240630 Sermon on God working contrary to expectations (Pentecost 6) June 30, 2024

 Audio recording

Sermon manuscript:

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid; just
believe.”

A person might feel jealous hearing our Gospel reading
today. There was a lot of healing. Jesus was told about Jairus’s little girl
who was extremely sick. While he was on his way to heal her, a woman who had a
flow of blood was healed. By the time that Jesus got to the house the little girl
had died, and Jesus raised her from the dead. Jesus showed his great powers of
healing. Some of you might like some healing for yourself, or for someone you
know and love. Why can’t Jesus heal some more?

In my sermon last week I spoke of fighting or wrestling with
God. Our reason is skeptical of there being any benefit for ourselves from
engaging in this. How could we ever win? God is much stronger than us. And in a
way our reason is correct. In the examples of the fighters and the wrestlers
with God that I spoke about with you last week, the people didn’t come out of
the contest stronger. They came out weaker. But, as Paul says, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” The bones that God
has broken rejoice. These fighters were humbled, but they believed that God
would exalt them. They came into the fight with an idea of what they would like
God to do for them, they came out the other end with God having done something
that was different from what they expected, but also something that was more.

What I’ve just described is what some people have called
“the theology of the cross.” The cross that is being referred to is Jesus’s
cross as well as our cross as Christians that Jesus talks about when he says, “If you want to be my disciple, then take up your cross and
follow me.” The term “theology of the cross” is a way to summarize the
strange way that God works.

Think of how God worked when the Father sent his Son to be
the Christ. You might expect God to have sent him with great power and glory. Jesus
is God after all. But you know what God does. He causes Jesus to be born in a
stable. Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. Those are humbler circumstandes
than you were born into. Even if you were born in a house, that’s nothing
compared to Jesus’s birth. And the humility continued. He gave and gave.

Finally the Father had his Son nailed to the cross. To all
outward appearances, from the perspective of reason, it was no longer possible
to believe in this man was God’s Christ. It looked like it was impossible that
he could be or remain king. He just became weaker and weaker until he died.

We, of course, know that God was accomplishing the most
glorious and beautiful things through the bloody, gory cross. We know that God
made peace between himself and sinners. Although God humbled Jesus to the point
of death, even death on the cross, God has raised him from the dead. God has
highly exalted Jesus so that his name is above every name. At the name of Jesus
every knee will bow in heaven, and on earth, and those under the earth. Jesus
Christ is Lord!

But who’d have thought it while seeing him gasping and
crying out from the cross? Nobody! Not even his disciples could continue to
believe in him. They thought it was all over and done with. Thomas, one of the
twelve, wouldn’t even take his fellow disciples’ word for it. He was never
going to believe in Jesus again unless he saw the marks and felt the wounds. So
it goes. Such is the power of reason. Reason rises up against what God says and
does, declaring him to be unacceptable.

Reason can strike out at the cross—the very core of our
faith. To my mind there is no more direct way to disagree with Christianity
than to say that what God did to Jesus was wrong. Perhaps you’ve heard this
referred to as “divine child abuse.” It can have a ring of truth to it. Why did
God do it like that? Why didn’t God just snap his fingers and make everything
all better? Maybe you’ve wondered that before. If we were God we wouldn’t use
that nasty cross.

So it is that reason and faith go their separate ways. Reason
says that the cross is crude, ugly, unnecessary. Faith accepts and loves the
cross because faith trusts in the God who put Jesus on that cross. Faith waits
for the salvation that God has promised even if that salvation may tarry for a
time.

Now let’s go back to the thought with which I began. I
mentioned how some of you might be jealous upon hearing how Jesus did all this
healing. You or someone you love needs healing. Our reason can be the enemy to
our faith here. Our reason might ask, “Why doesn’t Jesus heal right here, right
now, in the way that I want him to?” What’s his problem? Why doesn’t he do what
I want?

To be a human being means that we have our reason. It is not
strange that our reason should act this way. What makes a Christian a Christian,
however, is believing that Jesus Christ is Lord. Jesus Christ is Lord with all
his forgiveness. Jesus Christ is Lord with all his resurrected power and glory.
Jesus Christ is Lord with his cross, with his testing, with his waiting, with
his wrestling, with his humbling, with his exalting. Jesus is who Jesus is. We
can’t pull him apart and take those things that we like best about him and dump
the rest in the garbage.

Maybe one of the things that you don’t really like about
Jesus is that he hasn’t healed you, or that he hasn’t healed someone that you
love. If you could, you’d dump that part of him into the garbage. Well, my
advice is that if you feel that way, then you should say that to him! We talked
about this last week as well. Your prayers don’t need to be polite. God already
knows how you feel, so you might as well be honest about it. More prayers are
better, not less. Tell him what you want. God will hear your prayer.

However—and this is a big however—he might not answer your
prayers the way you want or expect. He might not answer your prayers the way
that you would want to require of him. “If I’m going to pray to you, then you
better do what I want.”

This is true even in the cases of healing that we heard
about in our Gospel reading. I doubt very much that that woman with the flow of
blood prayed that she would suffer from her condition for twelve years, that
she would spend all her money on doctors, that she would be the victim of
medical malpractice. When she touched the hem of Jesus’s robe, that was when
the time was right.

I doubt that the father and mother of that sick little girl
prayed that they wouldn’t get their request to Jesus on time, that Jesus
wouldn’t get there in time, and that their little girl would die. They didn’t
pray that their little girl would lose all the color in her cheeks so that mother
and father would cry rivers of tears. I’m sure they prayed, “O God! Save our
daughter!” And he did—just not in the way that they were expecting.

Nevertheless, at the end of all of this, despite their tears
and sorrows, I am sure that all of these people whom Jesus blessed were better
off than if they had been healed in the way that they were expecting. God does
better to us that we would ever do for ourselves. But to believe that requires
faith. Our reason might have all kinds of things to say to the contrary.

We can easily apply this to ourselves and our desires. All
of us have things we want from God. We should make our requests known to him, firmly
believing that he will answer our prayers. If, for no other reason, we should
be confident because we know that God has given us Jesus. Jesus is God’s most
precious treasure. If God has given us Jesus, then he has to give us every good
thing.

But here’s the thing: We don’t know how he will do it. We
don’t know if it will take twelve years. We don’t know if we will lose all our
money. We don’t know if we or that person you love will have to die first
before the healing will take place. But it will take place. And it will be
glorious. You will be better off on the other end than if God would do
everything exactly the way you want him to do. But to believe that takes faith.
May God grant you such faith! Amen.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid; just
believe.”