(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “In The Hospital”, originally shared on October 29, 2025. It was the 378th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Do you ever imagine that all your spiritual
struggles would be over if only you had more faith? They wouldn’t. Today, we’re
going to find out what it would take, and why.
It’s been
said that the Church isn’t a museum for saints. It’s a hospital for sinners.
I’ve said it. I’ve also said that it’s
wrong.
The Church isn’t primarily like a hospital.
The work of the Church is to be more like paramedics, to go where the broken
people are, stabilize them, and then to take them to the hospital to be made
whole.
I’ve said that, too. And it’s true, but it’s
still not complete.
The problem is that many of our local
churches are more interested in being a friendly family than they are in being
either hospitals or paramedics. Look at their websites for how they describe
themselves.
The attitude is that, well, anyone can find where
we are and when we worship. The door’s open. They are welcome to come in anytime.
So they wait passively for something to
happen, something that will enable them to be who God has brought them together
to be.
That same attitude is at the center of the
reading from the Bible’s Gospels that will be shared in the vast majority of
churches this coming Sunday, Luke 17:5-10,
Jesus’
12 disciples were called apostles after they had been sent on missionary
journeys, because “apostle” means “sent one”.
They
were taught by Jesus for nearly three years. They were his closest disciples. They
felt that they could ask for things.
What
if you had been in their shoes, or sandals. If you could ask Jesus for one
thing, what would it be?
The
apostles knew. We see it in Luke 17:5,
5The apostles said to the Lord,
“Increase our faith!”
What would you do if you had more
faith? Use it like a superpower? Throw trees into the sea? Fling mountains into
the desert? Or would you seek greater service?
The apostles did have the right idea.
Faith doesn’t come as an act of our will. It is a gift from God. It is the
lived relationship for which human beings were created, now restored by the
cross of Jesus Christ and His resurrection. There’s nothing to do but repent,
open your heart, and receive it as a gift.
But, the disciples, and many of us today,
think of faith as a commodity.
They didn’t really know what they needed or
what it would cost.
When I was growing up, the people that I most admired were the adults I knew who
had a kind of luminous faith, and I wanted that. When I was able to see what
they all had in common, I realized that it was their experiences of struggle
and suffering through which they had seen God’s faithfulness. They were
faithful in response to the transformational power of God’s gifts.
So, as I grew up, I prayed that God would give me just enough of that
suffering. Not enough to sink me, but just enough to bring me through life’s
trials with that same kind of luminous faith. Then I grew up and found out what
that kind of life involved, and I stopped praying for that. 😊
The good news of salvation through faith
would come through the suffering of Jesus, and He was preparing his disciples
for that.
He replies to the apostles’ request in verses
6,
6The
Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to
this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey
you.
I had a friend who was also a pastor who
said that on the first day of the second semester of his “Introduction to The
Bible” class, the professor looked over the room and said, “I don’t know why
any of you are here for the second semester. You aren’t applying half of what
you learned in the first semester.” 😊
Jesus seems to be wondering the same thing
about the disciples, now apostles.
He used a common rhetorical technique in the
Middle East of his day by using an extreme example in order to signal an
important point. If he had meant it literally, there’d have been a lot of trees
flying around, to this day.
Instead, Jesus was making the point that the
apostles’ need for faith wasn’t a matter of quantity, but of quality.
I think you know that I was in the hospital
recently. It’s no fun, but it does give us a chance to reflect on what matters
in life.
Time seems different in a hospital. It
almost seems changed. It’s not measured in minutes and hours, but in tests and
procedures and surgeries and pain and pain management, and recovery.
I don’t watch TV in the hospital. It seems
to me a distraction from the gravity of what is happening.
When I was in the ER, a Code Blue was
called, and everything focused on the needs of that one person. The focus wasn’t
on the quantity of care that person was receiving, but the quality. I think
that that is Jesus point with regard to the request to “increase our faith” in
today’s Gospel reading. It was inspiring.
It is the kind of focus that we are called
to embody whether we live as churches or as paramedics today.
I saw a “life hack” online recently that
said something like, “Stop thinking of your life as things that happen to
you, and start thinking of it as things that happen for you.” I don’t
think that that means that God controls our lives, but that we can grow through
challenges in life by seeing them as opportunities for growth.
Any faith is faith, and faith that comes as
a gift from God is what saves us. It comes in the living relationship with the
one true living God for which we were created. Faith isn’t measured by its
amount, but by its quality.
This reality stood in contrast to the
teaching of the Pharisees who were lurking in the crowd, looking for something
they could use to bring Jesus down. The Pharisees believed and taught that
keeping the religious laws is what saves people. They were professionals at it.
They believed that they were already being blessed by God because of their good
works. Their status and respect in the eyes of the people proved it, and they
would be the ones receiving even greater rewards from God because they believed
that they were better than other people.
Jesus has an answer for them, and for his
followers, in verses 7-10,
7“Who among you would say to your
slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come
here at once and take your place at the table’? 8Would you not
rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while
I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? 9Do you thank
the slave for doing what was commanded? 10So you also, when you
have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we
have done only what we ought to have done!’”
These words startle us because we find
slavery so repugnant. In Jesus’ time it was as normal as going to the grocery
store. People thought of it as just the was things were. Every culture in the
world has owned slaves. Some still do today.
