Rising From the Table

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Matthew 17:14-20

June 2, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

As parents, there isn’t anything we wouldn’t do for our children. Now, children sometimes interpret that as, “I should be able to get anything I want,” but what parents most often mean by that statement is that we want the absolute very best for our kids. Even when it’s hard, even when it’s challenging, even when it hurts, we’ll do what is needed, what is best for our kids. I remember when Rachel was very little, not even a year old, and we found she had a physical problem that needed some attention. So they had to run all these tests to try to determine what exactly was going on and how they were going to best treat it. Now, it’s hard enough for us sometimes to understand the medical tests we have to go through; try explaining something like that to a baby. You can’t, of course. All you can do is put them through it and hope they, someday, forgive you for it! This one test that needed to be done required Rachel to lay still and have scans done for about forty-five minutes. That’s a long time for an adult to be still, and for a baby, that’s impossible. And the test hurt, which didn’t make it any better, so I had to physically put myself in a position to keep her immobile. Cathy and I held her down, one on each side, and she screamed like she never had before or since. For forty-five minutes, she screamed, and with every cry, it was like, “Why are you doing this to me?” She screamed loud enough my mom and dad, who were in the waiting room down the hall, could hear her. She finally wore out about two or three minutes before the test was over. And even though it was painful for all of us, I would do it again, because it was what she needed to get better. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for my children.

And so I understand the desperation of the father in this morning’s Gospel lesson. Jesus has been up on the mountain with three of his disciples for some time now. We don’t know really how long they were up there, but they’ve been having church (cf. 17:1-13). They’ve been in worship as the three disciples have seen Jesus’ glory and Jesus spent time talking with Moses and Elijah. It’s the ultimate “mountain top” experience. And while they’ve been up there, down below, with a crowd and the other nine disciples, a father has presented a request. His son is sick. In fact, Matthew indicates the boy is possessed by a demon. “He often falls into the fire or into the water,” the father explains” (17:15). Of course, today, the seizures the father describes sound a lot like epilepsy, and many scholars think that’s what’s going on. But the larger point is this: the boy is sick. The boy is in danger. In fact, he’s a danger to himself and everyone else (Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 2, pg. 166). And there isn’t anything this father wouldn’t do to help his son, including begging Jesus’ disciples to cast out the demon or heal the sickness or do whatever it takes to make his son well.

I sort of picture the disciples thinking, “We got this,” because earlier they’d been sent out through the country to heal and cast out demons (cf. Matthew 10:8; Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two, pg. 21). But when they try it here at the foot of the mountain, they’re not able to. We’re not told how many times they tried, but they fail, and so the father is overjoyed to see Jesus coming down the mountain. “Lord,” he calls out, “have mercy on my son” (17:15). In spite of the failure of the disciples, this father hasn’t lost faith in Jesus (cf. Barclay 166). “Bring the boy to me,” Jesus says, and when they do, he casts out the demon. He heals the boy, in an instant (17:17-18). And, though we’re not told, I imagine the father and the son went home, overjoyed, and probably told not a few people about what Jesus had done.

It’s quite a dramatic scene, and often we focus on the healing or on the failure of the disciples. What we also have here, though, is a picture of what William Barclay calls “real religion” (167). We get confused on what that is sometimes. We think of “real religion” as what happens here on Sunday mornings, or in our Bible studies, or on our couch as we read our brief devotional. Real religion, we have been led to believe, is all about our devotion and worship of God. And that’s part of it, but worship is really where things start, not where they end. Worship is only the beginning of real religion. Peter, James and John had spent time in worship at the top of the mountain. It was such a worshipful setting that Peter even suggested they build some buildings to either worship in or commemorate the moment. If you go to the Holy Land today, you’ll find that people since Peter’s time have taken him up on his suggestion. Any place that might be near a significant event, they’ve built a building or a church. Even over Peter’s house stands a church today. But Jesus didn’t want them to stay there on the mountaintop because he knew the real practice of their faith would come as they went down the mountain among the people.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at a wide variety of connections—practices that help us better connect with our heavenly father. We’ve talked about prayer and holy conferencing, about the presence of the Holy Spirit and fasting. But this morning we want to look at one more avenue of connection with God: service. Not a worship service, though I hope that is a time when you connect with God. But the service that comes after the service. This time of worship, the music and prayers and spoken word and, this morning, communion, are all meant as a beginning point, not an ending point. From this place, filled up with Christ’s love, we go to love and serve others.

