When I was a teenager, I was an atheist. It puzzled me to no end why otherwise perfectly sane and intelligent people would believe in a God that they could not see, especially when science had proven that the world was hundreds of times older than what my Christian friends told me. Talking snakes! A world-wide Flood! Men walking on top of liquid water? I could not believe it and openly laughed about these things.
When I asked my teenage Christian friends how these things could have happened, they often responded “You’ve got to have faith.” Well, I didn’t have faith, and I really had little idea what that meant. I simply wanted answers to my questions. To me, I couldn’t understand what the big difference was between a typical question – “why do airplanes fly?” - and “why do you think God exists?” It took many years before I understood.
In our reading today, we see faith in action. A man named Jairus has a daughter who is dying and he begs Jesus to come and heal her. Jesus agrees and goes walking through a crowd with many people around Him toward the home of Jairus.
There is a particular woman. She has heard about Jesus and His ability to heal people – literally, His ability to make people whole. (The word we commonly translate as “heal” means “to make whole”. This woman has been suffering from a slow hemorrhage for twelve years. For twelve years she had bled, and in this time before surgery, before modern medicines, there was nothing any of the doctors could do for her. Notice that the reading even says “she had endured much under many physicians”. She had gone from one doctor to another, spending money on different treatments, many of which were very painful and irritating, and she was now broke. And she continued to bleed.
Now we would worry about this condition even today. The continual loss of blood would mean that this woman was pale and anemic, weak and unable to work well. But in that time, in that culture, it was even worse. Blood was considered “unclean”, and unclean people could not worship at the Temple. Because of her disease, she was not even allowed to enter the Temple grounds. Because of her disease, she was not able to offer sacrifices. Because of her disease, she could not even be touched by another person. She was cut off from her friends. She was cut off from her family. She was cut off from God.
Imagine having Ebola today. You are isolated inside a quarantine room. The nurses and doctors treating you wear isolation suits. Your family talks to you from a distance. You cannot attend worship or receive Communion. You must live separately from everyone and not be touched by anyone. Now imagine that this state of affairs has gone on for twelve years.
The woman heard about Jesus and the miraculous healings He has performed. And so she made a courageous decision. She decided that even if she could simply touch the hem of his cloak, it would heal her. And so she enters the crowd around Jesus as he heads toward Jairus’ house, and she pushes and shoves with everyone else until she can reach out and touch his cloak. Surely no one will notice! Reach, reach, stretch! She barely touched the very corner of His cloak and suddenly SHE KNEW THAT SHE WAS HEALED!
But as soon as she touches Him, Jesus stops. “Who touched my clothes?” he says. And the disciples laugh and say, “Everyone is pushing up against you and you say ‘who touched my clothes?’”
The woman now was caught. She knew that she should not have touched this great and wonderful Rabbi’s clothing, a regular woman should not touch Him, let alone an unclean woman like herself. “He probably thinks I was trying to steal money from Him or assassinate Him or something equally terrible!”
And so she steps forward, trembling, scared to death, falls down on her face before Him and admits what she had done and why she had done it, and she waited for sentence to be pronounced upon her, a great and terrible sentence to be sent away, lashed, put into prison, or stoned.
And Jesus looks down upon her, smiles, and says: "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."
There is something wonderful here, something beyond the graceful words of Jesus, the powerful Rabbi showing kindness to a skinny, pale, fearful woman. There is something deeply profound here, something which is very important for us, something more than this beautiful encounter between a frightened woman and the majestic Son of God. There is something in what Jesus did NOT say.
For you see, Jesus did not say, “God has healed you today.” And Jesus did not say “I have healed you today” and Jesus did not say, “My power has healed you today.”
Jesus said, “Daughter, YOUR FAITH has made you well.” Literally, “YOUR FAITH has made you whole.”
What power healed the woman? The power of Christ, flowing to her because the faith of the woman opened the valve controlling that power. Jesus did not command her healing – she took the healing power through her faith!
There is something very deep here which shows the difference between the miraculous healings of Jesus and the magical healings that others would claim to have the power to do.
In our Trinitarian view of God, it has long been noted that God the Father-Creator provides the creative power for the Universe. If you will, God the Father pumps the power into the hose.
Jesus Christ, the Word of God, directs that creative power – remember from the First chapter of the Gospel of John? “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Jesus directs and controls the hose’s power.
And now we see that Jesus has let our faith open the valve.
When we have faith, we open the valve that lets the creative and healing power of God the Father flow to do great and wonderful things.
When we have faith, Jesus says, mountains can be moved into the sea. When we have faith, people can walk upon liquid water. When we have faith, people and nations can be healed.
