Sermon — June 30, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

These two stories of healing couldn’t be more different from one another; but when you get down to it, they’re exactly the same.

Jairus’s young daughter is in an acute crisis, near the end of her life; the woman who touches Jesus’ cloak has been suffering chronically for longer than Jairus’ daughter has been alive. Jairus comes openly to Jesus before the crowd. The woman approaches surreptitiously. He begs him over and over to heal his daughter, she reaches out without saying a word. He’s is a prominent member of society, a leader of the local synagogue, with messengers and mourners waiting back at home; she comes to Jesus alone and bankrupt, and the only social contact we hear about is with the physicians, under whose care she’s suffered much.

Their circumstances and their behaviors couldn’t be more different, and in fact they find themselves somewhat in competition. After all, when Jesus and Jairus set out for Jairus’ home, to heal his daughter, there’s no time to lose. She’s at the point of death. But the woman touches Jesus’ cloak, and she is healed, and Jesus turns aside. “Who touched my clothes?” he says. (Mark 5:30)

And I can only imagine how Jairus must have felt, just in front of him, leading the way to his daughter’s sickbed. He’s rushed out to find Jesus, and he’s found him; even better, he’s actually convinced him to come heal his daughter, and now Jesus has stopped along the way to ask, “Who touched my clothes?” in the middle of a crowd. Even the disciples are amazed— “Look at all these people,” they say. How could anyone know? (5:31) But the woman comes forward and falls on her knees. And Jesus blesses her and sends her along her way. (5:34)

Mark doesn’t tell us what’s going through Jairus’s head. But we can guess. If Jesus needs to stop and heal somebody, fine. But why the conversation? Why the delay? This woman’s sickness is important, for sure, but not urgent, not like his daughter’s illness; and yet Jesus takes his time, and I imagine Jairus somewhere between impatient and afraid.

And his worst fears are about to be realized, because while Jesus is still speaking, while he is still stopped along the way, someone comes bearing a message from Jairus’s house. “Your daughter is dead,” they say. And Jairus, who was full of words at the beginning of the story, begging Jesus repeatedly to come heal his daughter, is left speechless as his relief turns into despair.

But Jesus simply says, “Do not fear, only believe.” (5:37) He sends away the crowd who follow him, and the crowd of mourners. And despite their incredulous laughter at the idea that the child who has died while Jesus dilly-dallied on the road is merely asleep, he says to her, “Get up.” And she does.

This is a long story, and it’s full of strange and enticing details. There are so many questions that you might want to ask. What does it mean to say that Jesus’ healing power can simply flow out of him, that miracles can happen without his knowledge just because someone touched his cloak? Why does Mark record what Jesus says to the girl in Aramaic, Talitha cum, while translating the rest? Why does Jesus do everything in secrecy, sending away the crowd and the mourners and telling the family and the disciples to tell no one what they have seen? What’s up with the snack at the end?

If you step back for a minute, you might ask a bigger question. I said that the two healing stories couldn’t be more different, but at the heart of things, they’re really the same: Two stories about desperate people putting their faith in Jesus. This isn’t faith as a statement of belief, a collection of well-thought-out ideas about God and the world. This is faith as the last desperate act of someone who’s tried everything else. This is the trust that his help might make a difference. Jairus is so convinced that Jesus can save his daughter, in fact, that he gives up his last chance to see her alive to come and find him.

And the faith of these two people seems to be the catalyst for the healing that comes. “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Jesus says to the woman he has healed. “Go in peace, and be healed.” (Mark 5:34)

If only it were so easy for us.

 The connection between healing, faith, and prayer is one of the most difficult ones in spiritual life, in my experience. We want to pray for healing, for ourselves, for other people, for the world. We want God to act, to cure us of our ailments whether they’re physical, or psychological, or spiritual. We wish we could just reach out and touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak, and be healed. And sometimes, remarkably, it seems that we are healed. I don’t know about you, but I really have seen examples of this kind of change. Sometimes that means recovery from an illness or injury in a way that baffles doctors’ expectations. Sometimes it’s recovery from an addiction that seemed impossible to shake. Sometimes it’s a sudden about-turn in life, that can only be described as a divine intervention.

