SERMON – FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – YEAR B
“MALADY OF THE MARGINS”
MARK 5:21-43 / JUNE 28, 2015
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our
hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.
Amen.
Sometimes the most important things that happen to you in life are the
intrusions. You are on your way somewhere, with an agenda, a clear,
direct purpose in mind, and you get distracted. Something else comes up
that demands your attention, and that ‘something else’ turns out to be more
important than the journey on which you originally set out. I know that
some have the idea that clergy do not manage their time very well.
Sometimes it seems to take us too long to get things done. Try to have
some sympathy for us. We get distracted. We have set aside a morning
to prepare a sermon, but here comes someone with a need, an immediate
problem, and we drop everything for this intrusion.
Just last Sunday
afternoon, when I had other plans, I spent almost three hours with
someone who was distraught over family problems; a person with whom I
had little contact since officiating at her wedding a dozen years ago.
Intrusions happen and call for immediate attention.
I’m sure many of you
live in similar worlds of regular ‘intrusions’.
Today’s gospel story is about a woman who was an intrusion.
Jesus is
about important business. Just moments before her intrusion, a leader of
the synagogue, an important and impressive man, persuades Jesus to
make a house visit to heal his ailing daughter. On the way to do something
good for an important person, Jesus gets distracted. A woman appears.
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She intrudes from the margins. Of course, on the margins is where lots of
women have been through most of history. Historically, these women
have not had a place in the ‘big story.’ They have been there on the
margins, living quietly. They take what they can of the leftovers of history.
But they don’t get to make history. They don’t get mentioned when the
final account is given of what really happened in the world. Still, this
woman pushes forward. She demands to be noticed. She intrudes into
the story. We don’t know the woman’s name. We know nothing of her
family circumstances. All we know is that she is a woman who is ill. She is
a person in pain. For twelve years she has been hemorrhaging. We also
learn that she had endured much under many physicians. In frantic pursuit
of well-being, she has spent her days in waiting rooms, in emergency
rooms. She has been poked at, tested, discussed, humiliated, lost her
dignity, and still she suffers.
More than this, she was ostracized by
society Ritually unclean because of her flow of blood – she would be excluded from
participating within her faith community and rejected by the wider society.
Her money had all been spent on trying to find a cure.
Being ritually
unclean, impoverished, and a woman rendered her powerless, and in a
state of absolute vulnerability within society. She is the opposite of Jairus
for he is privileged, powerful, accepted, and male.
Now, exhausted and with just a thread of hope remaining, she makes one
last effort to live. She reaches out, she pushes out from the margins to
move toward power. She reaches out to Jesus, toward healing and new
life. She had said to herself, “if I can just touch his clothing (the hem of his
garment in some translations), I will be healed.” This is one of the
strongest images of faith in the New Testament - her hand, reaching out
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from the margins of the crowd to where she had been pushed by her
poverty, her pain, her gender, reaching out to touch Jesus, the giver of life.
She reaches out and receives the life for which she had hoped.
Meanwhile, Jairus, whose little girl is very ill, stands by waiting as Jesus
takes precious time with this woman. He grows hopeful as he witnesses
Jesus restore her to health. Then came the message from his home, “your
daughter is dead.
There’s no use troubling the teacher now.”
In the face of such news, what
should Jesus say? Jesus meant to heal one, instead healed another, and
the first one died. Well, as we know, in this story Jesus eventually went to
the house and raised the little girl from the dead. But that merely
suspends the problem; it doesn’t solve it. Because we all know for every
person who ever gets healed of a disease, someone else will die. For
every person who can push through the crowd to claim the power of Christ,
somebody else stands close at hand, having just lost a son or daughter.
I
guess we need to take some time away from the story to sort it out. Some
people get well. Others do not. What can we say about that?
A young boy was terminally ill with leukemia. Things had reached a stage
where there was absolutely nothing anybody could do.
The boy was part
of a family who regularly attended church; and throughout his ordeal folks
from the church, along with the minister, offered support and pastoral care.
One day, when the end was near, the boy was spending some time with his
minister and said to her, “I think I know why god isn’t able to make me
better.” “Why is that?” she responded. The boy said, ‘because I think
god’s busy helping everybody else.”
In speaking to a friend about her
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experience with the boy, she said, “I left the room, got in the car, and drove
around for a while. I didn’t know what to say. “
What can we say? Some people get well; others do not.
The gospel of mark would probably say, “This is the way this world is.”
All
the gospels agree that Jesus was a healer. He restored life in the face of
death.
Note, however, Mark’s tone of restraint. Mark says, “they brought
to Jesus all who were sick or possessed...the whole city gathered...and he
cured many who were sick.” Jesus cured many, but not all.
