I Call to Mind
God’s healing is coming, and therefore we have hope.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 13 B
Texts: Lamentations 3:(21)22-33; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Jeremiah found hope.
In the middle of his grief over the destruction of Jerusalem, lamentation after lamentation, verse after verse filled with sorrow over the exile of the people to Babylon, suddenly this ray of light shines through tears: “This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of God-Who-Is never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”
As we lament the pain and suffering of our world, can we find hope in God’s love like Jeremiah? For thousands of years, the suffering and pain people were aware of was close by, people you knew and lived with and could even help. Now we not only hold our own personal sufferings and grief, but day after day after day we’re constantly made aware of the pain of people we’ll never meet, from every corner of the world. This awareness is so recent in human history, we’re not at all evolved to handle that. But still, the news, the pictures, the grief, keep coming.
But can we, too, see a ray of God’s hope?
It seems to shine from our Gospel today.
There’s a beautiful pair of stories of Jesus, God-with-us, healing a woman sick for twelve years, raising a twelve-year-old girl from death. God’s hope and light shines through these stories.
But what about the others? How many other children in villages around the Sea of Galilee died that year whose parents never found this joy? How many women and men suffered from long-term disease that year (just think of cancer), and didn’t find Jesus in a crowd and touch his cloak? God’s mercy seems limited.
And that’s before we ask about the children of Gaza and Israel. About Ukrainian and Sudanese children. And adults. Caught up in the evil of war and violence and being killed day after day. Is there hope for God’s healing mercy in these stories that gives hope for today’s children and vulnerable people?
Our faith tradition commonly doesn’t lean into these stories of healing.
At least when it comes to our own expectations. Lutherans have always been a little leery of expecting God’s healing of our own disease, let alone healing all that ails this world. We’re not raised to expect miracles either on an individual or a global scale as some Christians are. It is enough, we seem to say, that we name these things before God in prayer. But we’re usually not expecting to be blessed like these parents or this woman.
But what if the hope we’re seeking comes from learning to pray with trust?
This father didn’t know if Jesus would heal his daughter, but he asked. He pleaded repeatedly that Jesus come and do something. This woman reached out and touched Jesus’ cloak, thinking it would be enough. They risked expecting God to heal in Jesus.
So what if we set aside our rationality a little when we prayed and simply, whole-heartedly, expected God to bring healing to those who need it? God still might not heal that person or situation as we ask. Fine. But maybe it would give us more hope to remember that sometimes God does. What if we could learn not to expect disappointment?
And what if we believed God’s Word that God deeply grieves for the children of this world, for those vulnerable to others’ evil and violence and oppression? What if we prayed for God’s healing in the Middle East, in Africa, in Ukraine, and actually expected God might move leaders to end war? Jeremiah didn’t have any evidence that this pain and suffering was nearing an end. But he clung to a hope that God was a God of love and healing.
Holding that hope, we can also learn about other ways God heals.
We have witnesses across the ages who asked for God’s healing, whether individual or collective, who didn’t receive exactly what they prayed for. For every fall of the Berlin wall and ending of apartheid in peace, there are so many wars that end only when one side has died so much they can’t go on. For every miraculous healing there are thousands who succumb to their diseases.
But people who learned to trust in God witness to a deeper healing in the face of adversity, a peace in their hearts even if their world is collapsing around them or their body failing. A sense that their lives, and the lives of their community and beyond, are in God’s love no matter the circumstances.
That’s a healing we can also pray for and trust we will receive. And find hope.
There’s one more thing.
The people of Corinth didn’t have the internet. They had no idea about the suffering of the Christians in Jerusalem. They had no idea that their Macedonian neighbors had given well beyond what they could afford for Paul to bring back to Jerusalem to aid in that suffering.
But Paul – as we heard today – made them aware of all this, just as we’re now aware of suffering far away. And Paul invited them to be a part of God’s healing.
This is also where we find hope. We are part of God’s healing mercy for the world. For our loved ones. For our neighbors. Now that you know, like the Corinthians, what others are doing to help, you can find a way to be of help. Now that you know, like the Corinthians, that others are in need, you can offer yourself to be a part of their hope.
Because this only works for God when we all share this ministry together. Macedonians, Corinthians, you, me. God needs more than one or two, God needs all to join together to be a part of God’s healing mercy in the world.
In the midst of lamenting the pain in the world, Jeremiah calls this to our minds.
And now you can call it to your mind, and therefore have hope: “the steadfast love of the Triune God never ceases, God’s mercies never end, they are new every morning.
It is good, Jeremiah says, that one should wait patiently for the salvation of God. Because that salvation will come to you. And it is good, Paul says, that one should also be a part of that healing of God. Because you are critical to it. And this is how God’s mercies are renewed every morning.
So this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Worship, June 30, 2024
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 13 B
Download worship folder for Sunday, June 30, 2024.
Presiding and Preaching: Pastor Joseph Crippen
Readings and prayers: Allen Heggen, lector; Steve Berg, assisting minister
Organist: Cantor David Cherwien
Download next Sunday’s readings for this Tuesday’s noon Bible study.
Questions Matter
Answers are important, but questions matter more — our questions for God, like “Do you not care that we are perishing?” and God’s questions for us, like “Why are you still afraid?”
Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 12 B
Texts: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41
God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The gospel reading today reminds me of an improv game that I remember watching on “Whose Line is it, Anyway?”.
The game is called “Questions Only,” and in it, the players must act out a scene off the top of their heads, but they are only allowed to speak in questions. So, it might go something like this:
Imagine a scene is set in a restaurant, one player might ask: “Are you ready to order?”
The other player can’t say yes or no, but they might respond with a question like: “What are the specials?”
“Can’t you read the board?”
“Would I like the BLT?”
