Second Weekend After Pentecost: “Audacious Faith”

               A church in NY City has replaced its usual outdoor sign with a blue and orange Knicks poster with the caption, “We know God loves everyone, but we’re praying for the NY Knicks.”  Is it possible that basketball fans are sending up as many prayers during these NBA Finals as soccer fans will be during the World Cup??  Along those lines, there was a great article in Friday’s paper with the headline, “Spike Who?  San Antonio Has Its Own Faithful.”  The Spurs’ cheering section includes a group of Roman Catholic Sisters, part of an order called the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco.  4 of them showed up on the front page of The NY Times, sporting Spurs jerseys over their white habits, receiving grateful handshakes from Victor Wembanyama (“Wemby”), who towers over them all.  The Sisters have a ministry to youth, and one of them explained, “That’s the reason we’re into sports.  To really be able to engage the young people where they’re at, you have to love what they love.”¹  Now, you fans out there know that 3 of the Knicks’ starters are Villanova grads: “the Nova Knicks.”  This enables the Knicks to say to the Spurs, “You may have the nuns, but we have the Pope!”

               Audacious faith is the tie-in between the NBA Finals and this weekend’s Gospel.  How long’s it been since the Knicks won the NBA Finals?  53 years!  (1973)  How long’s it been since they’ve even been in the Finals?  27 years! (1999)  Audacious faith that this will be the year they bring home the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy!  But without audacious faith, they’d have lost before they even played the first game of the series.

               There are at least 4 people with audacious faith in today’s Gospel: Jesus, Matthew, the tax collector, the ruler of the synagogue, and the woman with a flow of blood.  Jesus dares to believe that His association with “the unclean” -- the sinful tax collector, the bleeding woman, the dead child – won’t contaminate Him but will heal them, in one way of another.  Jesus trusts that the Father has given Him the mission and the power to save; Matthew trusts that Jesus can save him from his pariah status, his dishonesty, his disloyalty as a tax collector; the woman with the 12 year flow of blood trusts that Jesus can save her from that physical affliction and from the profound fatigue and devastating social isolation it has inflicted; and the synagogue ruler trusts that Jesus can save his 12 year old daughter, even from death.

               They all risked something: Matthew gave up the lucrative livelihood he knew for a discipleship he knew nothing about.  The woman set herself up to be punished for daring to leave the house and enter a crowd.  Jewish law said that her hemorrhage made her unclean and that she should avoid touching others to prevent them from becoming unclean, too.  (People couldn’t even sit on the same furniture or blankets as she.)  Many people already considered Jesus to be a holy person.  Bad enough to contaminate a common person; how much worse to render unclean someone who was holy!  And not just by unintentionally bumping into them but by boldly reaching out, not to touch their person, but their robe, nearly as bad and potentially with the same “dirtying” effect.  The father risked ridicule for “asking the impossible,” begging Jesus to bring his child back to life.  He also put his role as ruler of the synagogue in jeopardy by approaching Jesus, whom some Jewish leaders saw as a rule-breaker and even as an evil person.  Audacious faith!

               This Saturday, June 6, is the 82^nd anniversary of D-Day.  It was audacious faith on the part of General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, to send 160,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen on almost 7,000 ships and 12,000 planes to invade Normandy, along 50 miles of beachhead.    It was audacious, yet informed faith, as illustrated in the newly released movie, Pressure, about the Scottish metereologist, Group Captain James Stagg, responsible for coordinating 3 different weather services whose mission was to provide Ike with a reliable forecast to guide the timing of the invasion, Operation Overlord.  There were no weather satellites or computer storm-tracking programs in those days.  Nothing could be said with absolute certainty (still true to some extent, when it comes to weather predictions), so the experts made their best educated guess and passed it along to the brass, knowing many, many lives were on the line and the liberation of Europe was hanging in the balance.   

Another example of audacious faith that keeps coming to my mind is that of the Jewish art teacher who was told to pack a suitcase before being deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp during WW II.  Most other deportees packed clothes, food, photos, valuables.  She hid art supplies among her belongings.  She knew that children as well as adults were being consigned to that uncertain future, and she believed that art could keep hope alive.  She had audacious faith to risk punishment for transporting those art materials, for secretly leading the children in art projects, for quietly saving and hiding their pictures, ultimately burying them in suitcases on the property.  Most of the inmates of Theresienstadt were transported to death camps and murdered.  Years after their deaths the suitcases were discovered and opened, their contents a treasure trove of insight into the children’s minds and hearts, a testament to their art teacher’s ability to shed light in darkness and engender hope in the direst of circumstances: audacious faith that love could win out even in the face of death and that faith, hope and love cannot be exterminated.

One of our church friends has a tee shirt that says, “If you’re hanging on by a thread, make sure it’s the hem of his robe.”  Some of our boldest leaps of faith come when we’re in the toughest situations.  We wouldn’t call it a leap of faith if it didn’t require us to leave solid ground and launch out over empty space, praying we’ll reach solid footing on the other side.  We’ve heard the woman whisper to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well” (Matt. 9:21) and we’ve heard Jesus say to the woman, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” (Matt. 9:22)  Sometimes, instead of be made well the translation is “If I only touch his cloak, I will be saved” and  “your faith has saved you.”  The Greek word can mean either.  Since the woman has a medical disorder, we hear be made well and we think, will be physically healed.  For her, we believe it’s both/and: physically healed and spiritually made well after the trauma of her long-standing illness and separation from her family members and community.  Jesus was capable of physical, emotional, spiritual healing.  Jesus is capable of physical, emotional, spiritual healing.  Sometimes it’s all of the above, and sometimes it’s not.  But it is always true to say, “Jesus saves.”  One Scripture commentary describes it this way:

Healing comes in many different forms, physical, emotional, social, and otherwise, and we can trust that our most daring, faithful efforts will be met with God’s merciful healing touch, regardless of the form that healing takes in any given case.²

              Back to where we started, with the Knicks poster outside the church: “We know God loves everyone, but we’re praying for...”  We’re praying for those with audacious faith and for those who need audacious faith to reach out for the hem of our Lord’s garment to be made well, to be saved.  Amen

                    ¹Mirin Fader, “Spike Who?  San Antonio Has Its Own Faithful.” (The New York Times, June 5, 2026,                      A1, A11), A11.

               ²Salt on-line commentary for 2^nd Sunday after Pentecost (Year A), for Sun., June 7, 2026.

               Pastor Mary Virginia Farnham