But then, there are all the other times. All too often, the healing that we pray for doesn’t come. Our sick friend gets sicker, no matter how hard we pray; or our seemingly-healthy friend is suddenly at the brink, at the very moment when things seemed like they were finally looking up. And the more we hope for a miracle, the more we pray for healing, the stronger our faith that God will surely help, the worse it feels when nothing seems to change. Like Jairus, we’re left holding the disappointment and frustration that comes when our hopes for something better are dashed.

 And I think we find ourselves in this second situation more often than not. The story of the New Testament is the story of miracles that come one after another. The story of Christian life is a story of prayers that seem to go unanswered.

But if the story of Jairus’ daughter tells us anything, maybe it’s that sometimes, it’s just too soon to tell.

If you pause the story when Jesus sends away the woman who’s been healed, Jairus’s mission has been a failure. He thought his prayers were being answered, he got his hopes up, but God didn’t answer soon enough. Jesus delayed, and his daughter died, and the healing that he hoped for never came, and the story ends with grief.

But the story doesn’t end there. Within minutes, everything has changed. Jairus’s daughter is alive. She’s walking around, and having something to eat. His prayers were not unanswered; they just hadn’t been answered yet, and God was doing something that Jairus hadn’t asked for, something that he probably hadn’t even imagined was possible.

That’s the challenging hope of the Christian faith: God’s response to our prayers for healing is never “no,” but sometimes it’s “not yet,” and sometimes “yes” doesn’t come this side of eternity. Because we know, after two thousand years of Christian life, that we don’t get to have Jairus’s miracle in the quite the same way. We say every Sunday that we believe in the resurrection of the dead, but we don’t mean that that will come in this world. Like Jairus, we will see the people we have loved and lost again, but in the world to come. The pain of loss and grief are just as real for us as they were for him on that long walk home, and our grief lasts much longer. But given the choice between two worlds—the world in which God doesn’t answer most of our prayers, and the world in which God just hasn’t answered them yet, I know which one I’d choose, any day.

I don’t know which prayers of yours need answering today; where you need God to do something that hasn’t happened yet, where you need something to change in yourself or someone else, but the change has not yet come. I don’t know where your soul “waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning.” (Psalm 130:5)

But I hold onto the promise that’s at the heart of Christian hope: That there is a God who loves you, and who cares for you, a God who is answering your prayers, even if you can’t see it happening yet; that there is a future in which our divisions will cease and our pain will end—that however long the night is that we spend in weeping, joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:6)

Sermon — June 23, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I’m always amazed by whose daily work consists of dealing with relatively stressful parts of the rest of our lives. The surgeon who walks into a room and describes precisely how she’s going to slice through your heart, with no apparent anxiety about the procedure, because while this is the scariest moment of your life, for her, it’s just a Tuesday at the office. The skydiving instructor who casually launches people out of an airplane before jumping out himself, as he’s done hundreds of times before. The airline pilot who pops onto the announcements to say, “This is your captain speaking. It looks like we’ve got a little bit of bumpy air up ahead, so I’m going to put on the seatbelt sign…” You can’t see him through the door, but he’s probably up there popping Fritos while you’re clutching the armrests for dear life! These people can be soothing—surely, if they think it’s not such a big deal, maybe it’s not such a big deal. But they’re also unnerving—after all, isn’t there a chance they’re just completely nuts?

Jesus is one of these people, for sure. Jesus is with the disciples in the boat, but he’s acting in a way that’s not at all like the disciples in the boat.