“Do you like Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato?”
“Who doesn’t?”
And it can go on and on like that until someone can’t think of another question or accidentally answers.
It’s harder than you might think and the joy of it, I think, is when a player messes up. Not only because the mistakes tend to be pretty silly, but also because the format of question after question after question builds its own kind of tension, which can’t be resolved until one of the players finally makes a mistake and offers some kind of resolution.
And, at least in Mark’s telling, it almost feels like Jesus and the disciples on the boat are playing their own mini game of “Questions Only.”
When the storm blows up, the disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Jesus doesn’t answer them directly, but after he calms the storm, asks: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And, like good improv players, the disciples don’t answer this question, but respond with a question of their own which they ask to one another: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Question after question after question – but the answers are left unwritten. The sea is calmed, but the tension isn’t resolved.
And it reminded me of a quote from Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, who wrote that when it comes to studying scripture: “Answers are important, but questions matter more.”1
Faithfully seeking God is not about knowing the answers, it’s about the questions.
And nowhere is that more poignantly demonstrated than in the book of Job.
The entire plot of the book of Job hangs on one of the most difficult questions of human life: if God is good then why is there suffering? And famously, “the answer” that God gives at the end, isn’t an answer at all. Just more questions hurled at Job from the whirlwind:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
“Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together?”
“Who shut in the sea when it burst out from the womb?”
And we only heard the first part, it goes on and on with more and more questions like this for three more chapters! The questions are meant to enlarge Job’s perspective. To help him glimpse a God who is too big for storms and whirlwinds, and much too big for simple, declarative answers! God is beyond the declarative – beyond static description. The mystery of God’s being and reality can only be glimpsed in questions, in shifting images and dynamic metaphors–in a tension that can’t be resolved. It’s the same idea that Augustine observed, when it comes to God, he wrote: “If you understand, then it isn’t God.”
Which, to be honest, can be frustrating.
It can even hurt to be reminded of our smallness, of our helplessness in the face of a chaotic universe and a God we can’t begin to comprehend. And it sure doesn’t stop us from asking different versions of the same question from Job.
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” That question the disciples ask in the boat sends a shiver down my spine.
Because it’s the same question I’ve wanted to ask, during the storms I’ve weathered in my life, whenever I’ve watched whirlwinds swirl around my loved ones.
“God, don’t you care that we are dying?”
“Don’t you care that we are being gunned down in grocery stores and in Gaza?”
“Don’t you care that we are drinking polluted water and choking on toxic air?”
“Don’t you care that we are so lonely, so hurt, so hopeless that we are killing ourselves?”
“Don’t you care that we are dying?”
These are the hard questions that I think. I wrestle with them. I rage over them. But I don’t often speak them.
We’ve been taught not to speak these kinds of questions, especially not from the pulpit. Not to betray any kind of lack of faith, any doubt in God’s goodness. We’re taught to say “Oh sure, I know that God cares,” we’re taught to pray on the assumption that God cares enough to listen, we’re taught to give the good Sunday School answers and never to flat out ask the question. “God, don’t you care?”
Maybe because we are afraid to. What if we ask and God answers no? What if God says: “Your mind cannot even contain me. I am the question that cannot be answered. I am the storm and the stillness, I am the thunder and the tempest and the whirlwind and the fire, I AM THAT I AM. How could I care for a speck like you?”
That’s what our deepest, darkest fears whisper to us. So, it feels safer to shove the question down in our hearts and fake an easy faith that we wish we felt.
But the disciples didn’t do that.
They were terrified and they asked the question out loud: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
And Jesus doesn’t answer directly. He doesn’t say, “Of course I care, how could you even ask that?”
Instead he calms the storm.
We can ask. We can ask the hard questions.
Because God speaks from the whirlwind. Because God’s love is as big as God’s power and as big as God’s self. Because answers are important but questions matter more.
The questions we ask God. And the questions God asks us.
That’s what those four chapters of questions that God asks Job show us. They show us how much God cares. How much God cares for the Earth, right down to its foundations. How much God cares for the sea, who God calms and swaddles with clouds. And if we kept reading in these chapters we’d see more questions that show in beautifully strange detail how much God cares for all creation.
“Where is the way to the dwelling of light?” God asks.
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?”
“Do you know when mountain goats give birth?”
God cares. God cares so deeply. God cares for every photon and snowflake and baby goat. And cares for you. Cares enough to invite you into wonder. Into mystery. Into tension that cannot be resolved.
God cares enough to ask the hard questions of you.
“Why are you still afraid?” Jesus asks.
So often, we read this as a rebuke of the disciples, but if you go back and look again, it’s the wind and the sea that Jesus’ rebukes and commands, not the disciples. He doesn’t say “Don’t be afraid.” He asks them: “Why are you still afraid?”
I bet Jesus knew the answer. I mean, it seems pretty obvious. But it wasn’t about the answer. Answers are important but questions matter more.
Because the question is connection. Relationship. It’s a chance for the disciples, and for us, to search our hearts for where fear is coming from. It’s an invitation to swap that fear for faith. Faith in the God who cares enough for us to ask.
Why are we still afraid? Engaging with that question is scary in itself. And we’re probably never going to be able to answer it fully. Never going to be able to resolve the tension. But faith isn’t about knowing the answer. It’s about opening wide our hearts, and asking more questions.
In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1. https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/answers-are-important-questions-matter-more
Worship, June 23, 2024
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 12 B
Download worship folder for Sunday, June 23, 2024.
Presiding: Pastor Joseph Crippen
Preaching: Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Readings and prayers: George Heider, lector; Judy Hinck, assisting minister
Organist: Cantor David Cherwien
Download next Sunday’s readings for this Tuesday’s noon Bible study.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 346
- Next Page »