That’s what happens at the foot of the mountain in our Gospel lesson this morning. These disciples, along with Jesus, have been to worship, and when they come down, they’re immediately thrust back into the cares of the world, the worries of the day, and most especially they are confronted with this father and his sick son. And they’re confronted with the disciples’ failure. Jesus deals with the sickness first, and then later, when they are alone, he deals with the disciples. They actually come to him and ask why they failed. “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” they ask, implying that since they’ve done this before, why did they fail now? Jesus says, “Because you have so little faith” (17:19-20). That’s an unfortunate translation, because Jesus goes on to say that even little faith can move mountains. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” (17:20). A better translation of his first statement would be this: “Because you have such poor faith.” Small faith can do great things, because our trust is not in our faith but in our God (cf. Wright 22). What Jesus actually says there is that their faith is impoverished. It’s poor; that’s why they couldn’t do what they thought they could. They had failed to connect with God. They had, perhaps, become confident in their own abilities, forgetting that the only reason they were able to do anything at all was because of God. And so, they failed. If they had only a grain of trust in their great God, they could move mountains (cf. Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 391).

Now, I don’t think Jesus literally meant we would move physical mountains. If he had, why didn’t he demonstrate? Why didn’t he move a mountain or two himself? I don’t know anyone who would have more faith than Jesus. Rather, “moving mountains” was a proverbial way—in that day, and still in ours—of facing a difficulty, of overcoming a great challenge. Among the rabbis, a person who could explain a difficult text or interpret a hard scripture would be called an uprooter or even a pulverizer of mountains. What a cool nickname—Mountain Pulverizer! So Jesus is telling his disciples that with even a small amount of faith, difficulties can be solved and hard tasks can be accomplished (Barclay 167). In other words, Jesus is taking away the disciples’ excuses. They can’t come to him and say, “Well, this was an especially difficult demon to cast out. This was a hard disease to fight. There were other demands on our time. And quite honestly, Jesus, we were afraid!” Nope, Jesus says, none of those excuses works, because the real issue here is whether or not you’re going to put your trust in a God who is more powerful than it all, a God for whom nothing is impossible. It doesn’t matter how big the need is, disciples. The bigger question: how big is your God? It only takes a small amount of faith, placed in a big, big God to accomplish amazing things.

Jesus, Peter, James and John came down from the mountain. Having been in the presence of the glory of God, they came down to engage with the world. They didn’t come down “holier than thou.” They didn’t assume they were better than others because they had been in worship. Instead, they came down the mountain, out of worship, and began to serve. Jesus’ first act was to bring healing to a son and peace to a father. That’s a picture of “real religion,” faith that doesn’t just stay in the sanctuary but instead makes a real difference in a real world. Faith that isn’t intimidated or scared by the enormity of the need. James, the half-brother of Jesus, said that service connects us with God. In fact, he said, it’s the sort of thing God is looking for in us: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27). Pure and faultless…and a way to connect with God our Father…serving other people. Worship is where we begin; it’s a “launch pad” of sorts, a place from which we rise to go serve others. From this place and time, we go to become people who bring healing, who bring hope, and who push back the darkness of this world. Service is, as always, our response to God’s amazing grace, and we refuse to be scared off because the need is great.

And there are great needs, all around us. One of the largest in our community is for food. We have many in our community who are hungry, as is evidenced by the huge need for the “Feed My Lambs” ministry that we are just finishing three years with. “Feed My Lambs,” if you’re not familiar with it, gives kids in food-insufficient households a box of food for the weekend every week during the school year. But school is just about done for the year. What then? Well, there is the USDA feeding program, and some kids benefit from that, but too many can’t get to the feeding sites. And so some folks decided to try to tackle that need. The end result is that there are some food boxes being put together for the summer, and we have been asked to provide peanut butter and jelly for those boxes. We’d love to be able to help with hundreds of boxes which would help hundreds of homes this summer. Are you able to serve? Can you bring in some peanut butter and jelly? Could you help pack the boxes? Would you be willing to serve those in need this summer?

Another area of need in these economically challenging times are single-parent families—a demographic that is on the rise in our community. There are families that, whether through death or divorce or separation, are experiencing a very difficult time making ends meet. Some find assistance through the various community agencies, but money isn’t the only need. What about those homes with single moms or dads? Who will be a helper to them? Could you give that weary mom a night of free babysitting so she can go out with some friends? Can you help a child with their studying or help with transportation? James tells us to serve those who are widows and orphans—and I think today he would add all those who are single for other reasons, sometimes against their choice. I’m sure there are folks who are struggling like that in your neighborhoods. How can you serve them?

