"Good Security in a Declining Market"
We know God cares, because Jesus cares.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 9, 2003
Text: Mark 7:31-37
I knew by the way that she entered the plane and walked down the aisle, chatting to everybody, that this woman was going to be saying an awful lot over the next two hours. At the time, I was stranded on a runway in North Carolina while they were de-icing the plane during an ice storm. I then realized, to my great chagrin, that she was assigned the seat next to me.
She sat down and within 30 seconds began practically to recount her life story. In fact, for the next hour and a half I don't think she even took a breath, she just kept speaking. At one point in that 90 minutes I tried to create a little silence by opening my Bible, to suggest that I was doing some work, only to find out that she was the wife of a Southern Baptist minister and she now wanted to recount all the sermons he'd preached in 50 years! Oh, what a trial this was for me to endure!
As the flight proceeded - and after about a half an hour in the air and a few moments of silence - her purse fell to the floor and a piece of paper fell out of it. I saw, as she hurriedly tucked it back into her purse, that it was a photograph of a young man. Because it looked rather old, I assumed it might have been one of her husband. So I asked: "Is this a picture of your husband?"
There was a deliberate pause, then she grimaced and said, "No, it was my son." She went on to tell me that she had lost her son to an incurable disease and carried this photograph wherever she went as a reminder of him. Suddenly, the conversation that had been facile, shallow, and light turned into one of great depth and sincerity and I realized that this woman desperately needed to talk to somebody.
You see, the fact is that when we face grief and sadness, things become very real. That which is shallow fades away, that which only seems important dissipates and that which is truly important comes to the fore. In many ways we learn more through our grieving and loss than we do from the joys of life. Robert Hamilton put it so beautifully:
I walked a mile with pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with sorrow,
And ne'er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me.
You see, my friends, when we face sorrow and difficulties and tragedies - when we suffer losses we grieve. And not just the loss of a person we love: We grieve over the loss of a job, the loss of health, or the loss of innocence. So often it is when we grieve that we become all the wiser, all the brighter, all the more aware of the things that really matter.
That is why our passage today from the Gospel of Mark is so important. It is the story of Jesus being confronted by grief. And so often when Jesus meets people who are suffering or in need, we find the message of Christ at its most powerful and meaningful. In this particular story from the Gospel of Mark, we read that some people had brought a deaf man and a mute man to Him to be healed. Now some scholars have suggested that this may be two stories that Mark has rolled into one - of two different miracles - we don't know. We do know that there was a man who was a deaf and a man who was mute and Jesus healed him or them.
But more than that, the words that Mark gives us, with all the clarity and all the power that is so often evident in his Gospel, become clear. They are powerful: "Then looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha', that is, 'Be opened.' And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly."
Now, I want to look at this story more closely because there is a powerful message in it about how God deals with our grief, our losses, our sorrow. The first thing we notice is the sensitivity of Jesus Christ to the issue before Him.
I went back a few months ago and reread some of my notes from my philosophy course - I do that just to remind myself of all the things I have forgotten over the years! I saw something that one of my professors had written: "Surely there ought to be at the heart of the universe a just God." Now, from time immemorial philosophers have debated whether there is a just God at the centre of the universe. Some have suggested that there is a loving, benevolent and beneficent God who is the creator of this world, that at the heart of it all is a God who cares, who is compassionate and who understands.
Others have suggested philosophically that there is a God who created this world, but has left it to its own devices. This is a God who, in fact, is so far away from the world, so detached, that He does not care. Apart from the atheists who maintain there is no God at all, these have been the two supreme schools of thought. The only problem is that for all the philosophical arguments about the existence of this God and whether He is a benevolent, a thoughtful and a just God, we simply cannot prove any of it.
You cannot prove, even by looking at the beauty of the world, even by looking at the gorgeous nature of creation, that there is a God who really cares for you in your sorrow, for we are limited by our minds and reason.
George Eliot sums it up:
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (George Eliot, "Middlemarch")
What Eliot is getting at is that if we knew and understood and could fathom the fullness of that presence in the universe, we would be able to hear the grass grow, the squirrel's heartbeat, we would hear the pounding of the world and it would overwhelm us. We could not fathom it, we could not comprehend it and we certainly couldn't handle it. Even the brightest amongst us do not have the insight to say definitely there is a caring God, a just heart at the centre of the universe.
There is a wonderful story about Mensa, an organization for those who have an IQ of 140 or more. (Needless to say, it is not an organization to which I personally belong.) Mensa holds conferences once a year, where all the great minds get together to explore their reasoning abilities. Such was one conference in San Francisco. After their morning meeting the Mensa people decided to go out for lunch. When they got to the restaurant they noticed that the salt was in the pepper shaker and the pepper was in the salt shaker. So they put their great minds together, these towering intellects of their day. Finally, after their great minds had explored all the avenues of physics and chemistry, they came up with an idea: By using a napkin, a straw, and a plate they could solve the problem.
