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"Faith Can't Be Explained"
The Rev. Jan Kwiatkowski
Texts:
Genesis 45:1-15
Media Player audio |
(Flash video and audio - 33.7 MB) |
Well, I have good news for you. The Gospel story is very hard to understand, the commentaries and blogs and everything that I read in terms of resources this week all say different things about this Gospel. I have approximately 12 minutes or less or 8 to 15 megabytes or less to explain the Gospel and I can’t explain it. So, it’s a short sermon. No, not really.
What was interesting was as I read the commentaries about the lessons this week, all of them did say something very different about the Gospel. Some looked at this as a teaching story, sort of one of those teaching moments when Jesus says, “Ah, here. I can use this particular situation to tell you something about the kingdom of God.” Some commentaries talked about this as a Gospel again that showed us that being caught up in the laws and the rules and those kinds of things as the Pharisees were, are not what faith is about. It is about loving and healing and feeding and those kinds of things.
Other commentaries thought well, this is a message about being persistent about asking God, not giving up, asking for healing, asking for blessing, asking for what it is you want from God. Some even thought well wow, I wonder what this says about Jesus this is not at all like Jesus to give these answers. I’ve only come to the Jewish people, the people of Israel, not to you who are outside in the tribe. No, we don’t give our food to the dogs so why would we give our food to you who is an outsider. There are lots of different ways to look at this Gospel and then I thought about my own self as I was reading this and praying and studying and all the things you do when you prepare for a sermon and I thought about all the different perspectives and ways that I read this one simple story. I read this story, as a mother of a now young adult special needs son who can certainly understand the passion of a mother healing for her child. I read this as a pastor who has sat with a lot of people who have been sick and dying or looking for healing. Spiritual healing as well as physical healing. I read this as a teacher and a preacher, someone who is supposed to explain all of this to you and help you to understand this. I read this Gospel as a woman who has worked with men who have treated her with equality and men who have not. I read this as a woman who has also done her fair share jousting with people to get a one up position. So I’m thinking gosh, if I bring all these different perspectives to one little particular section of the Gospel how about all of you? All of these people who bring so many perspectives and life experiences to the Gospel and to this church this morning. How do we begin to reconcile what this passage says to all of us? Especially a Gospel that is difficult to understand.
Well, when I stepped back a little bit from trying to explain this Gospel and just kind of looked at all the characters and just kind of sat with them. What I realized is that each of those characters in the Gospel had faith. Every single one of them had faith and perhaps that’s the thing that is the common denominator in all of this. The Pharisees who often get a bad rap in the Gospel for good reasons, had faith. They were engaged in trying to live a life, their faith life, their journey with God as best as they could. They learned the rules, they learned the prayers, they learned the rituals, they learned the right way of doing it and they were struggling with their faith in the best way they could. The disciples were at moments clueless, at moments had brilliant times of insight and most of the time were somewhere in between. They were also wrestling with their faith trying to figure out what this was. And then there’s this Canaanite woman, a complete outsider, she’s a woman, she’s outside the tribe, she has different Gods and different spiritual customs but nonetheless, she’s trying to wrestle with faith. And the one thing that draws them all together is this person Jesus. Jesus struck a chord with each of these people. Some disagreed with him, some desperately wanted to follow him, some wanted healing, some wanted all kinds of things from him. But Jesus was the common denominator and they all wrestled with that. And I thought, "Wow, that might be the common denominator for us. "All those people in the Gospel story used their categories for each other. Pharisees, disciples, Canaanites, Samaritans all those kinds of things to separate and to judge and to figure out who was right and who was in and who was out. And I thought, “My goodness, not a lot has changed over the years.” We, because we are human beings, we do that too. We use labels and terms and ideas to separate and to exclude and decide who is in and out and who will get fed at the table and all those kinds of things. And instead of categorizing as Pharisees or Canaanites or Disciples we use words like liberals and conservatives, modern and post-modern, priest, bishop, deacon, layperson all those kinds of things that we use to separate and make judgments about people.
But the reality is that all of us, no matter what labels we put on each other are struggling with our faith and what we are realizing is that faith can’t be explained. We can’t in any logical way say why this person Jesus gets under our skin. Why there is something about this person Jesus attracts us and calls us. And God made us different and God made us all have different ways to understand and that’s what faith is about, it’s recognizing that we are all on this journey coming to understand what Jesus means for all of us and what we are called to do in this world about it. And another interesting thing I thought about was that Jesus who knew the good, the bad and the ugly about all those people in his time and who could look into the hearts and minds of those people did not send one person away. I looked. Jesus never sent the Pharisees away. Jesus never sent the disciples away. Jesus never sent anyone away. People chose to leave or people may have been excluded but he never sent anyone away. All were welcomed and all were fed.
So I’m wondering St. Christopher’s and myself and all of us enter this period of transition, if that is something we really need to keep at our forefront. We are here because Jesus calls us. There is something in our hearts that Jesus calls to and we’re all trying to figure out what that is and to understand it. And all that we can do is live it and wrestle with it and repent when we’ve done something wrong. Celebrate it and experience it. And that is what we are called to do at this point and time. It’s easy for us in times of transition to start making assumptions about other groups of people and start alienating people and as polite Episcopal Christians we’re not good about talking about things. We are kind of subtle, in therapeutic terms that would be called passive aggressiveness. But as polite Episcopalians we call it politeness or subtleness. But what we are called to do is look at those things, look at what divides us and go past that and realize that the one thing that unites us is Jesus and that Jesus who tugs on our hearts. And recognize that when we come to this table that we are all fed those tiny wafers of bread we depend on coming to that table to be fed those tiny scraps of food to enable us to live out our faith to experience with each other, to wrestle with each other and to love each other into knowing what it is that Jesus stirs so much in our hearts and then to respond to that. So in truth I really didn’t do much in explaining this Gospel to you but what I can invite you to do is live with it, wrestle with it, experience it, be fed by it and love each other into it. And if we do that work that is the greatest work we can to is to make sure all are welcome here and all are fed. Amen.
