The challenge this morning is to preach about healing in the midst of a splendid Western New York summer and glorious day such as today. Why preach about healing you ask. What’s to be healed? The economy is robust. The Sabres’ future secure. We’re talking waterfronts and office buildings and bridges and new hospitals in Buffalo. Life looks pretty good. My answer is not only is it the Gospel story for the day – and I am a lectionary preacher – but also because I believe all of us need to learn to talk about and be open to healing now as much as ever.

If you have your ear to the ground there are some distant rumblings. Friend of mine shared these “Only in America,” quips recently. Maybe you saw them.  Only in America do we order Double cheese Whoppers, fries and diet cokes. Only in America do we sell cigarettes at the front door of the pharmacy and make people walk to the back for their prescriptions. Only in America do we put handicapped parking signs in front of skating rinks. Part of our problem is that we want to be and have and do it all. You see it in the size of our cars and hamburgers and cups of coffee and khaki pants. Hedonism is alive and well but so are poverty and hate crimes and bigotry. The recent High Court ruling on the Boy Scouts of America, for example, is disturbing since it would also presumably allow a white supremacy group to exclude blacks because their presence would be contrary to the “expressive beliefs” of the organization. But more importantly where will gay twelve year old boys now learn the values and virtues of scouting?

The spirit of my remarks today is in the tradition of the President and Congress in the earliest days of the republic when they called for national observances of prayer and meditation. Those early founders saw clearly the connection between a healthy nation and the spiritual wellness of the people. Indeed, I believe there is a spiritual renewal taking place in many communities and churches across the nation today. A new openness to the role of the Spirit in our personal and corporate living. So, I suggest we reflect today on our need for healing and wholeness.

Eugene O’Neill – a fairly astute fellow – once observed this, he said, “Humans are born broken. We live by mending. The grace of God is glue."ⁱ  That in a nutshell is what today’s Gospel is about. Brokenness and grace. Life does break us, as Ernest Hemingway also observed. But then God’s grace heals us. Presbyterian writer Anne Lamott says this about grace, she says, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”ⁱⁱ Shift with me to the Gospel. One of the treasures at my grandmother’s house was a set of Russian dolls she kept on a table in her living room. The ones that sit inside of each other. Highly polished, beautifully painted wood with bright colors, curved like Coke bottles. You twist the doll gently at its waist, open it like a jar and there inside is another doll just like it only smaller. When you take that doll out and twist it open there is another doll inside of it and so on until you get to the last and littlest doll. Today’s story from Mark is like those Russian dolls. A miracle story inside a miracle story. Both are stories of people being healed by Jesus – that is what makes them the same. But they are different too. The first story of Jesus healing the daughter of the synagogue leader is a bigger story for the fact that it ends with Jesus raising the little girl from the dead.

This story is about healing and hope but it starts in anxiety and fear. A synagogue leader, Jairus, begs Jesus to help his little girl. Privileged, well-to-do, highly respected, tears of anger and fear mingling with beads of anxious sweat on his face. He falls at Jesus’ feet and makes that familiar prayer, “help me, help me, help me.” Parents do anything for sick kids. But just then like a Russian doll the story breaks open. Another story tumbles out. On his way to help the child, an unknown, nameless woman reaches from the crowd, touches Jesus’ cloak, is instantly healed. Jesus stops, surveys the crowd, asks rhetorically who touched him. Each passing moment spells doom for the girl. The disciples are beside themselves. “How can you ask who touched you?”  they snarl. “It could have been anyone in this crowd!”  The disciples are frustrated. Like the recurring dream in which you never get where you want to go. Never get your bag packed or make the right turn on the right street. The dream in which human foibles and interruptions and poor decisions keep you from your destination.

But that’s the difference between Jesus and the disciples. Jesus is interrupted but not frustrated. Jesus, clear of his destination, is on his way to help a sick child but refuses to ignore anyone in need. Not even a marginalized, poor, nameless, ritually unclean woman.  Jesus lives what Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen finally discovered. “My whole life,” Nouwen says, “I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions are my work.”ⁱⁱⁱ  If you’re a parent or manager or salesperson or teacher there’s wisdom for living! Had Jesus only paused, thought better of it and kept walking to the little girl’s bedside we and the New Testament would be immeasurably poorer. But because he allowed himself to be interrupted we have yet another treasured story of God’s grace healing someone in need.