As a matter of fact, he’s been with the disciples in the boat all day. Such a large crowd had gathered that morning that Jesus had gotten into a boat on the sea and sat there, while people crowded around on land to listen. (Mark 4:1) He told them parables about sowing seed, and hiding lamps under a bushel, and how the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and “on that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let’s go across to the other side.’” (4:35) Now, Jesus is tired—speaking to a crowd without a microphone will do that to you—and he falls asleep. Deeply asleep. A huge wind starts to blow, and the waves are breaking over the bow, and the boat is being swamped. You can imagine the scene: people rushing around, trying to bail out; throwing things overboard, and desperately trying to remember how to swim.

But in the stern, Jesus is asnooze. And they go back and start shaking him—“Teacher,” they say, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing!?” (4:38) And he wakes up, and yawns. And what does he do?

Does he start shouting orders, like a seasoned sea captain, like the commanding Messiah they might expect him to be? “Batten down the hatches! Ease the sails!” (I’m not a sailor.) No. He does not.

Does he call upon the name of God, like a wise pastor, praying in words that give voice to the fear and pain of his people and bring them comfort, that artfully articulate their deepest desires in the moment of their greatest need? “O God, you still the storms of the sea; surround us with your loving care; protect us from all danger; and bring us in safety to our journey’s end. Amen.” No. He does not.

Does he grab a bucket and start bailing? Nope. Does he panic, too? Of course not. He looks over the side of the boat at the sea, and he says, “You stop it! Chill!” And it does.

This little vignette tells us so much about God, and about Jesus, and about our lives, and I think it goes back to a distinction I noted earlier: just as Jesus was with the disciples in that boat on those stormy seas, but he wasn’t like the disciples in that boat on those stormy seas, Jesus is with us on our sometimes-stormy pathways through life—but Jesus isn’t quite like us, and that’s a very good thing.

Jesus is with us. And Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. Our God is not a cruel god, playing with us for sport, creating storms to torment us. And our God is not a cold, clinical god, swamping us with waves to test our faith or improve our endurance. God is not an absent god, creating the universe and laying down a moral order and then gone off somewhere on vacation, while the world burns and our prayers pile up in the inbox. Our God is a compassionate God, a God who “suffers with” us—this is what “compassion” means, “suffering with”—a God who comes among us on earth, and experiences what we experience. God feels every wave as it hits the boat, and God knows what it’s like to be swamped.

God is with us, but God is not exactly like us. Jesus doesn’t panic, when the people around him are panicking. He’s not afraid of the wind and the storm. He absorbs their panic and their fear. Like that skilled surgeon or jaded airline pilot he remains unbothered, infuriatingly calm. But he doesn’t just stay calm. He acts, in an unexpected way. He speaks directly to the sea, and tells it to be still, and it is.

There’s a dramatic irony in this story, something we know that the disciples don’t. “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” they ask, and we know that in fact, he cares very much. He cares not just about them, but about all of us; not just about the fact that they might be perishing in that boat, but that we are all perishing; that we are all only mortal, in the end. He knows, and he cares, and he acts.

In this story, he immediately stills the storm. But there’s an echo of another ending here, another way that he could act. Did anyone hear the echo of the book of Jonah in this story? Jonah flees from God’s call, and gets on a ship, and God sends a storm. There’s wind and waves and the sailors are afraid, but Jonah lies asleep. The two scenes are the same. The sailors wake Jonah up, and tell him to pray to his god, like they are praying to theirs. And Jonah, like Jesus, chooses to act. Unlike Jesus, he doesn’t rebuke the storm. He tells the sailors, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea.” (Jonah 1:12) And they do. And the ship is saved. And that’s where the whale comes in, by the way—God sends a whale to swallow him up, and Jonah remains entombed in the belly of the whale three days, and then rises again. (Does that ring any bells?)

Jesus doesn’t throw himself into the sea to save his companions. Not yet. But that’s where the story is going. The echoes of Jonah are no accident. Jesus is going to throw himself off the boat, metaphorically speaking, to save the people around him. Jesus is going to hand himself over to death on the Cross, and after three days, rise again. And it’s that act of self-sacrificing love that saves us from the power of death so that we, too, can travel safely across the stormy seas to the other side.

