“`I have faith,’ cried the boy’s father; `help me

where faith falls short”‘

(Mark 9:24)

As Mother’s Day comes round again I’m reminded of the stunning surprise my brothers and I experienced when we returned to our boyhood home to close the house after our parents’ death. We found here and there, tucked away in chests and closets, quite a stock of unused gifts we had sent to our parents through the years on various occasions — birthdays, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day. There were unworn scarves and ties, boxed perfume and jewelry, unopened boxes of cigars.

Such a discovery gave me a strange feeling. I wondered if my feelings would have been different had I found all the gifts and remembrances worn out or used up.

Then came the reassuring thought that the real transaction in such gifts on occasions of remembrance did not depend on their being used or con­sumed. Such things simply symbolized the groping of the human spirit through the material object for something beyond the tangible, sensate world to assist in giving expression to the love and gratitude that the heart feels.

But is there anything real and lasting about that invisible world beyond and behind the material? Are there just momentary emotions and shadowy memories? Does anything there really exist, or is it just a fantasy, a self-deception of the human mind to believe that there does exist something solid and permanent and indestructible in close family relationships?

The gospel story today is all about this: the reality or unreality of the unseen world, the validity of belief or unbelief, the power or powerlessness of faith, the part that faith plays in the relationships of families.

Here is the essence of the story: A man concerned about the condition of his son brought the boy to Jesus. The child could not speak. In some versions of the gospel he is described as an epileptic. Others say he was possessed by a “dumb and deaf spirit.” Presumably, the pent-up frustrations of the boy, denied the usual outlets of communication through intelligible speech, were expressed in violent fits, foaming at the mouth, muscular twitching, and jerking of the limbs.

You will remember that Helen Keller, as a blind, deaf, and mute child from Tuscumbia, Alabama, was given to violent fits of temper. The neighbors thought the girl was crazy. But when the teacher Anne Sullivan came and began to communicate with her through a code of touch symbols in the palm of her hand, the mind and spirit of a genius were discovered, and the real Helen Keller was set free.

The gospel record tells us that since Jesus was away when the man came with his disturbed child, the disciples tried to help but were unsuccessful. Finally, Jesus came back. He expressed impatience with his disciples for their incompetence. He blamed their impotence on their lack of faith, saying, “What an unbelieving and perverse generation! … How long must I endure you?”

Then the distracted father turned to Jesus: “`If it is at all possible for you, take pity upon us and help us.’ `If it is possible!’ said Jesus. `Everything is possible to one who has faith.”‘

“`I have faith,’ cried the boy’s father; `help me where faith falls short.”‘ Jesus straightaway healed the boy. Later, the disciples asked, “`Why could not we cast it [the spirit] out?”‘ Jesus said, “`There is no means of casting out this sort but prayer.”‘

In this gospel incident where we see the tragedy of the whole human situation in microcosm, everything turns on faith or the lack of it. The cry of the father, “I have faith; help me where faith falls short,” is both the confession of the whole human condition and the necessary petition for every rescue.

Is it surprising to discover that the first place faith falls short is in the church of Jesus Christ, in that handful of Jesus’ first disciples?

Quite understandably the world looks to the Church for help as the father of the mentally or emotionally disturbed boy looked to Jesus’ disciples. What is the Church for if not to concern itself with every human distress? “What is the Church worth,” asks Joseph Parker in his People’s Bible, “if it cannot save the lunacy of the world? The Church, like its Master, has nothing to do in the world unless it be to heal and to bless and to save mankind. The Church was not instituted to amuse the world, but to save it; not to mock the world by speaking to it in a pointless and useless speech, but to redeem the world through Jesus Christ the Lord.”

When people, with all their pressing, desperate needs, turn to the Church for help and do not find it, they are loud in their rebukes, and rightly so. But the rebuke of the Lord of the Church for her ineffectualness is louder and sterner. And notice that Jesus traces his disciples’ impotence to their lack of faith. “What an unbelieving and perverse generation! … How long must I endure you?”

