Sermon preached on Sunday, Trinity 4B, July 1, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: 2 Samuel 1.17-27; Psalm 130.1-8; 2 Corinthians 8.7-15; Mark 5.21-42.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was a young man, and until quite recently, whenever I read stories like the ones from Mark’s gospel lesson, I read them with a mixture of hope and despair, not unlike the main characters in the story. On the one hand, I took real comfort and hope in knowing that Jesus has the power to heal. If he could heal others of what ailed them, like he did in today’s gospel lesson, he could surely heal me and my loved ones if we became seriously ill. But therein was the rub. If Jesus could and did heal some, why didn’t he heal everyone? Surely for every person like the woman with a chronic disease that Jesus healed or who had a dead child that he raised, there were literally countless others whom he could have helped. But Jesus only healed a relatively small portion of folks that we know of, and he only raised three people from the dead—Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son (Luke 7.11-17), and his friend Lazarus (John 11.38-44)—again, at least of which we have a record. What’s up with that? And what was even more troublesome for me, why doesn’t the risen and ascended Lord not heal everyone who calls upon him? He certainly is in the position to do so. But we all know folks for whom we prayed to get healed and it didn’t happen. My daughter lost her faith over this very issue. When my dad got sick, she prayed that grandpa would get better. But grandpa died and she checked out. So this morning I want us to look briefly at the dynamics of faith and what we can do on our end to strengthen it so that we (and our faith) can withstand the trials and temptations of life.

To start with, these questions I’ve just raised, urgent and relevant as they might be to us, completely miss the point Mark is making and if we understand what it is Mark wants us to see, it can help us face the unanswerable questions that surround the mystery of healing with which we all must deal. Ultimately none of us can answer the “why” questions about who gets healed and who doesn’t. The book of Job makes that abundantly clear while reminding us that sickness and healing are not necessarily tied to how good or bad we are. Some bad people apparently escape suffering while some good people are afflicted with terrible diseases and none of us knows why God allows that. But again, that is not what Mark (and almost all of the biblical writers for that matter) want us to think about. Mark is not telling us that Jesus is some kind of a one man medical show and miracle healer, although healing was definitely part of Jesus’ ministry. No, what Mark wants us to see is that in these stories, we see God himself fulfilling his promise to his people to come and live among them as their Messiah to bring about his healing and liberation from sin and evil so that he might eventually do likewise for the entire world.

These mighty acts of healing and raising the dead are meant to be sign-posts on the road for us pointing and guiding us to God’s intended destination for us. Mark and the other gospel writers want us to look at Jesus’ mighty acts of power and see that they point to his death and resurrection, Jesus’ ultimate acts of healing and redemption. As Paul reminds us, on the cross, God has defeated decisively evil and the powers behind it (Colossians 2.15). That victory has not been fully consummated, but evil, sin, and death have been conquered by the blood of the Lamb and we are freed from the grasp of evil by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And of course, in Jesus’ mighty resurrection, God has given us a foretaste of the day when the dimensions of heaven and earth are fused together, the living and the dead in Christ will get new resurrection bodies, and the victory over evil and death will be consummated forever. God’s promised new creation will bring about the complete and ultimate healing of God’s people that we all long for and to which Jesus’ mighty acts of power like we read about in today’s gospel lesson point. To read stories like these in any other way misses the point Mark and the other gospel writers want us to see and can only serve to diminish our faith, hope, trust, and love in the One who can turn our fear into faith and give us what we need to live life with meaning, purpose, and power, irrespective of our physical or emotional state.

But what does that look like? Take David in today’s OT lesson for example. David’s faith did not protect him from all that can go wrong in life. After the Lord afflicted Saul with an evil spirit, Saul spent the rest of his life trying to kill David so that David wouldn’t take his place. But of course we know that Samuel had already anointed David and David’s kingship was a foregone conclusion because God willed it. But even after relentless persecution, David refused to diss Saul in his lament because Saul was God’s anointed king and David’s faith knew better than to bring dishonor to God’s anointed, even in death, and even if that person was his relentless enemy who wanted to kill him (cf. also 1 Samuel 24.1-7 for a rather earthy story).

