The Reverend Mark G. Dickson-Patrick, MA
Sunday, June 30, 2024
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When I was in seminary, in 2011, I got a phone call that I knew was coming, but one that I most dreaded: my beloved great-grandfather, the one who raised me in the Christian faith, who taught me everything I knew about the Lord, about prayer, and about how to be a loving and gentle person, had sadly gone to his reward to be with God. Upon hearing this news, I got the feelings and reactions that we all have in these types of situations: the sadness, the grief, but then came the anger. I was angry with God that my grandfather had died all alone. I was angry with God that I had not been there to be with him in his last moments. I was angry with God that one of the most beloved ones in my life was taken from me, and that I could not have just one more moment, one more prayer together, one more “I love you,” or one last morning of him waking me up because it was time for his breakfast, and when I was home from school, that was my responsibility. I was angry with God and didn’t know what to do about it.
At this developmental time in my faith journey, anger with God was not something that was acceptable in my mind. For me, at this time, anger with God was not something that was conducive to a good prayer life, to a good and healthy spirituality, to a good relationship with God and with others. Father Joe Chapel, a Catholic priest, was my spiritual director at this time, and I brought my conflict of spirit to him in one of our sessions. I said “Father, I’m so angry with God and I feel guilty about that. I’m not allowed to be angry with God.” Father Joe then looked me right in the face and he said something that I have never forgotten, nor will I ever forget. “Mark,” he said, “God is a big God. God can handle your anger.” This phrase alone helped to change my limited perception of God and helped to grow my spiritual life dramatically.
You see, my siblings in Christ, I had taken my perceptions of God and limited what I was thinking God was able to do, based on my own thoughts, my own biases and said to myself, “God can’t handle that, so I’m going to keep that to myself.” I limited God in my own mind, and thus limited my relationship with the One who is limitless. Have you ever done that? Have you looked at God through the lenses of your own perception and biases, in such a limited way, with boundaries being placed on God?
“Surely God can’t love me through this struggle.”
“Surely God can’t love that person because they support the other political candidate or they support this effort or that situation.”
“Surely God can’t heal my illness.”
“Surely God doesn’t have the best in mind for me, so I’m going to keep this from God and work on it myself.”
“Surely God doesn’t understand my circumstance. God doesn’t know where I’m coming from.”
Does that sound familiar, dear siblings in Christ? It sure sounds familiar to me.
Today in our gospel reading, we have Jesus encountering people who put these limitations on God and how God acts in their lives every single day. We see Jesus walking through the crowd, we see Jairus come to Jesus and ask him to heal his daughter.
And in true Marcan style, Mark starts a story, cuts away from that story for another story, and then continues the story. So in the middle of this story of Jairus’ daughter, as the large crowd is pressing upon Jesus, we hear about the unnamed woman bleeding with a hemorrhage for 12 years.
12 years.
12 years of suffering.
Mark tells us she suffered and endured much under many physicians and spent all the money she had to try to heal her illness, but none of it worked. She was at the end of her hope, but then she sees Jesus. In her faith, she knew that if she just touched Jesus, she would be healed of her illness.
She knows that there are limits to the potentiality of this, societal and religious limits. Her bleeding is considered by Jewish law to cause her to be unclean, and anyone that she touches anything that she touches becomes ritually defiled, cast out from society, until they are ritually cleansed again. She probably had not felt the touch of another human being for 12 years, for fear that they would be defiled by her mere touch. Surely she knew that by going to Jesus and touching him, she risks tainting him, tainting all those around her and causing societal chaos. That’s the limit that was placed on the healing power of Jesus in today’s Gospel by the religious leaders of their age. But this woman and her faith decides to test the boundary. This woman and her faith said “I have nothing left to lose. I won’t shame this man, so I’ll do it quietly. If I just touch the hem of his garment, the tiniest fringe as he walks along, surely God will work, and I will be healed and no one will be any wiser.” She thought she had to touch the Lord and her healing and go about her day quietly, because of the limits that society and their leaders had placed upon her and on God. “Surely,” she says, “this man won’t care enough about me to make a difference, to see me. Besides, the barriers are too thick, are too rough to cross.”
