July 1, 2012 Proper 8
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Mark 5:25-34
25Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. 27She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28for she said, "If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well." 29Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" 31And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, 'Who touched me?'" 32He looked all around to see who had done it. 33But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."
We will soon be celebrating our fourth anniversary of the founding of our little church. The process of our birth has not always been easy and the outcomes have not been certain but we've made it and I am sincere in telling you that I love what we have become and I am very happy to be the pastor of our emerging congregation.
One of the speakers at the Wild Goose Festival I was attending this past week had also founded a new church under circumstances very similar to our own. He specifically asked not to be quoted in detail about his story of the ups and downs of their journey from 40 participants to 700 members but one thing is just too telling not to repeat. He said, "You start a church with the 50 craziest people on the playground which is OK because the crazy ones all leave in the first three years."
We also started with about 40 people and the first couple of years there was a huge amount of coming and going. People came in presenting needs that were sometimes very demanding and sometimes, even if we bent over backwards to help them in their challenging circumstances, whatever we did was not enough, and many who left, left angry.... Some had to be asked to leave.
But mostly, as we were seeking to create community, we did a lot of visiting in one another's homes. We cooked and cleaned the homes of those who were sick, a couple of times bailed out people who were in jail, and got urgent medical care for those without insurance or money. But more importantly, we socialized with one another. Sometimes we spent holidays together, babysat one another's kids, and took vacations together.
Some of our early community members had to move away for work. Some have died. But there were others, whom I loved, trusted, and counted to be friends, who just disappeared. Sometimes they didn't agree with something I said, or some decision the church made, but every time, having to accept their departure was a blow.
Churches that have been around for more than a century have a core constituency that wouldn't leave if you set the building on fire. They sit in the pew where their grandparents sat and their family has endured bad preachers and loved good ones, they have been there for the thick and the thin years..... but a new church has no such inherited heritage. We are the community that we decide to create. Nothing holds you here other than your desire to be a part of who we are and what we are doing.
And we have sought to create this community in a time when people are finding it more and more difficult to stay in community. Friendships, family members, spouses, even children are more disposable today than in any time in my memory and I suspect we may be in a nearly unique period of history.
In 1990 I would hazard the guess that not a one of us had ever even heard of a Bosnian or a Serb. For our lifetimes, they were simply the people who lived in Yugoslavia. When Tito's died and internal strife lead to the break up of Yugoslavia, many people who previously didn't even know if they were from Muslim or Orthodox background started to fight and kill one another. We lived the first half of our lives assuming that Muslims were Muslims until we saw Sunnis and Shi'a fighting protracted bloody wars with one another in Iraq and Iran.
Our own nation is possibly more divided right now than we have been at any time since the Civil War and I fear that if conservatives and liberals lived in distinctly different regions of the country we might be in danger of open conflict right now.
The advent of cell phones, the internet, twitter and texting, the ability to SKYPE with almost anyone, anywhere in the world for free has not increased our connection to one another but rather has heighted the cheapening of our language that can make me say that I have 1600 "friends" on Face Book and no one with whom to go see a movie!
Because I just love to hear Sheryl Crow, Joan Osborn, Paula Cole and Sarah McLachlan, I made the decision a few years ago to attend not one but two of the Lilith Fairs, one in Kansas City and one in St Louis. I know that heterosexual males were not the target audience for those concerts and in fact the two or three of us who were among the sea of thousands of women there would sometimes turn and give one another nervous glances and nods..... especially when the over crowed Women's rooms evidently gave courageous women permission to join us in the Men's rooms.
You've never really had a shy bladder until three women are standing behind you waiting for their turn at the urinal..... but I digress.....
I never listen to country music but by virtue of going to the Lilith Fair I was treated to this song by Lisa Loeb that I asked Ashley to sing for us today. The title line stuck in my mind as such a succinct way of describing how incredibly shallow and disposable our relationships often are..... she sings, "The time between meeting and finally leaving is sometimes called 'falling in love.'"
And, of course, the most obvious application of that ironic line is to personal love relationships though it certainly doesn't stop there. When I first became single nearly 20 years ago, I passively assumed that within a year or so that I would marry again and try to have me some of that "happily ever after" that everyone keeps talking about.
The truth of my experience is that first dates often didn't make it through the appetizer before one or both of us realized that we wouldn't be lingering over dessert and coffee. Meaningful connection turns out to be a whole lot harder than I thought. After, oh, I don't know, fifteen or sixteen years of disappointing first dates, you start to wonder if maybe I'm not quite the fetching catch that I thought I was.
Even when you take out the alcoholics, addicts, borderline personalities and passive dependents, it still isn't easy for two adults to meet and excuse one another's idiosyncrasies enough to make a lasting relationship work. I'm not single at the age of 55 just because I forgot to get married. It is because I have the dual challenge of being very picky while being nearly impossible to live with.
And I would be very worried about that fact if there were not so very very many people in about the same spot in life. We don't connect well in the 21st century. People are less inclined to join smaller churches where they have to actually interact with people they know. The people who still go to church tend to go to churches that are more like going to a movie theater where you temporarily gather as a random collection of strangers and scatter as soon as the pop corn is gone.
