Faith's Power

 

Text: Mark 5:21-43

Focus: faith

Function: to build our own faith

²¹When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him, and he was by the sea. ²²Then one of the leaders of the synagogue, named Jairus, came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet ²³and pleaded with him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” ²⁴So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. ²⁵Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years. ²⁶She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better but rather grew worse. ²⁷She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, ²⁸for she said, “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.” ²⁹Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my cloak?” ³¹And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” ³²He looked all around to see who had done it. ³³But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

³⁵While he was still speaking, some people came from the synagogue leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” ³⁶But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the synagogue leader, “Do not be afraid; only believe.” ³⁷He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. ³⁸When they came to the synagogue leader’s house, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” ⁴⁰And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. ⁴¹Taking her by the hand, he said to her, “Talitha koum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” ⁴²And immediately the girl stood up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. ⁴³He strictly ordered them that no one should know this and told them to give her something to eat.

Good morning!

I read this passage and I just say wow! It is the story of two miracles, that happen during the same time period. One is a person of privilege and another is desperate woman who has lost all she owned trying to find a cure for her disease.

Let us imagine the story together.

Jesus keeps crossing the sea of Galilean Sea after he has fed the crowds and they see an opportunity for relief from the misery that has been their lot in life ever since the Roman occupation. A desperate crowd is following Jesus and Jesus is making himself available to more and more people.

In the middle of this popularity, with crowds around him, he gets the request to heal the daughter of Jarius, the Synagogue official. An important person. And the man has a level of faith where it is necessary to him for Jesus to be present with his suffering in order to understand and heal it. He could have, like the Roman Centurion, asked Jesus to heal him from a distance like he healed the official’s slave.

I wonder how that felt to the Jewish people when Jesus was healing their enemies?

But in this instance, after constant begging Jesus agrees to go with the man to the house.

And on the way, with a crowd pressing around them waiting to see the next amazing thing that Jesus does or says, another miracle happens.

Now I imagine that the Synagogue official is desperate knowing that his daughter is soon dying and I imagine that the crowd causing Jesus a delay is disconcerting to him.

And I imagine the story happening whereby Jesus is interrupted again, and this time, it is a “zap” of power going out of him.

He stops the crowd, who is already touching him and asks them who touched him.

And this poor desperate woman comes forward. She realizes that her reaching out to Jesus in faith has succeeded and she feels better and she tells Jesus that it was her that made the power go out of him.

The woman is different from the synagogue official. He needs Jesus’ physical presence in his suffering for his faith to work. She relies on a form of superstition.

The Jews had an ancient custom called “Tzitzit” It refers to special tassels sown on the four corners of the hem of the garment. And these tassels, Tzitzit, were placed there to remind them of the commands that God has given them in the Torah.

And again, she has the kind of faith that is more hands on, more tactile. She needs to touch the magical part of Jesus’ robe in order for her faith to work.

And the cool thing I find in this story is that Jesus is there, or here, present in the midst of everyone’s suffering to help them bear their burden. He said that he would never leave us or forsake us. He will not leave us as orphans. In his love he has carved us on the palm of his hands, his feet and his side.

We belong to him and we need to remember that he cares for our suffering and our needs.

So, although Jarius is fearing for his daughter, Jesus doesn’t mind the interruption with this woman.

Again, I imagine that by this time Jariusl is losing hope. And I can imagine that just as that hope is fading he sees the men who are bearing the bad news of his daughter’s passing. His plan to save his daughter has failed.

They men take him aside and tell him the bad news and and Jesus is eavesdropping on the conversation. He tells them to believe.

And I imagine again that this time, Jesus senses Jarius’ urgency and instead of walking with the crowd of disciples, he asks them to leave and they oblige him.

James, John, Peter, Jesus, Jarius, and the bearers of the bad news then quickly proceed to the house.

Perhaps now, seeing Jesus’ response to his suffering gives him some hope. Jesus tells him to have hope and to believe. I am convinced that those words of assurance from Christ himself build his faith.

I find those same words of comfort and assurance when I read through the Psalms, or the promises of God given to us in Romans chapter 8 about life lived in the Spirit of God.

