MOVED ANY MOUNTAINS LATELY? John M, S8uchanan

Matthew 17:14-20 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Novemper 6, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

On Fevruary 11, 1361, Abraham Lincoln stood in the Springfield Railroad station
to depart for Washington. He was surrounded by his friends, colleagues, neighbors
who came tc see him off. He said: "I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I
may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington,
Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed,
With that assistance I cannot fail, Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain
with you and be everywhere for g00d, let us confidently hope that all will be well.

To His care commending you, as I hope your prayers will commend me, I bid you an
affectionate farevell,"

Lincoln's public utterances consistently included references to God and allusions
to His will: so much so that Elton Trueblood has written an excellent little book
under the title, Abraham Lincoln, Theologian of American Anguish, Trueblood traces
Lincoln's spiritual pilgrimage and identifies the consistent motif of trust in God's
providence and dependence on God's will throughout, His feelings about slavery, some
have suggested, were political and pragmatic, Trueblood argues, however, that they
were moral and theological, In an almost mystical sense Lincoln believed that the
institution was wrong and in opposition to God's will. And he was confident that the
Divine Reality which stood behind the whole universe would prevail, if men had the
courage to act on their best and noblest ideals, Lincoln was anything but an
arrogant man: he was tormented by the pain of war and the bitterness of his colleagues'
criticism, But on the basis of his deepest religious convictions he knew the cause
was just, and that right would prevail, And a mountain was moved,

Our text this morning is one of those Biblical incidents which has entered the
common vocabulary and become a kind of all-purpose, religious cliche, "If you have
faith the size of a mustard seed you can move mountains." A popular item of women's
jewelry not long ago was the lowly mustard seed. And part of the folk wisdom of
American culture, a healthy dose of which my father administered to me on a daily
basis, is that "you can do anything you want if you want it badly enough,"

The curious thing about the text is that although it is a popular cliche not
much has been written about it that is grounded in sound scholarship. I expected to
encounter pages of commentary in studying the text: instead I discovered a few para-
graphs, I found the same scholarly and homiletic reticense when I checked my re-
sources for what other men have had to say about the text. My authorities, at least,
have ignored it. Part of the reason, I have concluded, is that the text has been so
terribly abused and mutilated by those who preach that Christian faith is simply the
means to accomplish whatever you wish to accomplish, And part is the old problem
of literalism, After having been burned a few times when we discovered that many
people remain Biblical literalists, we preachers Learn to avoid those texts in which
the issue is likely to emerge. The problem here is that if you are going to talk
and think about this text you can't ignore that issue, And so I won't, I do not
believe that Jesus meant to be undertsood literally, I do not think that His idiom
was one of landscape engineering, I cannot believe that He wanted His followers to
think that they could rearrange the physical terrain by faith alone, I think the
statement is very good hyperbole: a pregnant statement, the meaning of which will
never be clear so long as we insist on taking it literally.

The context, as always, is important. Jesus and several of His disciples had
just come down from the mountain on which they had experienced a very moving con-
firmation of their intuition about who He was, The event is known as the

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Transfiguration; a mysterious and magnificent religious experience, On the mountain
they knew He was the Christ. Wow, back down in the valinzy where people were, they
had encountered a frantic father, an epileptic boy and their own impotence to do
anything about it, That is the situation which precipitated the statement about the
mustard seed and faith moving a mountain, The object, in fact, was the little boy,
not a mountain, The framework is God's will, not the superficial preference for

the Location of a particular hill, The product was something He wanted desperately
to call out of His friends: something called faith, If you have it, He was saying,
even a little bit of it, some momentous things are going to happen, In fact, you
will do some things that seem impossible,

He was, that is to say, redefining the word "faith" as the power to do things
that God wants done in His world, It might be helpful at this point to look at some
of the ways the word is defined in the popular idiom, Faith, for many people, seems
to be unquestioning acceptance of certain authoritative ideas which have been passed
down through the generations, Or as an adolescent once wrote, "Faith is believing
what you know isn't true." For a substantial portion of the people faith implies
the temporary shutting down of the intellect: the cessation of critical and rational
thought: the turning back of the clock and calendar to the time when things were
simpler and God was in His heaven and all seemed right with His world, No one who
is intellectually alive doesn't experience spiritual nostalgia: we know exactly what
Gamaliel Bradford meant when he wrote in Exit God:

"So our father's God was real
Something they almost saw,
Which kept them to a stern ideal
And scourged them into awe,,.
I sometimes wish that God were back
In this dark world and wide:
For though some virtues he might lack,
He had his pleasant side,”
(Exit God, in Shadow Verses).

