A Sermon for All Saints' Day: Saint Sister

Sermon text:  Mark 12: 28-34

Saint Simeon

Sainthood is our common calling. You and I don’t feel much like saints, but we are trying to move in that direction.  True, we are not perfect, pure, flawless.  But St. Paul said that cracked and imperfect human vessels allow Christ’s light to shine through all the more clearly.  He addressed even the notorious Corinthians as the “saints at Corinth.”  Sainthood is not a vocation of perfection.  Sainthood is a vocation of commitment, courage, humility, growth, and love. Though imperfect and ordinary, you and I are saints in the making.

Nineteenth-century author Anatole France as a child became captivated by the legend of St. Simeon, an eccentric who supposedly expressed his devotion by living for thirty years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in Syria. St. Simeon inspired young Anatole one day to “perform a similar act of saintly heroism.” So Anatole went into the kitchen, placed a chair on the kitchen table, climbed up and up and sat upon the chair, staying there all morning. At lunchtime he got down. “His mother, who understood what was happening, counseled: ‘Now, you mustn’t feel bad about this. You have at least made the attempt, which is more than most people have ever done. But you must remember that it is almost impossible to be a saint in your own kitchen.’"[i]

How true.  In our own kitchens we lose patience with a whining child underfoot.  In our cars we exceed the legal speed limit.  In our church settings we irritate and are irritated by those who approach problems differently than we do.  It’s hard to be a saint in the ordinary places of life.

Maybe you’ve heard some version of this prayer:

Dear Lord, I’m doing alright today.  So far I haven’t gossiped, grumbled, or complained.  I haven’t lost my temper or demanded my own way. But I’m going to get out of bed in a minute and then I really going to need your help.

Even the early apostles were clueless. Even saintly grandmothers do things that, in the words of Anne Lamott, make Jesus want to drink gin out of the cat dish.  Even church leaders have feet (and legs and entire bodies) of clay.

Bearing that in mind, I’ve nevertheless taken it upon myself to nominate for sainthood someone known by many of you. This person is one of those ordinary saints who affected my life in extraordinary ways.  Although I believe saints live among us and don’t have to die to be recognized for the light they shine into our lives, I have chosen to canonize and add to my personal catalogue of everyday saints, someone who died this year: my friend, my sister in Christ: Sister Judith Smits, former Executive. Director and founding board member of The Quest for Social Justice.

If I get a little teary in the telling of her story, I hope those tears will not distress you.  It’s just that I am so grateful to have known her.  And I miss her.  I said goodbye to her in person nearly a year ago as she was being transferred from Providence Hospital to a nursing facility in Wisconsin under the care of her order, the Sisters of St. Agnes.  Her hereditary pulmonary disease was advancing.  When I had occasionally asked about her health in a private moment, she had  spoken comfortably with me about how little time she had left before her lungs would give out.  In those rare moments, I had been able to bear her words about her impending death without betraying my own anguish. I was not completely composed the day before she was flown to Wisconsin when a couple of other members of The Quest and I stood at her bedside. We knew we would not see her again.  Before leaving her hospital room, I offered a prayer and nearly made it through without crying.  Judith indulged me my tears but was not about to join me in any emotional display. She faced her death, as she faced life, with no-nonsense determination.

You may be wondering why I’ve chosen a nun to exemplify the ordinary and flawed version of sainthood.  After all, nuns breathe a rarified atmosphere.  Sister Judith had taken the extraordinary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  Many saw her as heroic: standing with her oxygen tank with the Occupy Mobile contingent in all kinds of weather; leading poorly attended prayer vigils outside the Cathedral to oppose capital punishment; planning rallies for immigrant justice; standing with factory workers being mistreated at a local company; challenging politicians in town hall meetings; protesting each November at the School of the Americas; writing letters to the editor on behalf of those on the margins; being faithfully at the table whenever people in Mobile were working against racism, poverty, exploitation, war, any injustice; speaking out—even when every other word out of her mouth was interrupted by a cough. She was hardly an ordinary Christ-follower, you might be thinking.

She would disagree. She found herself very ordinary, very flawed, in fact, and her ordinariness is the theme of the memoir she wrote hastily in the last months of her life and which I had the privilege to read in its first-draft form.[1]  It’s titled God Chooses the Weak. Not only was her physical body scrawny, but she was also a weak specimen of sainthood—she would say.  She did say. 

Nor could Sister Judith make up for a diminished physique with a big personality. In fact, she wondered if her lack of charisma and charm hindered her ability to raise support for The Quest.  But her social unease did not hinder her from welcoming those on the fringes (including a new female minister in town desperate to find like-minded colleagues). As Judith eventually came to understand, both her own mother’s untreated depression and emotional distance as well as her own training as a young nun to “avoid friendships” formed her in some positive ways but deformed her slightly in other ways.  She did not lead by personal magnetism.

