Sermon Title: "Finding the Faith to Reach Out"
Date: June 28, 2009
Ministers: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Mark 5:21-34

Have you ever had a scripture passage, when read, bring back a special memory for you?  Perhaps it was a passage that your parent or grandmother read to you.  Perhaps in the church where you were confirmed the pastor picked that particular scripture verse for you.  Perhaps it is your favorite passage that you seek to live your life by, or one that always sees you through your darkest time.

When I looked at today’s Gospel passage from Mark, particularly the story-within-the story of the hemorrhaging woman who reached out to touch Jesus’ clothes, it took me back a good 15 or 18 years.  It was late January, and I was attending the Earl Lectures and Pastoral Conference at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.  One workshop session I attended must have been on the subject of the dramatic reading of scripture, or the real meaning behind a story.  I don’t remember the workshop title, but I remember how the professor leading it shared the story we heard today.

He first had a person take the Bible and read it aloud, asking us to listen.  Next, he gave the Bible to another person and asked that person to read it, but this time more slowly.  Like you, this morning, we had only heard it once, so a second retelling gave us the opportunity to recollect more of the details.  Then he gave the text to yet a third person, and asked them to read it slowly, pausing briefly at each comma.  We began to remember the story pretty well.  Finally, he asked us to close our eyes, while yet a fourth person read it slowly, with exaggerated pauses at each phrase.  He asked us to listen, to envision ourselves there, to see it happen, and sense what it felt like.  It was something like this:

“[The woman] had heard about Jesus . . . and came up behind him in the crowd . . . and touched his cloak . . . for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes . . . I will be made well.’ . . . Immediately her hemorrhage stopped . . . and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. . . . Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him . . . Jesus turned around in the crowd . . . and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’”  (Mark 5:27-30)

The actual experience of hearing it read step-by-step while our eyes were closed, imaging it, feeling what each character might have felt as the healing unfolded, probably took at least seven minutes.  It was very moving, for me, at least, and made me feel as if I were within the body of the woman, or what it might have felt like for Jesus to perceive that power had left him.  It helped me delve into the real feeling of what happened to those involved much better than just reading or hearing it read but once.  I don’t know how many of you read the scripture lesson on which the sermon is based when it is publicized in the Carillon each week, but you might try it before coming to church to start your mind mulling over what Susie or I will use as the text for our sermon.

There are many aspects of today’s story that scholars could explain to you.  The woman had bled for twelve years; the daughter of the leader of the synagogue was twelve years old.  The number twelve is significant in Jewish thought (for example, the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles), so it’s no coincidence that the woman has been bleeding (and therefore cut off from life) for twelve years.  A flow of blood for a dozen years would exhaust a person, as if her life force were draining away.  On top of that would be the discomfort and, worst of all, the feeling of isolation that comes with uncleanliness and the taboos around it.  Women who experienced their monthly cycle were considered ritually unclean, and were to be isolated in a separate tent or dwelling for a period of time.  And yet Jesus ignores the taboo for the sake of relationship and, perhaps, honor.  He doesn’t permit this touch to stay an anonymous, passive healing on his part; he lets himself be sidetracked from hurrying to the synagogue leader’s home long enough to find the person who has reached out to him with a touch that is more specific, more intentional, than merely jostling him in the crowd.  Perhaps the crowd wanted to get near a celebrity, but this woman was reaching for her life.  Jesus felt both her weariness and her deep hope.  How could he simply walk away?

Then there’s the great cultural and socioeconomic chasm that exists between the principals in both the story that begins, and the one that interrupts it.  The leader of the synagogue is a person with a measure of prestige, respected in his community, accustomed no doubt to being listened to by people not as highly placed as he was, people without his knowledge and the power that it brings.  He was a leader, a religious leader, and yet his precious child’s illness has reduced him, weakened him, lowered him to the ground in front of a traveling folk healer in a last-ditch effort to prevent the worst from happening.  This man’s name is known to us:  Jairus.  Megan McKenna tells us that his name (onomati 'Iairos) in Greek is “a clue to what is going to happen”:  it means “he who will be awakened or he is enlightened.”

Compared to him, the unnamed woman in the crowd—ritually unclean, shunned by society—is a person of no stature.  And she’s a woman, regarded as a second class citizen compared to a man.

It has been reported that people before the scientific age did not allow themselves to get too attached emotionally to their children, because so many of them, before vaccinations, hospitals, and prenatal care, died young.  In Jesus’ time it is estimated that 60 percent of live births usually died by their mid-teens.  The gift of a child must have seemed too precarious to invest in wholeheartedly, yet this man couldn’t bear to lose his little girl even at a time when daughters were not valued as much as sons.  Jairus going to this itinerant preacher-healer who was already in trouble with the authorities (authorities like him, in fact – his colleagues and perhaps even his friends), he risks being ridiculed, and he risks missing the last few precious moments in his daughter’s life.

So you have all these cultural, hierarchical, political, social and religious differences colliding in these two stories today.  Into the midst of all of this comes the silent woman with a hemorrhage, without the boldness of the learned and respected synagogue leader, simply hoping for one healing touch.  Faithfulness or fear, desperation or hope:  there’s no alternative for either one of these people, and they do whatever they have to do, whatever it takes, for the sake of healing and new life.  Barbara Brown Taylor observes that Jesus preaches the “shortest sermon of his career:  ‘Do not fear,’ he says to the grief-besotted man, ‘only believe.’”  “Do not fear; only believe”—the words on our bulletin cover today.  Taylor says this sermon was not just for Jairus’ benefit, and not just for the early church Mark addressed, but for “all of us who suffer from the human condition, who are up against things we cannot control.”

And the question every preacher must ask him- or herself is, how does this text speak to the situation of the people in my congregation?  One cannot read this text and easily avoid the question of faith and healing, or the related question of prayer.  Most painfully, we ask why everyone who suffers is not healed, even when they do have faith, even when they pray and believe and trust God.  This question is most painful when it comes when someone in your church, especially a child, suffers with a life-threatening illness.  Neither the pastor nor the parent finds an easy answer at such a moment.  The hardest funeral I ever conducted was for the son of our good friends in my last church—born on my birthday, but died three days later from hypoplastic left-heart syndrome—which is now routinely repaired through surgery pioneered at Loma Linda Medical Center.  We were all people of faith, but I was as bereft of things to say as the parents were bereft at the loss of their first-born child.

Many of the commentators (especially those writing with a pastoral voice) wrestle mightily with these questions and find no easy answers in this text.  Barbara Brown Taylor, among others, sees Mark’s purpose as establishing Jesus’ identity:  “They are not stories about how to get God to do what we want, which is just another way of trying to stay in control.  Instead, they are stories about who God is, and how God acts, and what God is like.  Mark wrote them down for one reason and one reason alone:  ‘This is no ordinary man,’ he tells us every way he knows how.  ‘This man is the son of God.  Believe it.’”  Holding on to that knowledge would sustain Mark’s community and the church today, all of us, and give us “strength to meet the days to come....[and] not lose heart.”

It takes faith—faith in the unseen, faith in the unknown—to reach out and ask for help, from a friend, or even from God.  But we do it because we dare not give up hope.  The synagogue leader, whose station in life was different from Jesus, did it.  The unnamed woman, who knew that if only she touched Jesus’ clothes she would be made well, did it.

The faith to reach out:  may you find it . . . and hold on to it.