| Home Page > Sermon Index > June 17, 2007 |
“A Father’s Cry of Faith”
I know Mark must have been a father. I just know it. Matthew and Luke record the healing of the boy; but only Mark writes of the father…and his cry of faith. Because I believe Mark gets what it means to be a father before Jesus, before God.
“Lord, I believe;
help my unbelief.”
First, there is Jesus. What happens in this passage is
precisely the kind of thing Peter had wanted to avoid. On the
When a child is born, a father is born. A mother is born, too, but at least for her
it’s a more gradual process. She has nine months to get used to what’s happening; she becomes what’s happening. But for a father, birth happens all-of-a-sudden like. Even for the most prepared father, the birth of a child still comes as a whopping surprise. Whether in the delivery room itself or on the other side of the plate glass window, a nurse holds up something roughly the size of a loaf of bread for him to see; and even as his heart leaps, his mouth falls quiet and his soul quivers before the sheer awe of this person, this human being, this part-of-himself-being born. It’s like seeing the creation not just of some one but of the whole world. It has his mark upon it. He has its mark upon him. And both marks are, for better or worse, indelible. Beyond the hospital, a father is still a spectator of mother and child together; but once weaned not just from mother’s breast milk, a father has this feeling that the child is becoming his, too--and more intensely than he ever conceived possible. And as if all-of-a-sudden like again, he realizes that, while becoming a father might have been a mountaintop, the notion of being a father was going to involve some valleys…real fast. And so fathers start—each in their own way—praying that they do no harm to this fledgling, that they don’t mess up their children, especially the way they frustrated their own fathers.
Jesus came down to a delicate situation. A father had brought his boy to the disciples. The boy had all the symptoms of epilepsy; and the disciples had been quite unable to either to calm the father or to cure the boy.
Then Jesus arrived. When the people saw him, they were
astonished. Not by a lingering radiance of the transfiguration, but by their
assumption that he was still up on the slopes of Mount Hermon, preparing,
preparing himself for the j
On Mount Hermon, he had reached his decision to stake his life in bringing about a saving, loving, believing relationship between human beings and God—and each other, too. And now he had come back down to find his nearest followers, his own chosen disciples, beaten and baffled and helpless and ineffective. That must have daunted even Jesus. Looking at the Twelve, he must have had a sudden realization of what anyone else would have called the risk of his task, wondering if ever these men of the world would become men of God.
All children—sons and daughters alike—are prodigals. That’s the way fathers
were as
sons. And it’s no different for a father’s children, if they’re smart. Despite his
temptations to run out on them first, a father knows that his children will run
out on him if they are to survive; and if he’s smart, a father won’t put up too
much of a fuss. A wise father sees all this coming. Whether they ever find
their way home again, none can say for sure; and a father’s growing
helplessness to protect his children along the way can be disc
“Bring the boy to me,” Jesus said. When we cannot see the forest for the fog, when we cannot see the big picture or deal with the big questions, the big issues, or the big show, when we cannot discern the future, one thing we can do is to deal with the present moment, with the person immediately before us. It’s as if Jesus is saying, “I may not be able to change the world; but I can at this moment, help this boy. I cannot right now deal with the future, but I can attend to the present.”
Again and again, isn’t that a way to avoid throwing up
If I can stop one life from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If can stop one heart the aching
or cool
one pain
Or help one fainting robin into his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
One of the surest ways to avoid gloom and doom is to take what immediate actions we can—and there is always something positive, something good and glad to be done one person, one moment at a time.
Second, there is the father. At first, the father had come
seeking for Jesus himself. Since Jesus was presumed to be on the mountaintop,
he had had to deal with the junior varsity, and his experience of Jesus’
disciples was disc
How often do we as parents—as fathers especially--experience that father’s cry of faith for his child…and for himself?
The phone rang at
It was my daughter, Elizabeth, who for some time had been
seeking fresh fields in her practice of law. She had, just a few weeks before,
decided to leave both D.C. and her large law firm for the Big Apple and much
smaller and fresher practice. At the offer of her new work, she was on her mountaintop[ But she was calling late that night because she
just turned in her ID badge and keys and closed the door for the last time on
her career there and was heading home to begin packing up her stuff for the
move to
And then, after listening to her heart—and my own--for a number of minutes, I turned quickly to that fount of human compassion and wisdom…and handed the phone to her mother.
“Lord, I believe;
help my unbelief.”
It’s been a little different with my two sons—a little, but
not that much different. Even as a father lays down the law, he knows that
someday his sons are going to break it as they need to break it if they’re ever
going to find something better than law to replace it. Even as a father builds
a home, he knows that his children will someday leave it and him and go into
some far country to find their own place and their own person. Until and unless
that happens, there’s no telling the scrapes they will get into trying to lose
their father and find themselves. Terrible blunders will be made—sorrows and
failures, hurts and losses of every kind. And they’ll keep making them ever
after they’ve found themselves too, of c
Both David and Stephen are aspiring. They are preparing. They are struggling. They are figuring out who to be and what to do. Stephen aspires to be actor. For David, everything is pretty up for grabs, which means he’s wrestling with what’s worth grabbing.
Originally, Stephen had said he would give acting three to five years; and if nothing materialized by then, well, he would move on. Well, those three to five years are somewhere close to being up; and he’s still pursuing his dream—chastened a bit by the tenuous,, volatile world of acting and the necessities of paying rent. But he’s still pursuing the dream. He believes he’s called—driven is more like it--to be an actor. He believes. But he also struggles with his doubts…and, when he falls down, he calls home.
“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
Not that I feel particularly suited to answer Stephen’s
questions (which I can’t) or to solve his problems (which I can’t either). The
best I can do as a father (which frankly doesn’t feel like very much at all) is
to enc
David, too, is his own far country—in
“Lord, I believe;
help my unbelief.”
The cry of that father before Jesus for belief beyond his unbelief, for faith beyond his doubts, I think that is as honest and human as any father can ever aspire to. To pray and to hope as though we know for sure that there is really someone on the other side of the door who heals, who hears, who answers…who cares for his children as much as he does. And yet…and yet the issue is that, as fathers, we pray not because we are certain, but pray because we are uncertain. Father’s prayers are a risk where the risk itself is the outcome. But it’s a risk worth taking. It is a risk that a father simply cannot avoid taking for his children.
For after all a father says and does for his children, even after all he has said to and done for God (or so I believe), sooner or later his prayers yield to silence and he find the prayer of someone coming to him and finding him with tears in his eyes and lumps in his throat. Sooner or later, someone beyond all the friends, therapists, ministers and other fathers he talks to and asks help from, someone such as Jesus appears deep inside to him. And offers him a prayer in response to his cry of faith…a prayer that always helps, a prayer that never fails, a prayer that cries to the Father of all fathers and all children, “Thy will be done (for my children, please Father) on earth as it is in heaven.”
This sermon is
indebted, in part, to Frederick Buechner’s Whistling
in the Dark.