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"Insisting on Grace" Mark 7:24-37 A Sermon Preached By Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 7, 2003 |
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PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY 13214 Phone: 446-0960 phillchu@twcny.rr.com
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two brief stories of healing that we read in Mark this morning in some ways
couldn’t be more different. In the first, the gentile woman who comes to
Jesus begging him to heal her daughter, runs into some resistance from
Jesus, and shows a lot of "chutzpa" by coming back at him and insisting that
she and her daughter were worthy of what Jesus could do. It seems that Jesus
was moved by her argument, and, as Matthew tells the story, Jesus attributes
the healing of the woman’s daughter to her "great faith." In the second, the
healing of the man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, the man
is completely passive. Others bring him to Jesus, and Jesus works on him as
if the man himself had nothing much to do with it. There’s no reference to
his faith, or anything that he brought to their meeting, other than his
need. So, we can’t really draw any conclusions about what brings the healing power of God into human life, if that’s what we’re looking for here. If we want to make the point that God only responds to our need through the power of our faith and belief in him, we might look to the first story to prove our point. But then the second story would seem to question it. If anything, it was the faith of those who brought the deaf man to Jesus, not his own. Every Sunday we lift up our needs and the needs of the world in prayer to God. We pray that God’s healing power would meet those needs - to bring healing to the sick, comfort to the bereaved, justice to the oppressed, peace where there is war. We lift them up to God, praying that God would hear our prayers. "Come to me," is always the invitation of our Lord - come to me, approach me, bring to me all that weighs on you, tears at you, all that divides you from one another and from me. When we do this, of course, we cannot dictate how these things might be accomplished. Surely part of our prayer has to be that God would accomplish these things through us. We’ve got to be active participants in the process or our prayers won’t have much weight to them. But yet, we pray, "thy will be done." We don’t set the terms with God. Our part is to bring the need and be open to the movement of God’s spirit within and among us. In this morning’s gospel reading surely our attention is drawn first to the woman who comes to Jesus. That seems to be where the real action is here, isn’t it? Don’t we kind of root for her in this scene? You go, girl! She goes. Sometimes our faith needs to be like a rock, helping us to stand fast in the midst of everything around us swirling about in confusion and uncertainty. Sometimes our faith needs to stand on conviction. We might think of Martin Luther’s famous response to his inquisitors: "Here I stand, I can do no other." But for some folks that seems to be all that faith is. There are rules that always apply, behaviors that are always wrong, standards that should never waver from the truth. Surely there are times when we need to stand. But there are also times when God wants us to move off where we are standing. Jesus himself demonstrated that in his ministry, and how he with this gentile woman is one such time. His initial response to her - "Let the children (of Israel) first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs (gentiles)" - though it strikes us as harsh today, was imbedded in rock-solid convictions of the day that had been observed for centuries. You can just see the disciples nodding in agreement - "That’s right, Jesus, that’s the way it is." Sometimes we need to stand, and sometimes we need to move off where we are standing. But then there is another kind of view, or approach, to faith that opens itself up so much to the currents of the world that it ends up not standing much of anywhere. Ironically, Jesus implies it in his initial response the woman: "It’s not fair..." Being "fair" would seem to be the hallmark of an enlightened and morally sensitive person. There are a lot of things, of course, that aren’t fair - but the problem with fairness is that everybody has their own idea of what it is. Kids are great at pointing out what isn’t fair in relationship to their own wants and desires - what they do and don’t want to do. They just state it. The writer Anne Lamott defended her practice of making her 14 year old son go to church even though he hates it. She was bombarded by critics who accused her of child abuse and brainwashing. Her response was that we live in bewildering times and a little spiritual guidance never hurt anyone. Besides, teenagers left of their own would opt out of many things they don’t enjoy, like homework or flossing their teeth. "It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life." Lamott knows God also loves teenagers who don’t go to church, but such teens, she says, are deprived of seeing people who love God back. "Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive." She also makes her son go to the church’s youth group. Youth "want guides," she says, adults who "know how to act like an adult but with a kid’s heart. They want people who will sit with them and talk about the big questions." It’s not fair that some kids should have to go to church while their friends get to sleep in or have fun doing something else. It’s not fair that some people get terrible illnesses, or die in car crashes, or . . . And others don’t. And for many, that’s where faith stops - when the universe does not correspond to our sense of fairness, and God does not intervene to make it right. But the woman didn’t stop. She insisted on grace. She insisted that mercy should overcome human conviction. She insisted that what was apparently so and always had been and always would be should not determine what Jesus could do now. She wasn’t so much demanding that her own dignity be recognized in a society and a religion that relegated her to a second-class status. She was calling upon the power of God to drive the demons from her daughter’s body, insisting that Jesus could do it. Her faith wasn’t based on rock solid conviction or on what was fair or not fair but on what God can do. "Give me some crumbs, Jesus. There’s enough of God to go around. Don’t tell me there isn’t." Does our faith insist that God will be God, or does it insist only that we should be right? Do we think that there is enough of God to go around? When we break the bread and share the cup we say that there is. With five loaves and two fish Jesus fed a multitude. With spit and a sighing prayer he opened a man’s ears. With barely more than a crumb of bread and a sip of wine he gives us life. With a faith that does not passively rely on convention or wait to see if God will be fair to us, but a faith that insists on the freeing power of love and the forgiving power of mercy and the healing power of compassion, a faith that moves toward what God has promised - even as we do not see it - this is faith that saves. God loves you. Love him back by insisting on God’s goodness and love, and by giving yourself to it. Amen.
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| Copyright 2003,
the Rev. Dr.
Peter W. Shidemantle. All rights reserved. Permission granted for
non-commercial use.
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