Grace and Peace to you from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
While living in Africa, I developed a beautiful friendship with an American missionary named Alice Sanderson. Alice was a former college Dean in California and had lived in Zimbabwe for 20 years doing literacy work. She lived on her retirement and money she’d saved. People loved her and called her “Mukoma” which means little sister in the MaShona language. One of the teacher trainers, Sylvia, that she worked with, was married to an alcoholic. He was not a drunk-he worked and turned over his paycheck, but he was unavailable emotionally, did not participate in childrearing. He simply came home every night, at dinner and drank himself to sleep.
Sylvia had faith that one day he would stop. By the time he did, Sylvia guessed that he was being prayed for by well over a thousand people. No one hounded him, they just prayed. Miraculously, he stopped drinking, started going to AA and began a journey of recovery and wholeness that made him a model father and a new husband.
In our lesson today from St. Mark, Jesus heals a young man who has what we would as modern people call epilepsy. It is a brain disorder that causes convulsions and does throw people to the ground. They lose consciousness and fall backward. Jesus chides the disciples for their inability to heal this young man and calls them, as a group, you “faithless generation” and then says to them, “how much longer must I put up with you”. They seem like harsh words to lay on the disciples, who are already dealing with their own failure to help this man and his beleaguered teenager out. Jesus seems to have been tired or impatient – he obviously was irritated.
I don’t know about you, but when Jesus dons his very human face – because what could be more human than to express irritation and exasperation – and expresses negative emotions, I always feel troubled. I suppose I feel threatened too when I see anything but the “gentle Jesus meek and mild” Savior revealing his true humanity. I really like Jesus to conform to my expectations of him – but if he did, he could hardly be human just like you and me, now could he? Perhaps it’s because I hate to accept these negative emotions in myself, that I’d rather not see my savior sharing them.
Later on in this lesson, we see Jesus more relaxed with his disciples, and when they ask him why they couldn’t heal this young lad, he explains patiently that some things can only be healed through prayer.
Like my friend Sylvia’s husband’s alcoholism, sometimes it takes a long time and a whole army of people praying, but prayer can change people’s reality. People can be changed by the prayers of others.
I’m sure that almost every one of us in here can relate to the father of this young epileptic. He says to Jesus when Jesus challenges his depth of faith, “I believe, help my unbelief”. I love those words because they resonate so in my life. Who among us doesn’t have a son or daughter who is ADHD, or has bi-polar disorder, or a severe reading disability, or a drug problem, or who has trouble relating socially? Who among us doesn’t have a chronic health problem such as asthma, or migraine headaches, or hypertension or diabetes that wants to run out of control?
How many times have you come before the savior and been so discouraged that you felt hopeless and somewhere deep in your soul you uttered the same prayer as he says in desperation and in a strange concoction that is a bizarre mixture of faith, desperation and skepticism. Help me, help my unbelief! I want to believe but these prayers I’ve been dispatching have seemed to remain unanswered for so long, I’m well past desperation and somewhere near to hopelessness.
Yet that is where these words from scripture speak to us today. As Alexander Pope, 18th Century poet, once said “Hope springs eternal in the human beast”. Like this desperate Biblical father of our miraculously healed epileptic, love can never give up hope. No matter how discouraged, we still cling to the possibility that prayers are answered and that the living, loving God can work miracles in our lives.
We have been exploring this theme of healing during this Lenten season. To be healed sometimes simply means having our faith restored. Perhaps the cure we need is simply to pray like the epileptic boy’s father, “I believe, help my unbelief”. So may you be touched by the Spirit of Christ whom scripture calls “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” that your believing my be strong and whole. May you be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and continue to pray in confidence for the needs of those you love. May you wait patiently for God’s power to rescue and restore you, no matter what you are praying for.
In Jesus’ name Amen.
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