Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 14B, September 9, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125.1-5; James 2.1-17; Mark 7.24-37.

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

This morning I want us to look briefly at what the biblical writers mean when they talk about faith. There are really two sermons related to faith to be had from today’s texts but mercifully, I am only going to preach one because one of the topics is fairly self-evident—that is, how we are to treat the poor and how this is a reflection of our faith. So I will only state the obvious and do it quickly. Our faith in Christ should always manifest itself in our caring for the poor because as the writer of Proverbs reminds us, they too are made in God’s image and are every bit as valuable as the Bill Gates’ of the world. In other words, how we allocate our resources, both financial and otherwise, are powerful indicators of who and what we ultimately put our faith in. And I would be derelict in my duty if I did not remind us that Scripture consistently warns of dire consequences for those who misuse the resources with which we have been blessed. As people living in the richest nation in the history of the world, I humbly suggest we pay close attention to this and put our money where our mouth (and hopefully our faith) is.

The other topic, faith and how it relates to healing, is much more complex and so merits the bulk of our time this morning. Is it true, for example, that when our prayers for healing apparently go unanswered it means we lack faith? The issues around this question are real and complex, made even more difficult by our limited perspective on what constitutes real healing, and can be faith breakers for us. So let us see what today’s lessons can teach us.

Every one of us can relate to the Syrophoenician woman in today’s gospel lesson. We all know someone who has been chronically or desperately sick or dying—I know several of you are dealing with issues and loved ones in your life like this right now—and in our desperation to find healing for them (or ourselves) we are open to almost any possible solution. This is what is happening in today’s gospel lesson. Here we see a Gentile woman who has caught wind that a wandering Jewish miracle healer is in town and she takes a huge risk by going to see Jesus because Jews and Gentiles usually mixed as well as oil and water do. But at the moment this doesn’t matter to the woman because she is desperate to find someone who can heal her sick daughter. This traditional animosity between Jew and Gentile helps us understand the somewhat shocking interchange (at least to our ears) between Jesus and the woman. She pleads with Jesus to heal her daughter but Jesus at first apparently rebuffs her, reminding the woman that his mission is first and foremost to his own people, the Jews. But the woman’s faith would not let Jesus’ response deter her. Notice that she doesn’t argue with Jesus. She simply says to him that whatever it is Jesus has, there’s surely enough to go around, even if it is just the leftovers.

If you are looking for an operational definition of what James is talking about in today’s epistle lesson when he talks about faith expressing itself in behavior, look no further than this woman. Notice carefully her belief that Jesus could heal her sick daughter, i.e., her faith, led her to risk humiliation and rejection to find a cure for her daughter. This is faith in action and irrespective of what or who we put our faith in, it will always drive our behavior and cause us to behave accordingly. In this case the woman’s faith would not let her take no for an answer and Jesus rewarded her faith handsomely by healing her daughter. The woman’s faith had overcome her fear of being turned away.

And of course people today still have this fear of being turned away when bringing their deepest sorrows and troubles to Jesus. Sure, on one level we might believe that Jesus can bring about miraculous healing (miraculous from our standpoint, that is, because if God really is omnipotent there is no such thing as a miracle cure) but we worry that we or our loved ones are unworthy or that Jesus might turn us away for some reason or another, and so unlike the Syrophoenician woman we don’t even try to bring our troubles and sorrows to Jesus. We let our doubts and fears overrule any faith we might have that Jesus can bring healing for us or our loved ones.

But is it realistic to expect Jesus to perform a healing miracle for us or our loved ones or at least be open to the possibility? On the one hand we all know or at least have heard about cases where God apparently violates the expected order of things to bring about what we would call a miraculous cure. But we also know cases where faithful people have prayed for healing, miraculous or otherwise, and the healing does not come. Instead, the disease continues unabated and/or death occurs. Are we to conclude that Jesus has turned those folks away and does not care about them or their needs? Does this mean that those folks don’t have the faith needed for Jesus to act and that only folks who have their prayers for healing answered have real faith? The short answer to these questions is no. Nobody knows why God answers some prayers for healing while apparently saying no to others. And if you ever find someone who claims to know why Jesus does or doesn’t act to heal, run like crazy because that person is a liar.

But before we look at the answer to these questions more fully, we need to look at what today’s gospel lesson tells us about Jesus and his healing miracles. The first thing we notice is that Jesus was telling the woman he had not come to be a traveling medical missionary. Rather, he had come to announce God’s kingdom to God’s people, Israel, and to invite Israel to follow him so that they could be God’s light for the world to bring God’s healing love to bear on his sin-sick and broken world. In other words, Jesus’ primary mission was to invite Israel to be the blessing God had promised Abraham they would be (cf. Genesis 12.2-3). Jesus in effect was telling the woman that he could not let her personal need distract him and keep him from going to Jerusalem to complete his saving mission on Calvary.

To be sure, Jesus healed the woman’s daughter as well as many others, all signs of the promised new creation where God will finally and fully heal all his children, both Jew and Gentile alike. And to be sure, faith was intricately involved in those healings. But if we think about this for a minute we quickly realize that those Jesus healed constituted only a tiny fraction of those whom he could have healed. This isn’t because Jesus only cares about some people but not others. It’s because he didn’t have time or the opportunity to cure everyone who needed curing. After all he was human like us, and as we have seen, he didn’t come to be a medical missionary and miracle worker. He came to bring peace and reconciliation between God and his wayward and rebellious people. The healings were simply advance signs of God’s promised Messianic Age where all who are in Jesus the Messiah will be healed. It is critical that we understand this. Otherwise, we are always going to be left wondering why Jesus healed some, but not all.

