I believe!

 Way back in Seminary, back in a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we had to read a book called 'the hammer of God' by Bo Giertz.  He was a Swedish clergyman, who wrote the novel at least semi based on his experiences as a clergyman in Sweden.  Most of what was in that book has long since left me, but I do remember a passage that was especially resonant with a classmate of mine.  It was where a character named Fridfeldt has this conversation with a much older rector:

"I just want you to know from the beginning, sir, that I am a believer," he said. His voice was a bit harsh. He saw a gleam in the old man's eyes which he could not quite interpret. Was approval indicated, or did he have something up his sleeve? The rector put the lamp back on the table, puffed at his pipe, and looked at the young man a moment before he spoke. 

 "So you are a believer, I'm glad to hear that. What do you believe in?" 

 Fridfeldt stared dumfounded at his superior. Was he jesting with him? "But, sir, I am simply saying that I am a believer." 

 "Yes, I hear that, my bon. But what is it that you believe in?" 

 Fridfeldt was almost speechless. "But don't you know, sir, what it means to be a believer?" 

 "That is a word which can stand for things that differ greatly, my boy. I ask only what it is that you believe in."

Very simple, very straightforward, but laced with meaning. What does it mean to be a believer?  Great question.  For, you must understand, that you cannot simply be a believer.  You must, by definition, believe in something.  And in this case, Fridfeldt was gobsmacked.  He assumed, incorrectly, that being a believer would be, in and of itself, sufficient.  He was very wrong.  

For belief is like love - it cannot be unattached. It cannot be disinterested.  It must be attached to something specific.  You cannot love in a vacuum, your love must be attached to something, lest it be vapor and smoke.  You can love a person, a thing, a country or an idea, but you cannot love into the vapor.  That sort of love cannot exist.  It is much the same with belief.  You can believe in God, believe in yourself, believe in the power of prayer and whatnot, but you cannot simply believe.  It must be attached to something.  It's like that same riddle from professor egghead: How is a reptile like a number?  Neither one is real.  Oh certainly, you can have a box turtle or a garter snake, but take away the snake or the turtle, and what happens to the reptile? It doesn't exist.  It's a classification.  Similarly, if you have six boxes, and you take away the boxes, what happens to the six? It doesn't exist.  If you love a woman, and you take away the woman, what happens to the love?

And that's precisely what makes the Gospel reading so interesting for today.  The woman who had been bleeding for essentially the entire time that Jairus' daughter was alive was told by Christ upon her healing that her faith had made her well.  But faith isn't a thing that exists in a vacuum. You have to have faith in something. Now, these days, we tend to get a bit confused about faith.  This woman wasn't healed by her faith that Jesus existed, you know, nor by touching his cloak.  For at that moment, Jesus was surrounded on all sides, pressed in upon by a massive crowd who all a) could clearly see that he was right in front of them, and b) were touching his cloak all the time.  The bigger the crowd, the less personal space we all have, and the more likely we are to rub up against one another.  So, you have to understand that it's not just that this woman grasped a hold of the clothes of Jesus, but rather that she grabbed a hold of them in faith.  And that's a big deal.  

There's a difference, you see, in grasping the cloak of Christ, and grasping it in faith.  Anyone can grasp his tunic, some soldier even ended up keeping his tunic permanently, you know, and I highly doubt that he ended up immortal at that point just by virtue of having that cloak.  But there's a big difference between grasping it, and grasping it in faith.  Faith in what? Faith in Christ as the one who undoes the curse.

The Gospel accounts of the miracles of Jesus are beautiful, partially because they are stories that show the magnificence of Jesus not just as a healer, but as the one who undoes the curse placed on Adam and Eve after their first sin.  At the moment of their sin, Adam and Eve were not only cast from the garden, but they had a curse laid on them.  From that moment on, they would only eat from the sweat of their brow. Thorns and thistles would sprout up because of them, and eventually they would return to the dust, for they are dust, and to dust they will return.  That curse has dogged humanity from the time of that curse, and had that inevitability attached to it: Sickness and death will plague us always.  As certainties.  But when Jesus passes through the world, all of a sudden, there is evidence of the curse being undone. 

The scarcity and effort that governs eating by the sweat of your brow - undone at the feeding of the five thousand.  The sickness that plagues humans because of sin - dismantled when He heals the woman's hemorrhage.  The return to dust promised as the finality of the curse - smashed when Jesus says to the girl 'Talitha Coumi,' Little girl, I say to you, arise.

Faith isn't empty, it can't be.  For it to be faith, it has to be attached to something, and to something specific.  And you can't just say 'I have faith in Christ.' Faith in Christ to do what or to be what?  And the answer to that great question is to say that you have faith in Christ to undo the curse.  The woman who approached him didn't have faith in him as a doctor, but as the great physician who undoes the curse.  And when Jesus says to her 'your faith has made you well,' it's faith in him not as a doctor, or as a miracle worker, or a prophet, or a good man, but faith in Him as God himself, deciding to roll back the curse, and showing with every miracle that God is now on your side.

