When Jesus, Peter, James, and John approached the other disciples, they saw a large crowd surrounding them and legal experts arguing with them. 15 Suddenly the whole crowd caught sight of Jesus. They ran to greet him, overcome with excitement. 16 Jesus asked them, “What are you arguing about?” 17 Someone from the crowd responded, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, since he has a spirit that doesn’t allow him to speak. 18 Wherever it overpowers him, it throws him into a fit. He foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and stiffens up. So I spoke to your disciples to see if they could throw it out, but they couldn’t.” 19 Jesus answered them, “You faithless generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I put up with you? Bring him to me.” 20 They brought him. When the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a fit. He fell on the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth. 21 Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been going on?” He said, “Since he was a child. 22 It has often thrown him into a fire or into water trying to kill him. If you can do anything, help us! Show us compassion!” 23 Jesus said to him, “‘If you can do anything’? All things are possible for the one who has faith.” 24 At that the boy’s father cried out, “I have faith; help my lack of faith!” 25 Noticing that the crowd had surged together, Jesus spoke harshly to the unclean spirit, “Mute and deaf spirit, I command you to come out of him and never enter him again.” 26 After screaming and shaking the boy horribly, the spirit came out. The boy seemed to be dead; in fact, several people said that he had died. 27 But Jesus took his hand, lifted him up, and he arose. 28 After Jesus went into a house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why couldn’t we throw this spirit out?” 29 Jesus answered, “Throwing this kind of spirit out requires prayer.” (Common English Bible)
“Help in Unbelief:
Reconciling Faith and Belief,” Week Six
Four
tours of duty in Afghanistan across a twenty-year military career. Three times in those four tours, he was
almost killed. Yet still, Sergeant
Joseph Serna returned to the United States at least physically intact, if not
entirely mentally intact—as many soldiers from war zones sadly do, Sgt. Serna
suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and it eventually landed
him on the wrong side of the law as a result of substance abuse, and I’ll let
the Washington Post pick it up here:
While Serna’s years in
combat earned him three Purple Hearts and other military accolades, like many
combat vets, he’s been unable to leave the battlefield behind him. Since returning to the U.S., the decorated
Green Beret has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and been charged
with driving under the influence. He
entered the veteran’s treatment court program…over which…State District Court Judge
Lou Olivera presides.
Serna had fought to stay
sober, appearing before Olivera 25 times to have his progress reviewed. He confessed to Olivera that he lied about a
recent urine test last week…in response, Olivera sentenced Serna to one day in
jail.
The judge drove Serna to
the jail in a neighboring county…As Serna sat down on the cot in his cell…he
heard the door rattle open again and saw Olivera standing before him. Olivera sat down beside him. Someone came and locked the door.
This was a one-man cell
so we sat on the bunk and I said, ‘You are here for the entire time with me?’”
Serna (said). “He said, ‘Yeah, that’s
what I am doing.’”
A Gulf War veteran
himself, Olivera was concerned leaving Serna in isolation for a night would
trigger his PTSD.
So,
Olivera stayed with Serna the whole time, conversing with him and trying to
help rebuild him.
In
a moment of weakness, of unbelief in perhaps himself, or in whether he could
actually live and cope with life, Serna had done something colossally dangerous
to himself and others. But he was also
able to cry out, like the father in Mark 9, “Help me in my unbelief!” And someone actually did.
This
has been a sermon series for the church season of Easter, which is now almost
up. According to the church calendar,
Easter lasts for the fifty days between the day the empty tomb is discovered by
Mary Magdalene (and, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the other female disciples of
Jesus) and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the assembled followers of Jesus
on Pentecost as described in Acts.
During
the first forty of those fifty days, the newly-resurrected Jesus made several
appearances to His followers so that they may know that He was well and truly
brought back from the dead, and so that their belief in Him as the Son of God
might be made complete.
But
their belief was not—is not—enough.
Jesus commissions His followers to, in the words of His brother James in
his own letter in the New Testament, to be doers of the Word, not merely
hearers.
And
to be a doer of the Word, belief is only part of the recipe. One must have faith as well. After all, belief at its core is merely an
intellectual assent to reality. I
believe that the earth is round. I
believe that milk spoils. I believe the
hokey pokey is what it’s all about. But that’s
all belief does.
