{"id":251,"date":"2012-07-02T10:05:24","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T15:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=251"},"modified":"2017-10-26T22:20:33","modified_gmt":"2017-10-27T03:20:33","slug":"sermon-health-and-freedom-july-1-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2012\/07\/02\/sermon-health-and-freedom-july-1-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Sermon: Health and Freedom July 1, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

Text: \u00a0Mark 5:21-43 <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Fortuitously, albeit coincidentally, the Gospel lesson for today presents us with a story from the ministry of Jesus, whose ministry is our own as we are now the body of Christ in the world, about illness and the healing of two women, one who is but 12 years old, and the other a woman who has been ill for as long as the child has been alive, and who has expended all her resources in an effort to be well.\u00a0 The fifth chapter of Mark contains three healing stories:\u00a0 two of the three happen at the margins, beyond the boundaries of acceptability.\u00a0 Two of the three stories concern women.\u00a0 All three deal with people who are deemed unclean and untouchable, and therefore immoral because of their presenting illnesses.<\/p>\n

Mark\u2019s Gospel also shows us Jesus changing sides of lakes, rivers, boundaries at every turn.\u00a0 He has just returned from the other side of the sea of Galilee, dealing with a man wild with mental illness in the foreign territory of the \u201cGerasenes\u201d on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee, when he now encounters a man who is the ultimate insider, on the west bank of the Sea of Galilee, a leader of the local synagogue, whose daughter is so desperately ill that her frantic father is seeking the help of this itinerant healer and teacher.\u00a0 Within that larger story of the healing of the daughter of Jairus, Mark gives us the story of the middle-aged woman who has suffered for 12 years with hemorrhages.\u00a0 Contact with the dead or with blood, if you have read Leviticus, represents two of the most stringent taboos in all of Jewish law, requiring various forms of purification rites if a man has contact with a bleeding woman, or, if female, requiring isolation and more purification.<\/p>\n

It may surprise you to know that there are some scholars who have looked at the miracles concerning the woman and the girl here in the fifth chapter of Mark, and \u00a0found ideas that relate to national life.\u00a0 Almost as an afterthought, at the end of the intertwined stories of the raising of Jairus\u2019 daughter, and the healing of the woman with the continuous flow of blood, the narrator observes that the girl was twelve years old.\u00a0 The woman, you will also note, has been ill for 12 years.\u00a0 This number twelve links the two women to each other, and to the ethnic reality of the twelve tribes of Israel.\u00a0\u00a0 The older woman represents, says Dutch New Testament scholar Waetjen, the \u201ctradition-bound mother Judaism.\u201d\u00a0 Unclean, isolated from the world and oppressed by the law and the invading conquering Romans, she is saved and her life is redeemed by her risk of reaching out to make contact with Christ.\u00a0 The young girl, on the other hand, might be seen to embody in Mark\u2019s mind the new Israel, offspring of the synagogue and its Pharasaic heritage, who is on the verge of puberty, of bearing children, and bringing new life to the world.\u00a0 By resurrecting her from the dead, Jesus redeems her life and, as a result, enables her also to fulfill her destiny.<\/p>\n

The \u00a0older woman \u00a0is nameless.\u00a0 She represents all the powerless, marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the sick.\u00a0\u00a0 When her life comes in contact with the incarnate love of God, she is renamed:\u00a0 \u201cDaughter\u201d\u2014a title often used in prophetic speech by God as a term of endearment for the chosen people, the nation of Israel.<\/p>\n

For both the woman and the girl, ill health has enslaved them, kept them from the fullness of life that they desired, and that these stories are trying to tell us is God\u2019s intention for every human being\u2026whether it be the foreigner known as the Gerasene demoniac, as the King James Version calls him whose story begins chapter 5 in Mark\u2019s Gospel, or these two women.\u00a0 Surely good health correlates strongly to\u00a0 human liberty.\u00a0\u00a0 The healing mission of Jesus is the restoration of liberty and possibility to human beings and to human community.<\/p>\n

An aside:\u00a0 Sister Joan Chittister, in her baccalaureate address to the students at Stanford University several weeks ago noted that two thirds of the hungry of the world are women.\u00a0 Two thirds of the illiterate of the world are women.\u00a0 Two-thirds of the poor of the world are women.\u00a0 \u201cThat can\u2019t be an accident; that has to be policy,\u201d she noted with some sarcasm.<\/p>\n

Ill health makes us dependent on the kindness and mercies of others.\u00a0 Good health on the other hand enables our independence.\u00a0\u00a0 Such is the thread that I am using to tie these stories to our own nation\u2019s celebration this week of our independence.<\/p>\n

Last month, actually in mid-May now, when Owen Williams asked me to give the invocation for the Transylvania Commencement exercises, I was taken back in memory to one of my own graduation events, and the prayer that Bill Coffin gave at the Baccalaureate service for the young men (and they were all men at that time) who were graduating from Yale College the year that I graduated from Yale Divinity School.\u00a0 Snippets of it have remained in my memory bank, but somewhere along the way I had lost my copy of the prayer.\u00a0 Hence, I wrote to the Yale Library to delve into their archives to send me a copy of it, which just arrived this past week.<\/p>\n