After they had done this they thought they would show off their intellectual prowess, so they invited the waitress over and said: "By the way, my dear, did you know that the salt is in the pepper shaker and the pepper in the salt shaker?"
And she said: "Oh, yes. I'm terribly sorry about that," unscrewed both caps and swapped them!
The blindingly obvious, right?
Even our greatest intellects cannot fathom the complete depths of the universe. Now, this is important, because when people grieve or feel a loss they really want to know: Is there a just God in the universe? Why am I suffering? Why have I lost my job if this God cares? Why have I lost my loved ones when I shouldn't have? Why, as the woman on the plane asked, have I lost my son when I have been so religious all my life? They ask: Is there a just God?
The answer, my friends, is not found in philosophical discourse or argument. It is not found in looking for an ideal God somewhere beyond the stars and wondering whether that God cares. It is found in a man, in Jesus of Nazareth. That is why the biblical stories of Christ and the healings are so important. They tell us clearly and with the greatest of evidence, simplicity and character, that Jesus does care and thereby, that God cares.
When Jesus lifted His eyes to heaven, Mark in his Gospel says He "sighed." The Greek word is stenazo which simply means "to grieve" or, as our Bible translates it God "groaned." That desire, that sympathy, that outpouring of emotion means that when Jesus sees the people grieving and suffering there is this sigh, this groan. It's the same as we find in the Book of Exodus when Moses says, "God has heard the groans, the cries of my people and has answered them." So too, now, Jesus of Nazareth has heard the groans and the cries of His people and He has groaned with them. Such is the sensitive, caring power of almighty God. We do not need, then, to speculate and ask. We can proclaim. God sighs, Jesus sighs - He knows our grief.
But there is something more: The preparatory power of prayer.
We read that Jesus lifted His eyes to heaven and with a sigh, cried out. In other words, Jesus prepared Himself for the healing, for the authority that He was going to need to carry out this miracle, by first and foremost casting His eyes to the heavens. Symbolically, He was seeking the power of the heavenly Father. Jesus understood that power precedes command, that power precedes healing and that power comes from prayer.
My friends, very often when we face great difficulty we are ill-prepared because unlike Jesus of Nazareth, we have not taken the time to pray. When we face conflicts, when we worry about war and what will happen to future generations, it seems to me the need to pray is so important because the prayer precedes the command and the command was ephphatha, which means to be opened or to open up. The opening power, the unfolding power of God occurred after the words of prayer.
Hugh Price Hughes wrote a wonderful book titled "The City of Everywhere." In it is the story of a man who arrives at a train station and disembarks. When he enters the station he notices that all the people are barefoot. Oh, the porters are wearing their red caps, and their uniforms, passengers are carrying their briefcases and their handbags, but everybody is barefoot. So he approaches one of the porters and asks: "Why is everyone barefoot?"
And the porter says: "Ah, that's the question."
The man gets into a cab and looks out the window at the falling snow as he is driven past all the stores. He notices that everyone is beautifully dressed but nobody is wearing shoes. When he finally arrives at the hotel he says to the cabbie, "Have you noticed that nobody around here is wearing shoes?"
And the cabbie says: "Yes. Ah, that is the question."
He walks into the bustle of the hotel: There are bellhops carrying luggage and there is a constant inflow of people. He looks down and notices once again that they are all barefoot. Women wearing beautiful coats but barefoot. Men in tuxedos but barefoot. Finally, as he's about to enter the restaurant he approaches the concierge and says: "Have you noticed in this city that everybody is barefoot?"
The concierge says: "Yes, I know that."
"Well, isn't that strange?"
The concierge says: "There is a factory across the street that makes shoes. So, we know there are shoes. Every week we all go over to the factory and we are told about shoes and how good they are, then we walk away - barefoot."
The man asks: "Why? Why?"
The concierge says: "Ah, that's the question."
You see, my friends, our attitude towards prayer is like the attitude of the inhabitants of "The City of Everywhere" to shoes. We hear every week that there is prayer. We believe that there is prayer, we are told that there is prayer. Once a week we surround ourselves with people, like me, who tell you there is prayer. But for the rest of our days, having heard it, do we pray? Ah, that's the question.
I want to say to the young families here this morning who have had their children baptized that if you really want to prepare your children for life ahead - apart from all the other great and wonderful things you will provide, including education and health and love - there are two more things that you need to do: Pray, and teach them to pray. To be prepared when life's difficulties come along. To be ready for life's challenges. To be able to rise to those things that cause us to ask: Is there a just God at the heart of the universe?
For if you have been praying to that God, then you will already know the answer. And the answer will become so clear and will be so readily available for you, for in that prayer you are ready for the command. The command is for God's healing - a God who cares. And when Christ, along with you, sighs, the sigh of the eternal can change your life. Ah, the question is, will you now go and pray? Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.