Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

June 28, 2009

Scripture:         Mark 5:21-43

Sermon:           “No Time to Rest”

            Our scripture lesson this morning contains two intertwined stories of Jesus’ healing.  He was called to go and attend to the needs of a dying girl, see if he could prevent her death.  And in the midst of this a woman came and touched him as she tried to find healing for her own disease.  You can’t very well tell one of these stories without telling the other.

            So, our scripture lesson is a bit longer today than is usual.  I’ll try not to make the sermon longer!  Turn with me to the 5^th chapter of Mark’s gospel where we’ll read together verses 21 through 43.  You can find that easily on page 54 of the New Testament in the pew Bible.

            This is the word of the Lord…

            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.”  So 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 hemorrhages 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 loud.  “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.

            There is a very popular rock band from Ireland, U2, that fascinates me to know end.  You may not be all that familiar with them.  And, then again, you might.  But, their singer, who goes simply by the name of Bono, has been struggling with his Christian faith publicly for years in ways that, I think, are amazing and powerful.  Raising awareness of AIDS in Africa.  Calling for the forgiveness of national debts for developing countries.  Pointing out the debilitating effects of poverty.  Great, great man.

            He said this one time about calling himself a Christian:  “Not a very good one.  My thing is just struggling to approach that word.  I don’t feel worthy to use the word Christian because I know too much about myself.  I’d be the one who’d just stick my hand out to grab at the hem of the robe.  That’d be me.  Because I feel like I’ve broken and entered heaven.  I climbed up the drainpipe and got in the window.  I can carry the cross but I can’t wear the badge.”

            Just touching the hem of the robe.  I’ve never met this man.  I’d like to.  But, I’ve never met him.  Sure seems familiar.

            Gosh, doesn’t all of this sound familiar?  These stories of Jesus?  I mean you’d swear that you know this family with a sick child.  And you know this woman who cannot for the life of her find a cure.

            I think it is one of the most frustrating things for us when there just doesn’t seem to be any answers for what ails somebody.  What can you do?  You’d like to just fix it for them.  You can’t fix it.  You tell them that you’re thinking about them.  You’re praying for them, you know.  And you are.  But, what you’d really like to do is just fix it and make the suffering go away.

            Maybe I’m projecting my own stuff onto you.  I want to fix things.  Can’t fix them.  But, I want to fix things for people.

            But, I’ve known these people that Jesus ran into that day.  I’ve known them.  They’ve been members of our church and folks I’ve known elsewhere.  You’ve probably known them, too.

            Sweet, dear, woman in the last town where we lived.  She’d been a teacher all of her life.  Physical education.  So, from that you can rightly gather that she was a giving person with great ideals of shaping young lives for better futures.  I mean she was conscientious and driven by her faith and values.  We just loved her.

            But, those many years of walking on concrete floors had done incredible damage on her body.  She was a gymnast in her youth.  But, her body had kind of fallen into this constant state of pain where everything was an effort.  I’d wince as she forced herself to walk up the steps into the choir loft so that she could share this unbelievable and powerful soprano voice in praise of God.

            She’d been in constant pain for years.

            I wish I could have fixed it.  That’s what I wanted to do.  Couldn’t fix it.  I just thought about her and prayed for her as she had surgery after surgery.  She switched from one medication to another.  And she got desperate to the point of seeking out an acupuncturist.  That’s somebody, if you don’t know, that sticks pins in you trying to block the pain by stimulating a pressure point.

            None of it worked.

            And the financial toll of trying to find a cure just had to be mounting. You know insurance will only carry you so far.  And insurance won’t cover some things.  She had to retire early because of the pain, so that just complicated things.

            Now, she didn’t have a hemorrhage like the woman who found Jesus.  But, she was pretty much that same woman.  And her story probably sounds familiar enough to you.

            It’s the other one, though, that just rips at your heart.  It’s the kind of stuff for which no answers seem good enough.  An innocent child is dying.------I don’t know what to say about that.  I mean, most of you know how I talk about being a father.  Probably drive you crazy with it.  But, I’m completely in love with my daughter.  She’s the most amazing thing to ever happen to me.  I hesitate to even try to imagine being in the shoes of a parent who’s watching their own precious gift lose his or her life.  It is gut-wrenching.

            My sister watched a friend of hers lose her son a few weeks ago.  She called me on the day it happened.  It was Mother’s Day.  This boy, 11 years old if I remember correctly, could not be cured.  Was it leukemia?  I can’t say.  Maybe it doesn’t matter.  There are terrible things that get a hold of people too young to die.  And then they’re gone.

