The Faith of Ordinary People When my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer, she was immediately rushed into surgery. The doctor opened her up; looked inside, and then sewed her back. That evening, with the family gathered around the bedside, the doctor came to the room and told her, I m sorry, but it s bad news. The cancer has spread throughout your body. There isn t much we can do. What do you do at a moment like that? How do you handle your death? Do you stop believing in God? Do you question God s goodness? Do you begin to doubt whether God cares? If you ever have had feelings like that, you re not alone. Too many people we care about hurt too much to let believing come easy. We ve had loved ones die too soon. We ve seen marriages break apart amidst terrible hurt. We ve seen young people go from one problem to another without ever getting their lives sorted out. For most of us, faith doesn t break loose with a whopping, Hurrah for God! More likely we cry out, God where are you when I need you? Years ago, Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore starred in one of the most powerful films about a hurting family. The film, Ordinary People, is about a perfectionist mother who tries so hard to control her world but can t cope at the death of her favorite son. When he drowned in a tragic accident, her power to love drowned with him. A son, the brother who survived the accident, can t cope with his guilt for being alive when his brighter, better brother is dead. A father can t cope with the unsettling fact that the two people closest to him are hanging alone, out of his reach. These are ordinary people. To be ordinary is to be too weak to cope with life s terrible traumas by your own strength.
Most of us are ordinary people. We can t manage life as well as we would like, at least not in our secret places. We can t get all the strings tied; it won t wrap up the way we want. For us, survival is often the biggest success story we dare hope for. Ordinary people are people who live on the edge, just a step behind the line of those who fall apart from the seams. Ordinary people are the ones who cry for a sign that it might still be all right when everything seems horribly wrong. A husband and wife, always smiling in public, hate each other for letting romance in their marriage collapse in a routine of tidy tedium. A father is plagued by feelings of failure because he can t stomach, much less understand, the antics of his slightly crazed son. An attractive young woman is absolutely paralyzed because of her breast cancer. A middle-aged fellow with his new Mercedes, an obvious success story, keeps wondering why his life feels so empty when he seems to have everything he could possibly want. A submissive wife is terrified because she is being pushed to face up to her closet alcoholism. Ordinary people, all of them, and there are a lot more where they come from. What they all have in common is a sense that everything is all wrong when it matters to them most. When I was a newly ordained priest ministering on the Gaspe Coast of Quebec, I witnessed the slow dying of a woman. Her death genuinely upset me, and so one day I went to Archdeacon Grover Kendrick and told him about this woman s fight with cancer. And then I said, The cancer won. Archdeacon Kendrick, who was a wise and gentle man, got angry with me. If the cancer won, where is it right now? Where is this victor? he wanted to know. It killed her, and it died too, I said.
So, the cancer is dead in the grave, said Archdeacon Kendrick. Yes, I said. And where is she right now? he asked, if you believe what you say you believe? She s with God, I said. So, who won? he asked. God won, I said. I got the point. Thanks to Jesus Christ, our loved ones may slip out of our hands, but they never slip out of God s hands. For at the heart of the universe is the One who makes everything all right even when everything seems all wrong. When Jesus walked this earth, living as a person who gave his life for others, he was about the business of making it right for us at the core of life. He let it be known that when we are confronted by the God who made us and holds us in his hands, we are facing a God who loves us and wants our good. Nothing, nothing at all, can change this fact: God loves us and wills our good forever. Believe this and you will discover a God you may never have yet experienced. A God who will sustain you no matter how broken and beaten and battered you may feel. Charles Stanley is the Senior Pastor at First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. He is one of the most prominent Baptist pastors in the country. He has written many best-selling books and his television and radio programs are distributed throughout the nation. And yet, early on in his time at First Baptist, Charles
Stanley faced enormous opposition from some in the church who wanted to fire him. It was a bitter and painful time in his life. In the midst of the turmoil, an elderly member invited him to her apartment for lunch. Stanley hesitated. It was a busy time and he was reluctant to go. She could tell that he was hesitant and said, Son, you need to come. Finally, he agreed. He met her downstairs at the retirement community where she lived. They had lunch there, and then rode the elevator to her apartment. Entering the apartment, she said, Now son, I don t want you to sit down. I want to show you something. She took him to a place in her living room. There she had a picture of Daniel in the lions den hanging on the wall. She said, Son, I just want you to look at that picture and tell me what you see. Stanley looked at the picture and saw that all the lions had their mouths closed and some of them were even lying down. Daniel was standing with his hands behind him looking up at this red light coming into the prison. Stanley told the woman everything he saw in the picture. He told her about Daniel and the lions and the bones. She asked, Anything else, son? He said, No, ma am. She put her arm around him and said, Son, what I want you to see is, Daniel doesn t have his eyes on the lions, but on Christ. Charles Stanley says that was the greatest message he could possibly receive at that time in his life. It saved his ministry and his sense of self. Daniel wasn t looking at the lions. Daniel was looking at Christ. It all comes down to something just this simple when life gets out of control and threatens to overwhelm us to focus on Christ. That s what the Syrophoenician woman does in today s gospel she focuses on Jesus and simply will not turn away. She is desperate for help, at her wits end, with nowhere else to turn except to Jesus. This woman has everything going against her.
