Luke 17:5-10
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
7 October 2007
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
“That just ain’t right!”
Proper English aside, as difficult as I know it is for some of you to do, I ask you to say those words along with me: “That’s just ain’t right!”
Those words were engraved in my memory by a friend. Patrick coined that phrase with his southern drawl after being awakened in the middle of the night by feeling a strange sensation of his forehead. He was staying in hotel where, earlier in the day, he had seen some cockroaches. He thought nothing else about it until he was awakened by that strange sensation. His first thought was, “O God, please don’t let that be a cockroach climbing on my face.” When he discovered that it was indeed a cockroach, Patrick uttered those words, “That just ain’t right!”
I just had a “That just ain’t right” week. It started a week ago Thursday when I got an email informing me that my friend and mentor, Pastor David Koch, had died. We have all had “those” phone calls that have carried us into a fog, but my “That just ain’t right week” continued when I got a telephone call from Pastor David’s wife, Ruth, asking if I’d be part of the funeral on Tuesday. As I traveled to Denver on Monday and as I traveled home on Wednesday, I can’t tell you how many times I said those words, “That just ain’t right.”
I definitely felt like a player in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” – you know one of those episodes where you’re not where you’re supposed to be, but somehow you find yourself in a parallel universe. “That just ain’t right.” That’s the way I felt as I attended the viewing on Monday night and saw David’s 68-year-old earthly body lying in a church where he had faithfully and powerfully served the Lord Jesus and His people. “That just ain’t right.” That’s the way I felt when I saw his wife, Ruth, his daughters, Anne and Abby, his son-in-law, Scott, and his three precious granddaughters, all with tears in their eyes because of their very real loss. “That just ain’t right.” That’s the way I felt when about 25 ministers clothed in white robes and white stoles, including two District Presidents, showed up to pay their respects to David and his family. “That just ain’t right.” That’s the way I felt when I, along with 6 other pallbearers, picked up David’s very heavy casket, literally transferring the heavy burden of his death onto each of us. “That just ain’t right.” That’s the way I felt, with tears welling up in my own eyes, as we stood at David’s grave and one of his former assistant pastors repeated in a loud voice the words of King David at the death of Abner, “Do you not realize that a prince and a great man has fallen in Israel this day?” [2 Samuel 3:38]. “That just ain’t right.” That’s the way I felt gathered with family and friends after the burial at the family home – the home that David and Ruth had intentionally and personally custom-built for themselves for their retirement years, the home where David only spent a few short years. “That just ain’t right!”
Those have been pretty much my constant words the last 10 days in my life. But I am not trying to throw a personal pity party. I realize that we all have those “That just ain’t right” days and weeks of life We all get “those” telephone calls, informing us of one thing or another. We all make “those” telephone calls, informing someone else of something they’d rather not hear or know. “That just ain’t right.”
Those times are tough, aren’t they? Sure they are. That’s, I believe, why our Gospel today allows us to see the disciples walking up to Jesus with the seemingly simple request, “Increase our faith!” What a great request! Maybe the disciples have finally learned something! Instead of bothering Jesus with requests about who will be greatest in God’s Kingdom, about who will get to sit at Jesus’ right hand in glory [Mark 10:35-45], the disciples might be on to something important here: “Increase our faith!” You and I say the same thing to our Lord Jesus when we’re having those “That just ain’t right” times of life – and if we don’t say that, we should: “Increase our faith!”
Notice Jesus’ response to the request of the disciples. I do believe it’s very important to note. Jesus didn’t do what many of us do in those circumstances. He didn’t say to His disciples, “Oh, come on, you guys. Stop being so hard on yourself. You know your faith is stronger than you think.” Jesus didn’t say that, did He? He sure didn’t. Instead, Jesus acknowledged the fact self-recognized by the disciples: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it would obey you.” What did Jesus mean by that response? He meant that the disciples had weak faith, that they had come to the right place to be strengthened in their faith.
