Faith Beyond Borders

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[0:00] Now it's time for our sermon. Our sermon reading is from Luke chapter 7, verses 1 through 10. Luke 7, 1 through 10. And we are in our... Oh, I have to say one thing. This is something I forgot from the announcements. So the rummage sale went super well. And at the end of the rummage sale, the last half hour, we just told everybody, everything is free. Just got to go. Got to go. Because otherwise, we're just going to have to drive it somewhere. So those of you who didn't know that, when you leave here and you see something you want, just take it home. Just go. Get it out of here. I even told somebody who emailed me that they're going to come here at 1145. So I'll have to be quick, you know, that they can come back because they missed the rummage sale. This is somebody from the community. And I said, you can come and take anything you want for free. And so I fully expect a few people to show up. And we'll just give them coffee and treats. And they can take all the stuff they want. And hopefully, they'll take it all. But I doubt it because it would not fit in one vehicle. So take some stuff home. Anyways, that was... That was... Back in the announcements. Let's go to the sermon now. Luke 7, 1 through 10. And as Victoria said, we're in week two of a five-week series on miracles.

[1:09] Last week was about miracles of nature. This week, miracles of healing. Next week, miracles of power over spiritual darkness. And May 22nd, miracles of the resurrection or of resurrection. And finally, the last Sunday of this month, May 29th, the Holy Spirit and the miracle of faith. Which perhaps is the greatest of all. Let me talk about the holy book of Luke and the holy book of Acts. Let me talk about the holy book of Acts. Let me talk about the holy book of Acts. Let me talk about the holy book of Acts. of Galilee is where he is. And he has also been in a synagogue and said, you know, I'm the one whom Isaiah foretold. The prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing. And so Jesus is really beginning to announce his ministry. He's beginning to heal people. He's beginning to show some miracles.

[2:17] Some of the themes that I'm going to have you listen for as we read and we'll go through today is one of the themes is the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles. We have a prominent Gentile here, and it's a good relationship in this particular vicinity, but Jesus manages to confront racism while he is preaching or teaching on this in our reading today. So that's interesting to look for. Another theme is the power of the miraculous. So you remember that one of the questions that we're asking ourselves in this sermon series on miracles is, do we actually believe these miracles as we've had them recorded for us actually work? And so we're going to look at the power of the miraculous. Do we actually believe these miracles as we've had them recorded for us actually work? And so we're Or is there some other explanation for it, right? And I think our reading today is not only going to highlight the miracle of healing, but it's going to highlight the power that Jesus has to do miracles and where that power comes from and whether or not we can trust that these are really miracles or if there's some other explanation. And then finally, how some miracles take place. What are some ingredients that we see in miracles? So a little more general teaching on miracles

[3:27] itself. So without that introduction, let's go to our reading is Luke chapter 7, 1 through 10. Let's begin. After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly. Saying, he is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people. And it is he who built our synagogue for us. And Jesus went with them. But when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore, I did not preserve presume to come to you, but only speak the word and let my servant be healed. For I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. I am a man set under authority with soldiers under me. And I say to one, go. And he goes. And to another, come. And he comes. And to my slave, do this. And the slave does it.

[4:39] When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him. And turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith. When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health. Let's pray.

[4:59] Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. And we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, again, we have a healing story, or a miraculous story, this time a miraculous story of healing. And I want to say something before we kind of move into everything else, but this is all related, about this Roman officer. We don't know his name, so he's a nameless person, but he develops quite a character in just these 10 verses here.

[5:26] If you follow the narrative, you will see that he is a man of God. And you realize that Jesus and this centurion have a dialogue with each other of sorts, but they never actually meet face to face. Did you catch that? They never actually meet, which is interesting. It's very interesting. All their interactions take place through intermediaries. And so at first, it's some elders who go to Jesus. And so Jesus starts coming. And then he sends a few more people to meet him, not even halfway, but close to his house. So he's always communicating with Jesus through intermediaries. And this builds on what we know about this man. He has a good reputation among the Jews of Capernaum. He helped build a synagogue for them. And this is a bit unusual because relationships between Jews and Gentiles was generally poor. The Gentiles were foreigners in their land. They were oppressors. There was not a lot of love there. Jews would definitely not have a Gentile in their house. And the Gentile here maybe thinks that Jesus would not have a Gentile in their house. He would not even enter his house. Or that he is not worthy enough for Jesus to enter his house. And so we have here quite an unusual Gentile. One who thinks that Jesus is more worthy than him, which is not kind of an imperial way of thinking.

