A Sermon Based Upon Mark 9: 38-50, NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
First Sunday in Lent, February 14th, 2016
“I believe in…..” That’s how the ancient “Creed” begins. “I believe in God the Father almighty…. I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son....I believe in the Holy Spirit… This ancient statement of faith called the “Apostle’s Creed” was written around 180 AD to refute one of the major threats to the Christian faith. But this very old claim of ‘belief’ was not saying what many assume it means: “I believe in something, or that something exists.” It was originally saying something more like: “I trust in something or put my trust in this.”
This is why Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sums up Christian life and belief in just one word: trust. In his small book written for new Christians, he defines that the core beliefs of Christianity can best be called “tokens of trust”. In our world where there is a ‘crisis of trust’, as fewer trust in governments, education systems, banks, churches, religion or in any kind of establishment or institutions, there is no more greater question than: “Who can you trust?”
WHO CAN YOU TRUST?
You may not want to ‘trust’ in anything, but you must. Gaining a sense of ‘trust’ is the most basic human need. Erik Erikson, a well-known psychologist listed ‘trust versus mistrust’ as the very first developmental task a baby must master in life. When a baby learns that someone will feed it, change it, cuddle it, and keep it warm, only then a baby develops a sense of hope and trust about the world. But if that ‘trust’ is not there, the child gets stuck, and nothing else works unless or until that baby finds something or someone to trust. Without trust hope is lost.
When you have learned to ‘trust’ it's hard to face life without it. But if you didn't grow up among trusting people in trusting communities, or that sense of trust has been broken, it can be hard, if not nearly impossible, to get it back. Someone told me recently about a loved one who'd never go back to church again. When I asked why, they said it was a matter of broken trust. Because they have no trust left, there was nothing more to believe.
You may have heard of Thomas Paine. He wrote a pamphlet entitled “Common Sense” that helped fuel the American Revolution. Paine was a deist. He believed in God and even believed that the British Monarchy was instituted by the devil, but he did not believe Jesus was God’s son nor did he trust the Bible. He ended up not trusting the Church, priests, or any kind of organized religion. He even came to distrust and attempted to discredit George Washington. Because he lost all trust in just about everyone and anything except what he called “the church of his own mind” he ended up moving to France. When he died, in spite of all that he did to fuel the flames of American Independence, only 8 people came to his funeral.
I feel sorrow for people with great minds but no trust. Maybe it was something that happened at church, with a person they believed in or with a pastor they had trusted. Or, maybe it had nothing to do with church at all, but they’ve just lost faith in others or in life. Maybe you have been there too, and it has taken you a long time to come back to faith or to trust. Perhaps even now, you still have doubts. If just one little thing goes wrong, you'll be gone, quicker than you can snap a finger. You want to believe, and you want to come closer, get more involved, and to trust, but to trust in something or someone is too much like walking on egg shells, or worse, it's more like walking on melting ice. Teaching trust to an untrusting person is almost like trying to teach a paralyzed person to dance; they still recognize the tune but there is no feeling left in their legs or feet.
However, the gospel was written for people just like this. The gospel is ‘good news’ to enable us, especially those of us who’ve lost trust in life, to believe or ‘trust’ again in life because of this good news about Jesus.
This most obvious call to ‘trust’ Jesus is especially visible in this 9th chapter of Mark. In this chapter, Jesus is teaching his disciples they can trust and follow a suffering Christ, even if he does not come to answer all their problems. Why would they want to trust someone like this--- a God who does not give them exactly what they want? In a very mysterious moment we call “transfiguration”, Jesus takes his closest disciples to the edge of what trusting Jesus will mean. But the dazzling ‘transformation’ of Jesus is not as much the point of this story as is the reassuring voice that calls these confused, puzzled, struggling disciples, to hear and to trust Jesus as God’s beloved son. Like their greatest leaders, Moses the lawgiver, and Elijah the prophet, God entrusts his greatest truth not through a book nor an idea, but through one who is ‘human’, like a ‘son of man’.
You may not yet be ready to ‘trust’ a voice like this, especially if you have been jaded or hurt by someone. But because we humans remain dependent upon others for what we know and who we can become, if we don’t find a voice of trust in our lives, our lives will be lived in a constant fog. So, the question is not, will you trust, but what or better yet, who?
