Full service is HERE. Sermon begins at 35 min.
Pentecost 5B
June 27, 2021
Mark 5:21-43
INTRODUCTION
All of our texts today speak hope and joy into the grief and despair life sometimes throws our way. The book of Lamentations, as you might guess from its name, is almost all lament, in particular over the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians and the subsequent exile. But this one chapter is a light shining into that darkness. I’m always caught by the parenthetical statement halfway through: “There may yet be hope!” It is emblematic of all our stories today.
The Gospel reading is a classic example of one of Mark’s narrative tactics: the Markan sandwich. He starts telling one story, interrupts it to tell another, then gets back to the first, and the reader knows that these two stories are meant to interpret each other. In this sandwich, we also see more of the boundary-crossing I mentioned last week, but rather than a physical boundary like a lake, today’s boundaries are more social and religious. Both the hemorrhaging woman and the girl who dies would be seen by Jewish law as unclean – the woman because she is menstruating and the girl because she is dead – and anyone who touches someone unclean becomes unclean themselves. Yet Jesus touches them both. They are stories about how nothing will stop God from reaching out to us in relationship, healing and love.
As you listen, notice how that line in Lamentations plays out in today’s readings: “There may yet be hope!” Let’s listen.
[READ]
 |
| Mural in the Encounter Chapel of the Duc in Altum Spiritual Center, Magdala, Israel. |
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
“It takes a lot of courage to be a human being.” This is the assertion of Barbara Brown Taylor in her essay, “One Step at a Time.” “Year after year,” she writes, “we add to our experience of the world, pushing against our limits to find out what will budge and what will not, and gradually we gain a sense of our own power. We find that we can make certain things happen and we can prevent other things from happening; we can make friends and we can make enemies; we can say yes, and we can say no.”
It’s true – all this learning about how to be a human being DOES take a lot of courage! We start innocently enough as babies. Then we grow up a little, we go to school, and learn that sometimes people are mean, that “we can’t always get what we want,” and that some things are too hot, too sharp, too noisy, or too difficult. But we pull ourselves up each time we fall, and we keep going, wiser for the wear. We proceed into adulthood, and our problems get more complex – relationships, jobs, loss, growing families, moving, compromise, mortgage payments… Still, we power through, convincing ourselves that we can keep control over our lives. We can handle this. We can make career plans, and save money, and organize a schedule. We can have control….
Until, we can’t. Until something happens that completely knocks over the perception that we ever had control: a spot shows up on the X-ray, or the school principal called you again about your child, a global pandemic changes everything, or you find yourself in an automobile that has lost control and all you can do is sit there, strapped into the vehicle, and pray… and realize, “I have lost control of my life.”
That aspect of the human condition is not unique to our time and place. Just have a look at Jairus. Jairus was a man of power, a respected man in his community, a leader in the synagogue. You know he’s important because Mark gives him a name – not just anyone gets a name in the Bible! But Jairus – he is worth that. He’s educated, and strong, and respected… and completely at his wit’s end because his 12-year-old daughter is sick to the point of death. If ever there is a time to feel completely and utterly helpless, it is when your child is severely ill. And Jairus is desperate. So desperate, that he goes to this man, this folk healer, Jesus, whom many of his colleagues despise. He works in the synagogue, remember – where the scribes and Pharisees hang out. But what else is he supposed to do? He is desperate!
Or, look at the woman with the hemorrhage. The possibility of losing control in our lives does not discriminate based on social status or income. This woman is the opposite of Jairus. She has no name; she is known only by her ailment. She is an outcast, because the ailment she has lived with for 12 years has made her ritually unclean. By law, she is untouchable. Perhaps she once had a chance at a prosperous life, but she was struck with this ailment that has not only rendered her unclean and untouchable, a fringe member of her community, but also unable to bear children, which was the primary responsibility of women in the first century. She is worthless to society, and without anyone to advocate for her. She has spent every cent she had on shoddy health care that has made her worse instead of better, and left her with no money to her name. She has completely lost control of her life. All she can do is reach out and touch the garment of this man she just knows can heal her. “If I but touch his clothes,” she thinks, “I will be made well.” (There may yet be hope!)
