Lectionary 11.09                                                          Christ Church , York

It is one of the more clever advertising campaigns on television today - that little gecko who is the company representative for Geico insurance. I enjoy the ads, partly because they are fun…and of course that gecko has the loveliest English accent. I particularly liked one of the recent ads where the company president does his little trust exercise with the gecko by falling backwards, confident that the creature will catch him. It’s a clever ad because many of us have experienced similar exercises at school, or work or whenever any group wants to build trust between its members. Indeed in one of my previous lives we did these exercises regularly as part of our sensitivity training for working with the mentally and physically disabled in our programs. Even as President and CEO of the company I participated in such exercises which sometimes involved splinting our arms out straight so that we knew what it was like to be spoon fed by another person; sometimes it meant spending some hours in a wheelchair so that we would know what it was like to be pushed around by another, often to places we did not want to go. But of all the exercises, the one I least enjoyed was when they would blindfold us and lead us around. Most of us like to be in control of our lives and our living and while it was difficult to be fed by someone else or pushed around in a wheelchair by another, I found the blind exercise to be the most difficult because then I truly knew what it meant to be at the complete mercy of another and to have to learn to walk by faith and not by sight. But on the other hand of all the exercises, it was that one which produced the greatest level of trust, a trust which goes way beyond even the falling backwards exercise, for now your whole life, safety and welfare is guided by the hands, the eyes and the feet of another.

“For we walk by faith, not by sight,” the apostle Paul tells us this morning. Preachers down through the ages have spoken to their congregations about this text, how it is that they are to have faith even in the things that they cannot see or understand. But these words from Paul and the words of Jesus in our Gospel lesson this morning go much deeper than just an urging to have just a little more faith or a little more confidence in God when the going is getting tough. Instead both Paul and Jesus are calling for something far more extreme, far more radical and far more difficult. They are calling for us to take a massive leap of faith, beyond even that which even a six foot man has when he places his faith in a six inch gecko to catch him.

You may believe that you have already taken some pretty big leaps of faith in our lives. After all at this time of year, when high schools graduate their senior class, lots of young people are taking leaps of faith as they go off to college or enter the workforce. Young men and women take leaps of faith as they enter into the covenant of marriage, hoping and praying that they have found just the right person with whom to spend their lives. Moving to a new job, a new area, a new home, all call for leaps of faith on our part. But are they really? After all we visited those colleges before choosing the right one to attend; we checked out that job, that new area, even that new career before we entered into them. And we even checked out our spouses before we married them so as to be sure that we could live with them for the rest of our lives; this is the prudent and wise way of doing things. But the radical challenge that Paul and Jesus lay out before us is far different from these other leaps of faith for they call for us to go beyond the prudent and the sensible ways of operating or the wise ways of the world which make sense, to go beyond that which is reasonable, rational and logical and call for us to walk in faith, even when it makes no sense; to walk in faith even when it flies in the face of what seems real or logical; to place our faith not in what makes sense but in what in what appears to be nonsense. We are called to walk by faith not sight.

It sounds simple this walking by faith and not sight, but it is amazingly difficult. As I found out each time we engaged in that sensitivity training, we humans like to be in control and we don’t like to trust others or to place ourselves in their hands. And yet it was me who likes to be in control; me who likes to be independent and not reliant on another; me who likes to process all the information I can see; me who likes to be rational and logical; me who likes to know where I am going – me who found myself now without sight, being led by another and being forced to learn to walk by faith and not by sight. And in that walking I found that I had to trust another when they said they would help me down the stairs; that I had to trust another when they said that they would not let me fall; and that if I started to fall I had to trust that they would catch me. This was a difficult exercise because I was not willing to take a leap of faith, preferring to trust in myself and not the other.

To walk by faith and not by sight. It sounds so simple but it is so hard to do. We want to trust only in those things that we see, those things which make sense to us. And that’s what the people were probably doing when Jesus spoke to them about a mustard seed that would grow into a large tree. They had seen tiny mustard seeds and they knew that they grew into large bushes. But for that tiny mustard seed to grow into a large tree, especially a tree big enough for birds to nest in it, made no sense and seemed beyond belief. But Jesus was not asking them for their commitment based on those things that made sense. Instead He was asking them for faith even if that meant believing in what seemed like nonsense. And then Paul comes along and speaks of death in our second lesson. If there is anything in our world that seems final and absolute, it is when a person is dead. That’s it; over and done with; the end. Yet Paul tells us that if this earthly tent, this body, is destroyed, there will be something else, something far greater, something far stronger. Nonsense, irrational, illogical! Absolutely! But then Paul is not saying that it makes sense but rather that, in walking by faith and not sight, we see that death is not the end, only the beginning; that while this earthly body will perish in the grave, we will rise again in new life at the end of time; and that death is merely the beginning of an eternal life forever in God’s kingdom.

There is much in our world that does not make sense – the wars, the hatred, the misery, the anguish, the pain and the suffering. None of these makes sense when viewed through the lens of human sight. But God asks us to have faith, that in spite of all this, He is still Lord of all and continues to reign supreme over all the earth. And if our world does not make sense at times, our faith seems to make even less sense at others. How can there be faith when there is bad blood in a congregation? How can there be faith when the Christian world is so divided among itself, with even more splits being threatened today within our own denomination? How can there be faith when bad things happen to seemingly good people, while good things happen to those who seem bad? And it is hard to have faith when we see those around us who have no faith seeming to prosper and grow while we suffer and languish. But then we are being asked to walk by faith and not by sight.

Once again this day then Jesus and Paul come, asking us to enter into this radical trust of walking by such faith and not sight. Once again we are asked to believe in faith that a tiny mustard seed will become a tree and that life can come out of those bodies of our loved ones that have died. Once again we are asked to have faith in this God who has always shown Himself to be faithful to His people, even when the people were not faithful to their God. Once again we are asked to put our faith in this God who in love sent His only Son to die for us and who then raised that same Son from the dead. And like that man in the Geico advertisement, we are even asked to trust that this God of ours will catch us when we fall! In short, we are asked once again, to enter into this radical, life changing, life-defining trust where we will learn to walk by faith and not by sight.

The call has gone out from Jesus and Paul for us to take that leap of faith, to give up our self-centered control and really begin to trust God. I heard a song recently that said when we talk about faith it’s a bit like being a little kid with a batman cape who believes that if he stands in the middle of the room, takes a deep breath and spreads his arms wide, then indeed he will fly; he will fly! That is the faith of the little child; that is the radical faith called for us as we live in our adult lives; that is the faith which says that, unlike the uncertainty of whether that little gecko could actually catch that big man when he fell backwards, we can trust this God to catch us when we fall and to lift us up in His ever-loving arms. This is the trust that walks in faith and not sight and, in good time, this is the faith that will lead us through the gates of death itself into everlasting life. Amen