"Will Our Faith Break If Stretched?"

Sermon Delivered By Reverend Richard E. Stetler – September 29, 2013

Centenary United Methodist Church

Jeremiah 31:27-34; Luke 18:1-8

 

    Today, in a number of our modern societies, there is a hidden or disguised stressor in our midst that few of us pay much attention to.  We see this stress-causing agent outcropping when people complain about how slow their computers are.  We find it lurking under our skin when we are in congested traffic patterns at the end of the day. 

    While waiting for our son’s arrival at the airport recently, I overheard someone say, “What is that woman doing?”  The woman in question was standing in front of the ATM just outside the terminal and appeared to be having trouble with it.  The complaint came from a man who was among others that were waiting to use it. 

    Our response to this stressor is impatience.  The cause of our response is that we are in a hurry for everything.  If we took the time to question ourselves about this need to rush, quite honestly, most of us would be at a loss to explain it.  There appears to be an invisible, aggressive energy driving us to hurry all the time, but few people can define it or understand its origin.   

    Recently, I was driving on Middle Road toward Hamilton when a supersized SUV was following me inches from my rear bumper.   I stopped to let someone turn in front of me on Brighton Road so that the backed up traffic behind her could begin moving again.  I could see in my rearview mirror that the driver of the SUV was furious.  At his first opportunity, he passed me on a very dangerous curve that was well marked with a yellow line.

    What is curious about his response is that I was only two cars behind him when we both stopped at the first traffic light before entering Hamilton.   One has to wonder what evoked such passion in that driver to risk his life and the life of others to gain two car lengths.  If we spoke to him, I doubt he could connect the dots between my extending courtesy to another driver and his need to overtake my car on a dangerous curve.  This invisible energy is flowing through all of us.

    The level of efficiency that numerous services provide has spoiled us.  We enjoy a steady diet of instant gratification in so many areas of our lives.  This may be the source of our agitation when our expectations are denied.   Rather than being grateful that our societies have such high speed services, we complain when our television screen goes blank or when we encounter a long line of clients waiting for an available bank teller.

    Our lesson this morning from Luke features a widow who kept coming to a judge for justice.  She would not let him alone.  Finally, after her constant persistence, the judge decided to deal with her complaint just to get rid of her.  Peterson translates this passage very graphically:

I do not care what God thinks and even less what people think.  But because this widow won’t quit badgering me, I had better do something to grant her the justice she seeks – otherwise I am going to end up black and blue by her persistent pounding. (Luke 18:4f)

    Jesus goes on to tell his listeners that God will judge in favor of his people who cry out for help day and night.  Further, he tells his listeners that if a corrupt judge is capable of bringing swift justice because a widow is badgering him, how much more will God bring hasty results to his people? Peterson ends our Scripture lesson with words that are the jump off point for my message this morning: “How much of this persistent kind of faith will the Son of Man find on earth when he returns?”

          This is an excellent question!  In an environment where instant gratification is available so readily to most of us, how do we respond to unanswered prayer? Sometimes we feel like the widow, i.e., we will have no justice until the judge intervenes on our behalf.  Is this parable an invitation to continue asking God both day and night until our need is met?  Some people may understand prayer this way but then they open themselves to feeling abandoned when God does not meet their expectations.

    There are a number of scriptures that support the idea of instant gratification even in our prayer life. Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive, seek, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”  (Matthew 7:7)  The granddaddy of all Scriptures says, “I will do whatever you ask if you ask it in my name, so that the Father’s glory will be shown through the Son.  If you ask me for anything in my name, I will grant it.” (John 14:13f)

    Of course, all of us can understand the obvious conflict when a bride prays for a sunny day for her outside wedding ceremony and when a farmer is praying for rain for his new plants in his garden.  What happens when both end their requests with “In the name of Jesus”?  Has such a verbal formula ever granted us instant gratification to our requests? What did Jesus mean when he said, “How much of this persistent kind-of-faith will the Son of Man find on earth when he returns?”

    A number of our unanswered prayers come from requests that are evoked from our own insecurities. For example, we want God to bolster our confidence so we perform well during a job interview.  We want God to bless our cricket team or ask that our daughter’s surgery goes well.  We ask God to spare the life of our loved ones.  We reason that what is in front of us will be impossible to manage well without God’s intervention.  But suppose what we need to do is learn that unanswered prayers are our invitation to stretch our faith? 

    If we look at the Jeremiah passage this morning, we may find a clue why instant gratification cannot be part of our prayer life.  Jeremiah has God say, “A time is coming when I will make a new covenant with my people.  I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts.”  (Jeremiah 31:33)  The emphasis of this passage is on the words, “A time is coming.” These words should tell us that the timing of anything in creation is not up to us. 