Some will find a trust in their money, even though it also has “In God we trust” stamped upon it. Others find their trust in a career, a lifestyle, in their own strength or know how, or in some special people or relationships. Of course, we can hope that there are many voices of trust to be discovered in the world around us, just like some Jews knew they could trust the voices of Moses or Elijah---who gave the law or initiated the voice or work of the prophets. These had been sure voices of the past. Now, this voice from heavenly authority comes to say that Jesus can be trusted even more. Many have decided to trust this ‘voice’, but can we? Should we? Dare we still trust this most ‘beloved’ human son?’
HOW CAN YOU TRUST?
No sooner do they hear this assuring voice, recommending that they trust this ‘truth’ on the mountain, these disciples immediately discover it’s not that easy. They try to harness this power of ‘trust’ and ‘faith’ to help a young man who is controlled by a evil “spirit”, but cannot (9:14-18). It is quite disconcerting, if not embarrassing, as even Jesus rebukes them for their lack of ‘faith’ (v. 19).
What we encounter here, in the life of those first disciples, is the story that echoes the trust struggle of most of our lives. It goes something like this: You think you're getting a handle on trusting God, or trust life, then life throws you for a loop. Nothing goes as planned or as you wish. You have hardly any control over anything. What do you do now?
Get real. The Bible is being ‘dreadfully’ honest here. Trusting in the true God of the Bible cannot be like having a genie in a bottle. Sometimes our faith works for us, as we wish, and sometimes it seems that it won't work in our favor at all. Why is this happening? There may be no good reason, or no reason at all. What we can know is that If we were to always get what we want, we could stop wanting God, wouldn’t we? Isn't this why having ‘faith’ always demands our trust. It will take a lot more ‘ prayer and fasting’ to deal with the kind of problems we will encounter in life. You can’t get all your ‘ducks in a row’ or have it all laid out and expect it to stay that way. Life is just like that. It retains randomness and unpredictability no matter how precise, prepared or structured we are. In fact, the truth is that you nor I can never master ‘faith’ without continual and constant trust in God. This is just how ‘faith’ and life works. Nobody can be who Jesus was, no matter how hard we try. And sometimes, in this gospel too, Jesus wasn't able to perform any wonders because of the lack of trust and unbelief around him.
So, let’s ask ourselves, how will we trust God when it looks like there is nothing to trust in or no one we can trust? What do we do when the bottom of life falls out from under us and there is little power left in us to trust and to believe? What we can certainly know, is exactly what those disciples discovered. When their faith did not take them where they hoped it would, they either had to keep trusting and learning from Jesus, or they could give up altogether? It’s an obvious choice we constantly make in life. Faith does not bring automatic results, nor does it always bring desired ones either.. If it did, why would we need faith or trust?
As we reflect upon this very ‘sobering’ moment when the disciples began to realize that not only were they ‘not’ Jesus, they also began to realize that Jesus was not exactly who they thought he was supposed to be. Is there any good reason to keep being a ‘disciple’ when you can’t do what you expected or when God also doesn’t do what is expected? How can you keep having trust when nothing goes as you had hoped?
Brian Blount, President of Union Seminary in Richmond, tells about being five or six years of age when he accidentally entered his parents bedroom without knocking and something other than sleeping was going on. His parents were very religious folks and they were the kind of parents that you knew that their actions and their words always matched. All the years Brian was growing up, his father always told him to ‘stay close’ to God no matter what he was going through. He told him, “Brian, I’ve had my back up against the wall many times, but God always makes a way in just the right moment.” Brian said that as a pastor and professor, he’d wondered about that statement many times, and he was often concerned about his parent’s financial situation because as poor, black farmers, they did not always have a lot of money, but they always seemed to make it through. One time, when returning home from school he asked his father, “How are you doing?” and he wasn’t talking about physical health. The years of living had backed his father up against the wall financially, but still thinking the challenges his son’s schooling, the father said something Brian never thought he’d hear his father say, “Son, it seems like its never going to end, doesn’t it? It’s hard for us, too. Sometimes I think God does not want some people to have many materials things.” Brian answered, “But Dad, “How do you keep on going? How do you keep on believing? How do you keep on trusting that somehow, someway, God will still make a way?” It was then that the son remembered what he had seen when entered his parent’s bedroom without knocking. He found them huddle up together on their knees with hands clasped before their faces, just as they had taught me as a child to kneel and pray before I went to bed. Here they were, even when their backs were against the wall of life, doing what they’d always done, and would always do, and taught me to do---staying close and in prayer even when circumstances made God far away (From Preaching Mark in Two Voices, Brain K. Blount and Gary W. Charles, WJK Press, 2002, pp 161-162).
