Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, amen. The text for the sermon is the Gospel, which was read earlier.
What do you suppose it would be like to have to witness your child suffer from demon possession? The thought itself is chilling, isn’t it? The demon periodically throws your child into the fire trying to burn him to death. It throws him into the water trying to drown him. Destruction, death, of course, is the goal! Your son or daughter rolls around on the ground and foams at the mouth. The demon has taken away his ability to hear and to speak. You awaken each day wondering what the day will be like. Despite all of your previous disappointments, your hope remains because you are a child of God by grace. Not only are you His by grace, your child is His too by grace too. Though God seems to have forgotten His child, your child, you continue to believe that He has loved him unto death, even death on the cross.
That is what we see in Mark’s account of Jesus casting out a demon of a young boy. The father of the child goes to the disciples but they are unable to cast out the demon. The father then goes to Jesus in hopes that He would be able to free his son from the grasp of the demon. The request that the father makes is not one that shows great faith. He says, “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” The father’s faith had taken a nose-dive because the disciples had been unable to help him. By the time Jesus and three of the disciples returned to the village, the man was spent. Frustrated and disappointed, this father was losing hope, losing his faith.
The troubled faith that the father experiences is no different than the troubled faith that you and I experience. When we receive bad news from our doctor, we wonder how that could happen to me, an every-Sunday church goer. When a loved one is taken away from us, we blame God for not keeping that person in our life. But just as Jesus encourages the man, so He encourages us as well. Jesus tells the man and us, “All things are possible for one who believes.”
Without skipping a beat, the response of the man is one of anxiousness and great anxiety: “I believe; help my unbelief!” Such desperation like that of this father, if not answered, can lead to unbelief, taking many forms. There are many explanations to a person’s unbelief, but few if any are good excuses for lack of faith and unbelief. Unbelief is no respecter of persons and it doesn’t play favorites. It plagues all kinds of people, even that of Jesus’ disciples.
One the best examples of this is Judas. After following Jesus for three years, he was enticed to betray his Lord, our Lord, for thirty pieces of silver. As Christians, we do confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord of all, that He can do anything, and that He will always provide us our daily bread. Do we believe it though—wholeheartedly? Does our faith waver like that of the father or is our faith steadfast in the Lord, 24/7? Don’t be too quick on your answer, for your fruits of faith betray your confession of faith. You can fool everyone else, including yourself, but you can’t fool God.
We are helpless without God. The Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to say it this way, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins.” Dead people can’t do anything. They can’t even believe for themselves. Jesus Himself said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
As we see this scene play out, this scene is the greatest help, for this is where our Lord comes upon a situation and takes command. In whatever dire circumstances, desperate and frustrating, we are never out of reach of our Lord, never beyond His presence. In other instances, we see that the disciples had cast out demons, but not today. It seems that the disciples may have slipped out of faith into unbelief at the fact they were not successful. The disciples asked Jesus in private why they could not cast out the demon out. After all, Jesus had given them authority to do just that when He sent them out and they had in fact driven out demons before, but why not now? Jesus responds by saying, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” When the disciples’ first attempts had proved futile, they should have realized they needed to seek the Lord in prayer. This was not a power that was inherent to them, and it is not a power that is inherent to us either.
Our faith is not a gift that is inherent to us. It is a gift that is given to us, not something that we are born with, not something that we earn. It is faith in Jesus that gives us this hope. At another time and place, Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” From this we learn that only faith in the Son of God, Jesus Christ Himself, saves us from condemnation. Any other faith condemns us to eternity in hell.
Just as Jesus was the only solution for the demon-possessed son, so also Jesus is the only solution for us. Just as Jesus dealt with the demon in today’s Gospel, He also deals with the sin in us. He does not ask us to work off our own sin. Instead, He worked off our sins for us. He took our sins onto Himself and then carried them to the cross. He took the punishment of our sins on Himself so that we do not have to suffer for them. He conquered sin with His suffering and death and then conquered death by rising from the grave. Now He offers the cure for sin to all mankind.
We receive this cure by faith, but even here, the forces of sin try to deceive us. The devil, the world, and our own sinful nature try to convince us that this faith is something we produce in ourselves. Unfortunately, there is a popular song that starts with the words: “I have decided to follow Jesus.” Just think how detrimental that is to our salvation. We are the ones doing the work. What is worse is if you haven’t decided to follow Jesus, then what?
For us, we pray as did the father: “I believe; help my unbelief!” When we Christians pray this prayer, we acknowledge that our faith is weak and we can do nothing to maintain it, let alone strengthen it. We are crying out to God from our utter helplessness and begging Him to keep us in the one, true faith until He comes to take us home to Himself in heaven.
You have been given faith. This faith is yours as a gift, not because you earned it but because God has granted it to you through the Holy Spirit. It is your means of coming to God, in the sure and certain truth that because of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, your sins have been forgiven. It is your promise that in times of doubt and despair, God has not forsaken you but has placed His name upon you in the waters of Holy Baptism. Through this faith, He calls you to believe in Christ, who has earned for you the gift of everlasting life. Even in those times where you feel that you are far from God or that God has abandoned you, you have nothing to fear because your Lord has promised you, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” In the name of Jesus, amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus, amen.