Our Superpower

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 (Luke 12:32-40)

Faith is the assurance – the very substance – of things hoped for, the conviction – the demonstrated proof – of things not seen.

 

In other words, faith alters reality.

Faith creates reality, in fact, as powerfully as the Word of God creates reality in that Genesis story where God says “Let there be light” and light suddenly is. 

 

Faith is, perhaps, a superpower.

And right now, I have a lot of incentive to want that superpower that makes things real.

I would like to think cool thoughts, to have faith in cool air, say, and have a cool church for us to be worshiping in, today.
Wouldn’t you?

 

The Hebrew Christian community whose mail we’ve been reading today also need that superpower.

They’re experiencing all the discomfort of waiting for something they’ve been promised that never seems to be happening.
In their case, it’s the return of Jesus to obliterate all our errors and sins (the way we screw up that hurts other people, and the way other people have screwed up that hurt us, and all the ways those hurts weigh us down) and unite us to God’s unstoppable glory and joy and love – which we are waiting for, too – a wait that’s gone longer and is more pervasive in our lives than waiting for air conditioning.

 

And they are hearing – so we are hearing – about faith making real all that we hope for. Proving to us the truth of things we do not see. So that we experience the reality of God’s promises, of Jesus’ presence, of our souls’ deepest longings being fulfilled, even when it’s obvious to any other observer that Jesus hasn’t come, the world is still a mess, and it’s still hot in this church.

 

Faith changes the reality we live in.

Even while that unappealing reality goes right on being real.

 

That story about Abraham experiencing God’s promise of a permanent homeland even while he’s packing his life and family around in tents is supposed to help us connect with this faith superpower for ourselves. 

Supposed to be an example that will help us live in a reality where oppression and injustice and evil are obliterated, as God promises, even while the daily news is still full of unjust prison sentences and evil deceptions and oppressions we thought we were done with.

 

I want that superpower.

Anyone else?  (show of hands)

 

The good news is that we do not have to be bitten by a radioactive spider, (or a radioactive Bible) to get this superpower.

On the other hand, it’s not instant, either.

For most of us, it comes on in gradual, uneven, often awkward, stages – like an “acquired taste” for olives or okra or a new kind of music.

 

You don’t just experience multiple realities on the first try.

Most of us, anyway.

 

The best way to start experiencing the reality of God’s promises here and now – to experience faith – is to hang out with it. To spend time with other people who experience the realities of faith, and to try on their experience for yourself.

 

Maybe you know someone who always seems to see the way the universe is bending toward justice, even when everything’s going wrong. 
Maybe you know a person who goes into the scariest diagnosis with all the relief and zest for life of someone who’s already experienced complete healing.
Or someone who is always joyful and grounded and sees the action of God in what’s obviously sheer dumb coincidence.

Those are people living by faith in the reality of God’s promises, right in the middle of a reality empty of those promises.

Try it on with them.

 

That’s one way of staying alert for the coming of God that Jesus teaches in the gospel today, by the way. Seeking out faith to hang around with, and trying it on, helps keep us ready for God’s presence to appear unexpectedly.

Once, at the church I attended before seminary, a visitor to the congregation sat in a wash of color from one of the stained glass windows (when I really didn’t have time to listen) and told us the story of having been miraculously healed of a permanent injury by prayer, and visits to holy sites.

My rational, science-educated mind promptly generated explanations involving conventional medicine and coincidence, but as one of my friends nodded along with the story, I saw how real the miracle was, how real the healing was, right along with the rational unreality, and right along with the lingering signs of old injury.

It wasn’t my faith, not yet, but I glimpsed faith making healing real.

And it got easier to let faith change my own reality, to feel some healing in my soul even while some bitter truths still hurt.

 

Years later, helping with Vacation Bible School, I listened to our church’s young elementary-schoolers name their “God-sightings” – a friend met me at the pool, the sun shone today, I got a SpiderMan bandaid – and laughed a little. And then I tried on the possibility that I could, myself, feel the vivid presence of God in the morning sun, the friend who showed up for coffee, the store having bandaids that match more than one kind of skin tone.  And the reality of the world did start to shift, to a world more naturally full of the presence and joy and love of God all the time, even while it’s also clearly the kind of world where God must be missing, much of the time.

 

Gradually, a little bit at a time, I try on the faith of those around me – deep, lived, tested faith and fresh, new, uncertain faith – and gradually become more and more a person who lives in the reality of God’s abundance and presence even in a world driven by scarcity and absence. Someone who lives by faith, in a world made real by a superpower I don’t always know I have. 

A superpower, that perhaps, I don’t have, but that we have, together, as a community, a people, of faith.

 

A superpower you might not know you have.

But which you could have. Which you could share.

 

Faith is the reality of things hoped for; the proof of things unseen: It’s our shared superpower, changing reality, making God’s promises, hope, joy, and love more real than real has ever been before.

Longing for More

 Luke 11:1-13

“I don’t trust any clergy person who says they are satisfied with their prayer life.”

 So said a friend of mine last week. A friend who has spent a lot of time mentoring clergy and has thought a fair bit about this.  

And I think I understand why.

 

It’s not so much that clergy – that anyone – shouldn’t have a fulfilling prayer life.
It’s that a healthy prayer life should keep us pursuing more.

More connection with God,

more openness in our own hearts and spirits.

A healthy prayer life should increase our longing for the vibrant presence of God even as we feel our connections deepen through our prayer; increase our yearning to respond to God more fully even as we grow stronger in faith.

 

I mean, look at these disciples in our gospel story today.
They’re with Jesus, who is God, who listens to them, responds to them, teaches them, directs them, heals them and those they bring to him.

What more could you ask of your relationship with God, you might wonder?
But they aren’t satisfied with their prayer life.

Lord, they say, teach us to pray.

John taught his disciples. Don’t leave us out!

 

I suspect they want a formula, a specific set of steps or words to approach God: a best way, a right way, a way that always works.

 

And Jesus teaches them a way of prayer that may sound like a formula, but is in fact a process of aligning ourselves with God, one that can keep us reaching for more.

 

Father, he says, telling us to start by placing ourselves in the same intimate, vital, active relationship with the Almighty that Jesus himself has.

 

Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.

From that place of intimate relationship, name the awesome holiness of God that’s constant, and also beyond our grasp.
And place yourself in God’s purpose. To bid the coming of God’s kingdom is to name our longing to be part of the way God is transforming the world, to keep wanting more. 

 

Give us each day our daily bread. We need the basic stuff of life – food, water, air – not as something God sets in motion once, but as something we will always need more of, need renewed, a process that pulls us closer in trust.

 

Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. Jesus links our longing for God’s full and complete healing of all our wrongs and brokenness with the never complete, never enough work of forgiveness – of offering healing and release – in our relationships with everyone else. Enough grace for everything, one and the same with our constant need for more grace.

 

And do not bring us to the time of trial. Because too many things, every day, try to erode our faith we will always need more of God’s guidance; God’s protection. 

 

Jesus goes on to describe, in story and example, the sense of persistent expectation that prayer should create in us. Prayer isn’t a process aimed at satisfaction, but an orientation of our life and heart to anticipation, hope, confidence that there is more to be found in our relationship with God. 

 

Jesus is telling us to expect that as we pray God will respond to our basic needs and our emergencies, and also open up doors and quests and gifts whose shapes we don’t know, and may not name. 

Jesus is encouraging us to express the longing for more in our relationship with God, to seek it out, even if we don’t know what we’re asking or searching for. He’s giving us examples and starting places, because it’s often difficult to find our own words to express the deep longings in our relationship with God.  The phrases we’ve come to know as “the Lord’s Prayer” are our starting place, not the ending place of prayer, as Jesus teaches it.

 

Still, I suspect Jesus wasn’t surprised when we took up those examples of attitude and expectation as a formula we repeat verbatim, over and over, alone or gathered together, in celebration and distress, when our prayer life is fulfilling, and when it’s not enough. 

Because what Jesus taught us works.

As we repeat those well-worn words, they can open up our hearts and minds and souls to the prayer we don’t have our own words for. 

 

When the prayer we’re used to, the prayer we know, is not enough, we can turn to these words we know so well, and listen to Jesus praying with us, teaching us how to increase our longing for the vibrant presence of God even as we name and feel the solid, unbreakable holiness and purpose of God; teaching us to increase our yearning to respond to God more fully even as we grow stronger in faith.

 

Jesus doesn’t teach us a formula to get prayer right, to satisfy God, or us. 

He teaches us to pray imperfectly – to place ourselves in the heart of God’s holiness and purpose with all our own incompleteness,

to open up our sense of anticipation, trust, and expectation of what we cannot name,

and let our longing for more be all that we need.

I Came for Healing

2 Kings 5:1-14; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

I can kind of feel Naaman’s pain, right at that moment in his story when he stands on the prophet Elisha’s doorstep, wondering out loud why he just got the brush-off:
Go wash in the Jordan? What’s that got to do with healing? Isn’t the man of God supposed to come and do a ritual, call down the power of God, and directly heal this mess? I came for real help, not this; if washing can heal me, I could do that at home.

 

Now, I don’t normally want to be all that sympathetic to Naaman. He’s a big shot, full of power and privilege; he’s recently defeated Israel in battle, and now he’s come to Israel as a medical tourist, throwing his weight around with his connections, his power, his money. His demands for a showy miracle might be all about his self-image.

 

But something in me this week recognizes something else that might be in Naaman: the pain of carrying around a disfiguring, uncomfortable burden, an illness that limits his life, for which he’s found no cure – only a rumor of treatment available far from home – and a yearning to be healed, be whole. 

 

Maybe that yearning for healing is speaking, too, right along with his ego, as we hear him say: I brought this pain to the one who is supposed to be most powerful to heal it, and all I’m getting is a second-hand instruction to go bathe in the river?  Doesn’t the man of God, doesn’t God, care?

 

If that’s what Naaman’s thinking and feeling, well, I recognize it in myself today.

I’ve come to God recently – with my own privilege and power and access – seeking healing for my pain, for anxiety and grief that weigh me down. 

Pain about people dead in trailer trucks; about people living in fear as healthcare becomes fraught with danger, and established rights are taken away;
about living through the revelations of broken democracy unfolding in Congress on our TV screens.
Grief for the death of a distant friend, for the accidents and tragedies that have befallen several others I love recently;
grief for the things too many of us are still losing to Covid now that as a country, we’ve stopped trying to limit its spread. 

The horrors of beloved grandparents shot at the grocery, of children dying while authorities delayed rescue. 

And that’s not the half of it.

 

I’ve brought my pain to the gospel this week, to our assigned scripture readings this morning, because I need healing. And instead of direct balm for what ails my soul, I get Jesus’ instructions about something… else.

 

Go into all the towns and villages, taking nothing with you, proclaim peace, accept whatever you get, walk away from opposition, heal people and proclaim that the kingdom of God is near.  

 

But… I wanted the gospel to comfort my grief. I’d really like a show of divine power, the visible miracles of reconciliation, healing, justice, trust restored, safety ensured. I want it clear and present and immediate. I would very much like Jesus to wave his hand over our country – and my life – and see us healed.

 

I don’t want instructions about going on a mission trip. As practical directions for dealing with distress, Jesus’ instructions to his seventy apostles sounds just as unappealing to me as Elisha’s “go dunk yourself in the Jordan River” sounded to Naaman.
It doesn’t…feel like healing.

