What is this Mountain

Matthew 17.14-21

When they came to the crowd, a man came to him, knelt before him, and said, ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; he often falls into the fire and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him.’ Jesus answered, ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him here to me.’ And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’

            Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him. 

            Walker Percy began his novel, The Last Gentleman, with this revelation.  The moment in life where you come to see I am not destined to be all things in all ways to all people; I am destined to do a few things, in a particular place, with a handful of people.  There is great freedom to be found in this revelation.  The trick is knowing where to look for such destiny.

            Walker Percy wrote a series of lovely novels.  The Moviegoer, Second Coming, Lancelot.  His novels all revolve around a moment of profound undoing.  The main characters each have a moment where the world they thought they had, vanished.  The sense of life being in hand, contained as in a box, well, that just goes away in an instant.  It is as if all the stuff, the ideas, the beliefs, the certainties all the parts of life wherein we need them to be in place and we keep them in a safe place, a box, but suddenly you realize the box doesn’t have a bottom and all the things you had so neatly and carefully placed in the box were never in a box at all. 

That is the stuff of a Walker Percy novel.

Perhaps you have noticed that New Jersey just passed a law banning plastic bags.  Perhaps you are like me and now find yourself gathering up groceries in your arms and walking to the car in the same way you walked about the store.  Our car is chalk full of sturdy shopping bags.  I just cannot for the life of me remember to grab one before I go into the store. 

Recently I discovered a new strategy.  In the past I would not put produce in a plastic bag as that seemed like a complete waste of resources, bag into bag into bag.  But just the other day I got a head of lettuce and I put it in a produce bag, and then I put all the rest of my groceries (the olives, the cheese, the lemons) into the bag with the lettuce.  The checkout person seemed perplexed, but the lettuce didn’t seem to mind.

When I was thinking about Walker Percy and his characters I thought of the moment when the all too heavy-laden plastic bag breaks out at the bottom.  This day is now gone perhaps.  Gone are the bags and the moment when the cheap plastic bursts out the bottom. Maybe, but maybe not.

If you have done your fair share of grocery shopping, you know the moment.  It is always the bag with the eggs and any fruit that can roll.  The bottom just falls out and you are left scurrying about the sidewalk for your fleeing oranges.

Sometimes life is like that.  The bottom just falls out.  It might be your fault: bags have a limit and perhaps you put too much in it.  Each of us has moments where we tried too hard, where we reached too far, we aimed just a bit too high.  It may be the bag manufacturer’s fault whose machine didn’t quite finish making the one bag you needed not to fail. The Bible is filled with prophets and poets railing against a god who seems to be asleep.  Or it may just be the odds were not in your favor and no excuse offers consolation to your eggs now dripping on the sidewalk.

We seek such rationales when the bag that is broken is our heart or our ideal or most importantly our sense of certainty.  Most people I know do not live with complete certainty that life is wonderful and just and true and good and beautiful.  Most people have doubts and fears, and some even have a healthy dose of cynicism.  Yet, for the most part, most people have a sense of hope, even if it is hidden deep beneath unfortunate circumstance, even if it is not completely certain.  Like Little Orphan Annie, there is an indomitable belief, the sun will come out tomorrow; or Nina Simone crooning, the sun is going to shine in my backdoor someday.

These are the songs that seem to rise from the Walker Percy moments of the bottom falling out, the bag breaking, the loss of certainty.  It would just be nice if we could have the complexity of life without the cruelty, the depth of wisdom without the brokenness of hard lessons. That would be nice.

In our reading today, if we slow down, we can enter the confusion and heartbreak of the father.  It’s hard but if we wade into this murky water of a father’s plea, we can hear the weariness of living in chronic suffering, the chaos that comes when the bottom falls out and the bag breaks, when life is certainly not wonderful.

I met the father in our story once a long time ago in a grocery store.  The father followed his son, who was obviously suffering from schizophrenia, the father followed his son as the young man wandered the streets of San Diego and touched things.  That was his obsession. The young man was obsessed with touching things as if he needed to see that they were real.  You know the phrase, “pinch me” so to be sure this is not a dream.  Well, this young man needed to touch things to see if they were really there.

I watched the young man touch things in the grocery store where I worked in college.  He made his way through the store touching things.  He was quite harmless.  I knew that, but some of the people he touched didn’t know that.  Roger, the produce guy, didn’t know that and he really didn’t like him touching all the fruit.  Roger would chase after him and this spurred the young man to touch as much fruit as possible which led to fruit all over the floor before he dashed out the door.

