July 1, 2012
Mark 5: 21-43
Do Not Fear, Only Believe
People, all over the world, go to church for millions of reasons. Today, they’re sitting on pews, under tin roofs, in open air, on mats on a dirt floor...in church. Some of them are there eager to hear a “fix-it” or a solution to a problem...whether it be a minor decision they have to make, or something as serious as addiction, divorce, infidelity, financial stress, family crisis, sickness or loneliness...Some people are sitting in church today because they need to hear a positive word from the preacher, or because they need to pray with a friend or brother, and many people are sitting in church today because it’s Sunday, and that’s what they do on Sunday...they go to church. Some people go to church to feel good about themselves, to meet other people, to get a date :-), and some people go just to get out of the house- to escape the misery that has become their life.
However, I believe that most people who are sitting in a church today, all around the world, are there because at some point in their lives they have had glimpses of the holy, exchanges with a loving and compassionate God, have felt loved and accepted for who they are, and somehow believe that no matter what they are going through...God will be there, God will show up again..in a Holy moment.
Think about your holy moments....why do you come to church? Do you come to church today for the same reasons you first walked through the doors? Do you LONG for a Holy moment?
Faith, my friends, is not easy, and it’s not a guarantee either. As followers of Jesus, with a relationship to a holy and loving God we are traveling a journey, together, that will be the most difficult of our lives. And when faced with crises, when death and disease are knocking at the door, when grief strikes our home, when loss and bewilderment threaten to suck us into an eternity of torment, we are told to “Not fear, but only believe”.
In the gospel lesson for today, we are given two complementary stories, literarily juxtaposed, full of theological as well as homiletical discoveries. Just after healing the demon-possessed Gerasene man we find Jesus arriving across shore with a crowd of people gathering around him. First, he is encountered by a religious leader named Jairus who, at the feet of Jesus, pleads healing for his 12 year-old daughter who is lying at home on her deathbed. So, Mark writes that Jesus went with the man, and that while traveling, as usual, a large crowd was pressing in on him. Imagine, if you will, an outdoor market in a third world country...people everywhere, chickens running & clucking beneath your feet, children here and there, cars and bicycles crowding through...elders stooped down and teetering fragilely from one place to the next.
How many of you have found yourselves in this type of situation before? surrounded by people on all sides... I remember the first time I traveled to West Africa- Burkina Faso. I was to work in a village called Ouergoo and would be handing out medical supplies to children and families. Upon arriving at the village, we could hardly make our way to our hut because the people were in mass, following us, pressing in on us, reaching for our skin, wanting to touch our noses, touching our clothes, holding our hands, wanting to carry our bags. The air was semi- sweet strung with the stench of sweaty human bodies, it was HOT, a day much like today...no shade, maybe even hotter (I remember, my friend Mark writing a haiku on this day called HOT. I think it went something like this:
Hot, Hot, Hot
It’s Hot in Ouergoo
Hot, Hot, Hot.
The following morning, after we’d had a sleepless night in our huts, we awoke to a thousand eyeballs staring in at us through our door and our windows...tiny children sat inside our rooms on the floor facing our mats...looking directly into at us, waiting for our eyes to open. The people were excited about those who had come with medicine, and they were pressing in on us.
Imagine Jesus, again, the healer of diseases, the giver of life and forgiver of sins. The people knew who was in their midst and they were excited...they pressed in on Jesus, rubbing elbows, breathing his air, looking as closely upon him as they could, and then...he felt it... his power had been released. As if he were crazy with people hovering and pressing all around, Jesus asks “who touched me?” With this announcement, the crowd would become still, and people would look all around, until finally, at his feet once again a woman asking for his healing power and grace.
At this woman, Jesus does not simply spit or rebuke her for touching him, rendering him unclean, but he calls her “daughter,” saying your faith has made you well, go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
This woman, whose name we do not know, but who I imagine to be Isabelle, has suffered for 12 years...living in isolation, poor from spending all of her money on medicinal treatments and providers, much like someone today with a pre-existing condition and no longer eligible for medial care. Her soul is as bloody as her body, broken down with the stares of those who scoff at her, judge her for her sins, rebuke her for her uncleanness. Her journey is as unknown to us as our own. Who was she before the bleeding began, and why does this day mark her a daughter in the eyes of our loving savior? I see Isabelle cleaning the floor’s of her home, baking bread for the guests she will host in the morrow, singing to herself, watering flowers, and unexpectedly waking up, the next day, to an anguishing plight. No more light, no more songs, no more guests to serve or children to hold...no more friendships, relationships, and even the house has been lost. She has suffered long and has been blameless, but those of us who see her this day...covering her face, lowering herself to the ground, self-loathing in her condition...we make judgements and cast our stones, we position ourselves as far as possible from this one not worthy of our touch, but Jesus....
Jesus knows the journey, and embittered as she may be, he does not turn her away, but calls her “daughter”.
I think we are foolish to suggest that this woman had lived the last 12 years without cursing God, without asking “why me?” What did I do wrong? Were is God?? If there even is a God, where are you??? I want to see your face....!