The small group gets to the house and there are professional mourners wailing in order to help the family express their grief, it was their tradition. And Jesus tells them the girl is merely sleeping.

I don’t know if the girl has indeed died or is in a coma, either way, a miracle happens when Jesus says in Hebrew “Talitha Kuom” and the girl miraculously raises.

I can imagine again, the joy of this man and his wife at the restoration of their daughter.

And again, this story just blesses me to no end when I see the diversity of ministry of Jesus. He reaches out to the high and the lowly, to the enemy and the friend. Jesus indeed taught us how to love our neighbor as ourselves.

This is a Lord worth serving.

Powered By Love

 

Text: 2 Corinthians 6:1-13

Focus: enduring

Function: to help people see how Paul kept on regardless of his trials.

6 ^1-10 Companions as we are in this work with you, we beg you, please don’t squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us. God reminds us,
I heard your call in the nick of time;
The day you needed me, I was there to help.

Well, now is the right time to listen, the day to be helped. Don’t put it off; don’t frustrate God’s work by showing up late, throwing a question mark over everything we’re doing. Our work as God’s servants gets validated—or not—in the details. People are watching us as we stay at our post, alertly, unswervingly . . . in hard times, tough times, bad times; when we’re beaten up, jailed, and mobbed; working hard, working late, working without eating; with pure heart, clear head, steady hand; in gentleness, holiness, and honest love; when we’re telling the truth, and when God’s showing his power; when we’re doing our best setting things right; when we’re praised, and when we’re blamed; slandered, and honored; true to our word, though distrusted; ignored by the world, but recognized by God; terrifically alive, though rumored to be dead; beaten within an inch of our lives, but refusing to die; immersed in tears, yet always filled with deep joy; living on handouts, yet enriching many; having nothing, having it all.

11-13 Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!

Good morning and it is great to be back. I realized yesterday morning in prayer just how much the Holy Spirit is moving in our midst as we are being true to the faith as it was handed down to us through Jesus and the Apostles.

God has truly made us into an interdependent community. Brother Paul, the author of our text today speaks earlier to the same Church, the Corinthians, about the interdependence that we all have with each other. It is a bond of love that is fomented by the power of the Holy Spirit of Christ as we open ourselves up to the leading and direction of the Holy Spirit.

As you surmise from the bulk of my preaching, I believe that the moving of the Spirit, at least in my own experience, has always been to love someone more and forgive them. These are the times when I have sensed the gentle leading of the Holy Spirit whispering in my ear my need to love others the way that Jesus loves them.

I also believe that it is important for us to have faith in Christ. And the times that it is difficult to have faith in Christ are the times when we are suffering.

In this passage, Paul speaks of his faith and hope during suffering. They come through love.

I have been trying to learn how to live by faith in the midst of any suffering or hardship that I might be allowed to endure.

And in that process, I believe that God has a redeeming purpose in suffering. We know from scripture that he did with Jesus, the Christ. But we also learn that through faith in Christ in the midst of our own suffering we too are being like Christ in this world.

Paul talks about his suffering in this passage. He was beaten and left for dead. He was stoned and left for dead. And we read the list of the suffering that he endured when we heard our text. It was a lot.

And the reason for it was because God was using the circumstances in his life to bear witness to the love of God given to all of humanity through Christ Jesus.

I titled the sermon, “Powered by love” because I see the love that Paul has for the risen Christ and the people that Christ gave his life for, the world entire. I thought of titling it: “motivated by love” but I realize that God is love and therefore, Love is God.

So, as we are powered by God through the Holy Spirit, we are powered by Love.

When we love, we are being powered by God and it gives us the endurance to face difficulty.

Kathy knows what when I am suffering, I like to whine. I am short tempered and apparently, I can get sarcastic. Right now I’m a little bit confused because of the pain medications and that doesn’t help with my ability to respond patiently because I am angry with myself for the confusion and I need people to be patient with my response time. So, give me a few more moments this morning to respond.

