ST. THOMAS LUTHERAN CHURCH

Foolish Faith?

My father-in-law tells of a story of when he had to move some money in Brazil. I believe he was purchasing a home at that time. He tells it in Portuguese, so maybe I lost some of the details. And Brazil at that time wasn’t like the United States. You couldn’t drop a check in the mail and expect it to arrive. Inflation was out of control. Money had some value for the day, but then less value for the next. Also, people don’t have the chance to buy much on credit. If you want something big, you have to save up – for years and years. So, my father-in-law found himself in the risky situation in which he had to go to bank and clean out his savings, the full value of the house, and get across town to make the deal. Did I mention Brazil isn’t always exactly a safe place? Hold ups and car-jackings are much more a part of life there. What my he did for this daring feat was hire a professional body-guard. He was just a big man with a concealed gun to walk along with him. The deal went through. He got the house.

Last week we spoke about Ezra’s vision and his own bold move from Babylonia to Jerusalem for the sake of putting God’s Word again at the center of the life of God’s people. This Sunday we hear how Ezra made the journey to get there. It was a journey of faith. Ezra refused to ask the king for a guard for his trip. In his own words, he says, “I was ashamed to ask the king for a band of soldiers and horsemen to protect us against the enemy on our way, since we had told the king, ‘The hand of our God is for good on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him.’ So we fasted and implored our God for this, and he listened to our entreaty.”

That’s bold faith, audacious faith. We might even say foolish faith. Ezra was travelling with women and children.  He was travelling with something on the order of almost 4 tons of gold and 25 tons of silver and various costly treasures for establishing the worship of the temple and the religious life of the people. It was an astronomical amount. It wasn’t an unusual amount for kings to have access to in those days. Royal treasuries were kind of like Fort Knox with piles of gold. But you didn’t usually see it travelling down the road in a caravan. And he was travelling across 900 miles. The journey would take him some four months, through regions of bandits and highway robbers. He could have had the king’s escort. He chose not to. He felt led to demonstrate the power of God in this way and to show to the king that those who trusted in God enjoyed divine protection. Scholars estimate there were about 1,800 men with him – and their families. Can you imagine how they might have reacted when Ezra said, “Hey, you know what guys, we have to make this trip, but I’m embarrassed to tell the king we need any further help. We’re going to do this alone. We don’t need a police escort. We’ve got God on our side, right?” They might have said he was crazy, but they didn’t. They agreed. They went along.

If it weren’t recorded in Scripture, I’d say that such a man was tempting God. He seems to be demanding that God take care of him to such an extent that he’s not even taking reasonable precautions. Yet, such is the life of those who are led by the Spirit of God. Depending on the situation and the circumstance, sometimes they just fly free, ignoring the fears and precautions of this world and boldly stepping forward in faith. Of course, Ezra was no fool. Nor was he presumptuous. He did after all take the most necessary precaution: He led the whole travel company in prayer and fasting. He would call on God to be his guard. And thus, after 15 weeks, they arrived safely in Jerusalem. When the silver and gold was all counted out, it was all there.

Ezra and his company were bold in their faith. Dr. Martin Luther King once stated: "Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it BECAUSE it is right.” Ezra knew that at that time the right thing to do was to go forward in fearless faith forsaking earthly helps and trusting in God alone. God did not let him down.

I think there are Ezra moments for each one of us to step forward in such heroic faith, but very often we shrink back in fear. Of course, we don’t call it fear. We call it wisdom. We call it being practical and having common sense. We try to reduce our risks, we try to protect ourselves against dangers, we look out for the bad things that could happen and we hedge our bets. In so doing, we are depending on our own smarts to keep us safe, without realizing that counting on our smarts might well be discounting the promises of God. What if God should call us to a bold thing? A daring thing? A thing that would demonstrate to the world His unique faithfulness in protecting His own and blessing those who trust in Him? Could we do it? Or would we dismiss it as foolishness?