Life is one burden after another. She s not a Jew but she really isn t accepted by the Gentiles. She has no legal rights by virtue of being a woman. Her husband is probably dead and she is now struggling to survive, to live one day at a time so that she has enough food to eat and a place to sleep. Add to this, she has a daughter who is infected with what Mark terms an unclean spirit probably a mental illness of some kind that made both the daughter and her outcasts in their own community. This woman is living on the margins, hopeless, helpless, having nothing left in life but her resolve to help her daughter. She sees God s power in Jesus, and so she begs him for help. And what does Jesus do? He insults her, in effect, calling her a dog. But this woman has chutzpah and won t take no for an answer. She persists in pleading for her daughter, accepting his characterization of her as a dog but reminding Jesus that even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the master s table. Jesus is amazed by her faith, and so says to her, For saying that, you may go the demon has left your daughter. And the woman returned home and discovered her daughter was well. I am not sure why Jesus said what he did to this woman when he called her a dog. Was it Jewish prejudice against Gentiles, or was he playing with her, or testing her I don t know. What I do know, and what the Bible tells us, is that Jesus looked into the eyes of this Syrophoenician woman, saw a sister in distress, and responded. He showed her God s love that lifted her up, gave her hope, healed her daughter, and helped her face the future with courage. What a difference Jesus makes in a person s life! In Jesus you are held, loved, cared for, and inseparably bound to your Savior God. In Jesus you are never beyond God s reach, God s love and God s care for you. In Jesus you have a God who sustains you in the worst moments of your life, strengthens you when you are
exhausted, forgives you when you fail, and gives you the strength for the journey ahead. I tell you: in life and in death, nothing is stronger than God s love, absolutely nothing! When I served in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one of my dearest friends was the Senior Minister of the neighboring Presbyterian Church. Bob Williamson was an outstanding pastor and preacher, a man of deep faith who genuinely loved the Lord. A short while after his retirement, Bob was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was totally unexpected a real shock to those of us who loved this man. As Bob s health declined, his wife Beulah arranged for Bob s friends to have one last visit with him. As I knocked on the door to say farewell to Bob, I was feeling sick to my stomach, anxious and fearful, I didn t know what to expect or how I would react when I saw him. Beulah opened the door and led me to Bob who was sitting on a sofa. When Bob saw me, he smiled and said just three words: God is good. For the rest of our time together, we talked about how good God was even when things go bad. As I left his house, I thought how odd that Bob had ministered to me more than I had ministered to him. He was God s pastor to the end. Yes, God is good even when things go bad. This is the faith of ordinary people like you and me. God may not spare us suffering but God will see us through it. We can face whatever comes our way because we know that at the end of the road Jesus is there to welcome us home. Death never has the last word in our lives. God is with us, God sustains us, and God will bring us to heaven. Dr. Gary Nicolosi September 9, 2018 Text Mark 7:24-37 Proper 18, B