![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/img-20180221-161528344-hdr.jpg?1534175828)
Peter JB Carman
July 1, 2018
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady NY
Reading: Mark 5: 21-43
Twelve. The dying girl is just twelve years old. The woman has been secretly bleeding the whole length of the girl’s life. Twelve.
The fifth chapter of Mark’s Gospel is full of strange stories, starting with the rabbi Jesus going back and forth across the stormy sea that divides one culture from another, healing a demon-possessed man amid the tombs and driving the demons, suspiciously named “Legion” (the Latin word for a thousand—or a whole bunch of Roman soldiers) in a herd of pigs down into the sea. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of the sad fate of Pharaoh’s army when Moses and the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea. Then Jesus crosses back over to the Jewish side again.
When he gets back to his own side, the crowds are waiting. A synagogue leader named Jairus is desperate for help—his twelve-year old daughter is close to death. So, with compassion Jesus agrees to go with him. But the crowd presses in and in the middle of the crowd is someone else who needs healing, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, a painful condition that also make her virtually untouchable in that world. She somehow finds the courage—not to ask for help but simply to reach out to touch Jesus’ clothes. She finds the courage to overcome her own untouchability, and to seek healing. When he spins around, aware that he has been touched, despite the press of the crowd, she finds the courage to admit that it was she. Healing is happening not just in the cure but in Jesus’ affirmation that her faith has made her well, his affectionate words, and the sending: “Go in peace!”
Then it is on to the young girl, to heal again, this time insisting that she is only asleep, not dead, and as she rises, the charge to the people around her— give her something to eat!
There are all kinds of questions here! Why is the number twelve so prominently displayed—twelve years of bleeding, a twelve-year-old girl near death: is there something in Mark chapter 5 about God driving out the legions occupying the land, and healing the hemorrhaging twelve tribes of Israel, raising a comatose nation close to death? That would be a symbolic and political reading—and an interesting one! But before we even get there, we must name something so basic about this portion of scripture, so close to our noses, that we just might overlook it.
We who walk with Jesus travel with a healer. Not a doctor. Not a specialist in the psychology of religion. But, in the most holistic thoroughgoing spiritual political physical social justice making peace proclaiming world-transforming sense, a healer.
That our savior is a healer has radical consequences if we take it to heart. It has consequences for how we go about dealing with conflict. It has consequences for how we deal with death, when it comes as it must for every mortal, including you and me. It has consequences for how we deal, as Christ’s companions, with war! It has consequences for how we deal with relationships in our families and in our neighborhoods—yea verily even in our churches. And it has consequences for how we deal with disease in our minds, hearts and souls. Our teacher, our guide, our sovereign authority is a healer. And that changes everything. *
Early in Mark’s gospel a paralyzed man is lowered into his presence through a hole in the roof—Jesus knows what he wants and needs. He sees past the disability to the condition of the person before him—and offers him forgiveness! It is only after that, that he tells him to get up and walk! This time, when a woman who has been declared ritually unclean reaches out to touch him in a crowd, Jesus tells her that her faith has made her well—BEFORE a word about her physical condition. It is in the courage to overcome her isolation and seek community, to seek love, seek hope, that’s where the healing comes from. And it is in his affirmation of her as a child of God, over against all the isolation and shame, that we learn what it means to be a healer. We don’t even need to get the physical bleeding. The healing has already begun.
Some years ago, our children had a babysitter who was a student at the University of Rochester. They were too old to call her a babysitter of course. She was just Sarah. Sarah Preiser. We met her when she came to our house with a few other University students for a “bridge dinner” with folks in the community. She was eighteen or nineteen. She hit it off so well with the kids that we asked her if she would like an occasional job! She was excited. So were our sons. Through the years we visited, Sarah felt a little like part of the family, a beautiful brilliant young Jewish woman with nothing but promise and light in front of her. One time she came to our home to interview us for a paper. We ate together.
Shortly thereafter, I think in her junior year, Sarah learned she had a rapidly growing tumor in her heart. Fighting the odds, the specialists operated once—they bought her some time, but not a long time. Sarah had to come to terms with the reality that life was going to be short.
By the time she was twenty-one, Sarah Preiser already understood that she could not conduct her search for healing as though it were a war. “It’s hard,” she told me one day, “But I have to accept that what is growing in my body is not some invading army. It is my own cells. They are me too. And that is taking a lot of work to accept.” Somehow Sarah graduated from the University of Rochester, despite the hospitalization. Truth be told, you would never have guessed to visit with her that she was sick at all, even after the surgery. And when the medical folks told her there was nothing more they could do she sought healing in other places—her friendships, in learning to be a potter, in meditation, in writing poetry, and in the end, finding love in her family’s arms.