Slavery was later abolished largely by
Christians, but at the time of Christ it wasn’t chattel slavery, as it has been
in much of modern world history, but it was seen as a second-chance for
prisoners of war who weren’t killed in battle, or for people who sold their
labor to pay a debt. Slaves were given positions of prestige and trust and
could work their way out of slavery.
Jesus wasn’t condoning slavery as normal, he
was using it as an example of how very little we have to claim before God.
The last words of Martin Luther, the 16th
century Church reformer, are said to have been, “We are beggars. This is true.”
We come before God with nothing but the blood of Jesus to put us right with
God.
We don’t expect the restaurant owner to
thank us for paying our bill.
We don’t expect the government to thank us
for paying our taxes.
We don’t expect God to save us. But He does.
Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8,
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time
Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous
person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to
die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we
still were sinners Christ died for us.
The religious laws were given for our
benefit. The Pharisees had turned them into a burden. But, either way, God
didn’t give us the 10 Suggestions, He gave us 10 Commandments. God gave them as
a blessing for us to lead good lives.
But Jesus fulfilled the entire Law on the
cross. We are not saved by keeping the commandments.
We can only expect punishment either by God
or as a consequence of our own foolish choices when we break God’s laws. And
that was the end of the story of life for the Pharisees. Punishments and
rewards earned by breaking or by keeping God’s laws.
Paul explains God’s answer in the next
chapter, in Romans 6:23,
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
What is the good news of Jesus Christ?
Paul writes this to the Church at Ephesus in
Ephesians 2:8-9,
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and
this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—9 not
by works, so that no one can boast.
What if what we do and don’t do is not
what gets us into of heaven, what is this faith that saves us?
Faith is not
optimism, it is not blind, and it is not a feeling. It is not something we work
ourselves into, or something we all have to figure out for ourselves. If it is
any of those things: optimism, blind, a feeling, an accomplishment, or
something just for you, it is your faith. And because it comes
from you, it is not up to the task of Life and sooner or
later it will fail, and probably sooner rather than later.
What is
faith? Paul writes, in the 11th chapter of his letter to the
Hebrews, what many call the faith chapter, in Hebrews 11:1
“Now faith is the
assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Faith is
knowing things we don’t know, believing in things we cannot see.
This makes
us vulnerable in our own Post-enlightenment, Modern, and Post-modern culture.
We are challenged to prove that what we believe about God is true with only
material arguments. Or, more commonly, we are just blown off with the words of
Jeffery “The Dude” Lebowski, in The Big Lebowski, “Well, that's just, like, your
opinion, man”. Or people inflate every bad experience they have ever had or heard
about, every judgmental church lady or man, or every boring worship service
they ever sat through into evidence that the church is not for them and they
just form their personal religion, spiritual but not religious.
Faith that
is from you will most definitely fail.
And when
it does, where can you turn? How can a person return to faith?
First,
if your faith was from you, don’t bother trying. If faith was something you
manufactured for yourself and your own needs, it wasn’t real to begin with.
Second,
God never abandons us, but we can move away from God. There was a bumper
sticker stuck to the inside of the door to the emergency food pantry of the
church I served in Compton that said, “If you feel far from God, guess who
moved.” Turn your life around, that is, “repent” and allow God to draw you to
God.
Third,
remember that faith is not about you.
Fourth,
spend time in the Bible, the primary way that God speaks to us in the Holy
Spirit. How does this happen?
Faith
comes by hearing. In Paul’s letter to the Romans he writes, in Romans 10:17,
“So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard
comes through the word of Christ.”
The word
of Christ is Christ’s living present reality.
Fifth,
we can be the means that the Holy Spirit uses when we exercise our credible
witness. Study after study for decades has found that 80-85% of Christians come
to faith through the influence of a friend or relative, someone who is seen has
having nothing to gain, whose words are credible to them.
Sixth,
faith comes from God in community, and it can be restored there,
too. We are made for a living, personal relationship with God. We
live in the Christian community in relationship with one another in an
expression of that relationship. It is the hospital in which we are made new.
Seventh,
be real, be transparent, live before God from the inside out, live from the
transformed life within you. You are a new creation in Jesus Christ. Live from
that.
That’s how we know faith is real, even when
we struggle, even when we don’t feel anything. As Philip Dick, the science
fiction writer, once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in
it, doesn’t go away.”
Our call
is that we and all people turn to God, turn to the Ultimate Reality, the
Living Reality of the Holy Spirit, to the ongoing personal presence of
God for good in the world. Open your heart to receive the streams of living
water, the metaphor for the Holy Spirit used in both the Old and New Testament
of the Bible, to the presence of God to nourish you, inspire you, push you
sometimes, and to make of you a new Creation. God will make you into something
that is real, something that defines everything about you, something that makes
you a credible witness to others because your faith has not come from you. It
is real because it comes from God.
It’s not the quantity of our faith that
matters in life, it’s the quality, because faith that truly is faith is
the gift from God that makes us whole forever. It is found in the living
relationship with the one true living God for which all human beings were
created.
That is the meaning of faith. Accept God’s
gift of faith, accept that wholeness of mind, body and spirit that is restored
in God’s hospital, and live it today, now and forever.
