Proper 5(A) – Genesis 12: 1-9; Romans 4: 13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Well, it looks like today in our readings we meet a lot of different people with very different stories!

– To start with we have Abram, an old man with seemingly no much life left in him, and God promises him that he will become the Father of all of God’s people.

– In the Gospel, we hear about Matthew, a “fallen son of Israel” having become a collaborationist working for the Roman Empire, this Matthew who will become one of the closest of Jesus’s followers and the very writer of the Gospel we have just heard.

– Then we have a religious man, the leader of the synagogue, his teenage daughter who is dying, and a middle aged woman suffering from hemorrhages.

Very different characters with very different stories indeed, and yet it is not hard to figure out what they all have in common, what they all share, and what they all act upon. And if we have a doubt, it’s very unlikely that our reading from Paul’s letter will let us forget: What all these people have in common is faith. The old man, the collaborationist, the religious leader, the middle age woman, they all have faith and they act upon their faith.

So let’s look at that a little more closely first:

– What we learn from the book of Genesis, in the passage we have just heard and in other passages, is that Abram starts of his journey with God by leaving his country, his tribe and his family to enter an unknown, desert land with the hope that his previously barren and now menopausal wife will bear him an offspring. It is to be noticed that Abram does not seem to know a lot about this God: Abram’s father worshiped foreign gods and God makes no introduction to Abram. You may notice that God is not named.

– Matthew leaves on the spot a well-paid, secure job, and the protection Roman soldiers offered him to follow a wandering preacher surrounded by people who hated Romans and who would have hated even more people like Matthew, Jews who had betrayed their own people. Based on what we hear from the story, we can only conclude that Matthew was hoping for a different life where he would be accepted, we see that the first thing he does is to share a meal at his home with Jesus.

– Then we meet the leader of the synagogue, and although little is said about him I think we need to imagine how it was like for this man whose job was to know God and whose job was to help other people, to actually come and beg Jesus for help, this Jesus being, as we have noticed, a wandering preacher, a street healer. The man had to confess in front of all that he couldn’t do anything to help himself and that his prayers weren’t working. But he was hoping his dying daughter could be brought back to life.

– Then we have this woman who takes the risk to touch Jesus. Her behavior can be hard for us to understand, but the thing is that in Jewish Law, there were many things that could make you impure, like touching a corpse, having a skin disease, bleeding. You had to purify yourself before coming near to anything holy or even to resume everyday life. So the woman could have been punished for her behavior, daring to mix in the crowd and reaching out to Jesus, but she was hoping that Jesus could heal her from something she has suffered for a very long time and no one could help.

And so, through the stories of these people, we understand a little more what faith is about, or at least, what faith is not about:

– First, we see that faith is not about confessing certain beliefs. Abram does not know anything about God and all the people surrounding Jesus don’t know anything about Jesus yet. At this stage, they very unlikely believe he is the Messiah, and they certainly don’t believe he is the Son of God. Besides, before Jesus grants healing, the least we can say is that he is absolutely uninterested in what people believe in: the leader of the synagogue or an unknown, impure woman, Jesus does not make any difference between them.

– Secondly, we also see that faith is not about obeying the Law – and of course we have heard Paul who has a lot to say about it. But if we just look at our characters, we see that if anything, the woman breaks the religious law and Jesus rewards her for that! We also see that Abram does not observe the family rules, the leader of the synagogue does not do what’s expected of him according to his status, and Matthew disregards a basic work ethics…

So we observe that when they act upon faith none of these characters do anything wrong per se, but they probably don’t do what reasonable people do. To be honest, I think they all look a little crazy, act a little crazy. Reading their stories reminded me of this quotation attributed to Jeremy Goldberg: “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same thing. And that’s why life is hard.” And indeed we could say: Faith is knowing something is risky and doing it anyway. And Foolishness is the same thing. And we could also conclude: That’s why having faith is hard.

Now, how do we know the difference between faith and foolishness? Well, maybe sometimes we just don’t know and that’s why we take a risk. But look, what all the characters in our story have in common is that they do something risky for the sake of hope, hope in something better than what actually is: One hopes for an offspring, one hopes for healing, one hopes for a more fulfilling work occupation, one even hopes for the impossible: Resurrection. They all long for something good and act as if something very good was coming to them. They hope for something good and act upon it. And this is interesting if you think about it because last week we talk about the very nature of God and we said that the only thing we can know for sure from the Scriptures is that God is good. And so maybe faith, even if it’s hard, is nothing very complicated. I would even dare to say that faith is not something that looks very elevated or very holy: Faith is believing in God’s goodness and acting upon this belief.

So how do we do that? Well,if we truly believe that God is the giver of good things then we have to meet God halfway, or at least take a step towards God.

– The first thing I notice about the characters in our stories today, is that they believe in their own goodness or at least they believe that they can be the recipient of something good although all their circumstances tell them a different story: Abraham is “as good as dead”, Matthew is hated by his people, the woman is permanently impure, the man’s little girl is dead for real. Although they all feel fear, shame and even despair they don’t let these feelings have the last word, they don’t let these feelings have control of their lives and destinies.

– And then, instead, or in the midst of that, they turn to God and invite God into their stories. They make God the main character of their own private drama. They release their personal drama into God’s hands to let God intervene. As they do that, they all ask for something personal but not egoistical. Notice that they don’t ask to win the lottery, to be successful or even to find love. They ask God for their life, to be able to live fully, authentically, as God has intended them to live when God created humankind. We have seen last week in Genesis that this is what God’s goodness is all about, to create and to sustain life.

– In the end, they all are sent to bring to others the goodness they have experienced. It’s not about their private experience even though it has to be a private experience to begin with: Abraham will be a blessing to all nations, Matthew still shares his faith with us today through the Gospel he wrote, the man saves his daughter’s life, the report of Jesus’s healings spread through Galilee.

Paul insists that we cannot save ourselves through moral behavior and religious codes, that we will never live up to the Law. But we can respond to God’s love and God’s goodness by faith, by trusting in God’s love and God’s goodness. It’s not just an intellectual belief, a nice thought to comfort ourselves with in difficult times, we have to act upon it for our own sake and the sake of others. Maybe this will lead us to do something remarkable and even a little crazy, but mainly what I think our readings teach us today is that faith is a life– long practice, each time we don’t let circumstances drag us down, each time we rise above fear, shame and despair, to humbly ask to be able to see and to experience God’s goodness.