This brings us back to our questions about faith and healing. As we have seen, no one can explain why God chooses to answer some prayers as asked and not others’. But what our lessons remind us is that faith is always expressed in what we do (or refuse to do) and that it is intricately related to healing. And this reminds us that we have to believe Jesus has the power to heal us and our loved ones. If we do not believe this, we really cannot claim to have much faith in Christ in general.

Of course, to have this faith, we must know Jesus, not just know about him. We get to know Jesus through reading and wrestling with Scripture, through talking and listening to Jesus regularly in prayer, and through regular interaction with God’s people. Scripture reminds us what Jesus can do and has done. Prayer gets us focused on Jesus so that he can help us get to know him in and through the power of the Spirit. And interacting with other faithful Christians allows Jesus to give us the much-needed human touch so that we can further experience his risen Presence and faithful love for us.

As for having Jesus answer our prayers for healing, much depends on our willingness to see healing above and beyond its physical aspects. To be sure, none of us wants to suffer or see our loved ones suffer and so it is natural for us to ask Jesus for healing and for us to worry about and grieve over them. But what if the answer to our prayer is no? While none of us knows why some of our prayers for physical healing apparently go unanswered, this doesn’t mean that Jesus cannot or does not bring needed healing. Think about it. When human sin entered the world, it brought death with it. We all must die one day. Even the people Jesus healed, even the two he resuscitated from the dead, eventually got sick again and died. It is the fate of all of us. So even the most spectacular physical healing is temporary at best, much as we desire it.

But when we know Jesus and through him, God’s faithful love for us, we are open to deeper kinds of healing that we or our loved ones might also need. When we really know Jesus and have faith in his blood shed for us, death is something we no longer have to fear. As Paul wrote the Philippians, for him it was better to die and be with Christ. But he realized that Jesus needed him to continue to be an apostle to the Gentiles (cf. Philippians 1.21-24). So instead of bringing physical healing, our Lord might bless us with peace about dying and/or relieve us of the anxiety we feel. John Wesley, the old Anglican priest who started the Methodist movement, used to say that one of the marks of a Methodist was how well he or she died. By that Wesley meant that faith in Christ obliterated our fear of death and brought a sense of peace that passes all understanding, even when death was imminent. Jesus can heal us in almost limitless ways and if we see that our prayers for physical healing are not being answered as we have asked, our faith allows us to trust Jesus enough to ask him for the kind of healing he sees that we really need.

We could never do this if our prayers were based entirely on empirical evidence because life is entirely too unpredictable to develop the kind of faith we have been talking about. We can only develop faith if we really know our Lord and his love for us, and trust that his will for us is better than our hopes and desires and limited perspective on the situation. We don’t get this kind of faith overnight and some of us unfortunately never develop this faith at all because our faith is tied to only one answer to our prayers. But if we come to know our Lord and trust him in everything, we will be able to more readily see his healing in our lives.

Please do not misunderstand. I am not suggesting that we should not pray for physical healing for us or our loved ones or jump for joy when those prayers apparently go unanswered. Neither am I suggesting that we should long for death because death is the ultimate evil and poke in God’s eye. What I am suggesting is that our need to be healed runs far deeper than any physical healing that might or might not occur, and Jesus can and does offer that kind of deeper healing if we have the eyes of faith and the wisdom of Scripture to see it.

And as James has reminded us, our faith must always find an expression in what we do. So what kind of faith do you have? Is your faith strong enough to conquer your fears so that you go to God in prayer even if you are anxious that God may not answer you as you’ve asked? Do you know the love of Christ so well that even if your prayers for healing are not being answered as you hoped that you can change up your prayers and ask Jesus to show you how best to pray for yourself or your loved one?

I don’t say any of this as an exercise in theory. I have been battle tested myself. Four years ago this past week I walked into the ER of Lutheran hospital in Fort Wayne, IN. I had been told my mother had become unresponsive at the rehab center where she was recovering from a second round of back surgery and had been transported there. Having had chaplain experience, as soon as I walked into her room, I knew it was over. I didn’t even bother to pray for her physical recovery because I knew she was beyond that point and concluded it was her time to die. It took her three days and she didn’t die an easy death. But I could not have gotten through it had Jesus not answered my prayers to help me endure what I had to endure. And Jesus did not disappoint. He sent compassionate nurses to minister to my mom. He gave me a wife who ministered to mom in ways I simply could not. And then on the third day when I was about emotionally worn out, Jesus sent two hospital chaplains to refresh my beloved and me.

Did it turn out for my mom as I had hoped and desired? Of course not. Jesus chose not to heal her through the two surgeries she had. But through it all, despite appearances to the contrary, I knew my mom was in Jesus’ care and that she was headed for better place to be with Jesus and ultimately to the new creation where she will never suffer or be sick again. That didn’t make those three days any easier, but Jesus helped me transcend that awful moment in time. Jesus brought healing and hope to me in the midst of death and decay. That’s why I can still pray for healing today and preach a sermon like this. And when by God’s grace you have the faith to experience Jesus’ healing power in your life, especially when you desperately need it, you will also know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

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