Maybe this morning you feel battered by the storm, tossed around by the waves and barely hanging on. Maybe this morning you feel good, but you remember what that’s like. Or maybe you look around at a world that’s full of chaos, and violence, and war, and like the disciples, sometimes you feel afraid.

You’re not alone. God is with you in the boat. God loves you, and God cares that you’re in danger, and God comes to be with you there. And you are allowed to cry out! You’re allowed to say to God, like the disciples say to Jesus, “Don’t you care!?” That doesn’t bother God one bit. Jesus is calm, whatever the source of the storm. And when you bring that fear and pain to God in prayer, God can help to lighten the load, because God can carry any amount of it for you, and God will not be swamped.

Sometimes God works through other people, of course. Sometimes God is present to us in our own, quiet prayer, but often God is present to us in a friend’s listening ear, or in a conversation with someone we trust. You even pay someone to sit and listen while you talk to God sometimes, even if you think you’re talking to me. And that’s all well and good, and I hope that it helps calm the waves.

But God is not just a listening ear. Like Jesus, waking up in that boat, God chooses to act, in mysterious and sometimes surprising ways. I wish it were the case that God would simply still the storm. I wish it were the case that we could see such quick results. But who am I to try to guess where God is acting and where God’s not? I wasn’t there, nor was Job, when God laid the foundation of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and the heavenly beings shouted for joy. (Job 38:4, 7) I can only trust that God is stilling the storm to a whisper, that God is working in our lives and in our world to calm the waves, and that God will one day bring us safely that distant shore.

Sermon — June 9, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Have you ever heard the one about the college undergrad who wanders into a debate about the nature of free will?

So, a group of philosophy professors is meeting for their monthly faculty lunch. And they’re arguing about free will. Do we, as human beings, have control over our actions, or are they just the result of physical or biological processes beyond our control?

 “Look, people are responsible for their actions,” one professor says over lunch. “Yes, of course they’re shaped by their experiences of the past. But we know that mature human beings make choices all the time between right and wrong. We have free will, and we’re responsible for what we do with it.”

“Oh, come on!” says the second one. “We can’t just work off intuition. Psychology clearly show that our brains make decisions for us before we’ve even consciously realized it, and then we come up with the rationalizations after. Our wills aren’t free at all; our actions are just the result of biology. Empirical science shows that free will is an illusion.”

“Science?” asks the third. “You want to talk about science? Don’t you know anything about how the advent of quantum physics has opened our eyes to a non-deterministic model of causality!?” Things are really heating up.

Just then, a sophomore who’s wandered into the room pipes up. “I’m not so sure about free will. I walked in here, and I saw your lunch buffet, and— I know it was wrong, and I knew I shouldn’t do it, but, well… I just couldn’t stop myself. I ate all the cookies.”

From the Christian theological perspective, at least, there are really two different questions about free will: “Do we have free will?” as in, are the choices we make totally determined by some outside thing, by biology or physics or even by God, or are they under our control? But there’s another question, too— “Do we have free will?” as in, “When we make a decision, whether that’s really an individual choice or determined by some outside force—can we actually follow through?” Are our wills free? Or are they somehow in chains?

The Apostle Paul famously wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) You may know the feeling. Our cookie-eating student certainly does. It’s what Martin Luther called, somewhat ominously, The Bondage of the Will, the fact that the human will is, in some sense, constrained; that there’s some gap between our conscious decision-making processes, and the things we actually do. And I think this is the more relevant question about free will. With all due respect to our philosophical friends, few people are bothered day to day about whether their decisions are predetermined by biology or physics or not; but many people struggle with the inadequacy of their willpower to carry out those decisions.

It’s a pattern that dates back all the way to the beginning of humankind, to this foundational story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had free will, and they gave it away. They received the command from God never to eat the fruit of the tree that stood in the middle of the Garden. But they ate it, anyway.

