Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from July 2, 2006

“Healing and Community”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Psalm 130

Mark 5:21-43

If you have ever wondered why Jesus was in trouble with so many people so much of the time, this passage can pretty much clear it up.  In twenty-one short verses, Mark’s version of the familiar healing story that appears in both the other Synoptic gospels takes on subtle nuances that offend just about everyone, turn centuries of social propriety on it’s ear and poke a very telling finger at the religious authorities of the day.

Not bad for less than half a page of Scripture.  Of course, like most Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry, there’s good news to be heard as well, and how we might receive the story at any given point in time depends in large part on where we stand in relation to it.  In this text, there is healing and comfort in one breath and, in the next, a less-than-gentle shove beyond what is comfortable and familiar.  Mark’s masterful story weaving sets us on the razor’s edge of the Gospel. 

Make no mistake.  This is not a quaint story from antiquity that simply confirms Jesus as a private miracle worker who cured disease.  This is a stunning witness to the new and radically different social order that is a cornerstone of the kingdom Jesus ushers into history.  It unfolds in the early verses as we meet Jairus in his harried plea for his daughter’s health as she teeters on the brink of death, and Jesus’ interrupted journey as he encounters the woman with an issue of blood. 

Caught up in the urgency of the story, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that religious leaders of that time were not much concerned with women or children.  Women were the legal property of their husbands, and children—particularly girl children—had no social standing whatsoever.    Women were not allowed to work, so women who were widowed or divorced (men could divorce women but it was just about impossible for women to divorce men) became social outcasts and beggars and, in some instances, prostitutes.  

So choosing a woman and a child for this story, sets the context for Jesus’ choosing the quintessential symbol of society’s most vulnerable members and Jesus heals them.  They were nobodies to the world but they were not nobodies to Jesus.  The realm that Jesus ushers into the world is one where everyone matters, where value is assigned not on the basis of accomplishment, knowledge, wealth, skin color, age, physical ability, gender, sexual orientation, education, national origin,  or any other judgment we pass on others that create an “us” and a “them”. 

The world that Jesus seeks to create is one where the dividing walls of hostility are broken down, where perfect love casts out fear and we spend a lifetime learning to look at one another with holy eyes.  Jesus’ seemingly simple act of healing bears witness to a radically different way of being in the world.

There’s a second even more subtle twist in the text and it unfolds as Mark weaves these two stories together.  The first story of Jairus and his gravely ill daughter is interrupted by a second story of the woman with the hemorrhage.  This literary technique of laying one story over another is characteristic of Mark’s gospel and what he often lacks in story detail is more than made up for in his skillful editing.  Jairus, we are told, is a temple official.  That means that he was a religious heavy weight, a bigwig, if you will.  Now it was no secret that Jesus and the religious pooh-bahs of the day had more than their share of disagreements.  Jesus routinely lambasted them for their unholy alliance with the Roman occupation and the widespread suffering that it caused the Jews. 

Having said that, it’s also important to remember that Jesus’ didn’t have a beef with Judaism as a faith, but rather with how the religious officials compromised the demands of the Jewish faith in their dealings with the Romans.  Jesus was all for the faith of Abraham and Sarah but he was not so hot on the addition of Caesar and Herod into the mix.  Misunderstanding that fact is the cause for a lot of anti-semitism past and present, so it’s an important distinction. 

It also heightens the interest in the fact that it’s a temple official that comes to Jesus looking for help.  It’s fairly safe to say that this was not a daily occurrence.  Despite whatever disagreements and difficulties there were between Jesus and the religious leaders of the day, he goes willingly and immediately. 

But Jesus is distracted by a woman with a flow of blood; and in the world of first-century religious law, this is a really big deal.  Contact with blood of any kind made one ritually unclean.  Women were excluded from community life during their monthly cycle.  Anyone who was unclean had to cry out “I am unclean” as people passed by because if anyone had contact with them, they, too, would become unclean.  To be ritually unclean with a flow of blood was a significant and ongoing rhythm in first-century community life.  So for Jesus to choose to heal a woman with an issue of blood, someone who was “unclean”, was far more significant than dealing with someone who had eaten a pork chop.

