A sermon preached at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Mason, Texas.
The Lectionary readings for the Second Sunday after Pentecost are here.
Today is the beginning of this long stretch in the church calendar that we call Ordinary Time. It’s the longest season in the church calendar, the six months between Trinity Sunday and Advent. We call it Ordinary time not because it’s a long boring season, but because with the readings on Sundays we focus on living our faith in all of the typical and ordinary moments of our regular days, you know, life.
This is what discipleship is – the learning and being shaped by what we give our attention to with our life. We can be discipled by many things: the news cycle we immerse ourselves in, what we read, what we watch, what we spend our time doing. All that we give our attention to shapes us whether we are aware of the shaping or not and we reflect that to those around us. When we give our attention daily to Jesus, we are shaped by his life, death, and resurrection so that this is what we reflect to the world. God came to live as one of us to show us in flesh and blood the life God made us to live, to show us who and Whose we are.
I haven’t done an official count on this. but I’d be fairly confident in placing a bet on the third most common thing Jesus says is ‘your faith has made you well’. But just what is ‘faith’? Often we use it as a synonym for belief but they aren’t the same thing. Belief is the intellectual acknowledgment that something is and this knowing can come from study or observation or experience or any combination of these. We believe the sun will rise tomorrow because it has every other day we’ve been alive. We believe in God because of what we read in the Bible, what we’ve witnessed in others who say they believe, and because we ourselves have experienced God’s presence and peace and love.
Faith on the other hand is commitment and action. It is the living out of what we believe. We make plans tomorrow based on our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. We act in certain ways because we believe in God. If we believe that God is the God of compassion, love, and mercy, we do the things that help feed, clothe, house, and provide safety for those who are in need of these things. If we believe that God made all human beings in the image of God, then we treat each other with dignity and respect. If we believe that God created this world and made it good and asked us to be good stewards of it, then we do the things which take care of this earth instead of using it up for our own benefit.
In our gospel lesson this morning, we hear two stories of actions propelled by faith, one wrapped inside the other. In the outer story Jesus is approached by a leader of the synagogue. This man is taking a great risk in approaching Jesus. Jesus was seen as a threat by most of them. All that Jesus taught and did was counter to their methods of maintaining power over others. But this is a desperate father. He’d heard stories of Jesus healing people. He may have even witnessed it himself. His daughter has just died and he’s hurting more deeply than he’s ever felt pain in his life and at the core of his being where this pain is so severe, he recalls that God is a God of love and mercy and healing and if this Jesus really is the One sent by God then he can bring his daughter back to life. This man’s faith is an action of courage and strength …
And then our story is interrupted by another act of courage, that of a woman whom society had shoved aside. She doesn’t boldly kneel before Jesus as the synagogue leader had done. She sneaks in not wanting to be noticed by anyone. Her faith reflects courage and strength. But despite her best covert attempt, Jesus sees her, acknowledges her, and says, “your faith has made you well.” Her healing was so much more than just physical, she was restored to her rightful place in the community and Jesus calls her daughter, out loud, so everyone in the crowd would know.
The journey continues to the synagogue leader’s house where Jesus puts out the organized mourners and without ceremony takes the girl by the hand and she is also restored to life. The gospel writer Matthew doesn’t tell us anything more about her father after this. Did he return to his position in the synagogue? Does he give it all up and become a follower of Jesus? Does he continue in the same courageous faith that brought him to Jesus to begin with?
Now, to be fair, we aren’t told what happens to the woman either. Matthew doesn’t often give us the rest of the story. I think, that in itself is a lesson in faith. It leaves us asking, “what would we do?” How do we allow these stories to shape us? Do we act courageously because of what we believe? Does our own faith make us well? Do our actions and behaviors reflect the good news of God’s love for all?
Two people, one a respected synagogue leader and the other a woman with no standing at all, both propelled into faithful acts of courage. Life as Jesus shows us we are made to live it is about stepping out with courage every day. It takes courage to keep reflecting God’s love in this world when the hate and anger are so loud. It takes courage to hang out with the folks whom some would label as ‘sinners’.
When asked why he hung out with the sinners, Jesus said he came to call the sinners not those who’ve decided they are the righteous ones. As each of the original twelve disciples hear Jesus’ invitation ‘follow me’ they responded, not because they thought they had life figured out but because they were propelled by their faith that said there was more to life than what they knew. They followed Jesus, day in and day out, in the ordinary moments and the miraculous ones, so their lives would be shaped by his.
And Jesus gives us the same invitation – to live life as we are made to live it by following Jesus and letting the good news of God’s Love shape our lives, day in and day out, ordinary and extraordinary. It is our lived faith that comes from our belief in the God of Love that makes us well, restored as God’s beloved, whole and holy as we follow the resurrected Jesus. Amen.
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