“This kind only comes out through prayer and fasting….” Jesus told his disciples. I don’t think he meant as much that if they prayed harder or fasted more, they would have better results, as much as Jesus meant that if they would keep praying and fasting, keep trusting and believing, no matter the results, that they would get through and the demons would finally have to turn loose.
WILL YOU KEEP TRUSTING
So what do you do to refuel your trust, faith, and prayerful life in God, even when things are not like they should be, or when people are not as you had hoped they would be? How do you rebuild trust when you’ve lost trust?
Of course, there are no easy answers, that’s why Jesus is headed to the cross, not only as the way to redeem people from sin, but also to help people restore their faith in a God who loves and cares. There is a great mystery to trusting God that can’t ever be fully answered, but what we can figure out is where this ‘duke’s mixture’ of brief teachings are headed in our text. There are like building blocks of ‘trust’ lying out on the floor of faith just waiting for you to pick them up and start stacking them up. Humility, Community, and Integrity, all provides steps for rebuilding a life of trust. Do you see it?
First, Jesus tells his disciples that if they ‘want to be first, they have to be last….and they must learn to humble themselves, even welcoming a child. That’s the first one: Humility.
He also reminds them that being a disciple is not about who you are ‘against’, but it’s about being ‘with’ any of those who are not ‘against us’. Trust is not built by being ‘against’ people with by being ‘with’ and ‘for’ them. That’s the second block: Community. Do we want to be with others?
Perhaps the greatest lesson of ‘rebuilding’ trust comes at the end, when Jesus goes in great detail letting them know that we must live lives that don’t offend others. If you will hurting others with our ‘offensive attitudes and behavior; even if we stop trying to fix everyone else, but look within ourselves, then you are on the right track to rebuilding a life of trust. There are many things in life we can’t fix, and many people we can’t change, but we can look within and make changes within ourselves. Jesus says something like: If any part of your body causes you to stumble in faith, cut if off”. He doesn’t means physically chop it off, but he means spiritually, figuratively.
I know this all sounds a bit ‘crazy’, but Jesus is saying that the best thing we can do to begin to rebuild trust in our lives is to deal with what is inside of us, first of all. When you take personal responsibility, and you begin to really take care of your spiritual life, and your inner, emotional, and moral self, then you become worth your ‘salt’, so that you’ll not only have ‘salt in yourselves’, but you’ll have ‘peace’ with others; and this peace is the kind of ‘peace’ that will bring you back to building ‘trust’ and having ‘faith’ from the inside out.
When the Pope was finishing the final day of his trip to America last September, he was surprised to meet a family from his homeland and hometown of Buenas Aries, Argentina. As a family of four, with small children, they had made a 6 month journey driving in a VW van, just to come to the United States to see the Pope. When the Pope meet them, the first papal words our of his mouth were, “You’re Crazy!” (http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/travel/argentine-family-travelling-from-south-america-to-philadelphia-in-van-to-see-pope-322675581.html).
They surely were. They were the kind of ‘crazy’ that they took the initiative to go on a road trip together that would not only be the adventure of their life, but it was also a spiritual journey that strengthened their family and spiritual life. That’s the kind of ‘crazy’ faith is. It starts with saying, “I believe”, and it continues with all the many different ways we stay close to God, and to each other, as we give ourselves to God each and every day, and let God bless our lives in ways that can’t be understood except by people who have ‘trust’ and ‘faith’.
In a rare and recent TV interview with Bill Withers, the man who wrote and recorded two of the most beloved songs, “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Lean On Me”, told about how he was a stutterer early in life, until he started imagining people “without clothes on” when he talked them. That may sound crazy too, but it worked. It not only got Bill over his shyness, but it also enabled him to write, record and perform.
This is where trust is born, says Jesus. It has to start within you, not within what is or isn’t happening in the world. You must first try to ‘cut out’ all that is keeping you from ‘trusting’ within yourself. “Have Salt in Yourself, ” says Jesus. This is where trust begins. Amen.
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