By juxtaposing Jairus and the unnamed woman, Jesus establishes himself as healer at the extremes of the social margins.  Rich, poor, young, old, male, female, powerful, powerless, it didn’t matter.  Jairus was no more or less important than the woman whom history so dismisses as to not even remember her name.  It was no doubt good news to the last, the least, and the lost who heard the story then and who, perhaps, hear it today. 

It was less than good news to those who were and perhaps still are accustomed to special privilege and considerations because of their position.  As the early church sorted out its life together and how ministry was going to carry on, this story was a subtle but powerful reminder that the church was to be a servant community.  Whatever structure it set up, whatever institutional garment it might don was to be in the service of others.  Jesus stakes a claim for servant ministry as the model for the community that anchors the new social order.  

In this new community, there is room for everyone.  No one is left out; no one is left behind.  When Jesus feels the energy leave him as the woman touches the hem of his garment and is healed, the focus changes from her immediate release from disease to her reinstatement into the life of the community.  At that moment, as Jesus calls her forward, twelve long years of isolation, of shunning, of loneliness, come to an end.  After he cures her disease, he says, “Go and be healed.”  There is a difference between cure and healing.  Cure is about the presence or absence of disease.  Healing is about the meaning we make of the experience. 

Susan Sontag in her work with cancer and AIDS patients, reminds us that illness is a social construct that moves people from the center to the margins by merely the presence of a medical condition.  She writes passionately about the need for true community that can be formed when those who are ostracized by their conditions are reinstated to their rightful place in the mainstream.  In this text, Jesus crosses those boundaries and calls us to do the same. 

It may be that the most powerful witness of this text comes in the promise that whatever illness or pain, whatever secret shame or deep brokenness is part of our lives, there is a place for us in the new community of Christ.  Those distinctions lose their meaning in the embrace of God's love. 

 As a Hospice Chaplain, I was daily invited into the sacred space of final days when the possibility of cure was past but the possibility for deeper healing work remains right until the end.   Like the motto for the Peace Corp, I oftentimes think of it as the toughest job I ever loved.

In moments of silence and connection, the gentle rhythm of deeper questions and answers beyond words unfolded.  In those times, community comes to be redefined as those who could enter that space and be present whether for a moment or in a vigil.  For those times, we were privileged to become midwives to the dying.  It's hard to describe the gift of those moments even all these years later, but reading this text is a powerful reminder of what will, in some ways, always lie beyond words.

Cure may not be possible but healing always remains.  To be in that place is to stand on holy ground.  I believe it’s the place that we are called to stand as God’s people everyday.  It doesn’t belong just to those of us who stick a “Reverend” in front of our name.  We are invited out to the margins to meet people in the places of their pain.

I close with words that have been a part of my consciousness so long I no longer remember from whence they came.  A dog-eared copy is tacked to the bulletin board above my desk at home.  It describes the healing that our journey with Jesus makes possible for ourselves and for the world.

So how do you sit with a shattered soul?  Gently, with gracious and deep respect.  Patiently, for time stands still for the shattered, and the momentum of healing will be slow at first.  With  tender strength that comes from an openness to your own deepest wounding and to your own deepest healing.  Firmly, never wavering in the utmost conviction that evil is powerful, but there is a good that is more powerful still.

Stay connected to that Goodness with all your being however it manifests itself to you.  Acquaint yourself with the shadows that lee deep within you.  And then, open yourself, all that is you, to the Light .  Give freely.  Take in abundantly.  Find your safety, your refuge, and go there as you need.  Hear what you can, and be honest about the rest:   be honest at all cost.  Words won't always come; sometimes there are no words in the face of such tragic evil.  But in your willingness to be with them, they will hear you; from soul to soul they will hear that for which there are no words.

The invitation to sit in the sacred space that exists between us and a shattered soul lies at the heart of what it means to be God's people.  It calls us to the margins where we meet those the world judges and forgets.  It calls us to the margins where we discover the depths of our own brokenness and the possibilities for healing that are made possible in the new community that Jesus ushers in.

When we journey to that place, we join him on holy ground.  Amen.