Who has not felt like these people? I’m at the end of my rope. I don’t know where else to turn, what else to do. If only I could do X, Y, or Z, everything would be better. If only I were more like that, and less like this, I could get out of this mess. Perhaps we, like Jairus and the woman with the hemorrhage, turn to Jesus in times like this. Prayer is always a good place to turn! But when I’m especially desperate, I find my prayer often becomes, “God, make this struggle go away, so I can regain control over my life.” And that is not quite the prayer we want to be praying, and not what these stories are about.
The responses of the characters in both of these stories are worth examining, but I’m particularly struck by the woman’s. After she touches his cloak, Jesus feels the power go out from him – in itself, remarkable, given the density of the crowd around him. And when he calls out for her, she actually responds! How easy it would have been to slip away unnoticed. She was, after all, rejected by most of society, and really should not have been in public at all, given that she was unclean. But when Jesus calls out to her, she cannot stay hidden. It takes a lot of courage to be a human being, and she certainly calls on that courage here! “Knowing what had happened to her,” Mark tells us, the woman “came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth.”
What do you think that means – “the whole truth”? Did she tell him merely that she was the one who touched him and why? Or did she tell him all about the 12 years she had endured an embarrassing ailment, faulty treatment, and social isolation? Did she tell him how she felt during that 12 years? Did she tell him all the times she had doubted, all the times she wanted to disappear, all the times that the suffering became too much for her to bear? Did she tell him of the terrified joy she had felt when the power went out of him and into her and healed her?
The whole truth. That’s something we have trouble with, isn’t it? It’s a part of that desire for control that we have – being so honest as to tell the whole truth puts us in a very vulnerable position. It shows people that we don’t know it all, that we can’t handle everything, that we have doubts and fears and concerns and shortcomings, and we risk baring all those warts to everyone.
Or perhaps even worse, in telling the whole truth, we risk baring all those warts to ourselves.
It takes a lot of courage to be a human being, and it takes a lot of courage to tell the whole truth and make yourself so vulnerable. I think of myself as a pretty honest person – honest with myself and honest with others. I sometimes think I am TOO honest for my own good! But still, this notion of the “whole truth” catches me off guard sometimes. Even during confession, like we did at the beginning of this service. During that time of silence, when we are all reflecting on our sins and speaking them aloud to God in our hearts… I sometimes find myself naming something, and then my blasted human nature starts trying to justify itself! “Well, I don’t know that that was really a sin, Johanna. You don’t really need to confess that.” As if I could ever be anything less than wholly truthful with God. (If you recall, that didn’t work out so well for Adam and Eve!)
And that is what the woman who is cured of her hemorrhage has to teach us. She didn’t have to come forward. She could have just slipped away into the crowd, and never have to face Jesus – God – face to face. There were so many people there; who would ever know? But she knew what had happened to her. She knew the grace she had received. She felt in her body the restoration – the restoration of her body, but also the restoration she would feel in her community, having returned to a neutral status, no longer unclean. She felt that gratitude so deeply that she had no choice but to approach Jesus with fear and trembling, and tell him the whole truth. It takes a lot of courage to be a human being. It takes a lot of courage to be touched by God!
Did you know that the root of the word “courage” is the Latin word for heart – “cour”? So to have courage, then, is to be heart-full, to find the ability to tell your story with your whole heart. To let go of who you think you should be, in order to be the beautiful creature God made you to be – and God did make you this way on purpose! To have courage is to allow yourself to be in a vulnerable position, a position where you don’t have complete control over your life, trusting that indeed God is the one who always had control, not you. To make yourself willing to invest yourself in things that may or may not work out, to take risks in your personal life and in your faith.
Because hear this: God loves you, even with all your warts. God knows your most vulnerable self, and loves that self, dearly. God loves you for exactly who you are so much that God would send His own Son to take away the sins of the world, to bring us into eternal life, to restore relationship with us. If God loves us that much, then we ought to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen, for all that we are and for all that we aren’t, and to love one another with our whole, courageous hearts.
Let us pray… Loving God, we want so badly to have control of our lives, and to keep certain parts of our truth hidden from you and others. Make us courageous to share our whole truth with you, and to trust that you love us dearly anyway. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment