6th Sunday after Pentecost Sermon

Today’s gospel reading is the story of two daughters.

The first is the daughter of Jairus. We don’t know anything about Jairus or his daughter apart from this story. All we know is he’s a leader in the synagogue, which means – in his community – he’s a “somebody,” somebody to be respected and deferred to.

But now his only daughter is at the point of death. Desperate with fear, he flings himself at Jesus feet, begging him, “Hurry! Come to my house.” If the rumors about Jesus are true, then this is his last hope to save her.

And, in his mercy, Jesus does follow him. He heads off with him to his home, along with a crowd of people who are pressing in on him, eager to see if this wonder-worker will heal the dying girl.

And there, amongst the crowd, is an unnamed woman: the second daughter.

She’s been hemorrhaging for twelve years. The story doesn’t tell us the exact cause of her bleeding, but two things are surely true. First, she has been in physical misery for twelve long years. And second, with her condition, in her society, this hemorrhaging makes her “unclean,” which makes her an outcast because – not only is she unclean – anything or anyone she touches will also become unclean.

And now here she is, right in the middle of a mob of people, because she’s got a plan: She’s going to touch Jesus. Will it make him unclean and anyone else she touches unclean? Yep. But – at this point – who cares? Just like with Jairus, Jesus is her last hope and she’s risking it all to be healed. She’s going to touch the clothes of the man who just might be the Messiah.

And that’s what she does. Everyone is pressing in on Jesus as he makes his way to Jairus’ house, and – buffeted by the crowd – she stretches out her unclean hand, touches his clothes, and the hemorrhage stops (!) and she slips back into the crowd, unnoticed.

Until Jesus stops. He knows.

Who just touched me?

His disciples are incredulous:

Who just touched you?! Well, within the last five minutes about half the village of Capernaum!

No, no, no, he says. That’s not what I mean.

And his eyes start scanning the crowd.

The woman hasn’t gotten very far. She’s still close enough to see and hear what’s going on. She knows he’s looking for her. What’s she going to do? After all, she’s got what she came for. She can still slip away. But something tells her otherwise. Even though she’s an outcast who, minutes before, was only willing to approach him in secret, she now steps forward – fearful and trembling – and falls at his feet and tells him the whole truth.

The “whole truth.” How long did that take? Was it just a matter of seconds?

I touched you, Lord. I’ve been bleeding for twelve years, and no one could help me. So I touched you. And it stopped.

Or did she tell him the whole truth: twelve years’ worth of truth – of misery and isolation and fear. Did it all come tumbling out at that moment – there before Jesus and the whole crowd? I don’t know. It doesn’t say. But whatever it was, he heard it all,

Daughter, he tells her, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.

He called her “daughter.” On his way to heal Jairus’ daughter, first he stops and heals this daughter – this daughter whom society has forgotten. And in so calling her, he now becomes as Jairus. He becomes the father who wants nothing more than her well-being.

But it came at a cost. It took too long. While he was still speaking with her people came from Jairus’ house to tell him:

It’s too late. Don’t bother the teacher anymore. Your daughter is dead.

A parent’s worst fear is now reality. She’s dead. Whatever hope he’d had in Jesus is ended.

Perhaps Jairus – in grief and the bewilderment that comes with grief – would have done as they said and stumbled home after them to weep and cry over his daughter. But Jesus overheard the conversation and came to him:

It’s okay. C’mon. I’m going with you. Don’t be afraid. Only believe.

And off they go to his house. And, with no one else around but the parents and three disciples, and with just the simple words, Talitha cum – little girl, get up – he raises her from the dead. No magic. No theatrics of any kind. Just a basic instruction, Little girl, get up. And she does.

Now give her something to eat, he says. And tell no one about this.

I’m grateful for this pair of stories – grateful as I read them how much I want to be guided by them.

What strikes me first is simply Jesus’ awareness. There’s a sensitivity in him to what’s going on in his midst – to the movements of the crowds, to the power going out from him, to the conversation between Jairus and his household. He is so awake to his world, to his environment, to his own body. And, surely, this spirit of attentiveness is an elemental part of what it means for the Kingdom of God to be manifest in him. God in Christ is the watching one, the seeing one. He’s like the deer I come across in my neighborhood. As soon as I round the corner, they look up from their grazing: eyes focused on me; their ears pivoting to my approach – so aware.

But unlike the deer, whose attentiveness is rooted in fear – always poised to protect themselves from threat – Christ’s attentiveness is rooted in love: Who is in sorrow? Who is in pain? in fear?

