JESUSCARE

Text: Mark 5: 21-43

     Today’s Gospel reading gives us more detail, pathos, and suspense than usual from the terse writer of Mark.   How can our hearts not go out to a dying twelve-year-old girl—and to her father, so desperate to save her that he, an important synagogue leader, falls prostrate before Jesus?  How can we not be a bit repelled—let’s be honest—by a woman with an embarrassing gynecological condition, a woman ostracized for being ritually unclean, a woman who waylays Jesus as he's en route to the child?

As I think about Jesus being called, simultaneously, to heal two desperate people in two separate locations, I think of the classic superhero dilemma. You know. Where the bad guy creates two mutually irresolvable disasters, and Superman or Spiderman (yes, comic books require a male hero) must decide if he will save the woman he loves or an entire city doomed for destruction.  He can’t be in two places at one time.  Neither can Jesus—who’s not even a real superhero.

Then I think about my own limitations, and yours, as we join Jesus in healing a wounded world.  Must I as a minister of the Gospel, must we as a caring congregation, must all of us as citizens of this nation whose founding we celebrate in three days—must we do triage to help the few we can?  Must we admit our personal, congregational, and societal limits in order to do some bit of good, or else waste our efforts on those beyond saving, or quit trying altogether?  

I suppose this week’s top headline brought the problem of human limitations to the forefront of this Gospel reading for me.  You know the headline I’m talking about but which CNN and FOX news both got wrong when they first broadcast it on Thursday. I’m talking about the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Affordable Care Act IS constitutional.  With all the attention on what some derisively call Obamacare and its promises of universal healthcare, I’ve tried to imagine what Jesuscare looks like.   So I’ve looked with fresh eyes at today’s stories about Jesus’ health care plan for the kingdom of God. 

Not that I think the Bible contains instructions for reforming health care in America.  But Mark’s Gospel says an awful lot about healing.  And I do find in today’s paired healing stories something that prods me to ask about the personal and systemic limits we face in addressing problems today as U.S. citizens and as modern followers of Jesus.

On the surface, this Gospel passage suggests there are no limitations on Jesus’s healing.  Everyone, it seems, has access to his miraculous power: from the twelve-year-old daughter of the prestigious synagogue leader to a woman considered ritually unclean because for twelve years she suffered from menstrual bleeding.  Both the privileged and the pariahs are healed.  Both the petted and the pathetic.  Yes, even gynecological issues are covered under Jesus’ health care benefits.  Even a woman abused by the previous health care system that had, the story says, taken her very last penny but had left her sicker than before.  Even a woman with the “preexisting condition” of a twelve-year-old illness.  (The number twelve repeated in this story, by the way, signifies completeness, fullness, as in the twelve tribes of Israel, as in the twelve disciples.)  Jesus’s plan seems to cover everyone fully.  Even the desperately poor.  Even a seemingly incurable woman all other physicians have failed to cure.  Even a seemingly dead girl.  I’d call that universal health care.

But surely there are limits to the resources that support Jesus’ health care system.   True, he heals many. But he didn’t heal everyone in the enormous crowds clamoring for his care.  How many others never got close enough to see him, much less to touch his garment?  How many others called out to him in vain? And what was the cost to him and his followers for these healings?

Jesus himself knew human limitations.  He was not a nonstop healing machine.  At times he had to withdraw from the crowds to replenish his body and spirit.  As I gratefully anticipate the first week of vacation I’ve had in a year, I understand the need to withdraw for a while.  But I wonder . . . whose suffering went unrelieved while Jesus rested?  Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus growing overwhelmed by the crowds.  By this point in Mark’s narrative, readers start realizing Jesus is not going to be able to keep at it much longer.  If you try to heal everyone, then your limited resources—physical or financial or spiritual—will run out, right?

Let’s peek ahead in Mark to see if that’s the case. Immediately following today’s two stories of healing, Mark tells us Jesus traveled to his hometown of Nazareth—where it turned out that he tried but “he could do no deed of power there” (Mark 6:5), and Jesus’s skeptical homies scoffed at this prophet who was without honor in his hometown (Mark 6:4). 

Jesus had limitations.  But just because our resources are finite does not mean they are ineffective. Limited beings can still be powerful and generous and selfless and, indeed, innovative and collaborative.  Notice what Jesus does next to make his healing ministry sustainable.

Immediately after disappointing his hometown, Jesus implemented the next phase of his ministry, which was to instruct and then send out his disciples “two by two” (Mark 6:7) and Mark tells us they “cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them” (Mark 6:13).  An episode of failure perhaps created a paradigm shift for Jesus.  A healing ministry becomes sustainable only when others are empowered to participate as healers. 

For us, new church, this means that our growth, impact, and sustainability are tied to our willingness to share leadership and train others in the healing ways of Jesus and include all in a ministry of hope.  A Jesus model of leadership starts with a healer, who taps and trains others, who further maximizes the healing impact by equipping still others.  Members of our new church council will be talking with you soon as they seek to share leadership with you. Healing happens best in community. Today’s hymn expresses this idea as a prayer: “Healer of our every ill . . . teach us ALL your way of healing.”