I still get mad at God sometimes, about the death of Sarah Preiser. She was twenty-three. It was the twenty-eighth of December 2001. Yet I am also grateful, deeply grateful, to Sarah for what she taught me about healing. Somehow, she was able to accept that even though she wanted a cure—a cure that was denied her-- she could find healing with or without the cure, find it in all kinds of places, in friendship, in love, in beauty, find holiness and wholeness, where others could see only death. From the time when she learned of her cancer to the day she died, Sarah insisted on living. She squeezed every bit of meaning and insight and peace she could out of life. In the death notice, her parents—I am sure it was they—wrote: “She is remembered for her peacefulness, love of life, beautiful smile and special ability not only to give but to receive love.”
I go back to the scripture passage we read today, and I am grateful that it is about healing in the fullest sense. I am grateful it is a story about a woman hidden in shame emerging from the shadows, and about a young girl on the edge of womanhood, raised from death itself. But the woman who taught me what it meant may never have read this story, though I think she would have understood it well. Sarah taught me this—whether or not you or I get the cure we want, there is healing in community, there is grace in friendship, there is love that can resurrect us from defeat and despair. That’s what the table we gather at today is about. Strength for the weary, redemption from shame for one and restoration to life for another.
Reach out and touch the teacher’s shirtsleeve. Gather with me at the table of love, in this chaos- and confusion-filled world. We need strength for the tumultuous journey that is our faith. We need laughter and joy and truth. We need healing and we need mercy. In this is resurrection. Amen.
*I know the notion that Jesus might have been a miracle-worker is disturbing for some of us; we may feel the need to explain it away, we worry about whether this somehow disrupts the integrity of nature or isn’t scientific. In fact, we religious leaders spent most of the 1970s worrying about that stuff. We can argue about all those things still—but for this postmodern post-Newtonian observer, the order of nature seems open enough to allow for some divine work through it rather than in defiance of it. Plus, I think getting stuck in the physiological details makes us miss the point of the stories. And I notice that Jesus never does a physical healing without a deeper dimension and a broader point to the action. Miracles are often parables….
July 1, 2018
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady NY
Reading: Mark 5: 21-43
Twelve. The dying girl is just twelve years old. The woman has been secretly bleeding the whole length of the girl’s life. Twelve.
The fifth chapter of Mark’s Gospel is full of strange stories, starting with the rabbi Jesus going back and forth across the stormy sea that divides one culture from another, healing a demon-possessed man amid the tombs and driving the demons, suspiciously named “Legion” (the Latin word for a thousand—or a whole bunch of Roman soldiers) in a herd of pigs down into the sea. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of the sad fate of Pharaoh’s army when Moses and the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea. Then Jesus crosses back over to the Jewish side again.
When he gets back to his own side, the crowds are waiting. A synagogue leader named Jairus is desperate for help—his twelve-year old daughter is close to death. So, with compassion Jesus agrees to go with him. But the crowd presses in and in the middle of the crowd is someone else who needs healing, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, a painful condition that also make her virtually untouchable in that world. She somehow finds the courage—not to ask for help but simply to reach out to touch Jesus’ clothes. She finds the courage to overcome her own untouchability, and to seek healing. When he spins around, aware that he has been touched, despite the press of the crowd, she finds the courage to admit that it was she. Healing is happening not just in the cure but in Jesus’ affirmation that her faith has made her well, his affectionate words, and the sending: “Go in peace!”
Then it is on to the young girl, to heal again, this time insisting that she is only asleep, not dead, and as she rises, the charge to the people around her— give her something to eat!
There are all kinds of questions here! Why is the number twelve so prominently displayed—twelve years of bleeding, a twelve-year-old girl near death: is there something in Mark chapter 5 about God driving out the legions occupying the land, and healing the hemorrhaging twelve tribes of Israel, raising a comatose nation close to death? That would be a symbolic and political reading—and an interesting one! But before we even get there, we must name something so basic about this portion of scripture, so close to our noses, that we just might overlook it.
We who walk with Jesus travel with a healer. Not a doctor. Not a specialist in the psychology of religion. But, in the most holistic thoroughgoing spiritual political physical social justice making peace proclaiming world-transforming sense, a healer.
