Faith and Failure - Luke 9:37-25

Sermon for Sunday, August 9

Have you ever tried to help someone and failed? I’m sure you have. It’s a frustrating thing— it’s terrible. It will break your heart. Sometimes we give someone advice and they just won’t listen. Sometimes we pray and our prayers don’t work the way we wanted them to. Sometimes we do everything “right” and the wrong thing still winds up happening.

The disciples— at least nine of them— find themselves in just that scenario in today’s gospel reading. At the beginning of chapter 9, Jesus gave the disciples “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases,” and they went out and had some success, “bringing the good news and curing diseases everywhere.” But here, at the end of the chapter, while Jesus has been off on the top of a mountain with Peter, James, and John to visit with Moses and Elijah, the other disciples have a failed encounter with a demon.

The painter Rafael imagines the scene in his painting of the Transfiguration. Jesus and the “inner circle” disciples are up on the mountain, sharing a moment of glory, while a crowd forms around the remaining disciples, to watch them. I imagine the father bringing them to the disciples. Bartholomew rolls up his sleeves and says, “y’all stand back now and watch this. Demon! Come out!” And the boy begins to shake. Maybe one of the other disciples steps up, and says, “Out of the way, Bart. I’ll take care of it.” But the same thing happens; the boy makes no progress. Bartholomew, of course, was prepared for his friend to be successful, he would have said: “Well I loosened him up for you.” It would be funny, if it weren’t so tragic.

This inability to do what we’ve been able to do in the past can plague any aspect of our lives. Of course as we age, we lose some of our luster and as illness strikes we lose our ability. But sometimes we can’t even explain what has happened. In sports, there’s a phenomenon called “the Yips.” It’s an unexplained, often sudden, loss of basic ability by a player at a high level. A professional catcher loses the ability to throw to first base. A tennis player blasts a serve into the crowd. A basketball player air balls a free throw. Often the response by the player is to double down, to continue trying to carry the game in spite of their newfound impediment: “No, coach, don’t take me out— the game is on the line, I’ll get it figured out.” Meanwhile the team falls farther and farther behind.

This happens to us as well. We find our ministries that we once excelled in to be ineffective. We find the Bible study methods that we used to find so fulfilling leave us empty and exhausted. We discover that the way we have helped people in the past leaves our current “project” as lost and confused as when they came to us.

I imagine the disciples, wondering what is going wrong. “I always used to be able to do this,” they say to the father, “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Maybe they try to shift the blame to the boy. He must not want to get better. Maybe they try to tell the father, “perhaps this is as good as it gets.” Or maybe they keep trying until the father gives up on them.

When what used to work doesn’t work anymore, we can keep trying, or we can step back and try something new. Einstein’s definition of insanity, as you might know, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Everything changes, though, when Jesus gets there. The crowd turns from the disciples to Jesus. The father, desperate, walks right through the arguing disciples and the finger-pointing crowd and shouts at Jesus, “you’ve got to help me! My son has a spirit that gives him seizures and he can’t stop. Your disciples haven’t been able to help him.” And Jesus turns to his disciples and rebukes them with a phrase he has reserved for people who just refuse to get it. “You unbelieving and crooked generation!” What had the disciples done that was so bad? They trusted in the power Jesus had given them, instead of Jesus the source of the power.

If we were to read through verse 50, we would see the disciples make two big blunders. First, as soon as Jesus reminds them that he’s going to die and they won’t have him “in the flesh” anymore, they begin to argue about who is the greatest. I wonder what there standards are at this point: “Which one of us failed the most spectacularly at driving that demon out of that boy?” “Which one of us got that father’s hopes the highest before disappointing him?” Maybe one of the disciples succeeded in collecting a love offering before failing to drive out the demon, so at least they could afford a new bus for the ministry as they got ready to hightail it out of town. Jesus tells them, “If you want to be great, you’ve gotta be the least.” Some scholars think Jesus lifted up the very boy whose demon he had just cast out, and said “If you welcome this child in my name, you welcome me.” That’s important. Jesus doesn’t say “if you welcome children, you welcome me.” He says “welcome this child in the name of Jesus.“ Our ability to welcome the outcasts, the distractions, the people we are told we cannot welcome— this is the test of the power of Christ among us.

The second failure of the disciples is that one of them, John, comes up to Jesus and boasts. “We saw someone who wasn’t one of us casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him.” Let that sink in: they discouraged a guy who was being successful at something they had just failed at. I guess the logic is “if we can’t be effective for Jesus no one should.” I’m glad none of us are like that today.... But that’s a real risk. We have to be careful not to define our tribe as so small that we lose sight of the kingdom work happening all around us.

The way to overcome the yips, in sports or in life, is to get back to the fundamentals. Now, there are a lot of people who will tell you a lot of things about what the fundamentals of the faith are. They want you to believe certain things about the Bible. They want you to pray using certain words. I’ve even heard people who prescribe a specific amount of time to be spent in prayer and/or Bible study every morning. These things are all fine on their own, but they aren’t fundamental. The most basic aspect of our faith, which is so easy to get distracted from, is the God revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Of course, we find him in scripture. Of course, we find him in prayer. Of course, the disciples found him in the flesh. But the thing we have to remember is that the power of God resides in Him. Not in us. Not in our Bibles. Not in our efforts. Not in our rituals. In Him.

We have seen wonderful and amazing things happen in the name and presence and power of Jesus. We have seen the sick healed, the outcasts welcomed, people liberated from all sorts of trauma and violence and addiction. We have seen people reconciled who have hurt each other to the bone. When it happens in our midst, it’s amazing. But we run the risk of reenacting the barnyard tragedy.

My preaching professor, Joel Gregory, was the first to tell me about the barnyard tragedy: 

On a farm There was a rooster. And he lived among the goats, and the hens, and the cattle. And every morning, that sun come up, and the rooster crowed. Woke up the hens and the goats and the cattle, even the farmer and his wife. But along the way, the rooster came to some Fowl Logic. And he Reversed cause and effect. He forgot that he crowed because the sun came up, and started to believe that the sun came up because he crowed. After a while, the rooster became an insomniac rooster. “If I don’t wake up, the sun won’t come up.” He became an anxious rooster, a nervous rooster, a guilty rooster because sometimes he’d fall asleep, he became a stressed out rooster with the weight of the world on his wings. The world and his farm would fall to pieces if he didn’t crow. Until finally, they had to carry him off to the Home for Disturbed Roosters. 

See our job isn’t to heal the sick and drive out demons. Our job is to tell people about the one who does, who has, who will. This is the only fundamental. 

When we want to help, we should start with “God, help this person!” And then we should pay attention in case God decides to bring us along for the ride. But so quickly, our petition loses its comma. “God, help this person!” becomes “God help this person!” and we wring our hands and shrug our shoulders and give up. We walk away. We constantly drive between the ditches of doing too much and doing too little, trying to do everything or despairing and doing nothing. The first and last places we should bring anyone who needs our help is to the feet of Jesus. If they’ll stay there, they’ll stay with us, and maybe we can do some good. But Jesus saves. We testify.