For folks like us, raised in an individualistic and competitive culture, a dying child and hemorrhaging woman might seem to be competing for limited health resources, and we may feel pressed to choose which one gets our care.  We might be susceptible to inflammatory threats of "death panels."  Certainly resources are limited.  Hard choices have to be made.  Caring for our neighbors is not a license to be fiscally irresponsible.  I’m not so idealistic that I don’t get that. I don’t want my grandchildren to bear the burden of debt I help create. We must consider those who are not yet on this planet.  And there are many ways of understanding how we can do that best.

Yet I believe this also to be true: we have more than we think we have. We can cooperate to equip others to be healers of broken communities. That’s what the story of the feeding of the 5,000 teaches a few verses later.  If we don’t grasp our own fish and bread too tightly, then all will have enough.  We don’t have limitless resources—as a church, as a nation, as a planet.  But we have enough if we are compassionate.    If we prioritize care for one another, maybe my good health does not have to cost you your health.  If we can hear the words of Jesus to Jairus, the distraught father: “Do not fear; only believe," then healing can happen.

Even within our own congregation, if we all give in ways that truly challenge us, so that our giving then changes us, so that  we practice giving as an essential spiritual discipline, so that we cultivate gratitude and generosity, so that we don’t deplete some leaders without ever engaging others—then everyone receives what she or he needs.  If we as a faith community take turns serving and being served, giving and receiving, the healing ministry of Jesus is continued in a sustainable way.

Another way of facing the limits—within America’s newly upheld healthcare system or within Jesuscare—is to ask if our healing mission should be broadly or narrowly focused?  How specific is Jesus’s mission statement?  I’m told that a really good mission statement is precise enough to guide an organization in every decision it makes.  But Jesus’s great commandment to love God, neighbor, and self seems broad.  And I wonder if today’s story suggests Jesus himself got diverted at times. 

I hope he did.  I think he did.  What I love best about this story is that Jesus is on his way to help one person but gets detoured by another who reached out to him, and he paused long enough to do the deeper healing of her soul.  He said he was going to do one thing, but he ended up doing another.

Have you ever taken a detour in life?  Have you ever set out with one intention and ended up doing something else that turned out to be a more joyous or satisfying or healing experience than the original might have been?  Some of us are the ADHD- types who are too interruptible.  Others of us are too inflexible.  Today’s story tells me that Jesus probably knew what if felt like to be buffeted by all those clamoring for  help. Seems he both improvised and stayed the course.

We as a congregation have a mission statement that grounds us.  It’s written on the front of every worship bulletin and it does truly guide us in our ongoing discernment in how to be the church God is calling us to be.  But we can’t hear a Still Speaking God if we pour concrete around those words.

At last week's retreat, the church council generated three simple themes for the coming church year: growth, service, and leadership.  You’ll hear more about what these three words mean to us as Jenni leads our 6:00 discussion hour. You’ll also have a chance to share your hopes and dreams for the coming year with our new council members there to listen to you.  A clear mission or focus for a church, and for a particular year in the life of that church, is a good thing. 

But let’s stay relational more than organizational. Let’s be strategic but let’s also be at times spontaneous. Let’s remain alert enough to notice when a suffering soul pushes her way into our midst. 

I encourage you to study the issues of the day, but whatever your opinions about Obamacare—I invite you to ground yourself in Jesuscare.  It’s a healthcare plan for the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. 

Today we are blessing the work of a new church council.  But all of us are, in Jesuscare, both the healed and the healer. All of us can identify with someone in this story:  We have rushed a child to an emergency room and can feel the father’s terror.  We have depended on others for care and compassion and empathize with a sick and ostracized woman. We have overextended ourselves for the good of family or community and can imagine Jesus’s possible feelings of exhaustion and inadequacy.

Yet in this story, Jesus accomplishes the superhero feat: he saves both the woman on the seashore and the child in the village.  And somehow the story teller’s repeated details running through both stories suggest that saving one is not in conflict with saving the other. In fact, these two healings may be inextricably connected.  Jesus, for instance, seems to have Jairus’ little daughter in mind even while he addresses the hemorrhaging woman as “daughter.” Listen to Jesus’s closing cryptic words: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Did you catch that odd contradiction?  Jesus says the woman’s faith has already healed her.  And then adds, “Go . . . and be healed.” 

Maybe Jesuscare is ongoing and complex. 

Maybe the kind of healing that Jesus offers is never complete until the entire community is healed and whole. 

May it be so, O God.

INVITATION TO THE TABLE

Today’s gospel story ends with Jesus telling the little girl’s family to give her something to eat.  Healing is complete when we come to the Table.  Eating in that day was a communal event, often a celebratory rite.  Like a child who has been resurrected, we participate now in celebrating resurrection.  Arise!