God Helps Those Who Cannot Help Themselves

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Benjamin Franklin once said, “God helps those who help themselves.” Like most Episcopalians during that era, Franklin was a self-proclaimed Deist. As a Deist, he believed that God created the universe but does not involve himself in earthly affairs. He believed it was up to us as to whether we sink or swim. I will, without God’s help.  

Franklin was brilliant for a lot of reasons, but I’m afraid he got this one wrong. Like Thomas Jefferson, another nominal - Episcopalian, Franklin and other Enlightenment thinkers, influenced by Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, omitted the parts of the Bible that spoke of divine intervention. And when you take out all the parts about divine intervention, you are left with a message that proclaims, “God helps those who help themselves.”

More than anything else in the mainline American church history this way of thinking severely undercuts the power of the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ finds its power in the timeless truth that God helps those who cannot help themselves.  Again and again, scripture attests to a God who rescues a people who cannot rescue themselves.

Today’s gospel lesson echoes the grumbling of the Israelites in the days following their exodus from Egypt. We hear the helpless cries of the Israelites wondering in the wilderness. As we heard in last week’s Old Testament lesson, the people of Israel tell Moses and Aaron that they would rather be enslaved again under Pharaoh than die of starvation in the wilderness.

As the story goes, God gives these helpless Israelites food to eat and water to drink. God goes against every bit of parenting advice and gives into their temper tantrum. God doesn’t rain down manna from heaven because they follow the rules. God doesn’t rain down manna from heaven because they ask nicely.

God doesn’t devise a compromise and agree to meet them halfway between heaven and earth to drop off the food. Rather, God rains down manna from heaven to earth because God is faithful even when we are not, even when we are helpless.

I know what all you parents are thinking because I am thinking it too. If you give into your children’s temper tantrum, then you are destined to create an entitled, self-centered, spoiled little kid who grows up to be likewise. Along the same lines, you might be thinking, if you keep giving handouts to the helpless, then they will never learn to help themselves.

Friends, like it or not, this is the provocative and scandalous nature of the gospel. This is precisely the risk God is willing to take to save us again and again from ourselves. The alternative, I’m afraid, is death. The alternative will eventually leave even the best and the brightest in the dark because eventually even the best and the brightest are rendered helpless, even the best and brightest cannot make it without God’s help – a truth that Paine and Franklin wrestled with on their deathbeds.

God helps those who cannot help themselves. God helps those whom this world regards as a lost cause. God helps those who have given up trying to help themselves. And God wants to help those who think they don’t need any help.

In our baptismal covenant, we make a lot of promises, promises that say, “I will, with God’s help.” I will, with God’s help. We believe in a God who is intimately and actively involved in this world. And we make these promises not so we might earn the reward of eternal life when we die. After all, in our baptism we are promised eternal life now and forever through the death and resurrection of Jesus our Savior.

We make these promises because we believe God can and will despite our helplessness. We make these promises because we can and will only with God’s help. We make these promises because eventually we will drown without them.   

  Speaking of drowning, our daughter Mary Katherine learned how to swim this summer because we motivated her with prizes. At the beach, Jamie managed to convince Mary Katherine put her head underwater by promising her a unicorn floaty. A few weeks later, we convinced Mary Katherine to swim without puddle jumpers by promising her a mermaid tail.

The real reward, for Mary Katherine and for us, is that Mary Katherine is now a swimmer. She is no longer the only five-year-old at the pool with floaties. She can jump off the diving board with her friends. She now possesses a skill that will help her for the rest of her life.

Pretty soon, the unicorn floaty and the mermaid tail will become footnotes in the bigger story. Likewise, the manna from heaven is a footnote in the larger story of God’s plan of salvation. The feeding of the 5,000 is just a parcel of the salvation story.

In today’s lesson, Jesus says, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died…I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” The story is much bigger than the manna, than the feeding of the masses, than the unicorn floaty and mermaid tail. The story is much bigger than we go to heaven because we were good little boys and girls.

The true reward is that God makes us living members of the body of Christ on earth – the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh. As living members of the body of Christ, we live and serve and love the Lord not to earn the reward of heaven but because in Christ we have found that reward on earth. The true reward is that we are called to be agents of peace and healing in God’s story of salvation – on earth as it is in heaven.

Shortly before he was shot and killed in Hanyeville in 1965 during the Voting Rights Movement, Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels described his own experience of discovering the reward of participating in the life of Christ, a life initiated in baptism.

Daniels wrote, “I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord's death and resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God. I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance!”

A week later, Jonathan Daniels received the most prestigious reward that any Christian can receive – a reward that can only be received when one is confident in the truth that the only life that matters if the life of Christ – a life that lives beyond death and the grave.

Daniels gave his life to save the life of another by stepping in front of a shotgun intended for a young black woman. He gave his life for a cause he believed in – equal rights and human rights. Ultimately, Daniels gave his life for the Lord he loved.

It has been said that the blood of the martyrs are the seeds of the church. For me personally, the blood of Daniels inspires me to be more faithful and more confident in the truth that our true reward is found when our lives are hid with Christ in God.

Our true reward is found when we let go of all earthly expectations and worldly desires and cling to the truth of Christ that says, “I am faithful even when you stumble. I am faithful even when you cannot be. I am faithful even when you feel like you have no control over the situation.”

As we begin these last few weeks together, we will undoubtedly be consumed by the unknown. We might even feel helpless over the future. In my experience, when we begin to feel helpless over the future, fear sets in and we try to control that future. We do things that are out of character.

Friends in Christ, remember that God has already prepared a future for you that you can be excited about. In light of the reward and hope given in baptism, hold onto the promises you made to God and each other. I will, with God’s help.

Even when you cannot hold onto those promises, hold onto the promise that God made to you in your baptism – sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. Above all, hold onto the truth that God can and God will for God always has. Amen.