Then I would see his father.  He was an old looking man; he came to pay for the damage.  The father must have been my age, but he looked ancient.  He was weary, ragged, beaten.  He followed his son each day.  When something went sideways, he did his best to make amends.  He gave a few dollars to pay for the now ruined fruit, although it wasn’t really ruined.  Nevertheless, he paid for it, paid for his son, and then resumed the path.  I know it is not right, but it was funny to watch Roger overreact, and the young man try to touch as many apples as possible. 

It was comic until the father arrived. 

I met the father in our story in the grocery store and it was heartbreaking.

The father in our story, pleading for his son, has not only entered the place in life where “everything is broken”, he is also living in the hard, desperate place, where the world has no bottom. Life is chaos.

It’s not easy, but we have to step into this hard place, even if it is for just a moment, to hear what Jesus tells his disciples.  If we do not wade into the brokenness of the father and the son, then the words Jesus gives to his disciples are vacuous and quite possibly dangerous.

The dangerous words are the last ones: nothing will be impossible for you.  These are dangerous words.  They are dangerous if we read this teaching without the heartbreak of the father, the misery of the son.  The danger is when we become convinced, we can find a place to keep all our certainties in a nice little box.  Without the father Jesus is simply offering grandiosity, false certainty.

Nothing will be impossible for you.  You can say to the mountain, be gone.  Jesus tells his disciples they can say to the mountain, be cast into the sea and it will be so.  This can be read like a motivational poster: you can do it!  Work hard and try your best and you will be rich and handsome and popular.  If God is for us who can be against us; with Christ, we are more than conquerors.  These platitudes are very dangerous, and they have nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus.

The prosperity gospel and the falsity of certain success are dangerous.  Nothing in the life of Jesus paints a picture of unbridled success, a place beyond the chaos of life. This false certainty is a stumbling block, especially the idea that God is on our side.  The stumbling block comes clear if we remember the father and ask, “What is the mountain we are moving?”

The answer is found in the suffering.  Jesus tells his disciples: there is nothing broken you cannot heal, nothing crushed you cannot restore.  The mountain to be moved is heartbreak.  The mountain is the heaping mass of false certainty, false belief, falsity itself.  We can move this mountain, remove it as it were.

Jesus tells his disciples we can wade in and heal and amend and restore.  Nothing will be impossible for you is not about unbridled success in riches or fame.  It is certainly not a life lived above the fray of tragedy or betrayal or chaos.  At this point of the Gospel Jesus is preparing his disciples for his suffering and their failure.  The possibility is not how vast, how great an empire you can build; the possibility is how much of the brokenness of life can you heal.

Not too long ago, Robert Putnam wrote what I believe is the most important book for the church and our future.  The book is Our Kids.  What was so powerful, what was so significant was this: he identified the mountain. He answered the question: what is this mountain?”  The mountain he described is chaos.  He studied kids in different social/economic strata; he looked at different parts of the country; he looked at the different types of family structures kids were raised in and the one common denominator, the common struggle of all, was chaos.  How the bottom of life falls out, how the bag breaks.

You can be a fourteen-year-old girl being raised by two wealthy, successful parents who provide you with riding lessons and trips around the world, but your life can be complete chaos.  You can be a fourteen-year-old girl living in poverty in a trailer with one parent who is struggling with addiction and your life can be complete chaos.  Our Kids is such a powerful book because it wades into our story today and doesn’t confuse the possibility of success with the possibility of healing. 

There are moments in life where the safe place we kept all our certainties, the box where we placed our treasures, there are moments where we realize there is no bottom to the box.  The bag we filled with groceries bursts and our oranges roll and our eggs crack.  The order of things becomes chaos. We can try harder, and we can press on, and we can blame or deny.  But what we really need to do is stop.  Just stop.

We need to find the mustard seed of faith that says “healing will happen, life will be restored, and we can walk and not be weary.  This healing is possible; this day can come.” The weary father can see the ravaged son be whole again.  This is possible. 

If you are living in chaos today, if you’re feeling the heartbreak of finding out: hey, there is no bottom on the box, if that is your day today, the church is for you, the faith you need is here.  You don’t have it right now.  That is what suffering is all about.  But look around you.  You’re not alone.  Here is a place to find peace in the chaos of what seems impossible.  Nothing will be impossible for you. Amen