That our savior is a healer has radical consequences if we take it to heart. It has consequences for how we go about dealing with conflict. It has consequences for how we deal with death, when it comes as it must for every mortal, including you and me. It has consequences for how we deal, as Christ’s companions, with war! It has consequences for how we deal with relationships in our families and in our neighborhoods—yea verily even in our churches. And it has consequences for how we deal with disease in our minds, hearts and souls. Our teacher, our guide, our sovereign authority is a healer. And that changes everything. *
Early in Mark’s gospel a paralyzed man is lowered into his presence through a hole in the roof—Jesus knows what he wants and needs. He sees past the disability to the condition of the person before him—and offers him forgiveness! It is only after that, that he tells him to get up and walk! This time, when a woman who has been declared ritually unclean reaches out to touch him in a crowd, Jesus tells her that her faith has made her well—BEFORE a word about her physical condition. It is in the courage to overcome her isolation and seek community, to seek love, seek hope, that’s where the healing comes from. And it is in his affirmation of her as a child of God, over against all the isolation and shame, that we learn what it means to be a healer. We don’t even need to get the physical bleeding. The healing has already begun.
Some years ago, our children had a babysitter who was a student at the University of Rochester. They were too old to call her a babysitter of course. She was just Sarah. Sarah Preiser. We met her when she came to our house with a few other University students for a “bridge dinner” with folks in the community. She was eighteen or nineteen. She hit it off so well with the kids that we asked her if she would like an occasional job! She was excited. So were our sons. Through the years we visited, Sarah felt a little like part of the family, a beautiful brilliant young Jewish woman with nothing but promise and light in front of her. One time she came to our home to interview us for a paper. We ate together.
Shortly thereafter, I think in her junior year, Sarah learned she had a rapidly growing tumor in her heart. Fighting the odds, the specialists operated once—they bought her some time, but not a long time. Sarah had to come to terms with the reality that life was going to be short.
By the time she was twenty-one, Sarah Preiser already understood that she could not conduct her search for healing as though it were a war. “It’s hard,” she told me one day, “But I have to accept that what is growing in my body is not some invading army. It is my own cells. They are me too. And that is taking a lot of work to accept.” Somehow Sarah graduated from the University of Rochester, despite the hospitalization. Truth be told, you would never have guessed to visit with her that she was sick at all, even after the surgery. And when the medical folks told her there was nothing more they could do she sought healing in other places—her friendships, in learning to be a potter, in meditation, in writing poetry, and in the end, finding love in her family’s arms.
I still get mad at God sometimes, about the death of Sarah Preiser. She was twenty-three. It was the twenty-eighth of December 2001. Yet I am also grateful, deeply grateful, to Sarah for what she taught me about healing. Somehow, she was able to accept that even though she wanted a cure—a cure that was denied her-- she could find healing with or without the cure, find it in all kinds of places, in friendship, in love, in beauty, find holiness and wholeness, where others could see only death. From the time when she learned of her cancer to the day she died, Sarah insisted on living. She squeezed every bit of meaning and insight and peace she could out of life. In the death notice, her parents—I am sure it was they—wrote: “She is remembered for her peacefulness, love of life, beautiful smile and special ability not only to give but to receive love.”
I go back to the scripture passage we read today, and I am grateful that it is about healing in the fullest sense. I am grateful it is a story about a woman hidden in shame emerging from the shadows, and about a young girl on the edge of womanhood, raised from death itself. But the woman who taught me what it meant may never have read this story, though I think she would have understood it well. Sarah taught me this—whether or not you or I get the cure we want, there is healing in community, there is grace in friendship, there is love that can resurrect us from defeat and despair. That’s what the table we gather at today is about. Strength for the weary, redemption from shame for one and restoration to life for another.
Reach out and touch the teacher’s shirtsleeve. Gather with me at the table of love, in this chaos- and confusion-filled world. We need strength for the tumultuous journey that is our faith. We need laughter and joy and truth. We need healing and we need mercy. In this is resurrection. Amen.
*I know the notion that Jesus might have been a miracle-worker is disturbing for some of us; we may feel the need to explain it away, we worry about whether this somehow disrupts the integrity of nature or isn’t scientific. In fact, we religious leaders spent most of the 1970s worrying about that stuff. We can argue about all those things still—but for this postmodern post-Newtonian observer, the order of nature seems open enough to allow for some divine work through it rather than in defiance of it. Plus, I think getting stuck in the physiological details makes us miss the point of the stories. And I notice that Jesus never does a physical healing without a deeper dimension and a broader point to the action. Miracles are often parables….