Sermon Title: “Your Faith Has Made You Well”
Grace and peace to you from the God who is, who was and is to come, the one who is the same yesterday, today and forever, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
When I was a kid, Sunday afternoons in the wintertime were reserved for watching movies on Channel 5, WTTG, in Washington. They had the old classics and my Mom’s favorites were with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I’d groan the obligatory groans that a youngster would utter, and if you had told me then that I’d grow up to envy Fred Astaire’s moves on the dance floor, I’d have laughed in your face. Yet a few years later, I’m glued to the set when “Dancing with the Stars” comes on or the latest TV reality dance show “So You Think You Can Dance”.
After each dance sequence on the show, the competitors are judged by a panel which seems always to include a rather severe, stern faced man with a British accent. I was impressed, however, with his ability to put into words what was wrong with the couple’s performances. “You touched each other when you danced” he said, “but you were not in touch with each other.” “In dance,” He said,“ you must be linked not only by your bodies but in your hearts and minds as well.” Dance is intimate conversation between two souls; it is the entwining and intermingling of spirits. When you aren’t together, it’s movement but it is not dancing. “You have to be able to read each other’s touch.”
The event of Jesus is all about touch isn’t it? God so loved the world that he gave us Jesus to touch us, to heal us. God doesn’t remain aloof from us and watch from a distance. God has to be close to us, God has to connect. It is the marvel of the Christian faith that God clothes the divine self in human flesh. There’s an old hymn we sing at communion, which speaks so beautifully of this reality. It goes: For the Lord of all existence,
Putting off divine transcendence,
Stoops again in love to meet us,
With his very life to feed us.
It is the treasure of the church’s theology to believe that God indeed comes to unite with us in the Lord’s Supper. We meet Jesus there, we meet God there. We put his body to our lips and unite physically, intimately with him. He is one with us; we with him. It is mystical, a marvel, magnificent. By his touch we are healed and freed.
It has always been so. Today, we have two very beautiful passages of St Mark’s gospel, which fall under the category “miracles.” We’ve been having them for several weeks now. A miracle is a marvel. A miracle has no scientific or earthly explanation. God simply invades human space and time and overrules God’s own laws of cause and effect. The eternal and the temporal collide and God rearranges the reality that we know. Miracles are a demonstration of God’s power and even more, God’s authority. If you are God, you can break the natural laws you yourself have made. When we talk about God the rules don’t apply.
The first woman we meet lived a life of social isolation. She suffered from hemorrhages – a malady that caused her to bleed continuously. The Hebrew people of Jesus’ day and age believed that blood carried the presence of God. Blood was holy – “kathosh” in Hebrew. If you touched human blood you were unclean and had to go for purification and cleansing and show yourself to a priest before you could enter the synagogue or the temple. People didn’t want to be around you for fear that they would touch you. Further, most people believed that a lasting physical ailment like the one she had had for 12 years was a sign of God’s displeasure, a result of some secret sin that you were being punished for. You were shunned, avoided, an outcast. But this woman will not take “no” for an answer. She simply connects with Jesus – she touches his garment. Yet God uses her faith, and the touch, and she is completely healed. One cannot say Jesus healed her. It is God’s act – Jesus even appears unaware of it until the “power” goes out of him.
Who are the ones we shun? We used to lock up and institutionalize the “mad”, the insane - even the harmless ones. We have come a long way in understanding disease and treating people humanely. Yet, there are still those we ask to keep their distance - the ones with AIDS, those with birth defects – even birth marks or psoriasis we look upon with suspicion. Today’s lesson reminds us that when God visits us in human form, people are healed, miraculous things happen, and that Jesus isn’t afraid to become vulnerable to our world of disease. Jesus expects us to touch others and open ourselves to be touched by them too. We are the body of Christ in the world. We exist to be a healing influence and a medium of healing.
The other miracle in the story is a demonstration of both faith in Jesus and his power over life and death. Jairus is a leader in the synagogue – equivalent to the church council president. He is connected to scores of people, probably hundreds. He is respected, trusted and admired, but death came to his door too in the person of his little daughter. It’s a tender scene Jesus takes her by the hand and his touch and call bring her back to life. Here it is Jesus demonstrating the power of God because he is God.
Yet this little girl grew up to die, Jairus died, the woman with the hemorrhage died too. What matters ultimately is how we live and how we are connected to life around us.
In my second parish, it was my privilege to know Barbara. Barb had a terrible form of cancer – myeloma. When she had first gotten the cancer, the doctor gave her six months to live. When we met, she had lived six years with the disease. Barb was a wonder to me. She was deeply, deeply connected to other people. She’d been a nurse at the Adams County public home for the aged and she had this amazing ability to love people and connect with them. During our home visits, we were usually interrupted two or three times by phone calls or visitors. She had a joyful, playful spirit and a deep faith. People loved her just as much as she loved them. She scooped up life in great handfuls and drew life from others and gave it in return. If ever anyone was “in touch” that is to say, “connected” it was Barb. She touched any lives and let herself be touched. Jesus said “I came that they might have life and have it in abundance”. Abundant life, and faith in Jesus are ultimately connected.
Today’s lessons remind us to be open to God’s spirit. Life is full of miracles if we but open our eyes. God wants us to believe and trust that nothing will ever come between Him, His love and us! Jesus is the seal of His pledge. Trust Him.
In Jesus’ Name
Who We Are