            She just wanted to fix it.  She just wanted Matthew to get well and live and survive.  She wanted to see her friend raise a son to adulthood.  And she just had to watch it all happen without any way to make it all go away.

            Ah, it’s helpless.  And you’ve known these folks, too.  We’re just stuck in this powerless place where all we can think to say is “You’re in my thoughts and prayers.”  But, it feels like those are just words sometimes.  Just words.  It feels so empty.  What we’d like to say is, “I can make it all better.”  We can’t.

            And these folks who are trying to find Jesus are just willing to do anything.  Aren’t they?  That’s why we know them.  We know folks who are desperate for answers like that.  Can’t take anymore.  There’s nothing left but to hope and pray that God can do something nobody else can possibly do.

            So, I imagine that’s why Jesus responded the way he did.  What he saw were some desperate and suffering people whose lives were being torn apart by the things that don’t make much sense.  Diseases that the doctors can’t quite figure out.  Children dying and nothing’s going to stop it.  He couldn’t look away.

            The truth is that Jesus was swamped with the cries of humanity.  It was just one thing after another, which is how things get from time to time.  I mean, doesn’t it seem that tragedies kind of pile up on top of each other?

            Some folks are superstitious that great disasters happen in threes.  You ever heard that?  Plane crashes happen in threes.  That’s the big one.  But, a more common way of thinking about it says, “When it rains it pours.”

            That’s the way Mark tells these stories of Jesus.  He headed across the lake for a little respite from teaching the crowds.  And then this big windstorm came up and about swamped him and his disciples.  So he calmed the storm.

            No more than they could put down the anchor on the other side when a man came yelling at them all like he was filled with a whole host of demons.  He’d been living in the tombs like a dead man.  So Jesus drove out the spirits tormenting this soul.

            You know he’d been trying to get away from the crowds when all this happened.  But, there was no time to rest.

            So, they headed back to the other side where they’d come from.  Their original plan didn’t seem to be working.  Better to just go back home.  But, they got back there and throngs of people were crushing in on each other to try to be around him.  When would he ever get some “me” time?  We need “me” time.

            You know the rest, of course.  A preacher came to seek Jesus’ help in saving his dying daughter.  An incurable woman pressed in on him to touch the man’s cloak.  Just maybe if she could only touch him it would happen.  All this desperation.  All this suffering.  Everywhere he turned there were faces of the lonely, the grieving the hurting.

            And the way Mark tells the story…it’s immediately this.  Immediately that.  Immediately.  Immediately.  How do you ever get a chance to breathe?

            You know I wonder if God ever says, “Goodness, gracious!  I can’t keep up with it all! Y’all are wearing me out!”  What does it mean when the Bible says that on the seventh day of creation that God rested from all the work that he had done?  What does that mean?  Does God get worn out?

            Here in the church it is like we are on the front lines of a fractured world.  It’s no wonder to me that at our very best we are really like a spiritual hospital.  The walking wounded.  Wounded healers ourselves as the very wise Henry Nouwen put it.  Wounded healers.

            The trouble for us, very much like Jesus, is that we’re just overwhelmed at times with all of it.  What can we possibly do?  What more can we possibly do?  Still, the brokenness presses in on the walls of the church with a constant drum beat.  You can cup your ears to the windows and hear the cries if you wanted.  Just constant stuff out there.  Constant stuff in here, too.

            It’s so overwhelming to consider the kind of ministry it would take to see the kingdom of God in all of its glory.  And it’s not like you and I are burdened with a great deal of time to attend to it all.  You know?  You’ve got your own needs.  You’ve got your own schedules.  Your own family has a calendar that is packed to the rafters with this and that.  When is there time to breathe?  When is there ever going to be some “me” time?  What we’d like, and what we probably truly need, just like our Lord and Savior, is a bit of that seventh day of rest stuff.  Put up a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and just exist for a while.

            I had a mentor several years ago.  And I’d talk to him from time to time about things like this.  “How can you ever get it all done?”  And that’s not just the preacher’s question, you know.  That’s the Christian’s question.  How can we ever get it all done?  And he said to me, “It’s just like with Jesus, you know.  Going from one place to another and suddenly, immediately, there’s a problem.  What he could have done is say, ‘I don’t have time for this right now.  There’s bigger fish to fry.’  But, that’s not what he did.  He saw that in all of these distractions was the real ministry.  It was the distractions, you see.  The distractions were where the hurting people were.”

            My guess is that we’re all going to get distracted sooner than later with one of these suffering faces.  May we have the grace to see that God is calling us to ministry in those very moments.  And go and be what God needs you to be.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)