I wanted my prayer in 2012 to say something just as profound, because, like those days in the late 1960s, the rancor, the ugliness, the hostility in our national life is as bad today as it was then, except now the roles seem reversed.\u00a0 Whereas in the 1960s it was the poor who saw no way to escape their poverty, the minorities who were finally fed up with being treated as people of no worth, and the young being asked to fight a war that made no sense who were filled with righteous anger at their government, in our current season of incivility it seems that those most angry at our government are those who are most fortunate in all regards:\u00a0 wealth, status, opportunity, and even health.\u00a0 They are not those who need the military signing bonus to enlist to fight a war that is doomed to failure in one country, Afghanistan, and one that was begun under false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction in another, Iraq.\u00a0 They are not those who, like the woman with the 12 years of hemorrhages in our Biblical story have spent all they have to find health.\u00a0 They are not those likely to lose their health insurance and access to marvelous health care, unlike those become ill, acquire a pre-existing condition, and who are excluded from health care, and so become \u00a0bankrupt slaves to debt within the richest country on earth.\u00a0\u00a0 All of this is bad for the brain and worse for the heart, as Wendell Berry has written.<\/p>\n

My prayer, nowhere near the eloquence of my mentor and friend, was that graduates might\u00a0 live with courage to tackle impossible dreams and stubborn realities;\u00a0 with integrity to live with compassion for the suffering world and with never flagging conviction that \u201cthe world is a holy vision, if we only have the clarity to see it.\u201d* <\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps one of our impossible dreams might be expressed as a wounded longing for our nation to live up to its calling and high ideals, to be a place of civility amid our differences, a society of compassion and caring for one another, realizing that the social Darwinism of the survival of the financially fittest will leave the nation teetering toward disaster for the whole.\u00a0 And perhaps one of the most stubborn realities we face will be the gross inequalities in our delivery of health services to the citizens of this country, and the refusal of those who have insurance to realize how much those without insurance cost us all, in terms of money, innovation, and actual health.<\/p>\n

No matter where you stand on the Affordable Care Act, or what you think of the Supreme Court\u2019s decision this past week, the broken health care system is part of the economic and social malaise eating away at the foundational strength of this country.\u00a0\u00a0 The rapidly spreading incivility between the political parties and in society at large may be just one symptom of our lack of national and individual health, but like cancer it is ravaging everything in our \u00a0body politic.\u00a0 Bill Coffin\u2019s prayer in 1967 asked God to \u201cgrant us grace to quarrel with [the world we love].\u00a0 Grant us grace,\u201d he prayed, \u201cto quarrel with words that conceal the heart, with the glitter that is but a disguised and painted indifference, with everthing in our culture that distracts from rather than gives meaning to life.\u201d\u00a0 He didn\u2019t mean to quarrel with one another with hateful words.\u00a0 He meant we should engage with one another in serious dialogue about what matters most.<\/p>\n

We cannot solve the nation\u2019s economic woes, its debts, and its social problems of poverty, ill health, and failing education systems, without the civility\u2014the decency to respect one another and believe that these issues require us to work together, not to demonize and not to attempt to obliterate one another.<\/p>\n

As people of faith we have, I think, a high calling to serve our nation at this time of incivility.\u00a0 We, and Jews, and Muslims, and \u00a0people of all religions should be calling for the healing of our democracy.\u00a0 We have five things to contribute to the healing of our nation and the preservation and expansion of freedom. [These five things, \u201chabits of the heart\u201d are drawn from a book by Parker Palmer, a high school classmate of Ellen Gibson\u2019s, entitled:\u00a0 Healing the Heart of Democracy.] <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>1. \u00a0 We are they who know in our spiritual bones that we human beings are in this world together, united we stand and divided we fall.<\/p>\n

2. We are they who are called, in the name of God, to celebrate diversity as a good gift of a good creator, whether diversity makes us have different religious beliefs, different skin color, or differ in our sexuality\u2014and in our physical and mental capacities.<\/p>\n

3. We are they who know what it means to live in community with one another with respect even though we may differ greatly from one another in our opinions about politics, economics, and religious belief, and how to hold these differing opinions in a tension that is life-giving rather than life destroying.<\/p>\n

4. We are they who believe that every person should have a voice and have the capacity to effect change in their lives. \u00a0And…<\/p>\n

5. \u00a0We are they who know something about the capacity to create community.<\/p>\n

It is time for the religious communities, perhaps beginning with our own, to issue a call to our nation\u2019s political leaders and the citizens themselves to enter into a new season of civility.\u00a0 This country is headed speedily for disaster, and the only way to preserve liberty will be to build a new culture of civility, respect, and justice for all.<\/p>\n

Mark does not tell us these stories to convince us that Jesus is a nice sociable and sensible guy and we ought to be nice sociable and sensible people too.\u00a0 Mark tells us this story and all his stories to make us hear that good news that in Jesus Christ \u00a0we see God acting to overthrow oppression and superstition.\u00a0 Talitha Cumi\u2026, <\/strong><\/em>Jesus says to half the human race:\u00a0 get up, stand on your feet, be fed.<\/p>\n

As our nation celebrates its 236th<\/sup> birthday this week, religious communities have a new role to play.\u00a0 It\u2019s time for us to say:\u00a0 stop being dead to one another, get up, let us think and eat together, and maybe, just maybe we can solve some of these hideous problems that are dividing us.<\/p>\n

It took enormous courage and unflagging hope for the woman with the hemorrhage to reach out to touch the hem of the robe of Jesus.\u00a0 It took trust for Jairus, a man of authority, to ask the itinerant preacher for help.\u00a0 Trust that there is a holy power among us is perhaps the best note then, on which to end a sermon on the weekend before our national holiday.\u00a0 Look for it. Pray for it.\u00a0 Reach out to it.\u00a0 It is nothing to be laughed at, for that powerful love will raise us\u2014as individuals, as church, as nation\u2014from death to life.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n

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Text: \u00a0Mark 5:21-43 Fortuitously, albeit coincidentally, the Gospel lesson for today presents us with a story from the ministry of Jesus, whose ministry is our own as we are now the body of Christ in the world, about illness and<\/p>\n

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