning - to pray with you that the Lord's power would flow in your life, your family, in those you know and love. I encourage you to make more regular use of them.

And that is why we are a Christian community. Pray with each other. For each other. Do it when you meet as committees. Do it when you gather as friends. Do it when you join in education. Just do it.

For when a desperate hand and voice reach out to heaven, God will not let it go unheeded. Somehow, someway, sometime - an answer will come.
Including an answer to the prayer, "MARANATHA! - come quickly Lord Jesus to make all things new and whole."