 

Plant

 Christians are called to be evangelical.  Not to be evangelicals, necessarily, but to be evangelical.  And that means to spread the Gospel, to tell people of the wonderful works of Jesus Christ.  And that involves scattering the seed.  Scattering the seed is what we do when we take the word of God, and toss it around, plant even where we don't think seed has any business being planted.  We are there to make sure that the word of God is as widespread as possible.

Now, we may very well say of this seed scattering venture, that if God wants that to be done, then God himself could do it.  Which of course he could.  So why doesn't he?  Why is it that God our Lord insists on involving us in this initiative?  Well, let's dive into that from the perspective of one of the people who we know for sure was directly evangelized by God himself.

St. Paul is possibly the best and best known evangelist of all time.  It was he who took the word of God and planted the seed, and planted churches, all over the known world.  He underwent famine, fire, shipwreck and sword.  And he did all this to spread the word of the Lord, to evangelize from near to far.  But the funny thing is, that Paul was someone who was directly evangelized by God.  There was no membership class with Paul, no conversation, no adult confirmation class, nothing like that. Paul, then Saul of Tarsus was knocked from his horse on the road to Damascus, and a voice came from heaven saying 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?'  Paul became blinded at that point, and had to spend time listening and not getting too far.  When he became a Christian it was as though scales fell from his eyes, and he was baptized.

Now, someone who had that experience, of all of us, could look at the evangelistic appeal that we receive from God, and dismiss it.  After all, if God can strike me blind on the road, and turn a persecutor of the church into its strongest advocate, then why shouldn't he do that to everyone?  Great question.  And to answer that, I want you to think about your garden.

In your garden, you plant carrots, strawberries, tomatoes, and the like, and you tend them, care for them, and watch them grow.  Day by day, you plant and water and tend to them, and they grow, you know not how.  But what you do know is that your fresh garden carrots taste about a billion times better than the store bought carrots. And that's strange, because the store bought carrots are huge, thick and long.  They are readily available for a cheap price, and can be obtained year round.  At any moment, you can go to the store, and buy a big bag of carrots, and have so many carrots they'll start to go bad before you can eat them all.  The carrots that you grow at home are so small, usually, that if you peel them there might be nothing left!  So you're not growing carrots because you need the carrots, are you?  You're not growing tomatoes because you can't get tomatoes otherwise - they're at the store and they\re as big as your fists.  You're not growing strawberries because you can't get strawberries - the ones at the store are as big as apples, and are super plentiful.  So why are you growing them?  They taste better.  Why do they taste better? Partially because they're fresh, yes.

But partially because they're yours.

That is, nobody feels accomplishment in driving to the store and buying carrots, but everyone feels accomplished in pulling their own fresh garden produce out of the ground.  Truly, if God wished to, every knee would bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord.  That's the end of the Bible, and the end of history.  We're not there yet.  Where we are is that we are God's workmanship, created to do good works, which he has prepared in advance for us to do.  We're in the in-between, between creation and conclusion, in which God in his wisdom has chosen to have us involved with the work that he would have us do.  Not because he can't do it, but because he wishes for us to be involved.  It's good for us, to be honest, even if we don't think about it that way.

But ask yourself something.  Is the carrot from your garden so wonderful because it's a carrot, or because it's your carrot.  Is your tomato so great because it's a tomato, or because it's your tomato.  And when you're called to pray with and for people, to uphold them and cherish them, when you're called upon to rejoice with them and mourn with them, and bring them to the sacraments, it means much more.  This isn't every knee bowing, after all.  These are the knees you care about.

But I followed all the rules!

 Something that comes up a lot during COVID is when people get the virus, they will immediately say that they were for sure following all the rules.  

The line goes like this "I was doing everything right, wore my mask, stayed 2 metres apart from everyone, and only went out for essentials, and somehow, I got COVID." 

 

Sure.  I bet.  Here's the core issue, though, which is that if you were following all the rules, how'd you get the COVID.  In reality, the measures that we have in place have been quite stringent, and especially at the beginning of the pandemic, if you were following all those rules, it would have been difficult to have contracted the virus.  But people way overestimated how well they were following all the protocols. And people got sick.

When people say 'I followed all the rules,' what that's code for is 'I did what was convenient, and thought that I would get away with it.'  Absolutely.  And you know who else did that?  Almost everybody! That's why the push for the vaccine has been so key, because the vaccine, once applied, doesn't depend on the effort of the one who has received it to remain valid.  It works in the background, and as long as you get stuck with two doses, it's effective enough.  But depending on the average person to follow through on the restrictions well enough to keep the variants at bay?  Yikes.