That
is why, whenever I baptize someone, I do not just ask for a statement of
belief—the “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of God”
part, but also for an affirmative action of faith—“and do you accept Him as
your Savior?”
Faith
is acting on those beliefs, and that is where I think Christianity sometimes
misses the forest for the trees. We care
so much about right doctrine that we lose sight of right faith and right
action.
Right
action, though is what is front and center for the father who comes up to Jesus
here in Mark 9. His son has been
stricken—apparently for many years now—and when the son was presented to Jesus’s
disciples for help, the disciples were unable to successfully exorcise the boy.
So
the father does what you have to think any desperate parent would do for their
child: he created a large commotion within the crowd in order to get Jesus’s
attention. After all, if the disciples
cannot adequately utilize God’s healing capacities, you might as well try
anything you can to go directly to the source right? The father is successful in doing so, and
pleads vividly and emotionally with Jesus, “If you can do anything, help
us! Show us compassion!”
To
which he actually gets something that closely resembles a rebuke from Jesus, well,
actually, he gets two of them. The first
is that “faithless generation” rebuke, the sort of thing my millennial ears
have grown used to hearing about, you know, my generation’s noise/music, sense
of fashion (or lack thereof), and our insistence that we’re all special
snowflakes.
But
the second rebuke is what I want to focus on: “If you can do anything? All
things are possible for one who has faith (or believes, depending on your
translation—see, isn’t this a needed sermon series after all?).”
That
had to be mortifying for the father, don’t you think? All you want—all you’re looking for—is for
your son to be well and whole again, and the one person (well, God-in-flesh
person) who can help you, and he’s going to correct your begging first? As us faithless generation whippersnappers
say, “WTF?”
But
of course, Jesus’s gentle rejoinder—and really, it can also be seen as
encouraging, rather than scolding, to tell the father that if he does indeed
have faith, more and more possibilities open up—has the desired effect on our
desperate dad, who cries out to Jesus the line that inspired and entitles this
entire sermon series to this point: “I believe!
Help me in my unbelief!”
It
is, for me, one of the most amazing, most powerful, most profound paradoxes in
the entire Bible: I believe. But help me
in this unbelief I also have.
This
father may believe, but it is impossible for him to do so every minute of every
day. He sees his own limitations in a
moment of sheer, unadulterated humility—and even humiliation, if you consider
that this is all taking place amid a large crowd, and they may well be judging
him, thinking, as was a popular worldview at the time that sin (not germs or
genes) caused physical conditions and illnesses, “What on earth kind of sin
could you have possibly done to demonize your boy like this?’
Which
brings us back to the fact that the father was causing a commotion to begin
with. He was willing to risk that level
of humiliation and judgment in order to finally, at long last, maybe have a
healthy son again.
Just
as a judge in drug court was willing to risk a level of humiliation to stay in
jail to maybe, just maybe, have a healthy fellow veteran living life again.
Can
you imagine one of those two veterans sitting in the jail cell together, one
saying to the other those same words of the anonymous father, “I believe, help
me in my unbelief?”
Can
you imagine the one, the battle-tested veteran with PTSD, pleading for help in
his own quest for wholeness, and being encouraged in return, it’s
possible. It’s doable. It.
Can. Be. Done.
All things are possible for one who has faith.
It
is not just a platitude. It is not something
that you ought to find in the interior of a greeting card or a fortune cookie
to glance at fleetingly and then cast away forever. It is not a trite cliché to be trotted out in
commencement speeches and motivational halftime speeches.
For
it is what a wildly despairing father needs to hear in order to recognize and
proclaim this vital truth about himself, that while he may well have faith, he
still needs help in those moments when he does not, when that faith weakens, or
is questioned, or goes missing.
Our
faith may quiver and quaver, our beliefs may be tested and questioned, but
Christ still remains.
Christ
always remains.
And
in Christ, the stricken boy is indeed made whole.
May
we, like the boy, like the father, like the Green Beret, like the judge, like
the puzzle and tapestry and maze of grace and wonder and hurt and goodness that
is humanity.
For
in the midst of that humanity, Christ still remains.
Christ
always remains.
And
He remains to help us in our unbelief.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
May
8, 2016
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