It takes a lot of courage to be a human being.  MJ and I have been holding a new granddaughter this week. She doesn’t know that yet. At 4 weeks old she has eyes the color of the ocean.  Looking into them it is easy to see she doesn’t know anything about arthritis, or hurricanes or depression. She does not lie awake at night worrying about her Pension fund or Medicare or her relationships or even death.

There is no fear in those azure eyes. She eats, sleeps and burps when she is full. Her world is as wide as her mother’s arms. Emily Grace has much to learn.  As she grows she will learn that bees sting, that roses have thorns and that other children sometimes push, shove and call you names.  She will learn that you can catch a cold and get a sore throat, a runny nose. Just for starters.  If your parents decide to move to another state or another country there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  All of that is part of growing up. It is not the only part. It is in many ways the least painful part of how we learn to be human.  As we grow, we learn the limits of being human.  We learn what we can change and what we cannot change.  We can say “yes” and we can say “no.”

We can make friends and we can make enemies.  Some of us get so carried away with this newfound freedom that we begin to think we are in control of our lives.  We open bank accounts, we buy houses and sell houses. We even buy insurance to protect ourselves from those things we might have difficulty controlling.. including acts of God. We take our vitamins, we work out, we space our children two years apart and raise them by the book. Nine times out of ten it seems to actually work out.  And we live with the illusion that we are actually in control of our lives.  Until something happens! We lose our job. A child is born with Down syndrome. We feel a lump and the doctor sends us for a biopsy.  We feel like we are trapped in a car and the brakes fail.  In a split-second everything changes.

“I have lost control!” That is what good people say when bad things happen.  I’ve just lost control of my life.  The truth of course is we do not lose control of our lives. We lose the illusion that we were ever in control of our lives in the first place.

It is a hard lesson to learn. As it has been said “Nile” is not a river in Egypt.  So we go back again and again until we learn that much of life is a roll of the dice. Like whether you go to college or take care of a terminally ill mother. Genetics pays a role whether you develop arthritis or heart disease or type II diabetes, or all of the above. Whether you have children that are smart or just children that get by and you love them anyway. All that we really do have control of is how we deal with the “human condition”.

How we respond to that which life throws at us.  We can stock- pile an arsenal and when we have had enough, we can start shooting.

We can complain to our elected representatives, we can take pills to kill the pain or self-medicate with alcohol or nicotine.

It takes a lot of courage to be a human being.

Eight-foot waves swamped their little boat and Jesus was sound asleep. He had had a day – healing, teaching, preaching and there was always one more asking for help.

His disciples were beside themselves.. “don’t you care that we are perishing?” Lightning pops overhead. The crew is terrified.. they are no longer in control.  Even with reefed sails and a sea anchor, the boat was being swamped. Peter had already activated the automatic signal beacon. All the while Jesus was sleeping. “Teacher do you not care that we are about to die?”

“Peace be still”. The wind stops. And there was a great calm.

“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Mk.4.25

In this week's lesson Jesus once again has crossed the Lake of Galilee.  He is back in Jewish territory. No storm on this crossing. When he gets back to the shore,  Jairus who like us was confronted with the limits of life, not a storm or a runaway tidal surge, but a little girl who has fallen ill.  “Come lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.”

Before Jesus can get there others come to meet him with the bad news…  “she’s gone.”

Jesus ignores their version of reality. Turning to Jairus, Jesus preaches the shortest sermon of his career. “Do not fear, only believe.”

Those words are not just for a first-century grief-stricken father, they are for us as well.

For all who are up against the human condition.  Only believe what?

That our prayers are answered? 

That everything will turn out all right?

That we will get what we want?

In the Bible we get the impression that when people call on Jesus they get what they want.

The storm stops. A little girl gets up from her deathbed and serves tea. So we try to figure out what they did so we can do it too.

Only that is not what these stories are about. They are not stories about how to get God to do what we want.  Which is just another way of trying to stay in control. They are stories about who God is. How God acts and what God is like.

Mark remembered and recorded these stories for one reason and one reason only.  He wanted us and the world to know, that this Jesus is no ordinary man.  He wrote these stories because he was convinced that Jesus and God are one and the same.  He wanted to show us that this life that we live, including the “human condition” is not the final word for us.

Like us, Jesus in the end was up against the human condition. He wanted us to know that the “human condition” was not the final word about life.   Here was “one human being” who was willing to lose control of his life that he might receive it back again, not for one time but for all time and for all humankind.

“Do not fear.. only believe.”

Only believe what? We are not told, but there seems to be the two choices; to believe or to fear.

Believe that God has the last word or be afraid that the chaos of life will finally prevail… that seems to be it.

As for me, it is seldom that clear cut… I’m more like Thomas when Jesus told him to touch his wounded side and Thomas said “ I believe, help thou my unbelief…”

 I don’t know of anyone who believes all of the time, except maybe my 90 y.o. mother-in-law, and even she locks the door with double locks, bolts the windows from the inside, keeps the police scanner on 24/7 and cuts out  the obituaries of anyone remotely known to her.

I do know the difference between fear and belief. Fear is when you can’t think straight because your pulse is pounding and you are hyperventilating and you know that at any moment it’s all over. Fear is when you lie awake at night and wonder if your bank account is overdrawn or that biopsy is going to come back positive or you worry about your children, now grown…how are they getting along in their lives?

Belief is different.

It is much more difficult to put into words but I will try. Belief cannot be reduced to a set of rules or dogma. When we say the creed and say “ I believe in…”   we are talking prepositions and I’m not going to digress into an English lesson, Suffice it to say that when religious folk challenge our faith by asking if you believe in the virgin birth or in Jesus. . . or in “the Bible”  they miss the whole point.

And of late there have been many who have missed the point.

NT Greek speaks of believing “into” rather than believing “in.” There is really no English equivalent. So instead of talking about believing in God, it would be more accurate to say I believe God. Belief is not so much a preposition as it is a journey, less a realization, than it is a relationship. When Jesus said that who ever believes “into” him shall never die” he did not mean that unless you sign your name to the Apostle’s creed you would not have eternal life.  Eternal life is not the result of “believing in. It is the experience of believing.^1"

It takes a lot of courage to be a human being. Believing will not put us in charge or get us what we want or save us from all harm, but believing opens us to a journey that is more marvelous and more mysterious than anything you can imagine. 

My first hospital visit  just two weeks out seminary was to the mother of Doris, a 13 y.o. girl who was dying from cancer. Her mother, Lois was a widow of 38 whose husband had died only a few years before… “why”, she asked me? … thank God I resisted giving her a discussion on theodicy.

This is what I said.

“Lois, God knows what it feels like to lose a son”. We wept and I knew she too was on a journey called faith. Whatever the human condition, we may finally learn to live it, maybe even love it, if only because we believe He lives and loves it too ².

Amen.

Notes:

1.Fred Beuchner. Whistling in the Dark. Harper and Row. 1988.

2. Barbara Brown Taylor. The Preaching Life, “ One Step at a Time.” 1993 Cowley Pub. p. 8