And the reason I mention that I am a typical male patient who claims to be tough but needs a lot of nurture at heart is because getting impatient, frustrated and upset with the people you love leads me to feel guilty for my behavior.

Not shame, but guilt, or a conscience that is bothered. And then the enemy or our souls starts whispering doubt in my ear. And the doubt that evil whispers to me is that I am not measuring up to the standard of love that Christ said would be the hallmark of our Christian faith. But also where the Holy Spirit works leading me to love like God.

And if I listen to the enemy of our souls, it becomes shame. And shame is always what I call Satanic because it is an attack against the loving and merciful nature of Christ.

So, we walk by faith and we put off shame knowing that the power to love does not come from ourselves. It comes to us from the Holy Spirit. And for me, as your pastor, encouraging the leading of the Spirit in your lives is an important task that Christ has given to me.

Now, let me re-read the first and the last verse of today’s text. Paul talks about his suffering for Christ and transiently on their behalf because Christ wants them to live an abundant life.

It is his exhortation to them, It is the response that he wants them to get from his recounting of how God helps him through the trials that we face in life.

Hear these verses: Companions as we are in this work with you, we beg you, please don’t squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us....
...Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!

Because God is present in suffering, don’t squander the abundant life God has given us.

You know, I wonder if part of the way we squander this life abundant comes from a misunderstanding of John 3:16.

You know the verse and it ends with the phrase: “...that we might have eternal life.

I prefer to translate it more accurately according to the original Greek manuscripts as “life to the fullest.” The Greek word is literally “Life without limits.”

Do you see how that changes the narrative from “Jesus came so that when we die we can go to heaven” and many add the phrase “and not go to hell” to “Jesus came to give us the power to live life to the fullest?”

it isn’t about heaven and hell, it is about Christ’s presence in our lives restoring us to God and each other.

Through Jesus we see how he dismantled the unjust systems of his day in an effort to free the oppressed. They killed him for it.

He did it, according to John 3:16, because he loves us. God loves humanity so much that God sent His only son to save it.

To save us. To heal us. To restore us. To forgive us. To make us whole. This is God’s gift to us.

And motivated by that knowledge because he had experienced its help in the midst of suffering, he begs us to allow ourselves to be powered by the Love of God in our lives as well.

Mercy's Freedom

Text: Mark 2:23-3:6

Focus: Mercy

Function: to see how mercy triumphs over the law.

2:²³One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. ²⁴The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” ²⁵And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food, ²⁶how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?” ²⁷Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, ²⁸so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

3:¹Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. ²They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. ³And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” ⁴Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. ⁵He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. ⁶The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Good morning! I love this passage, or these passages, because of the irony of Jesus’ ministry and the way he confounds those who live merely religious lives and do not strive to be humble, and to love mercy and to do the just things that God lays on our hearts.

Both of the passages have the same theme and I see the theme as how the mercy of God is foremost in our lives and ministry because it is more important than being judgmental.

Probably the tension in the passage is demonstrated in chapter 3, verse 2: “They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.”

They did not care about the plight of the man with the withered hand, they only cared about their own plans to use Jesus’ mercy against him because he denied what they believed to be the requirements of the law.

It goes like this. To them, Jesus’ “job” was to heal the sick and since that was his job, he couldn’t break the law of the Sabbath and perform any work on Saturday.

They were trying to use their religious purity code to entrap him.

The irony is that if that was Jesus’ job, to perform miracles, then he must actually be sent from God and they should have realized that they were resisting God’s messenger.

Now, the purity code was important to them. It was a capital offense to work on the Saturday according to the Mosaic law. And, they believed the reason for the exile and terrible suffering that they had endured 600 years before was the punishment from God for not following the strict code of the law.

Some of them believed that they were actually being faithful to God in their desire to kill Jesus because Jesus, according to them, didn’t meet the strict requirements of the purity code. The Mosaic law spelled out for them what they believed to be very strict standards for a prophet and Jesus’ so called offense of working on Saturday offended some of them, and for others, they didn’t care about anything but power and they used it to kill him.