If you still doubt, let’s continue the story.
Just as Jesus is still talking with the woman, a messenger comes to speak to Jairus. “"Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?"
But Jesus overhears him and says to Jairus – “Do not fear – only believe”
And then Jesus takes Peter, James, and John and they go see the twelve year old girl who is lying there dead, and Jesus takes her by her hand says to her “Little girl, get up!” and she does.
“Do not fear – only believe”.
But why does our faith control such power?
To understand, we must look at two key aspects of God’s character.
First, God tells us that God is a jealous God. God will have no other gods before Him. We are not to think that anything else has god-like power – not a stone or wooden idol, not a man or a woman or a ruler or a government, and not even a philosophy or money or science or Mother Nature or even a powerful medical treatment. God wants us to be completely loyal to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
And yet over the centuries and decades and years, humankind and each one of us has fallen victim to the lie that says that one particular type of problem is fixed by a belief in this method or that method. Broken bones are healed by casts; money problems are fixed by working harder or finding someone with money; relationships are fixed by counseling; cancer is cured by chemotherapy. And so we worship other gods. But where does all the positive, creative energy of the Universe come from? God the Father, directed by Jesus Christ the Word of God.
My wife pastors Liberty UMC on the other side of town. They are a small church; they had slowly been dying for many years. They needed a new roof and it would cost over $12,000, which was about the same as their ANNUAL offerings. They had begun to believe that they were too small to survive, and that money and young people and a nice building were what was needed to grow a church. But they began to believe differently about a year ago. You see, my wife had a vision, a wide-awake dream, given to her by God. She saw a hot dog on a sign.
She told me she had been in prayer and saw a hot dog on a sign. A hot dog in a bun with a big streak of yellow mustard on it, and the whole sign had a blue background. And so she went to work at her telemarketing job that day and tried drawing out the vision of the sign God had given her.
Her godly friend saw what she was doing and Saundra told her about the vision. The friend said, “I made advertising signs for 10 years. It was my job.” And after work, they went to AC Moore, Saundra bought some supplies and her friend made the sign, a beautiful sign.
Liberty had a hot dog sale. Liberty is a tiny church on Limestone Run Road, where the only real traffic are water trucks. Nobody came to their fund-raisers – they usually made $200-$300 from a fund-raising event. But this time, the water truck drivers saw the beautiful, God-given sign and stopped in to order a dozen hot dogs to go. They bid on baskets, and they bought drinks. They bought crafts and they bought potato chips. And Liberty made $1200 that weekend, about 10% of what they needed for the roof. They were excited, so they tried some more fundraisers, raising about $3000 altogether. But the roof was still far out of reach. But Liberty now believed that with God’s help they could handle the roof. And then this spring, Saundra went to Cedar Lakes with the United Methodist Women.
She ran into some women from St. Marys. We had served churches near St. Marys, and I grew up in St. Marys, so Saundra knew most of these women. But she met a new woman, and discovered that she was my fifth grade math teacher. She asked how I was doing and Saundra told her, bragging about these two churches I pastor. Then Saundra told her about her four small churches and the story of Liberty and its roof. The woman said, “It sounds like you need a grant.” And Saundra said, “How does one get a grant?” and the woman said, “You ask me” and promised to email Saundra a form.
Liberty jumped on the form. They got all the information together in record time and asked for just over $9000. The entire leadership laid hands on the form and prayed over it. Saundra sent in the form on a Thursday and on Tuesday evening received an email telling them that they had been approved for the grant. The check should arrive shortly. God is good to those who worship God - and only God.
The second aspect of God’s character is God’s tremendous overwhelming politeness. God allows you to choose your path. God does not coerce you. If you truly want to be your own god, God will let you, even letting you try to figure out how to live after your death by yourself without God’s help. If you truly think that money can buy you happiness, God will let you get that money and you will find out the answer to the question. If you really think that the best specialist in the country is the only answer to your cancer, as Steve Jobs did, then God will let you reach that specialist and find out, as Steve Jobs did, that that specialist cannot make you whole. Your lack of faith in God blocks the power of God to flow.
But if you will surrender yourself to God, and ask God for help. truly trusting in God as the woman did, as Jairus did, as Liberty Church has, you will find that the valve of positive creative power has been opened. God helps those who love God.
When you do not have an open faith in God, God knows this. God will not work against your subtle fears of God. You may say that you want a miracle done, but deep inside, deep down inside, you may fear that you will lose control of your world if God does the miracle. You may truly NOT want the miracle done, and God knows this. God is tremendously polite.