It won't work any longer, Faith that is to be taken seriously today must be
intellectually tough, open te the most difficult questions, It can never again
be blind acceptance,

For others faith means having ali the answers. Doubt becomes the enemy,
Regardless of the problem, faith has the solution with a series of Biblical texts
as proof, Nels Ferre, in the Finality of Faith, has written, "This is a contradic~
tion in terminology. The man who has all the answers doesn't have faith at ali, he
has knowledge. He doesn't need faith," Faith, according to Ferre, is the opposite,
It is the ability to live confidently and peacefully without having all the answers,

For other people faith means believing certain doctrinal ideas about God,
Jesus and humanity, "The Christian faith" means orthodox Christian theology, Now
we Presbyterians have been doing theology for a long time: we love it: we value it:
we sometimes describe the highest purpose of the church in terms of teaching people
to think theologicaliy, But we must be very careful. Jesus, apparently, spent no
time at all talking theology. He required no examination in doctrine before inviting
people to be His disciples. Theology may undergird faith: it may nourish faith -
but we ate on thin ice indeed when we define faith as believing chat certain ideas
are true,

=~ 3 -

Unfortunately, Jesus never defined the word. The New Testament uses it 250
times. and assumes, I believe, that we will learn what it means by looking at Jesus,
His definition was His own life - and if I may presume for a moment - this is how
I interpret, Faith is an undying trust in God's faithfulness, It is an unshakeable
confidence that God's will is working its way in history and that it will prevail,
And it is behavior, a life - if you will, Lived out of that trust and confidence,

The New Testament is far more interested in behavior than theories. Now,
precisely at this point, the text becomes problematic. It seems, at first brush,
to be saying that faith will help you do whatever you want to do. And there is no
doubt that confidence, self-confidence, is a vital ingredient in any kind of
successful venture,

Several Saturdays ago two football teams did something which, by anyone's
calculations, they should not have been able to do, Notre Bame annihilated a very
good Southern Cal team: prior to the game they were sung Irish ballads about men on
the gallows for “the wearin’ of the green": they were reminded daily that they could
do it: moments before the kickoff they were issued green jerseys, for the first time
in fourteen years, When they took the field they were a better team than they had
thought befere, They won, The same thing happened between Michigan and Minnesota,
Seif-confidence is the vital ingredient in successful ventures - even football games.

Norman Vincent Peale has become one of the Legendary Christian preachers and
authors of our generation, He is not a theologian or a Biblical scholar. His
genius is in talking about self-confidence, or the power of pasitive thinking,
Robert Schuller,at the mammoth and enormously successful Garden Grove Community
Church in California ig the héttest item on the religious market today - because he
talks about "Possibility Thinking'’, Over and over again he telis the millions of
people who listen to him = "With God you can do anything,'' The trouble with that is
that people hear the possibility but not the "with God" part,

I don't think Jesus meant that you can do whatever you set out to do if you
are pious about it, Self-confidence may help you a great deal: it may enable you to
do more than you are doing, But God must be offended to be treated as a
celestial errand boy who may be summoned to assist in winning footbali games and
earning millions cf dollars,

The power and goodness of the idea so successfully represented by Peale and
Schuller, however, dexvives from the fact that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has, too
frequently, been on the other side of the ledger, We have preached sinfulness so
eloquently that people haven't heard the good news about redemption, We have pounded
away at human inadequacy so consistently that people have not heard the good news
about human worth and the New Being in Christ, We have talked about the fall of man
and allowed the secular philosophers to monopolize his dignity, le have made ptople
feel so bad about their sexuality, that we are no longer even invited to be part
of the discussion of morality, The Christian Church has aided, for too long, the
process of heaping guilt and feelinss of worthlessness on the corperate back of
humanity, And we are indicted by the emergence of something called the Human
Potential Movement cutside the Church, We should be the resident experts in human
potential: our Lord said we could move mountains,

~ 4

The text speaks eloquently to our situation and to each of us personally,
One of the major motifs of our day is the sense of powerlessness, Rol’: May has
written that the most pervasive tendency for modern man is to see himself the victim
of forces which are out of his control. Personally, we have taught that we are the
product of deep, subconscious drives, Politically, we are victims of grand global
forces over which we have no control whatever, He writes, "It is this inner ex-
perience of impotence which constitutes our critical probiem.'"' (Love and Will,p.i04),