Remember, Jesus also hung out with prostitutes, lepers and other unclean people. Their purity culture could not abide the fact that Jesus was changing the rules that they thought were keeping them safe from the terror of God and they claimed it had been working for 400 years.

Of course, it wasn’t actually working. They were under bondage to the Romans and things couldn’t get much worse for the general population. But the ruling class was using religion to keep the people in this kind of bondage because they didn’t want to give up their power and the wealth it gave them.

So, there is a lot of irony here. They were persecuting Jesus to keep them safe from a system that wasn’t even working for them.

But Jesus is on a completely different wavelength! His wavelength is mercy and compassion. Then there is power. Some of them with legitimate interests and some of them with evil intent.

The lesson to be learned from this seems clear to me and is reiterated in the sermon on the mount, Don’t judge others by religious standards. Instead, love them, accept them, and allow them to and even help them to meet their needs.

The first illustration of th is mercy has to do with the disciples working to satisfy their hunger on Saturday.

Now we just bought a new electric range. It has a Sabbath mode. It is a mode that programs the oven to not work on Saturday to ensure that all food is prepared before Saturday so that a person doesn’t need to work on Saturday. In other words, this rule still applies today in Orthodox Jewish homes.

The disciples were breaking the rule by shucking the raw grain and eating it. They should have already prepared food in order to be ceremonially pure.

And when the Pharisees question Jesus about it, he lays down a new principle for us to consider. And that is this. The Law was made to help people love God and others, not to burden them with commands that might appear to be religious, but don’t really help them live a life without limits as Jesus said would happen for us.

Jesus uses scripture to show them how God ordained a rule breaking episode in order to preserve the life of David and his men.

Every day 12 loaves of bread were baked and set on the alter before God.

And the rule that Moses gave was that only the priests could eat the day old bread and if you were not a priest and you ate the bread, you were to be put to death.

And Jesus tells them that God ordained the breaking of the law in order to nurture and aid one of his children.

Jesus shows us the heart of God’s desire for mercy.

Then the next passage shows Jesus doing exactly the same thing.

He heals on the Sabbath because he says that God’s principle is to restore people. It was his mission. He came to seek and restore the lost.

Remember, the Bible says that Jesus died to save the world, to restore the world back to God.

His salvation is healing and restoration.

It isn’t just personal, but it is for the whole society.

That is why the early disciples shared their belongings, because they recognized that God had blessed them and they were to share God’s blessings with others instead of hoarding them in the fear that God will not bless them still in the future.

I understand that fear and I am trying to be obedient to the prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread….”

This is the move of God. To break down the barriers of the law and to set us free to do what is necessary to love God by loving our neighbors.

Keeping the Sabbath was in important commandment. And by the time the Epistles are written, we see different groups of followers having a diverse pattern of Sabbath worship from Saturday, to Sunday, the day of resurrection, the “Lord’s day,” to every day is a Sabbath so some groups abandoning the Sabbath requirement altogether since we have already entered into our rest with God.

And it was God’s Spirit moving in their midst that changed the rule.

It happened again in Acts 10 when God changed the rule about collaborating with Gentiles. Again, the Jews were afraid that mixing with Gentiles would corrupt them, which also lead to their destruction 600 years before, and they would be repeating the sin. They were taught to be prejudiced and then, all of a sudden, the Church, when people are baptized says “Neither Jew or Gentile, Slave or Free, Male of Female, but all are one in Christ.”

The Spirit of God changed the rules of the OT because God’s mercy takes precedent over God’s judgment. As a matter of fact, he commands us to be like Jesus and be merciful or we will not receive mercy, according to James 2:13

And in the end, Revelation 7:9 gives a picture of heaven where all races, nations, tongues and peoples are together before the God in God’s majesty.

Mercy toward others took place over judgment of them.

God is calling us to that same mercy.

It is compassionate and it is part of our mission to spread the Kingdom of God from one person to another through acts of kindness.

Romans 2:4 says that It is the kindness of God, the mercy of God, that leads people to change their minds and embrace the love of God given to them by the Spirit of God.

So let the Spirit’s love fill our heats and give mercy when we face difficult people or situations that we don’t understand.