Sunday, June 2, 2013

Asking for Help

This is the “Summer of Hope” at Luther Memorial Church.  What is hope?  Hope is current confidence in a better future.  I often suggest that the method of hope can best be represented by the acronym, “I-HOPE.”  Those letters stand for:

·       I—Identity: who I think I am shapes my hopes.
·       H—Help: hopeful people get the help they need and give the help they can.
·       O—Optimistic thinking styles: people of hope see possibilities rather than problems.
·       P—Pathways to the future: hopeful people are open to alternative life paths.
·       E—Ends or purposes that matter.

I want to focus on the second letter, the “H” in “I-HOPE.” Hopeful people get all the help they need and give all the help they can.

At our worship today we talked about the centurion in Luke 7.  He is a prime example of a hopeful person.  He is a man of power and authority, of influence and impact, of worth and wealth.  The Jews of the area report his reputation to Jesus.  “He is worthy of having you do this for him,” they declare, “for he loves our people and it is he who built our synagogue for us.”  In modern Jewish terminology, he was a “righteous Gentile.”  He had earned the right of having Jesus’ attention.

The centurion was also unaccustomed to asking for help.  Look at the little autobiography he shares.  “”For I am also a man…with soldiers under me; and I say to gone, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes,’ and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.’”  He is a man used to giving orders and being obeyed.  He is not a man in the habit of asking another for help.

Asking for help is one of the hardest things most of us can try to do.  If we’re honest, many times we think something like this.  “There is no way I am going to be dependent on someone else like that,” we think.  “I don’t want any help.  I don’t need any help.  And as far as I’m concerned, people who ask for help are weak and needy.  I’d rather suffer and die than ask for that kind of help.”

In the ancient world, asking for help was an admission of weakness.  It was a mark of dishonor.  Asking for help put the centurion in Jesus’ debt.  Asking for help made Jesus his superior.  And he was willing to do this to get what he needed for his slave.

It is any wonder that Jesus marveled at his faith!  The centurion treated Jesus as a man with God’s authority.  The centurion put himself aside and got the help he needed.

Hopeful people get all the help they need and give all the help they can.

How is it that Jesus praises the centurion’s “faith”?  Martin Luther defines faith in God as the willingness to trust God for what we need.  Luther discusses this issue in the Large Catechism.  He explains the First Commandment—“You shall have no other gods.”  He does this by first asking a question: “What is it to have a god?  What is God?”

I want to quote his answer:

“A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need.  To have a god is nothing other than to trust and believe him with our whole heart…That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.”[i]

Luther expands on this as he explains the Lord’s Prayer.  “To pray,” Luther writes, “is to call upon God in every need…By invocation and prayer the name of God is glorified and used to good purpose.”[ii]  God expects us to ask for God’s help.  That is how we treat God as God.

This pagan is a prime example of Reggie McNeal’s indictment of the church.  I shared that indictment a few weeks ago, but it’s worth sharing again.  “The North American church culture,” he writes, “is not spiritual enough to reach our culture.”[iii] 

We church people have become functional atheists. We intellectually assent to the idea that God exists.  We are glad that Jesus died and that the next life is managed for us.  But we don’t really believe that God can make any difference in this life.

This pagan had more trust that Jesus could heal than church people do.  “I tell you,” Jesus declares to the crowd, “not even in Israel have I found such faith.”  I pray that this critique is not one that sticks for long to the Church in North America.




[i] Tappert, The Book of Concord, p. 365.
[ii] Tappert, The Book of Concord, p.421.
[iii] Reggie McNeal, The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church, page 27.

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