6th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 8 – Year B – Bill Harkins
The Collect of the Day
Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: Mark 5:21-43
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” He went with him.
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She 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 about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all…Amen. Good morning…and welcome to Holy Family on this 6th Sunday after Pentecost, the long green season of Ordinary Time. We are so glad you are here, and if you are visiting us this morning, please do let us know so we can get to know you, and give you a proper Holy Family welcome!
Today we hear two stories about healing, the story of Jairus, and the story of the woman who touched Jesus’ robe. They suggest, among other things, that Jesus’ authority was something beyond the established authority of the state or some other institution. Rather, it was an authority that came from God and as such, it was an “aura of love” and an “emanation of the spirit” that drew people to Jesus. In all the stories of healing in scripture, Jesus never sought out people to heal. The initiative lay with those seeking healing and reconciliation. And here is where this story connects with ours. How often do we ask for what we need in the way of healing? How often are we even aware that we need it?
Jesus’ life grants life-changing healing. It is a healing authority that crosses boundaries, both ethnic and gender. Jesus chooses not to leave people in the conditions in which he finds them. How about us? Can our small community alter the conditions of people’s lives? Can we, too, bring healing into troubled circumstances? Must our efforts not also cross boundaries — whether they are related to ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, politics or any other boundaries that divide our society — and advocate life-giving meaning and change? Ask anyone from Parish Life, Outreach, the DOK, the intrepid Grounds Crew, and on and on, and the answer is yes! May God grant us the courage to continue to do so!
We wonder what might have happened if Jairus had listened to his self-doubt instead of taking action? What if the influence of the status quo—and we recall here that he was an elder in the local temple—had triumphed in his heart, and he had backed off from asking this unconventional holy man named Jesus into his home? These questions are not, my brothers and sisters, philosophical or rhetorical. One of my seminary professors once told us: “Always remember that many—if not on some days most—of the people you face on Sunday morning almost decided not to come.” We have to show up—we have to “be there,” to get what Jesus has to give. Sometimes it means learning things about ourselves we’d rather not know. The story of Jairus’ daughter is not about some sort of cosmic quid pro quo in which if we have enough faith, then our child will not die, or we will not die, or bad things will not happen to us, or we will acquire riches beyond imagination…and I have heard all of these preached. This story, and others like it, has been used as a way of saying that life is a theological contest, where everything depends on you, on whether you have enough faith, or the right sort of faith, to win the prize of Jesus doing something good for you and yours. The seductive attraction of this is that it appeals to our desire to have all the answers… for the absence of ambiguity… for everything to fit together. Sometimes things happen for no reason whatsoever, and that’s when our faith comes alive. This thinking also appeals to our childlike desire for omnipotence: that everything that happens somehow happens because of me…if I’d only had enough faith this bad thing would not have happened, or because I had so much faith I am blessed with riches…and so on. The question is what kind of a story do we find in today’s Gospel? Is it a miracle? Or a story primarily about the healing power of relationship? Or, is it perhaps both?
I do enjoy these stories because they, too, invite us into relationship with Jesus. I confess that the science-loving part of me does not know what, exactly, happened here. But the most significant part for me is where Jesus takes the girl’s hand and says, “Talitha cum”—”Little girl, get up”—and suddenly we ourselves are the little girl. Little girl; old girl; old boy; old boys and girls with high blood pressure and arthritis, and lower back pain, who are themselves at times caring for aging parents…who have recently lost someone they loved… who are having challenges at work, or with their children…and on and on; all the ways we human beings are vulnerable to those places life may take us. Those who believe; and those who sometimes believe and sometimes don’t believe much of anything; and those who would give almost anything to believe if only they could; you happy ones, and you who can hardly remember what it was like once to be happy; You who know where you’re going and how to get there and you who much of the time aren’t sure you’re getting anywhere. “Get up,” he says, all of you—all of you!—and the power that is in this invitation is the power to give life not just to those who may or may not be dead, like the child in today’s text, but to those who are only partly alive, which is to say to people like you and me who much of the time live with our lives closed to the wild beauty and miracle of things, including the miracle of what Mary Oliver called “your one wild and precious life.” Can we ask Jesus to act in the name of love by healing and reconciling all that is ostensibly un-loveable in each one of us? Jesus made wholeness his priority and as such, sought to bring together those who were divided, separated, or left out of the whole. He gathered together what was divided and confronted systems that diminished, marginalized, or excluded human persons. He challenged others not by argument, but out of a deep center of love. It is a life-giving power at the heart of this story about Jairus and the daughter he loved, and the woman who reached out to him, that I believe is at the heart of all our stories—the power of new life, new hope, new being; that whether we know it or not keeps us coming to places like this sacred space, year after year in search of it. It’s about how faith itself has the capacity to make the woman whole; faith itself is healing. And this is certainly not about what here in America we know by the name of the Prosperity Gospel. That’s a heresy that makes God into a used-car salesman, selling health and wealth and a ticket into heaven in return for the payment of our belief. What I mean is something more mysterious, harder to quantify. The theologian James Alison—who spoke at the Cathedral some years ago–says that we often misunderstand faith. That we make faith about frantically following rules, about creating borders, about calling out people who are doing the wrong things, who are believing the wrong things, about feeling guilty. But faith, Allison says, is actually about relaxing. Faith is about being with God, being with someone whom we trust, with someone who knows us absolutely and, as Mr. Rogers used to say, likes us just the way that we are. That sounds like healing to me. Your faith has made you well. In this Gospel text we see a man of power and wealth who is made to wait for an impoverished woman. A woman, what’s more, whose medical condition makes her ritually unclean by virtue of the cultural standards of her time. What is being interrupted here – by Jesus, by the woman to whom he gives his full attention – is not just Jesus’ journey to Jairus’ house. What is being interrupted is patriarchy; it is economic privilege; it is a societal system that values some human beings more than others. In this moment, Jesus and the woman embody what Jesus will say elsewhere: The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. And, Jesus says to Jairus, Be not afraid. Believe. So, this is a short story interrupted no fewer than six times. Each interruption takes us further into possibility, into faith, into compassion, into love. Each interruption takes us into resurrection, and this is where science may help us…it happens every day.