“Lord, increase my faith.” That should be my first response when I have one of those “That just ain’t right” times of life. That should be your first response when you have one of those “That just ain’t right” times of life. “Lord, increase my faith!” When we say those words to our Lord Jesus, what happens? Suddenly we find that we’re not alone in our feelings or experiences.
I have always marveled at God’s plan of salvation! God – being God – could have dealt with our sin in a multitude of other ways, I am certain. He could have just wiped Adam and Eve off the face of the earth and re-created human beings without the free ability to sin. God could have simply created a giant eraser and employed a bus load of angels to constantly erase our sins off the eternally huge chalkboard of Heaven. He could have invented other creative ways to deal with sin. If He couldn’t have done that, He wouldn’t be God.
But instead of doing any of that, instead of dealing with sin in an easy way, God instead chose to personally intersect with our time and space, to clothe Himself in our human flesh, to wear humiliating diapers as a baby (the Bible calls them “swaddling clothes” but they were diapers), to personally experience the whole range of human emotions: from the tender love He received from Mary as a baby and the tender love He returned to her, to the anger He showed that day in the temple as He overturned the tables of the moneychangers, to definite disappointment in His disciples as they were just not getting what He was trying to teach them, to the heavy tears of grief and loss He personally shed when He stood at the grave of His dear friend, Lazarus. “That just ain’t right.”
If you want an experience that will certainly trump your very best “That just ain’t right” experience in life, walk with me for a moment. Walk with me to a place called “The Skull:” GOLGOTHA; CALVARY. There, two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ, the perfectly sinless Son of God hung on a rough piece of wood for the sins of the entire world. “That just ain’t right.” He hung there for you and for me. “That just ain’t right.” He died a painful death without the benefits of modern medical technology or hospice care designed to lessen the sting of death. “That just ain’t right.” The sky was darkened and the earth shook at the moment of His death, screaming out with all creation: “That just ain’t right.” Wrapped again in human swaddling clothes, He was placed in someone else’s grave. Talk about humiliation! “That just ain’t right.”
All that Jesus did so that we would have the ability – and the right as His dearly loved children – to come to Him in our “That just ain’t right” moments of life with the words, “Lord, increase our faith.” Because He clothed Himself in our flesh and blood, He knows our weaknesses. He knows our weak faith. He knows our bruised knees from spending time in prayers. He knows our broken hearts when people who are important to us have been taken from us. He knows our frustrations and our disappointments. All that Jesus knows because He dealt with sin the way He did, because He became one like us in every way, so that He could suffer and die for us so that we could boldly ask Him to “Increase our faith.”
Remember what Jesus said to Thomas? When Thomas adamantly stated that he would not believe the words of the other disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead [John 21:24-31], Jesus didn’t scold Thomas. He didn’t overlook him. He didn’t belittle him. Instead, Jesus held out His hands and said to Thomas, “If this is what it takes – here, touch My hands. See for yourself that I am who I say I am and that I have done what I set out to do for you.” And in that moment that Thomas’ fingers deeply probed Jesus’ nail-pierced hands and His spear-driven side, Thomas’ faith was increased. The words on his tongue changed from “That just ain’t right” to “Lord Jesus, thank You for dying for me to increase my faith at this moment of life.” In that moment, Thomas learned an important lesson that sadly eludes many of us way too often: that with Jesus, everything is “All-right.” With Jesus, no matter what we’re facing, no matter what we’re feeling, no matter how impossible it seems, no matter how heavy the burden, everything is “all-right.”
At the beginning of all time, God surveyed His creation, despite knowing full-well the impending fall into sin, and He uttered the words, “It is good.” He continues to survey His world – and the events of each of our lives – and because of the all-efficacious suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus from the dead – continues to say, “It is good. It is all-right!” He throws open His arms to each of us and, like little children, we run into those arms with tears and burdens and they are all lifted from us.
Confident of that, and humbly asking the Lord Jesus to “Increase our faith,” repeat with me our Easter response of praise and victory: “Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!” And all is “all-right!”
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Pastor Christopher Schaar
Historic First Lutheran Church of Pasadena