Now this is not to say that God will always grant your prayers, and this is not to say that when your prayers are not granted it is because of your lack of faith. I am simply saying that a child-like faith in God and God’s goodness is helpful, very helpful in giving God permission to enter your life in a big way to do good things for you.
Generally speaking, God does not grant prayers for two reasons. First of all, God knows you don’t really want the prayer granted. Or secondly, God knows that granting the prayer is bad for you or others, or not granting the prayer is actually better for you or others. God always acts for the long term good of those who choose to follow God. Sometimes, that “long term” may not happen for a hundred years or more, long after you have left this earth. So be patient – and have faith. Have faith in God.
Does this mean that you should not go to the doctor? No. God often acts through other people when God does miracles, and doctors are one of the ways God makes us whole. But they are not the only way, and regardless of what the medical schools teach, the healing power of doctors ultimately comes from God and Christ.
And so, you see, it is our faith in God that gives God the permission to work in our lives. It is faith that allows the tree to cling to the side of the rocky cliff and grow. The power is there, waiting for us, for God has already commanded that that positive creative power work to make people whole. God has chosen to provide that power to the followers of God’s Son, and Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the Son of God, has chosen to direct that power to make us whole. Our faith in Christ removes the real barriers to that power working in our lives: our desire to be independent…our desire to rebel against God….our desire to be in charge of our lives…. And our desire to worship other gods.
So often we think that we must make a strong effort to move toward God and to find God. We think that we must beg God to come into our lives, that we must negotiate terms with God, that we must go forth and convince God that we are worthy of being helped. We think we have to go outside the fortified castle that is our self and find the God who will rescue us. We expect a journey of a thousand miles to find God and then we expect God will give us ten quests to do before we are good enough for God to help us. But that isn’t so.
God is, even now, pounding on the doors to your castle. God is ready to pour into your castle, like the sea flooding through a broken dike on Holland’s coast if you will simply open the door and invite God in. But we only want God to speak to us on the drawbridge. We don’t want to let God into our castle. And we surely don’t want to let God pour through our castle-self into every room, flooding us with God’s overwhelming love, do we?
Why not?
Because we know that our lives will never be the same inside our castle. Those cold, stone walls inside our self-castle will be redecorated with fine warm tapestries if God comes inside. Our rough-cut furniture will be replaced with beautiful designer pieces, easy on our bodies. Our empty halls will be filled with friends of God, joining us in fellowship and joy. We will no longer have a dungeon in which we have imprisoned our self, torturing ourselves daily over our terrible deeds, for God will open up the dungeons in our castle and replace them with places where God will talk with us over tea or coffee until the wee hours.
And so we keep God out because we know God’s power, but don’t trust God’s love. We have the fear of what we have not experienced, the fear of places we have never gone, the fear that God will change things and we are afraid that those changes won’t be for the better.
We do this in our lives, and we also do this in the church, don’t we? We say we have faith, but we don’t act in faith. We are afraid to step forward and teach people about Jesus, not because we are afraid that those people will laugh at us, but because we are afraid that they might actually choose to follow Jesus, and then we would have to show these new Christians we have found just how much faith - or how little faith - we truly have ourselves. And that is frightening, because underneath our costumes of churchy words and churchy activities and churchy behavior, we are all naked before God, and we are afraid that other people will see this. And so when God brings a non-believer to us, we are afraid to tell him or her of our God-stories, we are afraid to mention what Jesus has done in our lives, and we are afraid to have a long, heart-to-heart talk with them about the most important story in the Universe because we are afraid that we will be discovered to be naked and afraid before God, like Adam and Eve in the Garden after they sinned.
That is why God does not act in your life in a big and bold way. You have only let God onto the drawbridge, allowing God to redecorate your front porch, but have not let God into your castle in faith.
The woman who touched Jesus’ cloak had faith. True, it was her desperation which gave her the courage to step forth and touch the great Rabbi that day. But she acted upon her faith – and so must we.
We must each step forward and act upon our faith, surrendering the doors of our self-castle to God, letting God pour into our self and redecorate us, change us, transform us through God’s Holy Spirit. Faith means that we trust the One at the front gate with more than our front porch. Faith means that we ask to be made whole people, people who are ready to do spiritual battle throughout our lives, throughout our community, and even throughout the world.
Have you ever thought about what you would do for God’s mission if you were single and wealthy, if every day you could count on all the money you needed for support, for life, for the mission, if no one had a call upon your life except God? What would you allow God to do through you? What great things would you and God accomplish? What group of people would you lead to God's love?
So why wait to be single and wealthy? Have faith in God’s ability to make things happen despite your poverty, despite your commitments to others, despite your fears. When you have that faith and completely trust in God, you will truly be made whole. Take the leap… and trust your Heavenly Father!
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