Sermon Title: “Faith Brain”
Grace and peace to you from the God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I was reading somewhere recently that we human beings only use 6-10% of their potential brain power. The human mind is capable of telekinesis – that is moving objects in space simply by “thinking” about it. We have an immense capacity to store visual and auditory cues. Some folks even have photographic memories – which makes them a big hit playing Black Jack at Atlantic City. Some identical twins can even send messages of distress or joy over vast distances to one another. Imagine what it would be like to do all the things our brains can potentially do. What power we could possess!
Our lesson from Ephesians talks about power too. The power of faith, St Paul writes: “I pray that God may grant that you be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit.” He also writes “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the fullness of God’s love in Christ.” And at the end of this lesson St. Paul waxes lyrically about the sheer size and magnitude of God’s love. He says, “Now to God, who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine….” St. Paul is referring to the immeasurable riches of the grace, mercy and love of God . God stands ready to grant us all kinds of power to do acts of charity and love for our neighbor if we but only ask. One of my favorite books is J. B. Phillip’s classic “Your God is Too Small”. It’s a good phrase for us to remember. So often we ask too little of our gargantuan God because we underutilize our “faith brain”.
What percentage of your “faith brain” are you using? So often we don’t take seriously God’s immense power. We believe in God. We know that this beautiful world and all that exists are not a product of chance but the creation of an awesome, divine being. Yet, so often we consign this awesome being to the pages of history. God did create. God had done, but now that the work of creation is complete, we act as though God is retired – off in Maui getting a tan. The truth is God is hovering over us, supporting and undergirding our life every second of every day. God is waiting for the invitation to help, to guide, to direct, to heal and to bless. Scripture reminds us all the time of God’s availability, “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”
I took someone to an AA meeting once long ago in my ministry and I was impressed at how deeply these addicted people believed. They read from a book at the opening of the meeting. It was called the Big Book. The wisdom that the book shared was simple, It said, “Those who underestimate the power of prayer, have never given prayer a fair chance.” In other words, in their doubts or their impatience they may have prayed once or twice, and then given up. Yet as you live or stay close to God in the church your “faith brain” grows. You experience God’s power yourself, or you hear of God’s power through the answered prayer of others. The more you experience God’s power, the stronger your faith in God’s power grows.
One of my favorite John Travolta movies is a film called “Phenomenon”. John is outside looking up at a beautiful, star studded Western sky and a meteor passes by and John is then changed. Instead of using 6-10% of his brain, he starts being able to use vast portions of it. A young Brazilian woman is hurt and he and a friend go to help her, and on the 10 minute drive to the scene he read a Portuguese grammar book. He starts chattering to her in Portuguese to everyone’s amazement. He moves objects about at will and develops some kind of new fertilizer that grows enormous plants. His brain is the same, yet the power latent in it, is released to do what it is capable of.
In another parish, Lutheran Refugee Services called up desperately seeking sponsors for the 60,000 Kosovo refugees that the then President Clinton had agreed the US would host. We discussed it as a council, then at a meeting after worship. Doubts arose, questions were asked. “We are mostly elderly retired people. We are tired. We don’t have the energy or the resources.” Yet, God overruled their fears and empowered by their hearts, they agreed. They astonished themselves, me and the whole community around them. They resettled not just one but two families and they tapped into the “faith brain” of the congregation in a big way. They started using not 6% but more then double that. The experience was energizing and life-giving for them and the result of their exposure to God’s power was to want to do even more. Like St. Paul writes in our lesson from Ephesians God gave them “the power to comprehend, with all the Saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,” and their hearts, the hearts of a timid people, “were filled with the fullness of God.”
I recently read an article in Newsweek about two young Yale co-eds who were international study major’s doing a semester of hands on development work in Guatemala. Guatemala like much of Central America is a place filled with injustice. They visited a village of repatriated women refugees who had lost their husbands due to war. They had no source of income and had children to feed and educate. It takes $80 to send a child to school. These women do exquisite bead work and weave elegant cotton tablecloths. These two young women, Benita and Ruth are very internet savvy. They took home two suitcases filled with craft items and by Christmas had set up a cooperation called Mercado which last year netted $600,000 for these desperately poor women. Two twenty-somethings with a lot of heart, and immensely powerful spirits are changing the lives and future of hundreds. They are majorly dipping into their “faith brains”.
I watched Bill Moyers show “Faith Matters” on PBS Monday night. He had a fascinating guest who was talking with him about God and the universe we inhabit. I loved hearing this man talk. He is not a traditional Christian but has an awesome faith in God’s power. He said we’ve come a long way in understanding our part of the universe. He noted that Albert Einstein had taken us light years forward in our ability to understand how the cosmos is constructed and the principle which makes it work. Then he added, breathtakingly we are still at least 8 Einstein’s away from real understanding.
Perhaps 8, but I would say perhaps 80, perhaps 800. It doesn’t matter. The most important thing we have to know is the universe’s heart and it has already been revealed in Jesus – the heart and the root of divine love – a love willing to snuff out its own life so that we and the rest of life may live.
Bask in that love. Trust in it. Root your own heart in his, and your “faith brain” will take you to new heights too.
In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Who We Are