There’s another, broader category of hurting people that also long to be served, to know that someone cares. For the last five or six years, we’ve had Stephen Ministry in place, helping to meet a need for one-on-one caregivers to walk with people through difficult places in life. However, as I’ve shared before, over the last year we began to feel more than a bit constrained by the structure of Stephen Ministry. It’s a great program, a great ministry, and it has served us well. But we’ve begun to hear a call to expand our caregiving ministries so that it doesn’t just become about us, but rather it becomes a way for us as a church to serve not only ourselves but also our larger community. And so, this summer you’re going to hear us begin to talk about Congregational Care Ministry, or CCM. Congregational Care is going to encompass four primary areas of care, and those are prayer, hospital visitation, shut-in ministry and grief ministry. The hope, or the goal, is to reach out and be more proactive than we’ve been able to be in meeting needs, caring for others and serving humanity. This might be a place where you feel called to serve, and my dream, my goal, my hope is that we’ll have at least 50 Congregational Care Ministers deployed by the end of this year. You might be one of them—caring in a particular area and serving in places where the need is great. Now, I recognize that we have a hurdle here to overcome, and that’s the mindset that the pastors are supposed to do all of that. Even if that were true, it’s numerically impossible. Pastor Deb and I cannot be everywhere there are needs. Besides that, the Biblical picture is that all of God’s people are in ministry; we even say that every week in our bulletin, that the ministers are every person in here. Pastors have a specific ministry role to fulfill, but we’re all called to be in ministry to one another, to serve one another. CCM is a huge part of fulfilling our calling to love God, love others and offer Jesus. Those who have been working in Stephen Ministry will tell you that serving others in this way has strengthened their faith and drawn them closer to God, because service does that. Congregational Care is an exciting way to serve, to get connected to God, so be listening for more information in the coming weeks.

There are many ways—too many to count—to serve, to stretch your faith, to engage in what we call risk-taking mission and service, but I want to mention just one more this morning, and it’s big. It’s to speak up for those who have no voice. The Bible, from cover to cover, calls us to defend those who are on the underside of life. Do we give serious thought to what we can do and how we can respond from a Biblical worldview when there is injustice confronting us? How do we respond to a culture that continues to find ways to deny adequate health care to people? How do we respond when confronted with a system that forces people to stay in poverty and penalizes them when they try to get out of that life? What do we do when a company continues to engage in practices that are harmful to others, that dehumanize others? Are we willing to speak for those who have no voice? I love the story of Jesus when he had dinner at Simon the Pharisee’s house in Luke 7. While he’s there, a disreputable woman comes in and anoints Jesus’ feet, washes them with her tears, and all Simon can think about is how awful it is that this horrible woman has come into his house. Then there’s this very poignant moment when Jesus asks, “Do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Well, of course Simon could see her. That’s why he was upset. She was right there, in his house! But Jesus’ question was deeper than physical sight. Do you see her? Do you realize she is a human being, just like you, Simon? Are you willing to serve others like her, to speak up for those who have no voice, no mater how big the need? When we do, we serve our big God and we become more like Jesus. Do you see those around you who need you to be on their side?

Service is a practice which connects us to the God who calls us to serve, to the savior who gave up all the rank and privilege of being God and came among us to serve (cf. Philippians 2:1-11). As we’ve honored graduates today, it takes me back in my own memory...not to high school graduation (I only barely remember that!) or to college graduation (I remember that a little bit better) but to seminary graduation. Twenty years ago this last month, I finished my formal education, received my last diploma and then returned to Indiana to serve as a pastor for the first time. And I remember all the energy, the excitement, and even the fear that filled that moment. I wrote in the newsletter this month that I’ve realized I’m at somewhat of a midpoint. I’ve been a pastor now for twenty years, and I probably have somewhere around twenty years until I retire, which is enough to cause one to stop and think. Maybe our graduates aren’t thinking this way yet, but the question we should always be asking is this: what are we doing that will matter? What are any of us doing that will last? When twenty years goes by quickly, what will you have done to serve others in Jesus’ name? What will you have done to draw nearer to God and to make a difference in your community? It’s not enough to just come to worship for an hour a week (or less); God calls us to so much more. As we share in the bread and the cup this morning, he calls us to receive his grace, to be filled with his spirit, and then to rise from the table to go and serve. What need will you need this week? William Barclay put it this way: “Real religion is to rise from our knees before God to meet…the problems of the human situation. Real religion is to draw strength from God in order to give it to others. Real religion involves both meeting God in the secret place and men [and women] in the market place. Real religion means taking our own needs to God, not that we may have peace and quiet and undisturbed comfort, but that we may be enabled graciously, effectively and powerfully to meet the needs of others” (167). True religion is this: to rise from the table energized to meet the needs of those who most matter to God. And all of God’s people said…Amen.