They try to pass the blame along. Both Adam and Eve try to claim that they didn’t have free will, that their actions had some cause outside themselves. “The woman whom you gave me,” says Adam, trying to pin the blame not only on Eve but on God, “she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” (Gen. 3:12) Then God turns to Eve: Don’t look at me! she seems to say. “The serpent tricked me, and I ate!” (Gen. 3:13)

It’s not a very good defense. God entrusted them with the freedom to choose, but told them not to eat the fruit, but they did it anyway, and so God put enmity between the serpent in the Garden and the woman, and between their descendants. And this sounds just about right, because here we are, all these generations later, still struggling against our demons.

You often find Jesus battling demons, too. That’s not just a cute segue from one reading to the next. Much of Jesus’ time, in his early ministry, especially in this early Gospel of Mark, is spent casting out demons of one kind or another. Before he even begins teaching the disciples anything, in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, here he is, so renowned for his demon-fighting skills that people have begun to speculate. Is he a demon himself? Or at least, demon-possessed? Is he a sorcerer who calls on one dark power to defeat another?

Not at all, Jesus replies. “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” (Mark 3:23-24) To use evil to cast out evil would only weaken itself.

Jesus isn’t evil, or using evil powers. I assume we can all agree on that.

But Jesus continues with an interesting image, that’s a little less obvious: “No one can enter the Strong One’s house,” he says, “and plunder his property, without first tying up the Strong One; then indeed the house can be plundered.” (Mark 3:27) Of all the metaphors we have for who Jesus is and what Jesus does, this has to be one of the strangest: Jesus Christ, Burglar.

Here’s one way to understand what Jesus means: The house is the world in which we live. The Strong One is the spiritual force of evil, violence, and despair that Jews and Christians have sometimes personified as Satan or the serpent. Jesus’ ultimate battle is not with any of the smaller forces of evil, the demons that afflicted people in their lives. Jesus first needs to confront the great power, the Strong One himself, and tie him up; and when that power is bound, then the property in the house can be plundered; when the Strong One is held captive, then we can be freed.  

This is, ultimately, the story of Jesus’ life, and of his journey toward the Cross. Jesus is headed toward a struggle against all the powers that hold us down, against the power of Death itself. And we live now, as always, in the in-between time, when Jesus’ victory has begun, but is not yet complete; when the Strong One has been bound, but we’re not yet fully free.

And so we have the ability to love. We have the ability to will and to work for the good. But our wills are not yet completely free to do what’s right, as perfectly as we might want.

So there’s the bad news: the human will isn’t free. We will never reach the place of perfect self-control, in which our conscious decisions and our actions are always perfectly aligned. We’ll never even reach the place in which our decisions or our values are exactly what they should be. We’ll never quite love God with our whole hearts. It’s unlikely that we’ll love our neighbors as ourselves; that bar can be very high, depending on the neighbor. We’ll come here, again and again, with the need to confess our smaller sins, our gossip or apathy, our harsh words or our imperfect compassion—and sometimes even bigger ones.

But that’s good news, too: the human will isn’t free. If you find yourself, coming here, again and again, just as imperfect as the week before— It’s not just you. And I don’t mean that to pass along the blame (“The woman whom you gave me, she gave me the fruit!”) I mean it as an antidote to shame. There’s no shame in being an imperfect person, in having imperfect control over your will. That’s not an individual flaw. That’s the human condition. And everyone else faces that struggle, too.

 But there’s even better news than that, and it’s this: We’re not facing that struggle alone. The Holy Spirit is with you, in all the decisions and all the actions of daily life, strengthening you, helping you grow toward a more consistent and a more compassionate kind of love; pray for the Holy Spirit to guide you in those decisions and in those actions, when you need God’s help. Jesus has already gone before you, to bind up the Strong One so that you can be free, even if imperfectly so. And God is beckoning you forward, inviting you into a renewed and restored life, raising you up just as Jesus was raised (2 Cor. 4:14). So “do not lose heart,” as Paul says. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed, day by day.”  Amen.