Some of you may have seen the Disney film “Encanto,” a favorite of our grandchildren. When Disney decided to nominate a song from the movie for the Oscars, it submitted “Dos Oruguitas.” It is the first Oscar-nominated song written entirely in Spanish. Dos Oruguitas translates into “Two (Little) Caterpillars.” The song is performed beautifully by the Colombian singer Sebastian Yatra. The song describes two caterpillars in love. They rejoice in their togetherness, holding each other, staying together constantly through good and bad weather. But somehow they know that, very soon, they will need to let go. It will be time to turn into larvae and re-emerge some time later, each as a butterfly. There is nothing the caterpillars can do to stop the inevitable. The song is gorgeous, and the images it evokes are emotional beyond words. Scientists have long been astonished by the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies. Milton Packer, MD, is currently distinguished scholar in cardiovascular science at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas and visiting professor at Imperial College in London. Packer is an internationally recognized clinical investigator who has made seminal contributions to the field of heart failure. After the loss of his wife, he wrote a lovely essay about Encanto, and the science behind the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly—a resurrection narrative. The caterpillar eats voraciously during its entire lifespan, presumably to accumulate sufficient nutrients for the coming transition. When the time is right, the caterpillar spins itself into a silk coverlet (a cocoon) and digests itself. During the larval phase, the release of enzymes kills the caterpillar and destroys all its organs, turning it into a mushy soup, with nothing left of its former self. If one opens a larva, there is no sign of the original caterpillar; it is gone — except for a few cells (known poetically as “imaginal cells”) that survive.
Then, by some miraculous sequence of events, a new set of instructions takes hold, and the amino acids in the larval soup are rearranged, carefully and meticulously, into an entirely new organism. The imaginal cells emerge, armed with the genetic instructions for the transformation. Initially, the caterpillar’s immune system rejects the imaginal cells, but they continue to multiply with abundance. Finally, the cells begin to clump together, forming the organs of an entirely new organism with completely different anatomical features, with long legs and wings. The fact that the caterpillar’s immune system attacks the new cells of the butterfly demonstrates that — biologically — the two insect forms are entirely distinct life forms. So essentially, the caterpillar dies and is resurrected. Dr. Packer writes that when he cares for patients who have died, “Perhaps grounded by religion or some personal philosophical perspective, some relatives or friends would say, “We will see her/him again soon.” They proposed there would be some future meeting between those who loved each other deeply during this lifetime, perhaps in a spiritual sense or even in some alternate physical world. When these predictions were made, I always agreed with them. But I did not believe them. I was trained to believe that death had absolute finality. There was no scientific basis for resurrection. There was no way a living form could die, dissolve away, and be reassembled into another creature… Yet, it happens every day. Caterpillars die and are resurrected as butterflies, using the same juices as the original life form.”
Well, make of this what you will, but consider this truth from today’s Gospel: Jesus is ready, willing and able to heal the body, mind, and spirit of anybody – regardless of their station in life, their religious affiliation, their economic status, their popularity, their perceived flaws – doesn’t matter. The common ingredient in both these stories is faith! Jesus says “Don’t be afraid; just believe…your faith has healed you.” As a priest and pastoral counselor I can say this…some of the “whole-iest” people I have known have been terminally ill, or facing what seemed insurmountable challenges. So let us follow in the footsteps of Jairus. Let us go forth with courage—with vitality and wonder—into the unknown new creation made possible by our saying “no” to a narrative of scarcity and anxiety, and “yes’ to the world to which this Gospel text points. It is a Resurrection world, in which there is meaning and hope in each of our lives and, yes, in each of our deaths, both small and large. God promises that God’s word of love will be the last, best, and strongest word. God promises that God will make all of creation new, and that we will be a part of that new creation. Amen.