The gospel
of mark knows what you and I know: sooner or later, one way or another,
all of us become sick. The warranty runs out on our moveable parts. A
stain appears on the x-ray. The blood count changes without warning. Or
a hemorrhage begins and lasts twelve years. That’s how it is in a world
like this. Like it or not, sooner or later, one way or another, time will run
out.
So I want to suggest this morning, that the Christian faith, the power we
receive from Christ, is not so much about cure, but care, not wellness but
wholeness. Wholeness is not simply having a body that is no longer
diseased. It is, primarily, to be at peace with god and neighbour, what is
known as ‘shalom’ - that all embracing peace which means that we are at
home in God.
I once knew a fellow who, in my opinion and the opinion of many others,
was self-centred, miserable, cranky, difficult, complaining, and bigoted –
well the list could go on and on. He developed a very serious heart
ailment.
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I can’t remember the details, but what I do remember is that the doctors
had told him nothing could be done about his condition and that he could
look forward to only a couple of years of life at most.
Then one day his
doctor contacted him to say that there was a new procedure, a very new
procedure that was highly risky, but if successful would effectively cure him
and he could look forward to many more years of healthy living.
He
decided to have the risky procedure done and as it turned out it was
successful.
But, as I later observed, he did not change one iota.
While
happy with the outcome of the surgery, he had no words of gratitude for the
doctors, no sense of the wonder of his being well – and he remained as
cantanerous as he had ever been.
Cured? Yes. Healed? I think not.
I once knew a young woman. She was vivacious, extroverted to a fault, the
ultimate party person; but also rather materialistic , even hedonistic, and
quite self-centred.
One day, while in her office at work, she suffered a
brain aneurysm . She lay in a coma for two months, nearly died several
times. When she came out of her coma, her lovely face was permanently
twisted, she could only walk with great difficulty and pain. Yet, her outlook
on life was completely different. She told me how at peace she felt.
She would sit on her veranda blissfully sipping her coffee, joyfully looking
into her backyard noticing its beauty as she had never done before. Her
senses were more alive to, and appreciative of, everything around her.
She took nothing for granted any longer; she was thankful for every minute
of life; she began to care for her friends and family in deep and loving
ways;
No longer self-centred, rather she was now centred in the shalom of God
for which she was so grateful.
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Was she cured?
Not really.
But healed. I think so.
At its heart, the story of the healing of the woman with the long standing
hemorhage is similar.
It’s more about care, than cure; more about
wholeness than wellness.
As she touches Jesus, he turns to find her. He wants to know who she is.
and this woman who was an unknown, identified only by her bleeding and
her pain, is now going to be known – known by face, by name, in all of her
wonderful particularity and individuality.
Jesus addresses her, not as ‘you
patient,’ or ‘you recipient of the health care system.’ Tenderly he calls her
“daughter.” “Daughter”. It is an intimate designation that honours her, that
places her within the family, the family of God. He praises her action.
“Your faith has made you well.”
Note that Jesus doesn’t even claim to
have healed her. Rather, he gives her all the credit. She had faith that
Jesus could heal her.
Yet she also had faith in herself. She had refused to accept the relegated
position to which society assigned her. She was determined to be
someone more than simply a person in pain and helplessness.
She had faith in Jesus, but she also had faith in her own capacity to reach
out and touch, to receive the power that faith affords.
And so Jesus blesses her, “Go in peace.” Go in wholeness, go to live life in
its fullness. Your faith has made you well. It may be that her story is your
story. From what I can tell, there is a great deal of bleeding, much
hemorrhaging going on. Life is ebbing away from us, day by day, and I am
saying that only because I am over sixty! We. Like the disciples, stand by
and watch people get pushed to the margins, relegated to hopeless
situations, powerless, weak, and in pain. Too easily we can say, “she is
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beyond all hope,” or “you just have to adapt and accept your present
situation.” but here comes this story of the pushy, intrusive woman,
intruding into our settled arrangement, reminding us that in Jesus Christ,
there is a power let loose in the world which is there for us. In whatever
pain you suffer, however caught or trapped, will you reach out to that
power? Will you let him speak to you? Will you let the life that God intends
for you, flow toward you? This is the faith that makes us whole. Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Major Resources:
“From Death to Life- Proclaiming the Text” by William H. Willimon in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 28, No. 3,
Year B,pp.4-6. Editor: William H. Willimon. Wood Lake Books. Kelowna BC. 2000.
“Time Taken, life restored,” by William G. Carter in Emphasis, Volume 30, Number 2, pp.67-68.
Editorial Director: Teresa Rhoads. CSS Publishing Company, Inc. Lima, Ohio. 2000.
“Theological Perspective” by Mark D.W. Edington in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3,
Pp 188-192. Editors: David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox Press.
Louisville, Kentucky. 2009.
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