“Healed and Whole”
A Sermon Preached by
the
Rev. Jean Niven Lenk
Sunday, July 8, 2012
First Congregational Church of Stoughton ,
United Church of Christ
Text: Mark 5:25-34
Over the years and the many prayers we have shared together
as a community of faith, I have sometimes mentioned that I often find my eyes
welling up with tears when I pray, whether I am alone or in a group. Perhaps you have experienced the same thing.
I believe that these tears result from the very intimate
connection we feel with God when we pray, and such emotional closeness can
occur only when we open ourselves up and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. I have found myself at times wanting to avoid
deep prayer, because I know where the journey will lead – down through the
protective layers of time and denial and rationalization, to the place where my
deepest pains and losses and brokenness dwell, uncovered and raw. Certainly, I am renewed and comforted and
energized by prayer – but, it can also be frightening to open up and become so
vulnerable.
I think this is a struggle that many of us go through;
deeply desiring connectedness – whether with God or another individual or with
a community – and yet, simultaneously fearing it. One can read in the daily papers how people
are searching for community, how people long for connections in a disconnected
world. And yet, it seems we also fear
the vulnerability necessary for such intimacy to occur. So we get online and tap into the “virtual
community” of Facebook or Twitter – where the only emotions people see are the
ones we choose to express in words, whether or not they are authentic.
But emotional closeness is not possible without revealing to
ourselves and others who we genuinely are.
Such intimacy requires trust; we must be willing to lower our defenses
-- enough to be open to the possibility of being accepted or rejected, and
enough to open ourselves to being touched by a power greater than ourselves.
If we are to enter the realm of God, we must open ourselves
to being close enough to touch the fringe of something holy. We might both want and fear the touch of God,
but sometimes we are left no choice.
The is the case of the woman with the hemorrhage in this
morning’s Gospel lesson; she is not frightened by such intimacy. For twelve years, she has been unclean,
untouchable, unloved and unlovable; she has been poked and prodded and probed
by doctors. She has known the depths of
loneliness, of embarrassment, of fatigue.
Having been shunned and tormented for so many years, she has nothing
left to risk. Desperate for healing, she
pushes herself through the crowd and actively seeks intimacy with God, and she
reaches up and touches the fringe of Jesus’ garment.
And in the middle of an emergency to save a young girl --
the daughter of a Jairus, a prominent ruler in the synagogue -- Jesus feels her
presence amid the jostling of the crowd, and he stops and turns and asks, “Who
touched me?”
Because for Jesus, the most important thing at that moment
is not getting to the powerful religious leader, but rather to encounter face-to-face
the nameless human being who has reached out to him. While others in the throng may want to get
near this celebrity rabbi, Jesus understands the intentionality of the woman’s
gesture: she is reaching out for her life.
And while society has shunned her, this anonymous, invisible, and
rejected woman is -- in that moment -- the most deserving of his attention,
important enough to Jesus that he interrupts his plans and he stops what he is
doing to heal her.
She doesn’t need to tell him that, because of her
hemorrhage, she is prohibited by religious rules from touching or being
touched. She doesn’t need to tell him
that she is not allowed to worship. He
knows all this. Still, he listens
compassionately, and then he tenderly calls her “daughter,” telling her to “go
in peace.” Go in wholeness, go to live
life in its fullness. Through Jesus,
this woman who was an unknown -- identified only by her bleeding and her pain
-- is restored to the community, invited back from the outskirts of society
into the connectedness of relationship, so that she no longer feels fragmented
and alone. Jesus heals her not only from
her disease, but also from her isolation.
And then he says to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you
well. Go in peace and be healed of your
disease.” Another translation[i]
puts in this way: "Daughter, you
took a risk of faith, and now you're healed and whole. Live well, live blessed!” The purpose of healing in the biblical sense
is restoration to wholeness – restoration and peace with oneself, with one’s
God, with the community, and with the important relationships in one’s life.
Jesus saves the woman from hemorrhaging. But he saves her from much more. He saves her from her isolation and her
denigration. She asks for wholeness, and
she is wholly restored to life through a healing touch.
There are so many broken people in this world – perhaps
right here in our midst -- waiting to be made whole. Jesus turns to the woman and he turns also to
us and asks, “What is bleeding in your life?
What is draining the life out of you?”
It can be hard for us to even admit that we have some brokenness in our
lives, that our lives are not perfect and that we are not whole. And healing is not necessarily curing.
Those of us “of a certain age” may recognize this saying:
“Clapton is God.” In the 60s and 70s,
those words were graffitied on walls throughout England, and they refer to Eric
Clapton, one of the greatest rock guitarists ever, although Clapton himself was embarrassed at being
called a deity.
And for all his
fortune and fame, Clapton’s life was a shambles. He was addicted to heroin and alcohol, and his
4-year-old son Connor died in a tragic accident. While Clapton managed to shake the heroin, his
addiction to alcohol was unrelenting. After
many unsuccessful attempts to get sober, one day -- out of fear and humility --
Clapton hit his knees and screamed “God, please take this away from me!” And, with God’s strength, he has been able to
get and stay sober. But he prays every
morning that he will not take a drink. In 1998, he founded the Crossroads Centre
on the Caribbean island of Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance
abusers.
Clapton knows
he will never be cured, but he
has been healed because he knows that just by waking up each day, he has been
given a bonus. It’s not
something that he has earned, but is simply a gift from our generous and gracious God which inspired him to write these song lyrics[ii]:
I have finally found a way to live just like
I never could before…
I have finally found a way to live in the
presence of the Lord, in the presence of the Lord.
Indeed, it can be in
our loneliness and desperation, in the most heartbreaking moments of our lives,
that we find God, that we can recognize the face of Jesus. As we stand in our need and our brokenness,
we can experience the depth of the healing love and grace of God – the God who
offers hope out of hopelessness, brings possibility out of the impossible, and
turns death into new life.
And what about you?
Have you opened yourself up to God’s healing touch? And has the Christ in you touched someone
else with love and understanding? This
church community has a powerful touch. I
see how our ministries reach out and touch people with the love of Christ. We do it through visits to people in
hospitals and nursing homes and by sending cards that express our caring love;
we do it through our prayer shawls and by praying together and by worshipping
together as a family of faith. That is the Christ in us at work.
Jesus says to the healed bleeding woman, and says to all of
us: “Go in the peace of God.” “Take a
risk of faith.” Allow yourself to be
touched by Christ; open yourself up enough to reach that level of intimacy with
God.
And then, let the Christ in you (and in you, and in you…) go
and touch someone else’s life.
Amen.