And with his attentiveness of spirit is also a spaciousness of spirit. There is nothing rushed or limited or sparingly doled out. The woman before him at that moment became the priority – and remained his priority so long as she needed to tell her whole story.

I had a favorite professor in seminary: Charles. He was brilliant and wise… and caring. I’d sign up for office hours to meet with him. But whatever the stated academic topic was for our meeting, it was just an excuse. I came for him. When you were with Charles, it always felt like there were nothing in the world he’d rather be doing. There were no outside urgencies pressing upon him – no papers to grade or lectures to prepare. He was fully present to me. But then, when I’d leave his office, I’d look at the office-hour sign-up sheet posted on his door and see every slot filled with names of other students he would be present to, just like he’d been present to me.

And here’s the other thing about Charles, I always sensed that, as much as he truly cared about me and my life, he wasn’t burdened by it. There was no sense from him that my problems and the problems of my classmates were stacking up in his spirit like our papers were on his desk. When I was with him, he was with me. And when I left, I was gone, taking my problems with me, leaving him free to whatever or whomever came next.

I suspect this was also true of Jesus. He was alive and present to the moment. What came before was over. What was yet to be, was yet to be. But what was now, was now.

And in his presence to the “now,” Jesus shows no partiality. He simply does not abide by any of the social strata of our human creation and devotion. There is no lesser or greater; no preferred or rejected; no privileged or disadvantaged. In the Kingdom of God, revealed through Christ, these distinctions are simply disregarded. The question of “who is more worthy?” was simply not Jesus’ question at all. On his way to love one daughter, he stops to love the other.

But if we’re honest, as lovely and gracious as this may sound, it makes little practical sense to us at all because we are always constrained by our fear of “not enough.” There’s not enough money, not enough time, not enough health care, not enough jobs, not enough whatever to go around. And so we begin our endless process of stratifying: Who is more worthy and deserving of these limited and dwindling resources?

But this is not the spirit of Christ. Why is he free to stop and care for the bleeding woman, even if the girl might die? Because his power to heal was not a limited resource. When the time came: Talitha cum. Little girl, get up.

But so far as we can tell, we don’t share that same power with Jesus. With us, there would be no, Little girl, get up. We live in the “real world” with budgets and deadlines and not enough volunteers. I know. I know. These are legitimate objections.

But hear me out, because something deeper is happening here, that’s worth our consideration. And it has to do with this whole issue of being “unclean” in Jewish society.

In Jewish law, anything or anyone touched by an unclean person was automatically rendered unclean, too: a saddle, the sheets, another person. It was the spiritual equivalent to germs – something easily transferred. It’s like mixing dirty water with pure: the dirty water will always win out.

And there was a spiritual rational to all this. Being unclean wasn’t the same as being sinful. It could happen to you by any number of normal, unavoidable encounters. But it always carried with it some connotation of brokenness and dying. It was a bodily reminder of a spiritual reality that, in this life – in this world – we are always tainted with our complicity in brokenness and the proximity of death. And the consequence of being unclean was that you were removed, temporarily, from society and – more importantly – from worship. Uncleanliness was simply incompatible with God’s holiness.

But along comes Jesus who reverses the whole thing. The hemorrhaging woman reaches out her unclean hand to touch him. It should have made him unclean. But it didn’t. In fact, the reverse happened – she became clean instead.

The presence of God was no longer concealed or restricted behind thick temple walls. God in Christ was living among them – radiating purity. And when the bleeding woman reached out her hands in faith, (I believe) it was his purity he felt transferring to her.

This world is a muddy jar of water. But when Jesus is poured into it, the water becomes pure. The old rules no longer apply. And if we are the body of Christ, filled with the Spirit of Christ, then where we go, we are bringing the holiness of God with us. We do not need to be afraid.

We can stride into this world, propelled by all the values of the Kingdom of God that Jesus modeled for us. But beneath it all is this audacious hope that we go as Christ ­– we go with the power of God, with love, to heal and transform. I hardly know what that means. I certainly have no instructions on how to harness God’s power to do the miraculous. But this I affirm: God is real. And God is in us. When we set out to live as Christ in this world, we can hold our grown-up sensibilities of “not enough” rather lightly. We can go with a bit of naiveite that’s willing to say, “God, I’m just going to love the one before me now, and trust you to work out the details.”

We are stewards of God’s kingdom in which there is always enough.