In her book, Still: Notes on a mid-faith crisis, Duke Divinity Professor, Lauren Winner describes her own journey, after the death of her mother and her own divorce, saying, “On the days when I think I have a fighting chance, at change, I understand it to be these words and these rituals and these people who will change me. Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or, whether graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted; not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; wrest-less, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of hope keep interrupting my gaze.”
For Isabelle, I wonder if she found faith and lost it in the same day, whether she cried herself to sleep asking God for relief from her condition, from isolation and loneliness, whether she stopped talking to God altogether, and whether faith felt like a friend or a foe.
Winner writes, “-before my mother got sick, before I found myself to be a person thinking about divorce- I would have told you that these were precisely the circumstances in which one would be glad for religious faith. Faith, after all, is suppose to sustain you, through hard times- and i’m sure for many people, faith does just that. But it wasn’t so for me, in my case as everything else was dying, my faith seemed to die too. God had been there, God has been alive to me. And then, it seemed, nothing was alive- not even God.”
I think sometimes as Christians, as believers in Jesus, as worshipers of the creator God we are inclined to fear our doubts, to be shamed by our uncertainties, to hide our faces from the pain of faithlessness. Perhaps, what we find in this passage in the healing of a nameless, bleeding and abandoned woman, is Jesus granting healing to a woman who represents the human condition, who just happens to need physical healing as well. He makes her “well” and grants her peace and then says be healed of your disease. I do not doubt the significance of her ailments or of Jesus ability to heal the body, but what draws me in is the condition of this woman’s suffering soul, and Jesus’ inclination to provide her with holistic healing. He can see her, and has seen her in the closet hiding from loved ones, in the shadows cutting herself that she might live, in the bedroom cursing her body for what it has turned her into, in the daylight abandoning the faith that once was her song. Jesus sees her and has seen her through the journey, and still does not abandon her.
Yes, these stories do illuminate the power and possibility of faith, but I think even more
than the act of faith, the falling down at Jesus feet, the crying for mercy and the begging for forgiveness we witness a journey of faith, and find God’s mercy and grace beyond the scope of human understanding. That faith itself is a substance that resides deep within us, as hot as coals in the middle of the desert, as sharp as the blade that has cut us off from ourselves, and as redemptive and loyal as the one whom God created when you turned into you.
Lauren Winner continues in her journey of faith by sharing, “Maybe in hardening my heart to my marriage, I hardened it to God too. Here: I had been a person who felt God, who felt God’s company, now I was becoming a person who was wondering if I had dreamed up God, and then a person who was tired of her own wondering. Maybe none of it- God, incarnation, sin, redemption- was real, and I just needed to get on with personal growth and get back to politics, go on a peace-keeping mission with the UN, do something other than moon around wondering if I had faith”.
Not all of us will face the faith crisis that Winner describes in her book, and not all of us will find ourselves questioning the existence of God or of our relationship with God, but we have all questioned our own faith, our own shortcomings, our lack of faith, our undeserving sin-ridden selves, and have been intrigued by the invitation to abandon the hope that there will be more holy moments, that God is there and sees us, will continue to see us for who we are, and will not leave us alone.
When Jairus asked Jesus to come to his daughter’s aide, Jesus seemingly agreed, by following him to his home, but due to interruptions in the journey, Jairus daughter died before Jesus could get there. We will all feel the wounds of waiting on Jesus, waiting for peace and life to overcome suffering and injustice, waiting on the one who walks on water to move mountains, to end war and bring unity to broken-people and places, waiting on the pain of deep loss and anguish to subside, waiting for our songs to return again, and waiting to be found by the faith that once sustained us. But just as Jairus turned to hear the news, Jesus says to him, “Do not fear, only believe”. In this instance, a girl was brought from death to life, from silence to speaking, from lacking sustenance to eating food, from lifelessness to restoration, from lying to waking, to living...
Maybe we aren’t the walking dead, and maybe our ailments are less visible than that of the bleeding woman, but we all need healing, nonetheless. I think most often, it is those living with affliction and pain who have received the deepest of healings, even at their bedsides when their bodies are caving in and they are too weak to talk, their eyes tell the story of beauty & redemption, grace and peace. It’s those of us walking the earth without a thorny flesh who seem most daunted by the shame of faithlessness, who must learn to abandon ourselves before we can ever allow the faith of our beginnings to capture us once again, and let the journey be our faith.
This journey, Lauren Winner says is like this:
“There is a mountain, swathed in darkness. The mountain is God, and the mountain is your movement toward God. This is what it is like to ascend to God: you are standing at the edge of an abyss, and the foot of a mountain that seems impassable. All is soaked in darkness. You are fearful. Yet you want to go on.”
Faith is a journey that is ours as faith-filled people longing to live in communion with our creator God. It is not easy, and at times we will forget who we are and whose we are, but the one whom we crowd around and press in on will never abandon us.
Whoever you are, wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome at the feet of Jesus, and you will not be turned away. Jesus said, “Do not fear, only believe”.
May it be so. Amen.
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