 

And I suspect I may not be alone in that.

Without making any assumptions about what you may be bringing to church today, I am pretty sure that many of the first disciples came to Jesus looking for healing for themselves, yearning for divine power that directly addressed the public and private burdens that crippled them. 

And often, they got it.

But I suspect many felt they hadn’t gotten their full dose of healing and revelation before Jesus sends them out to heal and reveal for others.

 

Modern psychology and centuries of lived experience both tell us that helping other people is one reliable way to start feeling better yourself. That helping someone else bear their burden for a bit makes it easier to carry our own; that sharing good news or helping bring peace helps us hear the good or feel the peace ourselves.  
I actually know it will work. I actively use this tactic sometimes when I’m sad, or lonely. 

 

And still I’m a little cranky today that this is what the gospel and church offer us for whatever healing or refreshment we come needing, today. It is, in a way, such everyday advice. Sharing good news and working to heal others is – or is supposed to be – as ordinary and daily for Christians as washing ourselves clean. 

 

But as I metaphorically stand with Naaman on this doorstep, longing for the powerful, showy, immediate miracle and listening to God direct us to something else, something almost ordinary, I have to suspect that Jesus is giving us something different than good psychological advice.

 

I wonder if perhaps Jesus sends us to work for the healing, renewal, and salvation of the rest of the world, while we’re yearning for our own healing because we can’t be fully healed of the pain the world imposes until the world is fully healed. 

These directions to go proclaim peace and God’s healing among other people are not signs that God doesn’t want to heal us, that our pain is not important, or that Jesus doesn’t care. They are signs that God wants us to participate in our own healing. And that Jesus invites us not to seek healing and renewal for only what’s broken in and among us, but to entrust the whole of ourselves to God.

 

Several commentators point out the vulnerability that Jesus is asking of us, going into a potentially hostile world not alone, but without any of the things that allow us to provide shelter and food or basic security for ourselves; depending on others not only for our physical needs, but for success and even the opportunity to work.
That’s challenging enough when we’re feeling good about the world, or about ourselves. 

And only trusting God without reservation, with absolutely no limits, makes it possible to do this while we grieve, while we seek our own healing.

 

That’s both terrifying, and exactly what we need in order to receive healing for the hurts that go so deep we don’t know how to seek healing, can’t even show them to others to be healed.

 

Naaman – supported by his household – decided to take that risk. To entirely trust God’s word, given second hand, and do the stupid, everyday, task of bathing. And it healed not only his visible leprosy, but the deep space inside him that was longing for an encounter with a God powerful enough to spectacularly heal him. (The next sentence in the Bible, where Naaman returns to Elisha to declare that now he knows God, is inexplicably left out of what we read today.)

 

However they’re feeling about the world and about their own hurts and healing when Jesus sends them, the seventy disciples take that risk, too.  They trust themselves to God in this extraordinarily risky way of everyday being with other people, and come back full of joy, renewed and powerful, to hear Jesus declare the final and ultimate defeat of evil – the healing of all creation, happening now, in their ordinary, risky lives.

 

You and I – whole and healed, or grieving and hurting – are invited to entrust ourselves to God, in vulnerable things we already know we should do:

helping one other person find the care they need;

standing as one among many, or raising our voices, to reject the violence or injustices we see before us;

invoking peace – not the cosmetic absence of conflict, but the gift of deep, shared groundedness and trust – one vulnerable conversation at a time;

doing what feels like too little until it leads you to the opportunity to do a lot;

doing ordinary, risky things to heal and bring joy to others, even as we seek that healing for ourselves.

 

And the peace we give will return to us, we’ll share in its expansion, Jesus promises. We may just find our souls healed of hurts we never knew how to name.

And God will celebrate with us the ultimate defeat of evil, and of the pain the world imposes, as we find healing that is more gradual and quiet, but more powerful, deep, and transformative, than any instant, showy, miracle we ever longed for.