Faith is a Living, Growing Thing

A sermon on Mark 7:24-37 and James 2:1-17

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by name_gravity on Unsplash.]

Before every baptism I hold a pre-baptism class with the parents and godparents (or with the baptismal candidates themselves, when they are old enough).

In part the meeting is to get to know the family and their prayers for their child, in part to share a theological framework of what is happening in baptism, in part to go through the flow of the service, so everyone knows their parts…

And then we talk about the baptismal promises.

That’s the part where I keep waiting for the parents to say, “Wow! Umm… that’s a bit more than we were expecting.”

Because the “responsibilities” delineated for the parents are substantial, especially in the general context of consumer culture when it comes to church, where there can be an expectation of picking and choosing the things we want and don’t want from our faith community.

You can look over all the things the parents promise to do on p. 11 of your bulletins, but it includes substantial commitments of time, specific teachings, and habitual, active engagement in the practices of faith.

And that’s not all, because the commitments include a “so that” section, which set expectations for the kind of active, life-shaping faith these activities are anticipated to nurture in their child.

And I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling a bit intimidated.

Granted, before we get to that part of the class, I have already made a big deal about how it’s really God who is doing the thing in the baptism… that baptism is a sign of God’s grace, which is a free gift, and everything that we do is just a way to help us understand and experience the fullness of that gift – to unwrap it, so to speak.

But still… I would understand if parents felt a bit of trepidation.

Add to that that on this particular Sunday we get the reading from James, about “faith without works” being dead, and if you break any part of the law, even if you keep the other parts, you are still a “transgressor.”

And yikes! That feels like a lot of pressure for a baby.

Melissa & Chris, I’m sorry!  I know I told you that God’s Work Our Hands Sunday would be a great day for a baptism….but I hadn’t actually checked the readings for the day.

However, I find myself unexpectedly grateful for today’s gospel story that – in other contexts – is often dreaded by preachers: a story of Jesus being shockingly, imperfectly human.

Over the centuries, many attempts have been made to justify, or theologize, or explain away Jesus’s interaction with the Syrophoenician mother, but none of them can entirely conceal the disturbing dynamics of their brief interaction.

She comes to him desperate for help for her daughter, a help that no one else can provide.

And he tries to brush her off, essentially saying that she is not his priority because of her ethnicity.

It’s shocking. And disconcerting. It’s not what we expect from Jesus.

Jesus is usually the one who is exposing the small mindedness of prejudices that exclude some people from the benefits that others enjoy.

He is the one who eats with tax collectors, and touches lepers, and not only speaks to the Samaritan Woman at the well but also takes her seriously enough to hold a theological conversation with her.

He’s the one who defines the totality of the divine law as loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

His callous dismissal of the foreign woman and her suffering daughter seems completely out of character.

And I don’t want to shrug off any of the feelings or confusion we might have about Jesus acting so contrary to our expectations in this scene. I think it’s good to let ourselves grapple with the questions this scene raises.

At the same time, I want to look at this surprising interaction from a different angle:

An angle that lets us see MORE in Jesus, not less, precisely because it lets us see Jesus as something other than perfect.

Commentator Debie Thomas describes it this way:

“The Jesus who appears in the Gospels is not half-incarnate. He is as fully human as he is fully God. Which is to say, he struggles, he snaps, he discovers, he grows, he falters, he learns, he fears, and he overcomes. He’s real, he’s approachable, and he’s authentically one of us. The ‘Good News’ is not that we serve a shiny, inaccessible deity who floats five feet above the ground. It is that Jesus shows us – in real time, in the flesh – what it means to grow as a child of God. He embodies what it looks like to stretch into a deeper, truer, and fuller comprehension of God’s love.”[1]

That image of stretching into a deeper, truer, and fuller comprehension of God’s love…

For me, at least, it not only offers a new understanding of what is going on with my beloved boundary-breaking Jesus in this story,

It also offers the reassurance that I think we need on a baptism Sunday when James seems to be lecturing us about proving our faith through works and never messing up.

Because, how can never messing up possibly be the expectation when even Jesus has to learn, and grow, and stretch himself in order to move towards a deeper, truer, and fuller comprehension of God’s love?

The answer is that it can’t be.

And when we look more closely – at both the Gospel story and at the teaching from James – we see that it’s not. Because neither of these texts present us with a static image of faith.

In James we do get an absolutist claim that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it,” but what law is he talking about?

After this statement he exhorts us to “speak and act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty,” and then moves to speaking about mercy, and calling out faith-like words that are not followed by actions to make those words real.

And the metaphor he uses to sum up his argument is a faith that is “dead,” as in not living. He is calling us to a living faith.  

And words like liberty, and mercy, and living… those aren’t descriptors of a check-list faith where our focus is on marking all the boxes (or checking off our baptismal promises)

They are descriptors of a faith that learns and grows, that explores the freedom to show mercy in unexpected ways, and that brings us alive by pushing us beyond our thoughts and prayers into actively loving our neighbors.

I don’t think that James is actually drawing a bright line and saying that we are doomed by any mistakes. I think he telling people who were worried about checking every box that that they don’t have to operate under that kind of legalistic structure because faith is something that is ALIVE.

And all we will need to reassure us that we are walking the right path is to look for evidence of that life… to look for evidence that our faith is actually shaping the way that we live.

And that is exactly what we see acted out for us in the Gospel scene:

Jesus has withdrawn to be alone, and his first instinct when the mother comes begging for his help is to put her off because he has a clear understanding of his mission and she is not part of it.

But when she argues back, when she asks him to grow in his understanding of what it looks like to fulfil the mission that God sent him for, he DOES.

He recognizes that the limits he had assumed don’t have to operate that way, and this is actually a pivot point in his story as told in Mark’s gospel, marking an expansion of his ministry that continues serving Gentiles from that point.

And, ultimately, that same kind of living faith is what we are celebrating today.

The baptismal promises and expectations are just resources for us in nurturing that faith – for baby Gwen and for all of us.

Her faith journey starts today not because she understands it, and certainly not because God is now starting a checklist to see if she messes up.

It starts because she is now named as a child of God who gets to start the process of growing, a process that will throughout her life stretch her into a deeper, truer, fuller understanding of God’s love.

And we all get to be part of that because we are all doing that same growing and stretching.

And, when we get confused about what that might look like, we all have a great model to follow in the very human, accessible reality of Jesus, who learned how to expand his vision of God’s love too.

Thanks be to God.

[1] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1907-be-opened