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Elma United Methodist Church |
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Believe It or Not |
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Elma United Methodist Church |
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Believe It or Not Dan Shelly Elma United Methodist Church March 5, 2006 (Mark 9:14-29)
I’m afraid that I have to start this sermon right up front with a confession. Hey, we’re in Lent now and it’s a time to focus on prayer and confession anyway isn’t it? It turns out that way back on January 8th, when the lectionary verses were Mark’s recounting of the baptism of Jesus, it seemed to me that the story ended too soon. It didn’t include Jesus going out into the wilderness where he was tempted for forty days. So, I added a few verses at the end for my sermon. Now imagine my surprise when I looked at today’s verses and there they were, the very verses I added back in January. I guess someone had decided to break up the story a bit and save the 40 day wilderness experience for the beginning of our 40 days of Lent. Makes sense, but the problem is that I’ve already preached on these verses.
Of course my first instinct was COOL! I already have a sermon. Maybe I can just give it again and do something like give the first person who comes up to me afterwards and say “Um, Pastor Dan, didn’t you just preach that sermon recently?” a free doughnut or something as a reward for both listening to and remembering the sermon. But God wouldn’t let me get away with it. I became convicted that I did indeed need to write a different sermon for today. But I couldn’t use these same verses again, so what was I to do? Then it struck me. Last week was Transfiguration Sunday, and we talked about staying up on the mountain top with Jesus and finding a time of contemplation and prayer. But as with all mountain top experiences, they eventually have to end. So I looked ahead at the rest of the year, and our lectionary verses never cover what happens when Jesus comes down off the mountain. And it’s an important story in the life of Jesus and his disciples. So today, we took a bit of a side trip from the lectionary readings and read Mark 9:14-29. Because after the transfiguration, this is what Paul Harvey would call “The Rest of the Story!”
Peter, James, and John had all been up on the mountain and they had seen Jesus transfigured and shining like the sun, they had seen him talking with Moses and Elijah, and they had heard the voice of God from the clouds declaring “This is my Son, the Beloved.” OK I have to digress for a minute here to share a story with you. You see our 4 year old grand daughter Mila went to VBS this summer, and she’s been going to Sunday school; she’s been learning about Jesus and that Jesus is the Son of God. Well the other day she was riding home from pre-school with daughter, Shawna, and it was a cloudy day. But suddenly a small hole formed in the clouds and the sun shone directly out of the hole and onto their car. And Mila called out, “Look Mommy, I see Jesus!” “You see Jesus?” “Yes, right there in the clouds, I see Jesus the Sun!” Seems she had listened when people told her Jesus was God’s sun, but she took them a little to literally. And all the way home, she kept peeping at the sun shining through that hole in the clouds, waving, and saying “Hi Jesus! Hi Jesus!” But Peter, James, and John heard God’s voice saying “this is my Son.” S-O-N.
Now they came down off the mountain top with Jesus and walked right into a huge hubbub going on in the valley down below. You see, a week ago when they had left, Jesus told the remaining disciples to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of God, and to heal people in his name. And the disciples had been doing just that. In fact they were doing pretty good. People were hearing the good news and being healed. But then, a man had brought his son, S-O-N, and he was a really hard case. He could neither speak nor hear, and he often foamed at the mouth and fell down on the ground in uncontrollable convulsions. His description to us today might sound like someone suffering from a severe form of untreated epilepsy. It was enough to make the disciples doubt their ability to heal him, and in fact they hadn’t been able to do it.
When Jesus heard this, his response to them was “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” He attributed there inability to heal this boy to their lack of faith. In fact, the Greek term in the gospels that’s often translated “you of little faith” is best translated as “you little faithers!” I love to substitute that whenever I read or hear the words of Jesus. “You little faithers! How long do I have to put up with you?” And here, I also love his response to the Father. It’s translated so conversationally. After describing his son’s condition, the father says, “if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” And Jesus’ reply sounds almost incredulous. ‘If you are able? If you are able?!?—All things can be done for the one who believes.’
