Could’ve Moved Mountains: A sermon series on faith, doubt, and moving mountains.
September 2015
“Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Mark 11: 22-24
Is there some sort of relationship between faith, doubt, and things coming to pass? Jesus’ remarks here makes it seem pretty straight forward: have lots of faith, do not doubt, and the craziest impossible things will happen. Yet the straight forwardness of this formula is deceptive. It contains an almost, if not totally, impossible standard. Is it not laid out in such a manner that one could never argue against it? For if whatever it is we want does not come to pass, than surely we must’ve doubted. Or perhaps we were looking at the wrong mountain. Or the mountain is metaphor. Or what you thought was a mountain was no mountain. So we seem to always have ready to hand a quick response and an easier dismissal. A Jesus taken out of context, a failure of translation, a literary allusion to a foregone prophecy not meant to be taken literally—or, perhaps, a Jesus that is just wrong.
But we have mountains to move do we not? There is the possibility of resigning ourselves to our own efforts and limits, and there is the risk of taking on an impossible task. No answer can be given here but join us as we try to figure it out.