Acting with Faith
9/6/15
Prov. 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
James 2:1-10, 14-17
Mark 7:24-37
Dwight Nelson told this story about the pastor of his church.
Apparently the pastor had a kitten that climbed up a tree in his backyard and
then was afraid to come down. The pastor coaxed, offered warm milk, etc, but
the kitty would not come down. The tree was not sturdy enough to climb, so the
pastor decided that if he tied a rope to his car and pulled it until the tree
bent down, he could then reach up and get the kitten. So that's exactly what he did, all the while
checking his progress in the car. At one point in this process, he figured if
he went just a little bit further, the tree would be bent sufficiently for him
to reach the kitten. But as he moved the car a little further forward, the rope
broke.
The tree went 'boing!' and the kitten instantly sailed
through the air – and out of sight.
The
pastor felt terrible. He walked all over the neighborhood asking people if
they'd seen a little kitten. No. Nobody had seen a stray kitten.
So he prayed, 'God, I commit this kitten to your keeping,'
and went on about his business.
A few
days later he was at the grocery store, and met one of his church members. He
happened to look into her shopping cart and was amazed to see cat food. This
woman was a cat hater and everyone knew it, so he asked her, 'Why are you
buying cat food when you hate cats so much?' She replied, 'You won't believe
this,' and then told him how her little girl had been begging her for a cat,
but she kept refusing. Then a few days
ago, the child had begged again, so the Mom finally told her little girl,
'Well, if God gives you a cat, I'll let you keep it.'
She told the pastor, 'I watched my child go out in the yard,
get on her knees, and ask God for a cat. And really, Pastor, you won't believe
this, but I saw it with my own eyes. A kitten suddenly came flying out of the
blue sky, with its paws outspread, and landed right in front of her!'
Most of the time, God’s messages to us are not quite so
clear. At least for me, most of the time
my prayers are not answered so quickly, so clearly, or with such an
enthusiastic “yes!” Most of the time we
have to listen, in each situation, for the direction God is calling us to.
I hear
in today’s scriptures the command to love your neighbor as yourself, again,
always, consistently THE message from Jesus.
I hear in the James passage and in the Proverbs verses that faith is
active, that being a person of faith means loving our neighbor in the concrete ways
of caring for the poor, in particular. I
hear in the passage from Mark that Jesus included many whom we might not
include in his care, that he reached across lines to bring healing and comfort
and that we are called to do the same.
So it isn’t that God doesn’t direct us or tell us what to do. But I also recognize that when it comes to
every day behavior, every minute action, it can still be hard to hear God, to
get a clear message about what we are supposed to do, how and why. I love stories like the kitten story in part
because I wish that God was that clear with me.
So how
do we discern? Well, again, we start
with scripture. We start with the
message, loud and clear that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. We start there. That means we don’t start the conversation, or
any conversation, with “what is best for
me in this situation” but instead with “what is best for you.” And by best I don’t mean what is most
comfortable or even what seems most profitable at the moment. I mean what is really, ultimately best for
the other. I don’t believe that is
something that we can discern on our own.
We simply can’t figure out what is best for another alone…that would be
patronizing and condescending. We figure
this out with our neighbors, with the community of faith, with one another and
in prayer with God.
That cliché question, “what would
Jesus do?” is frankly the most important question we could ask in our everyday
behaviors and interactions. A friend of
mine told me this story…a pastor went to a tribe in Africa that was mostly made
up of warriors, fighters. And after
teaching them Jesus’ message, the pastor took them down to the river to be
baptized. But as he baptized the men in
this tribe, he saw that each of them kept their right hands out of the
water. They would go all the way in,
except for their right hands. Confused,
the pastor finally asked one of them what was going on. Their answer was that they needed to be able
to fight with their right hands. They
had read the gospels, they knew that Jesus would not approve of killing
another, even their enemies, so they left their right hands out of the water so
that they could still do their jobs of fighting, keeping that part of them
separate and unbaptized.
We do this, too. What parts of us do we keep out of the water
of our baptism? Is it our wallets,
during stewardship time or when someone is in need? And again, I don’t mean that we should just
give anybody who asks us whatever they ask for…we need to do what is BEST for
people, which is not always giving them whatever they ask for. We know this as we care for our children and
others. But what is best for the other
is never going to be our judgments when we are angry and feel vengeful rather
than seeking out forgiveness, grace and reconciliation. It will never be our sense of who should be
included and who shouldn’t in our hearts, in our lives. If Jesus is our model, our actions need to be
consistently in favor of the poor, the needy, the outcast – and that needs to
be every day, not just Sundays. What
parts of ourselves do we keep above the water?
We all have these parts, these areas that are uncomfortable for us to
really commit to loving the other. And
our call, as people of faith, is to see them, to remember these passages that
call us to act in faith and love, and to be willing to put all of ourselves,
even our hands, into the water of our baptism, to ask, “what would Jesus do?”
and to do it, too.
Henry David Thoreau said, “Could a greater miracle take place
than to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
Today in the story of the Syrophoenician woman, we see Jesus
doing exactly that, looking through her eyes and understanding. Understanding her desperation to help her daughter. Understanding her willingness to do anything
in order to make that happen.
Understanding her faith, her absolute trust that he could help her. And through that vision, seeing through her
eyes, that understanding led to compassion for her and choosing to do what was
best for her. It is through her story
that Jesus’ whole ministry changed.
Before her, his service was strictly to and for the Jews. After her, his ministry expanded to any and
all who asked for his help. His seeing
her was a miracle that changed history for all of us. His seeing her was a miracle that all of us
are called to repeat as we look through the eyes of those with whom we are
uncomfortable, those who challenge our ideas of what an “equal” human being
looks like, those who need us to have compassion and understanding, those whom
God calls us to love as we love ourselves.
We may not be given as clear a
message as the little girl in the kitten story, but the message is still pretty
clear. We are called to live out our
faith by loving everyone as we love ourselves.
It’s all that easy, and it’s all that hard.
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