Outlandish Faith in Merciful God, June 8, 2008

Genesis 12:1-9
Matthew 9:9-33
The Anthem sang from Matthew, “You are the Salt of the Earth, BUT When salt has lost it's saltness, how can it's savor be restored.”
Do we believe in miracles? With the ability to send a rocket to Mars and provide photographic evidence of ice...with the ability to diagnose who has a probability of heart disease, cancer, infertility,...with the knowledge of how to magnetically scan a person's body without surgery and know the position and size of every organ...
Do we still believe in the possibility of MIRACLES?

Matthew states something very powerful by alternating stories back and forth between, “Jesus was controversial” and “Jesus provided miracles”, as if to state MIRACLES Have Always Been CONTROVERSIAL & CONFLICT Requires FAITH. How much easier life wold seem to be, if we only had New WINESKINS, or if all material were PRE-SHRUNK, so you could put any patch on any fabric confident they would age the same. Things which ferment and grow and change cold be kept in limitations that changed with them. But MATTHEW does not record Jesus demanding there be only New wineskins, or only old tired and true pre-shrunk fabrics. Jesus named the need for both, the Traditional, Stable and Confident, AND the New, Changeable and Changing. Because life requires paradox.

Is what we believe only MAGIC, a trick to cause the blind to see and deaf to hear?
Do we believe in WISH FULFILLMENT? Surely a grieving father would wish his dead child back. A woman cramping and bleeding for 12 years would wish it to stop.
In a culture of DISILLUSIONMENT, when our hopes have been broken so many times, when we fear being asked to TRUST, we witness the story of ABRAM & SARAI who at 75 and 80 are CALLED to HOPE and BELIEVE in a PROMISE THAT CANNOT BE FULFILLED Cannot possibly be fulfilled IN THEIR LIFETIME, and they are barren.

Faith calls us to believe OUTLANDISH.
Not simply muttering a standard response when asked “Jss Cris is Lord Savior” or reading out of the book in unison when asked “I believe in God the Father Almighty”. But struggling to believe when fact can provide no reason, when logic has no answer

We are children of the Enlightenment, taught beginning in 1st Grade: Newton's Laws of Gravity, Force, Motion, Cause and Effect. We believe in REASON, LOGIC, FACT. The harder you work the more you succeed. 99% of Success is Showing Up.
But MIRACLES defy all Laws and Reason and Fact.
There is no equation that the more you believe, the more miracles there will be. FAITH in GOD is not Peter Pan and Tinker-bell, asking that if you believe you clap.
Instead, we come to understand and accept the PARADOXES of LIFE
The deeper our FAITH, the more doubt we endure.
The deeper our HOPE, the more prone we are to despair.
The deeper our LOVE, the greater pain love's loss may bring.
The more we HAVE, the more we are CALLED to Share.
We cannot avoid DOUBT, DESPAIR, LOSS, Other's NEEDS, without also avoiding Faith, Hope, Love and One Another.

In the midst of these PARADOXES OF LIFE, we are Called to have an OUTLANDISH FAITH, to trust and believe in the MERCY of GOD.
There is an Old Native American Legend, that when God completed creation of the heavens and the earth, Almighty God leaned down and placed God's hand upon the earth. God is so LARGE and WONDERFUL, that this lake we know to be miles long, hundreds of feet deep, and pure enough to feed the thirst of the entire City of Syracuse, is but the print of God's Little finger. And this ETERNAL God would act in MERCY for us. OUTLANDISH!

We have SEDUCED ourselves, that every day is going to be miraculous. In WEDDING VOWS and Baptisms we have pledged to be faithful day in day out, till death do us part. While It may be that each new day, you hear the birds sing, you smell the flowers, you see the brilliance of the sun's setting and are AWED. But the message of these passages is for the long dark night of the soul, when we feel so very small and all alone.

DO we believe in miracles?
Three years ago, Father's Day our community was broken, three lives we crushed by by alcohol abuse and drunk driving. Yet God did not give up on those whose lives were broke. Fact and logic would have said, Give up, Move on, Dispose of the Loss and Walk away. But you prayed and wrote letters and believed in redemption.

TRANSFORMATION is NOT following a script that we do this, then this, then that and everything always works out right. We live in a time in Human History where we are challenging and changing existing norms and patterns, which is never easy. HOW do you teach a people dependent upon a Welfare State to be self-Sufficient? How do you teach a people who have been at WAR, who have so many stories of aggression and prejudice and hate, to lay down their weapons, and overcome their fears? How do you empower a people so stayed and stalwart as to build their Church of Mortar and Brick, to change? This week, the clergy of the Presbytery met with a Psychiatrist talking about boundaries and change... There are those who will wonder why it took so long and others why we did so at all? But afterwards I sought him to relate our story, sharing that we had take on one campaign after another, we had chosen to be vulnerable with each other, and mission investing ourselves in outlandish dreams to change the world for others had given us new hope and future. Asking is this what you have encountered elsewhere, is this the secret to the ANXIETY Mainline Churches are suffering. And he shook his head and said “NO”. “No, from what you have described, there is not reason why this church should still be alive let alone thriving. All I can suspect, is that you never gave up on one another.”

TRANSFORMATION be it in an individual's life, within a family system, the Transformation of a Church, or Community, or Nation, especially in times of ANXIETY and CHANGE requires we never give up on one another. Transformation requires we believe in MIRACLES, that a PERSON's Life can be restored. That deaf to all voices but our own, we can learn listen. That blind to others, locked up within ourselves, we can be given the gift of seeing. That even when our child has been dead to us, even dead a long time, they can be restored. That those who have suffered long and intimately, can be healed and whole.

A long time ago, we began sharing a story from my friend Tom, who had a neighbor whose son was named Billy. For those who may not be familiar, Billy worked the 3 to Midnight shift, so slept during the day. About a decade ago, Billy's neighbor got a dog, and when they went to work in the morning, the dog would bark. SO to try to let them know the dog was disturbing his sleep, in the middle of the night Billy Barked. Arf Arf, Arf. When this had gone on for several nights, we asked Billy, why he did not just tell the neighbor his problem with their dog. Billy had said “Oh I couldn't. That would be too Confrontational. I'll just bark and they will get the message.” Bark Bark. Seven years ago, when the Village passed a Barking and Leash Ordinance, Billy would go out into his night and pace the property line, waiting. He was not going to be the first to bark, but if that Dog even yipped, he was going to bark for everyone to know. Last week, the neighbor's dog got out and ran away. There were signs staples to all the phone poles, the family missed their dog terribly. Billy had been resolute and stoic. But the other night about 2am I heard a noise and leaned out the window to see Billy standing in the yard alone, howling for what he missed. Owwwww.