We don’t live in the fear of highway robbers, but I do hear people talking a lot about lawsuits and the need to avoid them. It seems that this fear even drives some of our decisions in the church. It wasn’t but a couple of years ago that a Lutheran church here in Redford found itself in a lawsuit with an employee and the case made it from trial to trial until it went all the way to the Supreme Court. I can imagine that the church members were wondering how they got into such a mess. Maybe they felt like Ezra’s followers, out on a journey, exposed, without sufficient protection. The leaders may have been kicking themselves, thinking they should have taken more precautions to prevent such a thing from happening. Yet the hand of God was in it. Because the case went to the Supreme Court and the Court ruled in the favor the church, churches now have more confidence in their freedom to determine their own ministers. That would have never happened if the church had avoided all the possible dangers. God took the danger and did a good and blessed thing with it. That which they dreaded ended up being God’s way forward to strengthen the life of His people throughout the United States.

Legal fears may hinder us today, but financial fears do, too. What we forget is that our bank account will not keep us safe. Sums of money won’t secure the future of the church, either. Our safety rests in God and in God alone. You can find many times through the history of the church when it was exactly because the church had access to lots of money that the church then became unfaithful, corrupt, and decadent. When Constantine converted to Christianity, the church suddenly had it made. The wealth of the empire went to building churches and paying generous salaries for the clergy. We look back and now we can see that that was the beginning of the end of the church’s original zeal for God. Rather than expecting persecution and martyrdom in following Jesus, people began to sign up for Christianity because it could give them advancement and success in the society. Comfortable in the world, much of the church lost its true mission and purpose. There is a point to financial wisdom, but there is also a limit to it. If we count on our money to answer our problems and keep us safe, we’ll soon find that we have lost what is most essential to understand about our life in Christ – that it comes from God and God alone is our refuge in every time of need.

I still ask myself, how did Ezra know that this was the godly thing to do – to refuse to ask for a guard from the king for the sake of demonstrating God’s power? I can think of only this: Ezra was a man of God’s Word and Ezra was a man of prayer. Studying the Word of God, he grew in understanding the heart and mind of God. He could discern what the situation called for. Calling the people to prayer, he then acknowledged that the success of the journey rested with God. In fasting, they humbled themselves and sought God’s will and God’s favor.

And how all this then resounded to the glory of God! The king and all his counselors came to know that there was a mighty God in Israel. As Ezra put it, the message was: “The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him.” He was resting in the promise of divine protection and divine blessing for those who walk with God. It is time for us to believe this too, time for us to trust that Christians need not live in fear. Our way is kept by our Father and watched over by His angel guard. Believing this, new possibilities of bold living will open before us. Our lives too will resound more and more to God’s glory, because we’ll walk by that uncommon heavenly wisdom and not the common wisdom of world.

This is not the only case, after all, of God’s people marching to the beat of another drummer. When Jesus sat in the temple watching the offerings being made, one old widow woman threw in her last coin, all that she had to live on. She gained the praise of Jesus, because she acted in faith, trusting completely in God to provide for her. St. Paul heard in town after town that if he went to Jerusalem he would be imprisoned by the Romans. He went anyway, and as a result, he was jailed for years, but he also testified before kings about the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ. Why, even the Lord Jesus kept preaching until late in the day and the people grew hungry, and that just gave him opportunity to multiply the bread and loaves and feed them; He waited before responding to Lazarus’ sickness. Lazarus died – and that just gave the Lord opportunity to raise him from the dead.

The point is, the bad things we fear, the things we seek to avoid at all costs, don’t need to happen. God may well protect us from them, just as He protected Ezra from the bandits along the trek to Jerusalem. What’s more, even if they do happen, the Lord has a way to lead us through them. That way will bring us to a better and brighter outcome that will bring even greater glory to His name. Particularly when we are about the mission of God, as Ezra was, we shouldn’t let our fears become like a set of idols directing our steps or shortening our journey. If we’re about God’s work, we can dare to be bold to do it in God’s way, the way of faith, guided by His Word, committing our way to Him in prayer.