    What would be the implications for us if we never ask God for anything?  Think about this very seriously.   If we adopted this attitude toward God, our prayers would always be reserved for moments when we express our gratitude.  The mountains that often evoke our fears and insecurities could then be looked upon as instruments for our growth.

    The truth is, we do not know what any experience means nor do we know where it might lead us if we responded to each incident with acceptance and gratitude.  Our fears often cause us to forget that God is with us every step of our lives. We fail to remember that God knows our needs long before we express them. (Matthew 6:31b).  

    Think about the changes that took place in Joseph’s life after he was sold into slavery.  He never asked God for anything.  Think about Jesus, knowing that he was told several times by God that he was God’s Son, and yet he had to face what made absolutely no sense – death on a cross.  The reason we understand these stories thousands of years later is because we know where they led and how they ended.  Such an interpretation of our life’s episodes is not available to us until we are also able to use hindsight to gain understanding.

    In 1959, the Chinese Communists swept into Tibet and destroyed countless Buddhist temples.  They slaughtered five to six thousand priests that inhabited each of those temples.  They bombed the palace of the Dalai Lama forcing him to flee from their onslaught of terror.  To this day, not one word of condemnation has ever been spoken from the survivors of that holocaust.

     One Buddhist priest wrote a response to why no one cried out against the Chinese.

Angry men can be sent against us and they may kill thousands of us.  We know this is not the way to peace and community so their efforts will ultimately fail. Such people will remain as they are until they understand life differently.  Our understanding cannot be destroyed by anyone’s weapons or by anyone’s attempt to control us by fear.  Our understanding is within us where their attitudes and behavior cannot reach.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly what Jesus understood about his life and why he said from a cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”  His faith was stretched and did not break.

    We simply do not know how we fit into the created order.  However, when we look back on our lives, it appears as though a script had been created that caused everything to fall into place to bring us to this day.  When some of life’s hardest decisions were made or when we faced the most difficult challenges of our lives, we had no understanding about the meaning of any of them.     

          An American poet, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), captured the essence of how we process our life-experiences by writing a piece about a group of blind men as each tried to describe an animal the name of which had been withheld from them.

    The first man touched the side of the elephant and said, “This animal is like a large wall.”  The second felt the elephant’s tusk and declared that the animal was like a curved spear.  The third touched the elephant’s trunk and pictured in his mind a large snake.  The fourth touched one of the animal’s large legs and declared that the elephant was like a tree.  The fifth touched his ear and was persuaded that the elephant was like a large fan.  The sixth man touched the elephant’s tail and understood that the animal was very much like a rope.  Each man was partly right but all of them were wrong about the BIG picture.

    There is no breaking point to our faith and trust in God either here or throughout eternity unless our limited ego begins to take over as the interpreter of our life’s events. As cruel and unjust as our lives can sometimes appear, there is no need to feel that we have been abandoned by God.  We do not know where the river of life will take us any more than a fifteen year old could possibly know that one day she would be the lead surgeon in a large medical practice.

    Let us think about ourselves as a spring that begins to trickle down the side of a mountain.  As it continues on its journey, it meets other streams that cause it to become stronger.  As the flow becomes more mature, it cuts through rocky barriers that soon become canyons. 

    One day this mighty river approaches a chain of gigantic mountains.  Confidently, it smashes into those mountains with great fury not knowing what might happen next.  Its faith supports the understanding that there are no barriers to its flow.  The river began to flow along the base of the mountain range until it reached a pass and onward it flowed relentlessly toward the sea. 

    Suddenly, the river became terrified.  It realized that of all the barriers it had conquered, it had never met what was now lying in its path.  “I am doomed” said the river.  “There is no possible escape.”  The river was flowing toward a gigantic desert.  The river prepared to die as it plunged into the hot sand and was gone.

    A strange thing happened that was beyond the river’s senses.  The river never lost its consciousness.  Suddenly it had changed its form from liquid to vapors that rose into the sky and formed clouds.  Those clouds glided over the desert.  Soon the flood gates in those clouds opened and a torrential rainfall occurred.   Once fearful of its death, the river had its confidence restored as it resumed its journey to the sea. 

    Our adventure of life is about negotiating change and obstacles.  It is about navigating various illnesses, experiencing the loss of numerous loved ones, facing betrayal and defeat with a Teflon spirit and celebrating all of our life-experiences with gratitude for the growth we have gained.  This is what it is like to have faith that can be stretched without breaking.

    After telling the parable of the judge and widow to his disciples, Jesus asked, “How much of this persistent kind of faith will the Son of Man find on earth when he returns?”   We can answer unequivocally, “The outcome of our lives will be just fine, even though right now we cannot see it.  Faith is just another word for trust.”