And as Mark makes clear in his sandwiched story today, faith isn’t always as clear-cut or straightforward as we might prefer. Jairus surely came to Jesus out of desperation, not admiration. He had reached the end of his rope and was forced to turn to this itinerate preacher who increasingly was gaining a bad reputation among the religious movers and shakers in his community, not to mention old king Herod. But desperation sometimes causes us to do strange things and by God’s grace, Jairus reached out to the One who truly had the power to heal the sick and raise the dead, even though Jairus didn’t know that beforehand. There is nothing clean and neat about this story and we can relate because there is usually nothing clean and neat about our lives when we reach out in desperation and faith to Jesus to help us! But the point is that Jairus reached out in faith to Jesus, even if his faith wasn’t pure, and Jesus responded.

Or consider the woman with the chronic bleeding problem. In faith, fear, and trembling she reached out to literally touch Jesus so that he would heal her. She too was at the end of her rope, but unlike Jairus, she likely wasn’t concerned about her reputation because her illness already had shot that to pieces. Touching this woman meant that people would be unclean for a day and that was a colossal pain in the neck for those who did, which made the woman a social outcast and pariah. In reaching out in the midst of this frenzied crowd to touch Jesus, the woman literally risked her neck to be healed. Her faith was mixed with fear, but even in the midst of the chaos of her life and the crowd, Jesus responded to that faith, just like he does in ours. Where are you in this these stories?

So what do we do with the lessons from today’s gospel? In a few moments we are going to baptize another person into new life in Christ and his body, the Church, with all its hopes and challenges. As Patrick grows up, he will do so in an increasingly uncertain and chaotic world, and his faith will surely be challenged, just like ours is today. How do we help Patrick grow in his faith so that it will be strong enough to survive the fiery darts of the Evil One and all that is hostile and opposed to Christ and his people? As we have seen, first, we must learn the biblical story of how God fulfilled his promise to right all the wrongs that human sin and rebellion have caused so that we understand as best we can how God works and where God is taking us. That can only come from doing the hard work of reading, studying, and praying through the Bible over a lifetime, both individually and together, so that the needless despair that afflicted me as a young man won’t afflict him (or any of you). For example, I read the Bible now fundamentally differently than I did five years ago, primarily because of the amount of reading I do and the enormous influence Bishop Tom Wright’s commentaries have had on me so that I have stopped asking questions of the text that they were never designed to answer. That means that Patrick and all the rest of us have a lot of work and study to do over our lifetime and how we respond to that will be indicative of how important our faith and relationship with Jesus is.

Second, we also have seen that faith is not always straightforward and that’s OK because God’s power is greater than our faltering and incomplete faith. God can and does use our brokenness and the chaos of our lives to bring good and order to us, just like he did with folks in the Bible and countless others. Check out the story of Abraham if you don’t believe me. Today’s gospel stories remind us that even if we are hanging on by our toenails in the midst of fear and desperation, God will always respond to our cries for help. The more we know him and are familiar with how he normally operates, the better prepared we are to see his hand at work in our lives. This, of course, means that in addition to knowing the biblical story of salvation, we all need to be part of a community of faith so that we can love and support each other, even as we put up with each other’s foibles and brokenness.

Last, our hope in Jesus is rooted in his death and resurrection, in what God has done for us on the cross and what he has promised us in the new creation. This makes weekly worship essential because in worship we hear the word read and preached, and we partake in the sacrament of holy communion, which is a tangible sign and foretaste of God’s promised future. We ignore this great gift at our own peril because we need to be reminded constantly of what God has in store for those of us who are in Christ. It has always been true of God’s people (cf. Numbers 14), it will be true of Patrick in his life, and it is true of us.

Faith, of course, is a gift from God. We can do nothing to earn it. But like all gifts, faith requires our effort to cultivate and develop it with the help of the Spirit. We cannot become a great musician or athlete (or whatever) without the inherent gift. But that gift will never blossom to its fullest without our efforts to develop it and that means a lifetime commitment to the disciplines I have just mentioned and more. It’s hard work, but we engage in it because we love the Lord and believe that his power working in us is greater than our own weaknesses and all that can go wrong in this life. And of course as we grow in our faith in and through the power of the Spirit, we discover we have an ever deepening understanding that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.