Now, in the Old Testament, you see the first example of this, really. You see Adam and Eve, fallen into sin, and being confronted by God who asks them what's up. And as soon as God skewers them, Adam and Eve begin to come up with excuses.  Because why wouldn't they?  As soon as God confronts them, they both immediately rush to shirk responsibility.  Oh no, God, it wasn't my fault!  I was following the rules!  But this woman that you gave me, she put the fruit into my hands.  Oh no, God, it wasn't my fault, it was this snake that you put here, he tricked me. If it wasn't for him, I would have done the right thing the whole time.

Of course.

But if you were all following the rules so well, how is everyone still sinning?  Or, more likely, is this a case of everyone claiming they're following the rules to a T, but somehow staying far far from them?  Is this a case of everyone assuming that they're doing a far better job than they're actually doing?  Because that would be tiresomely predictable.  

That's what we do all the time.  Not just with COVID you understand, but with everything.  All the time, no matter what, we look at the wreckage our sinful lives cause, and shrug, and say 'well, it's not really my fault.  I was doing my best.  I was trying my hardest.  It's one of a number of things that is someone else's fault.  Not mine.'  But if everybody in society does that, then how do things get better?

What it comes down to, really, is to understand that we have it almost completely backwards.  What we do is to hype up ourselves, and claim that all the problems are outside us somewhere, when in reality, it's the opposite.  Our sins are our own problem.  We do things that we want to do because it benefits us, at least in the short term.  We do what we want to do, and hope to get away with it, and sometimes we do.  But in reality, that's the cause of our misery. We do that, and so does everyone else.  And then we act surprised.  Not just that COVID cases are going up, but that there is so much misery in the world.  It should be impossible, if we're all doing the right things.

But as a Christian, you have to understand that the pointing outside you that you do should be about righteousness, not sin.  The sin that you have, that's in you, and is caused by you.  But the righteousness, that belongs to God. And what that means is that you don't have to pretend anymore.  You don't have to hold up the banner that say that you're doing the right thing, and have always been doing the right thing.  Instead, you get to hold up a banner that says that it's not the sin that exists outside you, but the righteousness does.  If you don't do that, then eventually, you will be found out.  Eventually, someone will ask the hard question as to why you are the way you are, what you do, and so on.  You'll be in the world where your sins will be on full display, and will be obvious.  And at that point, the only thing to do is to cop to them: Yes, I committed those sins, and I shouldn't have.  

And if anyone asks at that moment what kind of Christian you are, you can answer by saying 'a repentant one.  and a forgiven one.  In fact, the only kind of Christian that has ever existed.'  For there truly has never been another kind.  Look through the scriptures, and you will find example after example of even the closest disciple behaving badly, getting up to no good, being faithless, doubting, all that.  They do all that, and still come off as holy and blessed because the source of their salvation has already been taken care of.

And it's precisely because they don't do their best that they need Christ.  If you were as good as you think you are, you wouldn't need Jesus.  But you do.  Because your sins are your own, but the righteousness is Christ's.  And then something amazing happens. The sins that you caused get transferred over to him. That's how you can afford to say 'I know I shouldn't have done those things.  But thanks be to God that he took those sins away.  I made the mistakes, but I claim the righteousness that can't be taken away.'

I go back to this line over and over again, because it really stuck with me.  It was from the Swan Princess, a movie that essentially nobody has seen.  In it, the wicked sorcerer is trying to marry the princess to gain the throne.  When asked why he doesn't just take the throne by force and become king by force of arms, he replies thusly:

"Once you steal something, you have to spend your whole life fighting to keep it."

Our self-righteousness, our carefully crafted image is stolen. And because it is stolen, we have to fight to keep it.  The borders must always be patrolled, the ramparts must be monitored, because the image is stolen.  The only way for something not to be stolen is for it to be given or earned.  Look at yourself and your history, and ask if you have actually earned your righteousness.  I haven't and I'd wager that you haven't either.  Sure, you may be in the process of getting away with it, but earning it?  Unlikely.  But, it can be given.  And is.  And that means that your righteousness isn't a matter of skating by and trying not to be found out.  It means that your righteousness is stored in Christ, and can't be taken away.  Nobody is ever going to find out that he isn't who he says he is.  Nobody is going to find out that he isn't as good or as pure or as righteous as he claims to be.  And if your store of goodness rests and lies in him, and is given to you, then it is safe, unassailable, and rightfully yours.  

Pointing outside you to sin but inside you to righteousness is backwards, though it is what we have wanted to do since Adam. But pointing inside you to sin and outside you to righteousness is a path towards grace.  Which is the basis for the Christian faith.