Neighbors don't talk to one another. People don't join civic organizations and most families gave up even trying to have family reunions back before Watergate. All of our centuries of Christian worship and practice has left us with a society that is harsh and intolerant and judgmental and nearly bereft of basic skills of forgiveness and minding our own business enough to let other people be who they are and still be willing to sit around the pool and chat with them.
I know it was a long time ago but I want to ask you to remember the passage of scripture that Ashley read for us before I started talking today. It is about a woman who had a persistent menstrual period, which, if ever there was something that was no one else's business, that would have to be it.
But in that society, when a woman was menstruating, she was considered to be somehow spiritually unclean and she was to separate herself from the rest of society. Bad enough for two or three days out of the month but solitary confinement for the woman in this text who had been made to feel like and unwanted leper in her community.
In fact, the use of the word "leper" is specifically relevant here.
One of the ways of looking at the healing miracles in the gospels is to ask yourself how each of the people Jesus is said to have healed would have been cut off from community before the healing and how being healed restored them to community. Lepers were forced to live away from healthy people and when they walked down the street there were supposed to yell "unclean!" as warning to healthy people that a leper was coming.
In most cases, in our society and in theirs, we let gossips do that for us.... The gossips shout and whisper about how unclean everyone else is. Mudslinging journalism tells us what everyone's failing, everyone's illness, everyone's pain is. This woman didn't walk around yelling about her problem but she walked, head bowed, face to the ground, and wouldn't even dare to speak to Jesus, she just reached out to touch the hem of his garment from behind.
In the church where I worked for several years, I greeted parishioners by the sanctuary door next to the pulpit. Some people shake my hand, some people hug me and some people go out one of the other doors. But I noticed that this one tiny, white haired woman often came through the line and hugged me more than once each week, sometimes three or four times and I realized that she came through the line, hugged me, then went through the chancel door and came back and got in line again, sometimes over and over.
Finally I asked her why she was doing that and she said, "Because you are the only person who touches me all week long and sometimes I just need another little bit of contact before I go back home." And I don't want to go all Leo Buscaglia on you folks today but do you hear how indicative that is of a society that is on its last legs of civilization?
For all I know she wasn't a great mother, or maybe she wasn't a good sister or even a caring neighbor.... There may have been reasons for her isolation but, I'm confident, not reason enough.
When Jesus healed a leper, he restored that person to being able to go back home, to go back to work, to synagogue, to the marketplace. When he healed a blind man, a lame person, when he exorcised a demon from someone, or healed a woman with a persistent issue of blood, he broke down the barriers that kept them from being in community.
And I don't know if you take these miracle accounts literally or metaphorically, whether they are a matter of history or of literature, they still have about the same meaning..... they are stories of restoration.... Of ending isolation.... Of opening up the way for a human being to once again become a part of community.
Many of us, if not, indeed, most of us, have been exiles from the faith community where we grew up. Some are exiles from family, past friends, places of employment. When my life blew up five years ago and I felt that I had been betrayed by friends, parishioners and members of my staff, I remember sitting in a meeting with my board chairman, a man whom I had believed to be a close friend, and I can remember only being able to say to him, "I hope I never trust another human being as long as I live."
I left that church and I told my friends that I was going to sell everything I owned, change my name to Habib Shashimi, and buy a coffee stand in Florida and never have another human interaction that went beyond, "Do you want me to leave room for cream and sugar in that?"
I'm only exaggerating a little bit. I did go down to Florida and started looking into businesses that were for sale. I was done with church.... I was done with friends... I was done with even trying to love or trust anyone. But I learned a couple of things pretty quickly. Number one was that Starbucks does not sell franchises; they own all of their stores so I had to forget about that.
Number two was that life cut off from others is not worth living.
The Buddha taught that he who has 50 loves has fifty sorrows and he who has 10 loves has ten sorrows and he who has no loves has no sorrows. Who am I to disagree with Buddha? I agree that to love anyone is to run the risk of betrayal and a broken heart. Some people will just stop loving you. Some friends will reject you for reasons so venial it would embarrass Attila the Hun. But, with all due respect to the Buddha, the person who has no loves has nothing but sorrow.
There is risk in loving another person but there is certain failure in cutting yourself off from friendship or the potential even of love.
In conclusion then, I have this to say. Friends will sometimes reject you for no good reason. That's a fact. But I charge you, don't you be that person. Some people will love you and include you in their lives until the day they turn their back on you.... It happens.... But I beg of you, don't you be that person. In our society when you can reach out and communicate with anyone anywhere at anytime, it gets easy to see any one individual as being entirely disposable. I'm here to tell you that is not healthy.
Jesus made a career of making broken people whole....of forgiving, healing, restoring people to community. If we say that we are followers of the teachings of Jesus then we too are to make it our business to forgive and to forego judging. It is our business to reconcile and not to reject. It is our moral obligation to work towards the creation of a peaceful, loving, healing, and reconciling community and to reject any base impulse we may have through moral condescension, judgment, resentment, or gossip to tear community apart.
You are the salt of the earth.... You are the light of the world. You are the hope of the future.