[6:42] And one who has helped the community that he's been set over instead of being antagonistic towards that community. He's also as unenlightened as it is to own slaves or servants. He's a more enlightened slave owner than other slave owners. Because he has this great affection for one of his slaves. And so when the slave back then, life wasn't worth that much. So if a slave got sick and was almost going to die, you might not do that much. You might just go buy another one. Although slaves could be expensive. But in this case, he had this great compassion for his slave. And he goes out of his way to find someone who can heal him.

[7:21] And he doesn't approach Jesus directly. But he asks other people to communicate with Jesus. Now, often Jesus is more interested in direct communication than indirect communication. That's the one way Jesus just acts in all sorts of other circumstances. He doesn't normally play telephone. You know the telephone, like he told me and then he told me? Jesus doesn't normally play telephone. But this man understands who Jesus is and what he can do. And so he answers. And he also feels unworthy to actually be in Jesus' presence or to ask him directly. So he sends people that he thinks Jesus would have a higher estimation of. The Jewish elders of Capernaum.

[8:10] What he doesn't realize is that he could have come to Jesus directly. Anyone can come to Jesus, right? And nobody is too small for Jesus to help. And nobody is too far from God's grace to be in Jesus' presence. But he didn't know that. All he knew is that Jesus would come. And he was a great healer. And so he sends people to meet him.

[8:32] And then what he also realizes about Jesus is sort of a more pragmatic thing. And this is going to be related to our next theme here. Is that Jesus doesn't need to come all the way to his house. Jesus only needs to say a word. And that word will have some power because of how he understands his own profession as being in the Roman army. Okay. So the word. That's our second theme. The second theme. And I want to. This is more generally about miracles too. When you notice or when you study miracles. And they vary to some degrees. That's the interesting thing about miracles is there's no cookie cutter miracle. They all are different in interesting ways. But there are some commonalities. A few important ingredients in almost every miracle. Now one is the faith. Sometimes, most times, there's faith involved. Especially on the part of the person who's receiving the miracle. So that. And Jesus often will say your faith has made you well. That doesn't mean that the miraculous didn't happen. It doesn't mean that Jesus' power wasn't on display. But it kind of says that there's a limit to what Jesus can do for somebody if faith is not present. He kind of won't intrude into their lives unless they're open to it and wanting it and believing that it can happen.

[9:54] So faith is a very important ingredient. But again, there's exceptions to this. Sometimes he heals people without their faith. Sometimes he heals people without them asking for it. Which I think is beautiful. It's one of the great things that there's these little variations. And it reminds me of the grace of God. Sometimes the grace of God is there for you when you ask for it. When you believe in it. When you hope for it. Sometimes it feels like the grace of God chases you around despite your sins. And it goes into the darkest places. And it taps you on the shoulder. And it doesn't let go of you. So there's something about that too that's beautiful. These miracles, sometimes Jesus pursues people who don't even ask for help.

[10:39] So, and that's actually maybe me most of the time. The grace is tapping me on the shoulder even when I'm not asking for it. It comes out of nowhere, which is awesome. So another ingredient in miracles is touch. Right? Jesus often, but not always, touches people. He lays hands on them. And sometimes in one case he makes some mud and he rubs it on the eyes of somebody who has an eye disease. And their disease is healed. Right? So physical touch is a reminder of the incarnation. Jesus is God coming to the world in the flesh. And we have in Jesus a God whom we can touch. Which is also good news. And I praise God for that. Right? And there are other ingredients, but the final one for us today that is almost always present is that in a healing miracle, almost all miracles in fact, a word is spoken. Something is said out loud. But not always. Okay? So, for example, Jesus tells the storm to be still. Words. Right? Last week when he made food enough for 5,000 people, he gave thanks. Before he did it. He spoke a blessing over the food that he had. And this multiplication occurred. Other phrases like be healed and so on. Or your faith has made you well. So miracles are almost always accompanied by some proclamation of words.

[12:11] But again, there's an exception. For example, there was a woman with a long illness. And all she did was touch Jesus and she was healed. No words were spoken except for after the fact. After the healing. Right? So there's always exceptions.