The Church’s resources in fine equipment and beautiful buildings and intelligently prepared educational materials and abundant financial backing have never been stronger, yet the Church is faltering in her ministry to a needy world because of a failure of faith. The disposition of the Church to put her trust both in her Lord and in the world, to believe in force a bit more than in love, to rely upon human efforts more than on divine grace, to seek first what we shall eat and what we shall drink and how we shall be clothed rather than to seek God’s kingdom and his righteousness-these are the reasons that the Church is one place where faith falls short.

The second place where faith falls short in the recurrent human tragedy is the family. The poor father who brought his son to Jesus was expressing, not only his personal concern, but that of others in the tragedy that had befallen his family. “If it is at all possible for you,” he implored Jesus, “take pity upon us and help us.”

When one member of a family suffers, all suffer. Sometimes trouble, pain, disgrace come as a result of wild disregard for the laws of man or God. Sometimes we bring trouble upon ourselves. Sometimes our troubles are there because of a power beyond ourselves.

The novelist John Updike, that steady student of our American life, keeps tracing our troubles in America to a failure of faith in the families of our nation. Updike writes about the sense of accumulated loss that is ours and shows how our national past contained a wholeness and an essential goodness that have now evaporated. In one of his novels, Updike depicts the Puritan gods of America’s past as having retreated to unawesome, half-deserted churches, while his principal characters are people in a stylish suburb caught up in a black mass of community sex.

Recently, consternation swept across our nation following the brutal attack on a woman jogger in New York’s Central Park by a gang of young ruffians who beat her and raped her and left her naked and dying. People were puzzled to discover that the boys who had done this were not school dropouts or poverty-stricken but from respectable, middle-class families.

Undoubtedly, the dimensions of our national tragedy are to be reckoned in figures of diminishing faith in our families — families where faith falls short. But also just as surely are the prospects for our salvation to be reckoned in an increase of the same collateral and in nothing else.

Lou Holtz, the football coach at Notre Dame, in a letter written to America’s next generation as part of an advertising campaign for Volkswagen, said:

The basis of any society is the strength of the family…. The strength of a society is not found in the comforts of living but in its values, morals and concern for its fellow man. And I believe that these principles are predominantly developed in the family…. The qualities that we admire in people-honesty, cheerfulness, thoughtfulness, cooperation-must be learned in the home and developed by society. Our future, in my humble opinion, is contingent upon parents success­fully developing these qualities so we can evolve into responsible, intelligent, compassionate adults.

In the gospel story, the cry of the father is, “I have faith; help me where faith falls short.” This is the honest prayer of every believer. We are all fitful mixtures of faith and unbelief. Today we may say with all sincerity, “O Lord, in thee do I put my trust. Thou art my strong tower of defense.” Tomorrow, in a despairing mood, we may whine, “Why go I mourning because of the oppression of my enemy? Where is my God, if God there really is?”

For faith falls short in the Church, and faith falls short in the family, and faith falls short for every individual unless faith is anchored in Jesus Christ. This is the supreme lesson in this gospel incident, indeed in the whole of Scripture. Jesus Christ and he alone can help us where our faith falls short.

What is faith? It is trust that there is a supreme power and purpose in the universe friendly to the truster, even though this reality is unseen and often contradicted by circumstances. And our faith would always fall short, doomed to fail us, were it not for Jesus Christ, who coming to us in human flesh reveals the quality of the divine love and depth and height and width of the divine power to deliver people from all the demons that assail them, assuring every person that from the divine point of view the relationship that exists between every soul and the Eternal God is that of a Heavenly Father and his well-loved child, and that nothing — neither life nor death, neither the fires of youth nor the ashes of age-can separate the souls that come to God through faith in Jesus Christ.

As The Interpreter’s Bible says:

Faith will not enable one to caress rattlesnakes safely, or to pluck money from the air, or to live without food. Yet in the wide realm of the Kingdom of God, and of God’s continued action to bring in that Kingdom, whether for one human life or for the world, there is no barrier that can be set against the divine invasion: none but our own cardinal weakness — that often we believe more firmly in the power of the demons of evil than in the power of the God of Love.

Where faith stands tall, where faith is the margin of victory in the most desperate of circumstances, is always that tiny, one square foot of earth where a humble, honest man or woman has prayed to Jesus Christ, “Lord, I have a little faith. Help me where my faith falls short.”