The nuclear age is a kind of symbol of the demise of the individual, The
existence of weapons capable of ending all human life has diminshed - almost
entirely - the confidence of the individual to influence what happens to him,

The result - a pervasive cyaicism: an apathy that could allow a Watergate,
for instance, because it was so bip and powerful and out of control that the individ-
ual simply was without influence: a skepticism about government at all levels and a
refusal even to participate in the elective process because “what can one person do?"
We encounter it even in ourselves: “what's the use in trying:I am who I am and why
bother being any different?"

Cynicism about the individual's ability to do anything is the endemic disease
of our age, And the Gospel of Jeaus Christ must encounter that directly, We have
been seduced into expecting too Little cf ourselves: and we have forgotten almost
entirely that we follow a Lord who sugsested that, within the will of God, we can
move mountains,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ stands on the incredible premise that God created
men and women in His own image: a little Lower than the angels, It defines tha
human dilemma as a consistent refusal to live up toe that; an unuillingness to be as
big or as much as the Creator intended, Our sin is pride - but it is also sloth
which means simply the moral laziness which refuses to be as whole as Gad created us
to be, The Gospel suggests that we are worth the very life of God's son: that our
dignity is granted in His death for us: that He calls us to share with Him the
continuing creation of the world and the reconciliation of all its people. Faith
means acting as if you believed that, If we're interested in faith at all we ought
to be venturing something, doing something which seems impossible, and counting on
God to be with us, That's how the Bible has it. People of faith in the Bible are
those who venture: those who see a vision of God's will and then, with all the
confidence in the world, put theiy lives on the line to accomplish the task,

That's how it has been consistently across the centuries of Christian ex-
perience, The disciples were bewildered at the demands He made of them: how could
they live up to His expectations? They couldn't even heal this little boy, But they
did it: they became more than they thought they could: they invaded and conquered
an empire and turned human history upside down. The Reformers, four and half
centuries ago, had nothing going for them but the confidence that God's will would
be done, And they moved a mountain, Thirty-five years ago racial segregation Was
a social and lesal fact of life throughout much of the nation, That was a big
mountain - but it was moved,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ promises that mountains will be moved: it tells
you and me that we matter, that we count, that our influence will be limited only
by our courage: that, within the will of God, we can do far more than we might
expect,

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Jesus said: "Use what you have, Don't wait for more, Don't spend your life
waiting for some grand, dramatic experience in which you will be siven a strong
and overwhelmine faith, Use what you have: even if it's no larger than a mustard
seed, it will be enough,”

{The mountains about which ve do most of our worrying: the mountains which
seem most immovable are intimate and personal, We need the assurance that we
count politically, economically, socially, But our needs are greatest and our pain
sharpest in the intimacy of personal life. It is there that we doubt: it is in the
heare that we aren't sure we can meet the expectations of others, The biggest
mountains are invisible to everyone else. I see a bit of them every day: the
person waging secret, and life and death war on alcohol: the young man on drugs
and looking for some reason not to be: the homemaker wondering what's to become of
her dignity and identity when the Last child moves away: the executive passed over
for promotion and frightened to strike out again: the widow, suddenly and without
warning left absolutely alone and wondering how in the werld she will survive: the
heart patient vondering whether the adjustments can be made and whether they're
worth it: the chemotherapy patient, sick at heart and bedy and not certain that
tomorrow will be worth the bother: the young couple with a heavy load of problems
and no way even to talk about them anymore, Somewhere you and I are in the
picture, or a similar picture. ‘There is a mountain for each of us which seems
immovable, Somewhere in each of us is an instinct to let it stand there; to recede
into the safety of cynicism. And somewhere in each of us there is a better instinct:
an impatience with the status quo: a Lingering suspicion that we can do it, I
believe that better instinct is of God, IE believe He gave it to us and keeps it
alive in us. I believe that is what Jesus Christ addressed when He said: "You can
do it: use what you have: venture it: if you have faith as big as a mustard seed
you can say to this hill, 'go from here to there', and it will go. You could do
anything,"

Amen,

Father, we confess our fears and our preference for comfort, Give us faith
to venture: to move the mountains that need moving: through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,