What do you need?

What do you need? 070112

Margaret Scott

Psalm 130; Mark 5:24b-34

We turn our eyes and hearts to you God, with all our wants and needs, hopes and fears, worries and wishes.  Give us a word for our lives.  Amen.

So, what do you need?

In the psalm, the need is help out of some kind of despair (out of the depths I cry)—it’s a despair born of the need for forgiveness. We don’t know why.  But the psalmist knows God knows.  And the psalmist knows God’s love and redemption is available, which brings hope.

Turn your eyes upon God who is love, and you are brought out of the depths….you might have to wait, perhaps so you can more fully realize your need, or to understand that what you think you need may not be what your really need….but in God, your need is met. 

With God, the poem says, is great power to redeem…. redeem….it means to restore to right relationship (which may or may not be what I had in mind when I was in the depths!)

Turn your eyes upon God, and your need may be clarified.

In our gospel reading, I bet this woman knew this psalm.   She knew the depths of suffering, she knew despair, and she had waited, how she had waited!  And her waiting wasn’t passive; she had kept turning her eyes this way and that, for the healing and help she needed.   This waiting had made her alert to all the ways God might be working, even in the depths.  So when she heard about Jesus, she was ready to risk.  She’d heard about his power, his steadfast love like the divine love the psalm assured her about.

So she turned her eyes upon Jesus, and slinking quietly in between the jostling crowd, she reached out and touched his clothes.

In the jostling busyness of life, with all the pleas and prayers and needs Jesus must hear, Jesus feels that humble, touching, plea.  In the raging noise of life, Jesus hears the still small voice of hurt.

Every act of faith, every bleeding soul, every quiet desperate plea, gets noticed…..but we have to reach out, and not just assume that without our participation God is a mind-reader.

This woman interrupts the flow of the crowd; she shouldn’t have been out in public where her ‘uncleanness’ could infect someone else;  And she messes up Jesus’ agenda. And I bet Jairus, whose daughter Jesus was on the way to heal, was really ticked.

  But then Jesus really messes things up:                                                              he is willing to be interrupted,                                                                                                          he is attentive to the moment, aware of what’s happening in his own body and soul,                                                                                                    and he is more concerned with relationship than rules

He wants people to understand that faith isn’t about rules and regulations and religion.  It’s about relationship and  restoration – that redemption the psalm talks about.

So he stops.

He puts himself into a relationship with a damaged soul, restores her to relationship with the community, and names her daughter, one who belongs.

I wonder why, as the body of Christ today, we do less?

Perhaps because we really need, we think, our secure boundaries, which protect us from the chaos we think is out there all around us?

But the last two weeks we’ve had sermons on crossing boundaries. And here it is again.  D’ya think God’s trying to tell us something?

Jesus crosses the boundaries we set up to define our safe communities or families or congregations.

Jesus called her daughter, made her one of the Jesus family, now one of us,  and this challenges us to rethink what “we” and “us” really means.

When Jesus does stuff like this it forces us to look at our own rules and phobias about who is in and who is out…who the ‘them’ are that we talk about (actually ‘think’ about, since we’re often too politically correct to actually name “them”)

As long as there are imagined ‘unclean’ folk –

the filthy poor or the stinkin rich,

the immoral liberals or the intolerant conservatives

as long as we can name ‘them’, we can feel secure in who we are.

But Jesus changes all that; she had been left out but now she’s a sign for all time that the JESUS community is different from business as usual, different from the way the larger society operates. (a good moment for a plug for our Practicing the Way of Jesus experiment!)

Those who practice the Jesus way belong to an inclusive community, one that yes is full of pain and suffering, health and wholeness, bleeding souls and busy crowds; a community that has people in the depths and people flying high….but it’s a community where all of them belong, and all are responsible for supporting one another through it all, by a touch, a smile, a word of hope, a gift of time….people who are the body of Christ at work now, as then – people who will stop and listen and spend energy.   THAT’s who we really are called to be.

I read an article this week and the author said this:

I hope the bleeding woman had all the other healed freaks over on a regular basis, because that’s how we remember who we really are. (Nadia Boldt-Weber)