June 30, 2024
I speak to you in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
All of us here today will have had times in our life when someone’s broken a promise to us. Sometimes they’re small promises: maybe someone stood us up for coffee or lunch, or forgot to call, or didn’t do that task they said they would. Other times, they’re bigger promises about more important things. I don’t know about you, but while I try to be forgiving, the fact of the matter is that a broken promise hurts. And the bigger the promise, the bigger the hurt.
So today’s Gospel story might feel kind of risky. Two people come away from Jesus having experienced a miracle. And these stories are so relatable, aren’t they? It’s a place where it’s easy to enter into the Gospel story. Who among us hasn’t experienced a difficult illness, or had a loved one who has? Every parent with a seriously ill child can identify with Jairus – when we hoped and prayed that the doctors or surgeons or specialists will be able to find out what’s wrong. To fix it. There’s grief and heartbreak and fear as we struggle to cope with the situation – as we wonder what might come next.
So stories like this one can seem to promise too much. Because for every person who recovers from that difficult illness, another person doesn’t. For every family whose child makes a complete recovery, there’s another family whose child dies. And if a tragedy like this has touched our lives, and then we hear Jesus tell the woman that her faith has made her well, it can tempt us to think – where is healing in my situation? Did God not show up? Were my prayers and my faith not good enough?
In that case, it can feel like a very big promise has been broken. And when that happens, it’s toxic to our faith. And so I want us to wonder this morning about what the promises in this story are.
When we try to enter into stories like these, we bring all kinds of assumptions about God with us. We usually don’t think too much about these assumptions, because we absorb many of them – almost by osmosis – from our environment. Now, one of the things floating out there is something called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” is a term that was first introduced in a 2005 book and describes a combination of five spiritual beliefs:
A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other
The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself
God doesn’t need to be overly involved in your life, except when you need God to solve a problem
Good people go to heaven when they die
This set of beliefs gives us a God who’s equal parts cosmic therapist and divine butler. When these beliefs color our thinking, we come to see God as a magical genie – granting wishes at our command. God is ready to help out when needed, but isn’t all that involved in our lives. It’s a me-centered message about a distant, transactional God.
A hollow God like this runs counter to the Gospel. Not the Gospel of moralism – be a good person, don’t cheat, and all that – but the Good News that Jesus actually offers. That in the incarnation the divine God who created the universe became flesh in the person of Jesus. That this Jesus shows us what God’s love looks like lived out in human form. That Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection is the best revelation we have of who God is. That God is deeply involved in the lives of God’s people. That God. Loves. You.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is based on interviews with about 3,000 teenagers, and so it’s often labeled as some sort of flaw in our young people. Maybe there’s some truth in that. But if we’re honest with ourselves, the reality is that these ideas have seeped both into the big-C-Church, and into the larger society itself. So forces within the sacred and the secular conspire to form us into the sort of Christians that read today’s Gospel story as a promise that God will fix our problems. That God will give us what we want, when we want it, how we want it. That God will give us the cure for whatever causes us pain and suffering.
The problem with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is that it offers empty promises that are destined to be broken – because they’ve never been offered. And we’re left broken when those promises don’t come true.
But if we read this story through the lens of the Good News, then we know that a cure is not what’s on offer. Healing is what’s on offer. And sometimes healing comes with a cure, but sometimes it’s something totally different. Because healing isn’t the result of a stand-offish God granting wishes. Healing comes when we experience the Risen Christ. It comes from being in a close, loving relationship with a God for whom sickness and suffering and grief and anger are not abstract ideas. We know Jesus has experienced suffering and loss as we experience them. Jesus has experienced the pain of sickness and broken relationships and death. When Jesus sent the woman who was healed off in peace, he knew how desperately we can need the peace and acceptance that are the hallmarks of healing.
The promise of this story today isn’t that God will save us from the fire and the water. The promise is that God will be with us in the fire and the water. Jesus’ journey to the Cross and back shows us there is no place God will not go to be with us. The promise is that our prayers and our faith are enough simply because we are beloved children of God. Not a distant God, but one who holds us close in the most peaceful place there is. The palm of God’s hand. Amen.