And immediately – remember we are still in the Gospel of Mark – immediately, the father of the child cried out, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ And that’s where I wanted to go with this lesson today because this is such a wonderful statement - I believe; help my unbelief. This Father didn’t have to have perfect faith for Jesus to heal his son, in fact what he does here is wonderfully human. He perfectly expresses the position that most of us as “people of faith” find ourselves in most of the time. We believe, but we’re also still carrying those lingering doubts along with us. This story tells us we can lay this all out to Jesus and cry out, “We believe, help our unbelief!”
And it’s understandable that we carry lingering doubts around with us, because faith has become a foreign and scoffed at commodity within our culture. In fact for many people, the only thing they have faith in, the only thing they truly believe is science. Living in a Western culture of facts and figures, scientific observation, and laws of cause and effect, for many, science has become the new religion. Yet if you talk to scientists who have walked down that road very far, they will tell you that all of the classical rules and theories about physics and the true nature of the universe fall apart when ever you either look too deep, or pull back and look at too large of a picture. At the cosmic end of the scale what you find is not the expected random chaos of a universe swirling and expanding out of control, but an order and a design that is so intricate and so complex that this design cries out for a designer. And at the other end of the scale, when you start to look at sub-atomic particles, they don’t behave as we expect and in fact what they reveal to the sub-atomic physicist is that for all our supposed knowledge and theories, when we break matter down to it’s most basic elements, we have little or no idea what we are really dealing with or how it really works. The whole house of scientific theories just begins to come tumbling down around our ears. For instance, do you know that if you shoot a beam of photons at a plate of glass, most of them will pass right through the glass’ surface, and that’s easy to observe, just look at sunlight (that’s S-U-N) passing through a window. Yet these same scientists will tell you that SOME of these photons will bounce off the surface of the glass and produce a glare or reflection. And they can’t tell you which photons in the stream will do this, or why they do it, all they can say is “We see it, so it must be happening.”
And that’s the way we live in this modern world. “You’ve got to see it to believe it.” It reminds of the character Geraldine that the break-through comedian Flip Wilson played on television back in the 70’s. Flip would dress up as Geraldine and her famous line was, “Honey, what you see, is what you get!” More recently, it also reminds me of the line from the movie Jerry McGuire. When Tom Cruise asked him to have faith and believe in him, Cuba Gooding Jr. replied, “Show me the Money!” You want me to believe? Then you better show it to me! Even our modern sports contracts no longer go on faith. When a baseball player is hired, they don’t give him his salary because they believe in him. Instead they fill up the player’s contract with incentive bonuses. If you bat above a certain percentage, we’ll give you a bonus. If you hit so many RBIs of Home Runs, we’ll give you another bonus. If you are selected to play in the All-stars, if you earn a gold glove at your position, if you become the leagues MVP, etc, etc, we’ll give you more bonuses. There’s little or no faith left in most modern sports contracts. Instead, it’s all about facts, figures, and measurable performance. That’s the world we live in today.
So we can really relate to that father who cried out “I believe, please help my unbelief.” In many cases, not only aren’t we taught how to believe, but if you do believe in something, if you have faith and express it, you can find yourself ridiculed by those who consider themselves too modern or post-modern for that type of stuff. They’ll put all their trust in facts, in figures, and in science thank you. They’d just better hope that they don’t get into too detailed of a discussion with a modern physicist!
And Jesus’ disciples found themselves in our same boat. There they were literally able to walk and talk with Jesus, yet he was constantly calling them “little faithers.” They were unable to heal or perform the same miracles as Jesus. When they got Jesus off privately, they asked him why they couldn’t heal this child and he told them, “This kind can only be healed through prayer and fasting.” They didn’t have enough faith to heal this child and Jesus’ solution to grow their faith was prayer and fasting. You see even the faith itself to believe comes to us as a gift from God. So if we want our faith to grow, we need to go to the source, we need to seek God.
And that’s what this time of Lent is all about. It’s a time to intentionally seek God. It’s a time to pray and fast and allow our faith to grow. It’s a time to wait, like a butterfly waits and believes inside it’s cocoon, wait upon the Lord, until our wings of faith are fully grown and strengthened. Then, and only then, can we break forth out of our shells, spread out our new-found wings of faith, and take to the skies. A Lenten time of prayer and fasting may seem like foolishness in our post-modern, scientific world, but in the world of faith, it’s the very air we breath that gives us life and hope and strength to grow and endure. So take the time, and enter the Lenten journey that leads to a deepened life of faith and discipleship.
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