Sung Eucharist and Matins, Christchurch Priory, 1st July 2018
Wisdom of Solomon 1.13-15; 2.23,24
2 Corinthians 8.7-15
Mark 5.21-43
Good morning everybody.
Last week, I went to see the most recent Star Wars film at the Regent Centre. The film’s called Solo and it’s about the maverick space pilot Han Solo, who some of you will remember from the original Star Wars films back in the 70s and 80s. Now I’m not going to give away any spoilers but it struck me when watching it that here again was a story where one of the key themes was trust. In fact, ‘Trust nobody’ is the advice given to Solo early on in the film. He has to work out during the course of the story whether or not this is good advice. And if not, who the one person is that he can trust, who won’t let him down, no matter what.
It’s not an original theme, of course. Almost every film or story has trust as a key element driving the plot. Take for instance The Jungle Book. Remember the snake, Kaa, with his big, 1960s psychedelic eyes, who, as he wraps himself around Mowgli in the tree, sings him to sleep with that great song, ‘Trust in me’. Mowgli, as he makes his way through the dangerous jungle, has to work out who he can and can’t trust. He learns he can trust Bageera and Baloo, but not Kaa, and definitely not King Louis.
What’s this got to do with our gospel reading? Well, at one level, the reading is about healing. It weaves together two stories of Jesus healing people at very different stages of life. He heals Jairus’ 12 year old daughter, but not before he’s healed—with the power just flowing out of him— a woman who’d been suffering from a chronic, debilitating bleed for 12 years. The fact that the girl’s been alive for the same number of years that the older woman’s been ill makes it clear that we’re very much meant to read these stories in the light of each other. Especially the outer story, that of the healing of Jairus’ daughter, in the light of the inner story, the healing of the woman with the bleed.
So on the one level they’re stories about healing but at a deeper level they’re stories about faith and what faith means. When Jesus has worked out who’s touched him with the intention of being healed, he says to the woman, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well’. And then the story continues with Jairus’s buddies —and remember Jairus is an important person in his synagogue —they tell him not to bother Jesus any more. ‘Your daughter is dead,’ they say. ‘Don’t bother the teacher any more’.
As you can imagine, Jairus is totally distraught at this point. But Jesus overhears what they’ve said and tells him, ‘Do not fear; only believe’.
Now, when we hear Jesus say, ‘Don’t fear, only have faith’ (and the word can be translated either believe or have faith) we can trip ourselves up at this point, as much depends on what we think is involved when we speak about faith or belief. This can happen especially if we think that faith is primarily about believing a set of ideas or concepts about God to be true. For example, we can end up focussing on God being omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipresent (present everywhere at the same time). At least, that’s the kind of thing we learn at school in RE. But when we think of faith in this way, it often gets reduced to our giving a kind of intellectual thumbs up to these more philosophical concepts, even if we’re not really clear what actual importance they have for us when we get up in the morning.
However, if we remember that one of the core meanings of the word faith is actually trust, then we’re going to be much more on the right track. Both Jairus and the woman with the bleed have put their trust in Jesus to heal. They’ve put their faith in him. Faith for them is not simply knowing that a certain state of affairs is the case, in this instance that Jesus is a healer. Rather, it’s an act. An act of trust. Jairus and the woman with the bleed are not trusting in a concept or theory or a list of ideas. They’re trusting in a person. They’re trusting in Jesus.
However, at that moment when Jesus tells Jairus to believe, to trust him, he adds this little word, ‘only’—‘Don’t fear; only believe’. And I don’t know about you but when I hear that little word, ‘only’, I want to say, hang on. ‘Only believe’? Only trust? That’s not a straight forward thing to do, only to trust in Jesus and not to fear all the challenges that life throws at us.
Yes, having faith in Jesus is what it’s all about. But it’s not something that comes easily to us— most of us, at any rate. It’s something that we have to learn how to do. It’s something that we have to become accustomed to doing, especially as lots of things happen along the way in life that can cause us seriously to doubt whether or not Jesus is indeed trustworthy, utterly reliable, no matter what. It’s one of the things that we learn to do together as a church. We’re not expected to know how to trust Jesus right from the beginning. We’re not expected to know from the very outset that this Jesus is totally dependable. No, we learn that. And we’re the community where over time—because it does takes time— where we learn to trust Jesus with the help of the Holy Spirit. Day by day, it becomes something that we learn to do more naturally. More and more, trusting Jesus becomes part of our character, part of who we are.
But how do we do it? How do actually do the trusting in Jesus thing? It’s a good question. So before I finish, let me give you a simple example. Say you’ve got a major decision to make. If you’re in your teens, it could be that you’ve got to figure out which subjects you’re going to study at GCSE or at A level or even at uni. Or if you’re at a later stage of life, and you’re a man of a certain age, it could be that you’ve just been diagnosed with prostate cancer and you’ve been presented with a choice of treatment options. Which of them do you choose? At every stage of life, there are always major decisions to be made. So how do we trust Jesus when we make them?
Here are two approaches. The first, and I’m afraid to say that this is the way I all too often find myself making decisions, is first of all I Google it. No kidding. Then having researched the decision online, I make a list of pros and cons of the various options I’ve got. Then I’ll chat it over with Jenni, my wife. Depending on the topic, if there’s someone else I know who’s had to make the same decision, I’ll ask them what they think. What they decided and why. Then I’ll make the decision. And then, and only then, I’ll pray. Something along the lines of ‘Lord, please bless this decision that I’ve already made. Amen.’
Sound familiar? You see, the thing is that when we make decisions like that, we’ve got everything the wrong way round.
The better approach is the one where you spend time at the beginning, before you start all your deliberations, by praying. Now that doesn’t mean you have to rabbit on for hours. It just means something like sitting still, closing your eyes and saying, ‘Lord, you know I’ve got this major decision ahead of me. I pray that you will guide me as I make that decision and that the Holy Spirit will help me to that end. Amen’. Then spend some time reading the Bible, maybe about people who have chosen to trust God like Jairus and the woman with the bleed. Then having done that, stay sitting for a little bit longer to let the Spirit guide you in the silence. You may even get a prompting that you hadn’t expected. Not a voice. Just a sense. Go with it. And as you do, then and only then proceed to do all the usual things you do when researching and evaluating what decision you should make.
Making decisions this way, entrusting them first and foremost to God, makes all the difference. Not just with the decision itself, but the whole process. You can approach it all with confidence because you’ve taken the deliberate step of entrusting it from the very beginning to the Lord.
One of the key reasons why we don’t tend to do it like this is because it takes more time. In our culture we have a tendency to want to rush things. But trusting God requires patience. Just think how patient the woman with the chronic bleed had been. 12 years! And yet she never gave up trusting that eventually the God of Israel would heal her.
This approach is also better because we’ve given ourselves time to have a renewed, deepened encounter with Jesus. Be it in prayer. Be it in reading the Scriptures. Or, as we’re about to, be it in receiving the bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Our Crucified and Risen Lord. In that moment we receive Jesus into our own bodies, into our own innermost being.
If there’s something this morning that you need to trust the Lord with that you haven’t yet done so, whatever it may be, take advantage of this moment. After we’ve said the creed and affirmed our trust in God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, we’re going to pray. Take that moment to pray to the Lord and entrust whatever it is or whomever it is, to God. Then come up and receive the bread and the wine, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus. Take him into your innermost being, confident that he will guide and sustain you in all that lies ahead, no matter what. For, as the psalmist says, and as Jairus and the woman with the bleed knew to be true, ‘the steadfast love of the LORD endures for ever.’ Amen.