Judith said she'd often been downright defiant as a child. She did not excel in school. She was frequently in trouble with the nuns who taught her. On the day of her First Confirmation, she forgot to fast, as was then required, accidentally eating one piece of candy.   Too afraid of the sisters in charge of her confirmation class to admit her mistake and delay her first communion, she decided to face eternal consequences rather than the displeasure of the sisters.  She later explained, “As David said to Gad in 2 Samuel 24: 14, ‘I’d rather be punished by God whose mercy is great than fall into the hands of man,’ Or Sister,” she would add. She emphasized this choice by explaining, “In those days, dying in the state of mortal sin was no joke. You had to have your Act of Contrition handy at all times. You never knew when you might be run over by a bus and off to hell you’d go.”

Judith failed at many things. She judged herself unsuccessful in her initial work as a teacher. More painfully, she failed to achieve her ultimate vocational goal.  You see, when the liberalizing waves of Vatican II brought new freedoms and opportunities to religious orders, Sister Judith was part of a group of nuns who began theological studies in preparation for the priesthood.  She told me, deep disappointment still edging her voice, that she had ardently believed she, a young nun in the 1960s, would be among the first female priests.  Such was the trajectory of the Roman church at that time. Judith was able to admit to herself only in recent years that that would never happen in her life time.  She knew failures, limitations.  Like all ordinary saints.

What I think made the Light of Christ shine so clearly in her life was simply the love of God and love of neighbor, which Mark’s Gospel reading today underscores. This bedrock love led to commitment, which led to perseverance. The “burnt offerings” aspect of religion had no hold on her; a vocation of compassion did.  I believe she would have made a fine priest. I am sad and a bit angry she never had the chance to live out that calling. But she found other ways to serve the cause of Christ and the people of God. She was undeterred.  Although she had a weak voice in a literal sense, Mobile has lost one of our strongest voices for Jesus’ way of peace and justice. 

Like many biblical characters called to do a job for which they did not feel suited, Judith simply saw needs and stepped in and did her best. And learned humbly as she went. And grew spiritually as she learned.  She began her religious life with a narrow, child-like, dogmatic faith, but her questions and struggles helped her grow a deeper, more complex, and more mature faith. 

A challenge for us as a new church is to cultivate leaders. If we are going to offer our community a progressive Christianity that takes the Bible too seriously to take it literally, that welcomes especially those who have not been welcomed elsewhere, that seeks and adapts spiritual practices (new and old) to nurture our inward journey and impel us outward to serve others, that invites science to speak to faith, that above all follows the loving way of Jesus . . . then we need leaders—flawed, imperfect, but willing leaders—to jump in and just do it.

So let’s be willing to fail at something.  Learn from it.  Lose the ego. Then try again. Saints don’t have to have a perfect record. 

And saints don’t have to work alone. When saints work together, we give one another lots of grace to make mistakes, just as we need to give ourselves lots of grace.  To try is better than not to try.  We have an eternity to get it right.  Remember what young Anatole’s mother told him after he failed at his kitchen table attempt to imitate St. Simeon?  “Now, you mustn’t feel bad about this. You have at least made the attempt, which is more than most people have ever done. But you must remember that it is almost impossible to be a saint in your own kitchen.’"

I want to make the attempt. I don't want the perfect to stand in the way of the good. I want to go for the good. Perfect is a long way off.  The attempt is everything almost.  I want to be willing to take some criticism without falling apart.  I am pointing myself in the direction of Jesus. 

I close with some words from Sister Judith, who has been a priest to me, and yes, a saint of sorts:

“The gospel calls us to live lives that question the popular culture. It calls us to make hard choices. The world is in such pain at the present time I have to think that we Christians are doing a poor job of advancing the Reign of God. Is it because we have ample experiences of our weakness but little awareness of our strength as a community of believers?”

My friends, we think of saints as soloists. Maybe St. Simeon was a solo saint, all alone at the top of that pinnacle. But for most of us, we move toward sainthood in the company of other imperfect pilgrims. And that great cloud of witnesses, which now includes Sister Judith, cheers us on.

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[1] God Chooses the Weak: A Journey of Faith Through Times of Change  is the title of the memoir Judith wrote and self-published. I'm in the process of learning how to purchase copies.

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[i] I’ve lost the original source for this story, but an internet search shows many sermons have quoted this same source, verbatim, but without attribution.  I’m happy to provide a citation if someone can provide the original source.