[12:25] I think the word is one of the most important though. Because miracles and proclamations are almost always connected to each other. Right? Especially in John's gospel. But also in the others. So the miracle accompanied by the word is not just a miracle, but it's a proclamation about who Jesus is and what he's doing in the world. And it's kind of a microcosm for all the miraculous that God does in the ministry of Jesus. And it all leads to the miracle of the resurrection and the miracle of faith that we have in that. So there's this great power in words. And there's power in God's word. But think of our own words. Just think of your own words for a second. And you may think back with sadness. Or you may think back with gladness or a mixture.

[13:13] You can imagine that a word, when it leaves our mouth, it takes on a power and a life of its own. And it can wound us. It can wound or it can heal. And I know I would love to have some words back that I've spoken. And the problem is they left my mouth and you can't. There's no undo button, is there? There's no pulling it back. And it goes out there and it lives. And it could live a very long time. Thank God the same is true of good words that we say. Right? Words have this immense power. You've heard that the pen is mightier than the sword. That is so true. That is so true. Even with wars. And there's war going on right now. The words about this war are more powerful than the weapons in this war. It's still true. Because the words are what's going to last longer than the war. So words are incredibly powerful. So if our words are powerful when we speak them, how much more is that true when God speaks? Think about that. When God says something. When Jesus speaks, how powerful is that? For example, in Isaiah 55 we read that God's word is like the rain. It comes down. It waters the earth. It makes things grow. It does not come back to him empty. But it accomplishes those things that he wants it to accomplish.

[14:29] So that God has this personification almost of his word. That it goes out and it does things. It has its own power. The word accomplishes things. And Jesus speaks. He speaks healing words. And healing happens.

[14:44] Now the grandfather example of all this miraculous speaking. You have to go all the way to the very beginning of the Bible, don't you? Genesis chapter 1. The creation of the universe. The creation of the world. Do you notice that God doesn't like rub his hands together? Or wave? I mean if he had a giant wand and a hat. And he would tap the hat and the universe would sort of fly out of it. It doesn't happen that way. How does God create the universe? He speaks a word. He says, Let there be light. And the cosmos are flung into existence. And that's the creation of matter on a grand order. We talked about creation of matter last week. Remember how much power is needed to make 100 grams of food? It was all the gasoline that fits into 117 jumbo jets. That's a lot of fuel. 63,000 gallons in each one.

[15:45] So more nerd stuff coming. So you can tune out if you want. But somebody calculated. And I'm sure this is off by a few orders of magnitude. But at this point it doesn't matter. How much energy did it take to create the universe as we know it? Well the answer is 10 to the 68th power joules. That's not like joules in your crown in heaven. It's spelled J-O-U-L-E-S. It's a measurement of energy. Right?

[16:16] Is it a Newton percentage? Newton per second squared? Newton meter per second? Yeah, a Newton meter. Thank you, Blake. See we have engineers in the crowd. Energy is mass times energy squared. Anyways, so 10 to the power of 68. What does that mean? Well, a lot of zeroes. 68 zeroes behind it. Now let's convert it into the 747 thing. All right. Now it's smaller. But not by much. 1.312335958 nerd stuff. Okay. 1.3 times 10 to the 55.

[16:56] 747 is full of the gasoline that would fit into all those airplanes. I mean that's a lot. Just think about it. It doesn't matter if you're off by a factor of 10 or 100. It doesn't matter. We're talking about there's no word in our language for numbers that big. It's just 1.3 with the 55 zeroes at the end. Think of all those 747s. All those 747s lined up in a row and all their fuel tanks full. That's how much energy it took to fling the cosmos into existence. That's what was unleashed when God said, let there be light.

[17:28] Now this is all related now to our last theme, right? This is about the credibility of miracles. Do we actually believe that miracles happened when we said they did? And again, do we believe that they can still happen, right? Now one thing is we can analyze miracles too much. We can kind of pick them apart. And we can look for alternative explanations that would then make them not miraculous. And that's a fun thing to do, especially for an atheist. They're like, well, I think I can figure out these were lies and this one I think I can figure out. So for example, maybe Jesus was just sort of a holistic healer. He used mud to clean this eye disease. He knew some sort of homeopathic treatments from way back in the day. He knew some sort of medicine that would help heal people back when. And for the other ones, it was more like a placebo effect. His warmth and his friendliness helped people to feel better. And so he didn't really heal anybody. He was kind of just a smart doctor.