It is important to note that this woman is living on the edge. Her sickness and pain and gender have pushed her to the margins of society. She is desperate. Physically and emotionally life is ebbing away. That is what happens when you are physically sick or emotionally troubled. I’ll never forget having a bad case of the measles during the month of May in second grade. I listened to my friends playing outside my window in Pittsburgh. Sun shining, birds singing, the green leaves on the trees getting larger each day. Life was passing me by. When you are really sick you lose dignity and control. You live in pajamas or hospital gowns. People come and stick things in you, take your temperature, feed you pills, set curfews, restrict visitors. You are a patient not a person. All the more remarkable that this woman, so restricted, living on the periphery of society, manages to push her way back to the center.

Every healing story has a signature moment. In this story it is when that nameless woman reaches out to touch Jesus. Reaching from the margins of the crowd where her poverty and pain and gender placed her – to touch Jesus, the giver of life. It may have taken years screwing up her courage or just the flash of an instant. But she made a decision. We’ve made a decision to reach out like that at Westminster. We’ve started a healing service. I can tell you this is new territory for us. Presbyterians are referred to as God’s frozen chosen because we use our brains so much to worship. Analyzing. Dissecting. But more than our brains it is our pride that gets in the way. Thinking we are in control, equipped with all the answers, able to solve any problem with enough work ethic.
So when our chapel started filling with people for the first healing service coming for prayers of healing saying in effect, “I am not in control, I don’t have all the answers, I need help,” it was like that moment when the woman reached for Jesus. A powerful moment, I might add, in today’s self-sufficient, self-impressed, muscle-bound, S.U.V. culture.

Mark says the hemorrhaging stopped immediately. But there’s a difference between healing and wholeness. She was healed but she was not yet whole. Like the nine lepers Jesus heals but never returned. It is the one leper who comes back to encounter Jesus who becomes whole. The deeper meaning of this story is knowing Jesus as more than a shaman or magician or worker of miracles. It is about beginning a relationship with him.  For the past twelve years this woman had been told by her doctors to sit over there, to wait here, to be patient now. But here she steps forward, claiming the power of life for herself. It was a courageous thing to do – risking the scorn of those frustrated disciples and ridicule of the crowd – taking Jesus’ time. But she’d tasted grace now and wanted more than the scraps of relationships and glimpses of joy tossed to her over the years.

When Jesus sees her I can imagine the surprise of the disciples and the curiosity of the crowd. He smiles tenderly and says to her, “daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, be healed of your disease.”  In that one instant she goes from being isolated, lonely and outcast to being a full-fledged member of Jesus’ family, the family of God. Grace, says Anne Lamott, is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that transports you from isolation and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually as grateful as you are to be there.^iv  The lesson to be learned from this story is not only this woman’s faith in Jesus but her faith in her own capacity to receive the power of life.

What about you? What about your capacity to reach out and receive the power of life?  From what I can tell there is a great deal of bleeding, much hemorrhaging going on. Life is ebbing away from us day by day. I am saying that in part because, as an older and wiser friend of mine likes to remind me, I am looking down the barrel of fifty. But also because I am a pastor and know the pain we suffer. Too often we stand by and watch people get pushed to the margins, relegated to hopeless situations, powerless, weak, in pain. Or maybe we give up on ourselves. What’s the use, we ask. She’ll never understand. He’ll never change. I’ll just have to adapt and accept things as they are. But then comes this story of a pushy woman, interrupting our ordered lives and settled arrangements, reminding us that in Jesus Christ is the power of life – let loose in the world.^v

You see, there is another Russian doll in this story today. Another story of healing inside this one. It is your story. The story of your search for wholeness. Your longing for grace. Your desire to touch the cloak of Jesus and be made well. The fascination of those Russian dolls was precisely the last and littlest of the dolls. The prize at the very end. The one that had been hiding. The one it took all the opening of the others to get to. The one children especially love and adore. That’s how precious you are to God. That’s how much God cares about the hurt child in you, wants you to come out of darkness and be known and loved and made whole in the full light of God’s grace. Amen.
 

  ⁱAnne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 1999) 112.

  ⁱⁱLamott, 143.

  ⁱⁱⁱHenri Nouwen, Reaching Out, p 36.

  ^ivLamott, 139.

 ^v William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Vol. 28, No. 3, Year B, July/August/September 2000.