Being Signs

Text: John 6: 24-35

          “Signs” is the title of the 2002 apocalyptic sci-fi film starring Mel Gibson as Graham: a father, widower, and former minister. Graham lost his faith when he lost his wife in a brutal accident six months before hostile aliens started invading earth. It so happens that Graham’s loss of faith is as disturbing to his family as are the sinister creatures that form mysterious “signs” in the cornfields nearby.  Graham’s naïve younger brother, Merrill, believes that we are part of a grand design and are regularly sent signs to read and to heed that will “save” us.  Newly skeptical Graham insists that life is random.  In overtly religious symbols and language, the film asks us how we understand signs—be they inexplicable crop circles out in the cornfield or odd coincidences in our everyday experiences. 

         The questions the movie raises about “signs” are important, but its simplistic answers disappoint. By contrasting the brothers’ understandings of “signs,” the movie’s flawed assumption is that either we believe everything we encounter in life is some preordained, cosmic message to interpret--or there is no overarching purpose or pattern to any of life, absolutely no meaning or design. Superstitious Merrill represents a magical pre-modern view of the world.  Skeptical Graham represents an entirely rational modern view. But where is the postmodern perspective that makes room for both science and symbolism, both data and imagination, both the measurable and the mystery? What the film neglects but what scripture and my lived experiences suggest is a third understanding of “signs.” For me, God neither creates a secret code we have to decipher, nor does God remain remote and uncommunicative.  

         Certainly the Bible speaks of signs. Jesus did “signs and wonders.”  In the second chapter of John, we’re told that Jesus’s transformation of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana was “the first of the signs given by Jesus.”  Interestingly, his first sign prefigures his last sign at the Last Supper when the wine on that occasion signified the blood he would soon shed and was a “sign” of the new covenant.  Perhaps, because the young rabbi Jesus began his new ministry in a spectacular way—with a “sign”—we should not judge the crowds too harshly for subsequently demanding more and more signs of wonder and for traipsing after Jesus like paparazzi hounding a celebrity.  Our Gospel lesson picks up immediately after Jesus fed the multitude from the bread and fish in a little boy’s lunch—a pretty impressive sign.  Of course, Jesus had given real food to hungry people.  But when Jesus retreats by boat, the sign-craving portion of the crowd, their physical hunger satisfied, seek more signs. When Jesus tries to explain to the crowd he has already fed that he offers an eternal food, the sign-seekers counter by saying that they need to see his credentials.  After all, they argue, they deserve a sign from God because their ancestors received tangible signs. Manna, for instance. Bread from heaven.  You and I can appreciate this need to be wowed with concrete evidence, can’t we?  
        Jesus tries again to separate the signs from their referent: “What you really need is the true bread from heaven, not just literal bread to feed your bodies, but the bread of God that feeds your soul.  Don’t become so enthralled by the physical symbols that you miss the spiritual truths.  Don’t become so fascinated by the glitzy visual aids of my lessons that you ignore me and my message.”  And so he denies them another sign. 

         In Matthew’s version of this exchange Jesus is even more emphatic.  In that account, the Pharisees and Sadducees ask for a sign to test Jesus and he practically says, “You wouldn’t know what to do with a sign if I gave you one.”  Jesus is not being coy.  Jesus is saying, “If I provide an enormous flashing neon arrow pointing you to God, I’m afraid you’re going to worship the arrow.” Symbols are symbols.  We must ask what they are pointing us to see, what they are urging us to do, what they are reminding us to be.  Sometimes religious leaders themselves become the object of worshipers’ fascination and maybe their adoration rather than pointing the people Godward.  Even the Bible can become an object of worship rather than a device that points beyond itself to the ultimate. People of faith should not look in the Bible for a secret decoder ring  or a cryptic treasure map with a big X drawn to mark the spot where God is hidden   As Abba Sisoes, an early monastic, said, “Seek God, and do not seek where God dwells.”  It’s always a temptation to seek a religious experience rather than to seek God.  People of faith do not seek signs to verify God’s existence or confirm God’s approval of them or to feel some ecstatic religious experience. And what sign do we need besides Jesus? Wasn’t Jesus himself God’s greatest sign that God not only exists but loves us beyond all human loving? Rather than pestering God for signs to bolster our faith or to direct our choices, perhaps we ought instead to consider ways we might ourselves participate in the signs of God, to BECOME SIGNS.