[18:26] And people just felt better being around him, right? Now this wouldn't cover the more extreme illnesses that he healed. In Luke chapter 14, there's a person who had dropsy, which was what we call edema. It's a heavy swelling. That doesn't go away instantly. Even with a medical intervention, if you give somebody a medical intervention, it will take time for that fluid to drain out of the body. But this person was healed in a moment. There's nothing short of miraculous there, right? He was healed right away.

[18:58] Once somebody told me that the miracle of the feeding of 5,000 that we got last week was really that once Jesus... Now listen, it actually makes sense in a way, but we're going to refute it. Once Jesus started sharing that little bit of food he had, all the other people there had actually brought food with them, but they were kind of keeping it close to their vest because they didn't want to share. But once they saw Jesus share, then they all started sharing. And the miracle wasn't this great miracle of creating something out of nothing. It was just the miracle of community. It was the miracle of love. It was the miracle of sharing. Kind of like that stone soup story from Eastern Europe. So that's the miracle. Generosity is the miracle. And it's a nice story. And there's no doubt that it can happen.

[19:48] But some of it just comes from skepticism about the miraculous. At heart, these miracles are fake. They're embellished. There's other explanations. The real power is in the virtue of humanity. But if you think the power is in the virtue of humanity, then you haven't been paying attention to anything at all for the last forever. Right? The virtue of humanity is by no means miraculous. There's no way. Right?

[20:16] This miracle that we're looking at today in particular kind of puts the lie to that. And it draws all our themes together. That's what I like about it. It kind of draws all our themes together. The centurion says a simple thing that shows his faith. It's a faith that is greater than any that Jesus can find among the Jews of Israel, which must sting for some of his listeners to hear. So he's surrounded by Jewish people, and he says, this Gentile has more faith than you all. And so that kind of shakes up the sort of the racial balance in that neighborhood. Right? Very interesting.

[20:51] But faith is this important ingredient in miracles. And the centurion says to Jesus indirectly, just say the word, and you can heal my slave from a distance. So Jesus heals with the word. Now, we don't hear him say it, but he must say something. Right? He says that person. Okay. Really by saying this person's faith is greater than any in Israel, he's saying, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this miracle.

[21:18] And so in this case, a healing isn't from touch even. Because he never even gets close to the person that's healed. It's from a distance. It's, you know, it's like telemetry. Right? It's like a wireless phone or something. He has this ability to even reach across the world. He can reach across space. So it's not physical touch, but it's faith. But there's some word involved. Right? So it's the word operating over a distance. Now, here's the question for us.

[21:50] If we believe that God can create the universe with the word, how can we not believe that he can do these things? And I think that's where we start. Right? I would always go back to Genesis. If I'm skeptical about the miraculous and say, I don't know if that really happened or not, then I would just always go back to Genesis. But he created the universe with the word. Is there anything that's too difficult for him after that? I don't think so. Right?

[22:17] So he does. God does great things, miraculous things in the scriptures, and he does it through Jesus, or Jesus does it as the incarnation of God. God made flesh. And so in the next weeks, we're going to want to talk about whether we believe that miracles are still happening now. And we're going to ask, as we go through it in coming weeks, we're going to ask you to tell us about miracles that you have received. And we want to share those stories. Okay?

[22:46] But for this week, I want you to bask in the healing words of Jesus. So I want you to hear the words of Jesus. Jesus says, if you have faith, and not even if you have faith, but you have great faith, or that it's because of your faith that you're healed, but even then God's grace will chase you down, even if you don't express faith. Jesus says you're healed. You're made whole. You're brought back to life. You're fed. He thanks God for the food, and it comes. Right? Now, I want to repeat a part of our call to worship today. And these are words of power, of healing, of hope, of praise, and they're for you. And I want you to hear the word as it is. And I'm going to pray in a way that words will heal you today and heal us. Like there's this powerful, just power in hearing God's words. God's words spoken for us. So I'll read again a little bit from Psalm 111. It goes like this. He provides food for those who fear him. He is ever mindful of his covenant. He has shown his people the power of his works in giving them the heritage of the nations. The works of his hands are faithful and just. All his precepts are trustworthy. And I'll pray now that we will have these healing words with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this powerful healing miracle that we read about today.

[24:12] And Father, let your word continue to create both faith in us and healing in us. And we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.