         There’s an overlooked story in Exodus that illustrates this meaning of signs as something we ARE rather than something we seek and decode to decide our next move.  At Moses’ burning bush encounter, God promised to give Moses a sign AFTER he led the people out of Egypt; indeed, God promised it would be a sign constructed by the people’s response. Listen to Exodus 3:12:  “This will be the sign for you that it is I who sent you:  when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”   Here’s how I understand this verse.  When God first called Moses, God did not initially promise Moses a sign that would publicly authorize him as a leader and inspire trust among the people, as Moses might have hoped.  Rather, says this story, God promised that the people’s reaction after their deliverance would itself be the evidence or a sign that they had been saved by God.  Hear the verse again: God says, “This will be the sign for you that it is I who sent you.” At this point, Moses is no doubt thinking, “Good!  God is going to provide a dramatic and supernatural sign that will convince the people right off the bat that I’m their leader and that will point us exactly where to go.”   But God explains their sign will be that AFTER Moses brings the people out of Egypt, they will worship and give thanks on the mountain. 
         Who needs a sign AFTER they have been rescued?  

         I have often wanted a clear sign to guide me in a decision.  But mostly I just have to step out on faith and with hindsight recognize that God has been with me. 

         You might believe that God works in this world by orchestrating some or all of what happens in life.  Or you might believe there is no Mover who puts into motion any of the activities, grand and minute, in this universe.  Or you might believe that life is chancy, that we are creatures with some degree of free will, and at any rate God is not a magician who controls the discrete movements of atomic particles or people or planets but instead is a name for the noncoercive force or energy or evolutionary propensity that is luring us toward more mature love and connection. 

         The Pharisees and Saducees of Jesus’s day had remembered Moses’ manna, that tangible, spectacular sign of God’s providence.  But they’d forgotten that the very first sign God promised when Moses commenced his ministry was a sign that materialized long after Moses had moved forward in faith.  And the sign was not something God sent but that the people themselves created and participated in.  This means that our response to God’s saving way becomes, retroactively, a sign of God’s direction!  Grateful people are signposts to God.  We are to BE signs of God’s presence in this world. 

         People these days are carrying literal signs, and some of those signs are about other people’s signs:  “Eat Mor Chikin” said one last week, and “Tastes Like Hate” said another.  Maybe we won’t have to carry signs if we can simply BE signs of God’s love.

         As 1st John 4: 12 explains, although no one has ever seen God, if we love one another, God lives in us and God’s love is perfected in us, and we become an approximation or picture or sign of God’s love.  Theologian Roberta Bondi explains that early Christians “stood out from the rest of the culture by their unusual love for each other.  This love was neither abstract nor a simple matter of good feeling:  it was a way of being together, a way of prayer, and a way of living in the world, rooted in their experience and understanding of the God who had come to them in the resurrected Jesus” (To Pray and To Love, 15).

         Some folks this week chose to eat or to not eat chicken sandwiches and waffle fries. That meal symbolized something to them.  Today as we gather before the Lord’s Table, we are mindful that some gluten-free wafers and alcohol-free grape juice are more than just food and drink. Here God’s love for us and our love for one another and our unity as the body of Christ come together visually and spiritually. We gather at the Open Table and eat the bread of heaven and drink the covenantal wine to become part of an enduring sign to one another and to the world that grace abounds.  This is a meal that always includes, never excludes or judges.  The Realm of God is here on this earth, we announce by our participation, and all are invited to join in this great sign of love, unity, and community.

          This understanding of signs of God reminds me of a song from my youth entitled “Signs,” a counterculture song that lambasted the Establishment’s use of signs to make constricting rules and to exclude certain people.  Some of you fellow Baby Boomers will remember this song, the chorus of which went like this:  

     Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, 

     blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind.  

     Do this; don’t do that. Can’t you read the sign?*

         But in the final verse, surprisingly, the Church, of all society’s institutions, displays the only sign that invites and includes.  That last verse about the church begins, “And the sign said, “Everybody’s welcome.  Come kneel down and pray.”   Many churches have literal signs outside that convey a message to passersby.  We have a small, portable, simple sign: “Open Table meets here. Sundays 5 p.m.”  But our church and you and I as individuals are constantly signaling something to the world.  Is it: “Everybody’s welcome.  Come, kneel down and pray”?  I hope the signs we intend to convey are consistent with the signs we are wearing on our countenances and in our interactions each and every day.

         We do need signs.  God knows we do.  But we dare not ask to receive a sign passively. We must be willing to construct these signs of love, to participate as signs of God, which is an act of faith.    

PRAYER

God, we are here not just to seek signs of your presence or to read signs of your love but to participate in the life of the church so that we together become signs of your grace and goodness.  Thank you for the bread and cup that are the enduring signs of Jesus’s way of love and nonviolence.  Let us internalize those signs so they can be read by others.

* "Signs" by Five Man Electrical Band, 1971 

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!