But then what happens? Mark tells us that immediately, the power left out of Jesus, and immediately the woman is healed. Jesus could’ve gone on his way. Jesus could’ve said, “Ok, healed that one, no effort. Mark that one off. Easy day for Jesus.” But no. He takes a step further, and He moves ahead to challenge the boundaries of society, to challenge the acceptable limits of the time.
He stops and says, “Who touched me?”
Now we see another instance where limits and boundaries placed upon God. The people putting limits on God are the disciples. “Lord,” they say, “you see the crowd pressing in on you. How could we possibly know who touched you?” But the woman who had faith comes to Jesus, and she confesses all that had happened. Jesus was a good Jew of his time, and by the rules, by the standards of his time, he should have chastised the woman for tainting him with her touch. He should have, according to society, kept her at the fringes, kept her in a place where she was unseen, unheard, unloved, untouched.
Instead, Jesus breaks the boundary.
Jesus breaks the limits that society has placed on him and on this woman who so desperately desired healing. Not only does he say to her that she is healed, but just by acknowledging her presence, he restored her to her place in society. The woman is healed, her place restored, the boundaries of society broken by the one who makes all things new.
And then at the end of the passage here we see Jesus continue to go in to Jairus’ house. He goes into house and the servants say to Jarius, “Your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the Master further.”
Has anyone ever told you that before?
This mission is over.
This ministry effort is done.
It’s time to close the doors, lock them up, and turn in the keys.
It’s time to go.
It’s dead.
Don’t bother God any further.
When Jesus hears this, though, he doesn’t pack it in and go home. Instead, Jesus rolls up his sleeves and says “Watch this.”
And here we encounter another boundary. Just to touch someone who has died in the Jewish culture of the time makes one ritually unclean and unable to participate fully in society. This is two times in the span of one chapter that Jesus risks being cast off by society by doing something that was considered to be socially unacceptable. He touches the dead girl, looks at the people, and says “She is asleep.” And instead of believing, they make fun of him. Their limits on God and God‘s love and God‘s power were far too insurmountable for their mind to overcome.
In times past, we may have had the habit to think that God surely can’t resurrect the dead parts of our lives, the dead parts of our community, the dead parts of our society, the dead parts of our ministry, the dead parts of our faith. And Jesus rolls up his leaves and says “Watch this.”
He comes in whenever we try to build barriers, when we build walls around God and around one another. Jesus comes through those walls, and through those barriers, and through the hate and the boundaries, and he shows us that it is boundless love, boundless life, healing boundless love that will overcome anything we’ve ever done and anything we will ever do. It is boundless love that can overcome any doubt that we have or any fear of change that we might encounter. (I said the word “change” in church and about five you sat up really quickly).
Fear of change, any fear of disruption, any fear of rocking the boat that we experienced last week in our gospel, Jesus comes through and says it’s the boundless love, not the limits that you place on me. It is the boundless love, not the limits, that will triumph in our lives, in our community, in the world. We have blocked out others because we have limited God’s love for them. There are ministries that we have allowed to fall by the wayside because perhaps they were not being received in the way that we thought they should or there are efforts that we have stopped because we thought maybe, just maybe I have it right and everyone else has it wrong and I don’t want to hear anything different or work with people who have different opinions than I do. I don’t want to be challenged. I don’t want peer over the wall and climb over it to live in a space of boundless love.
There was a story in the 80s of a high-ranking Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of New York in New York City. This was an honored man, given honors by the Pope, and named the right hand man to the Cardinal Archbishop. Whenever you saw this man, he was put together: not a hair out of place, not a thing askew, perfect clothes that were always professionally made, and hand tailored the most beautiful vestments, the most beautiful of things. This was the kind of person that you would say has boundaries around him. And something horrible happened in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic hit the world. People were dying from an unknown disease, not knowing how it was spread, but knowing that the people who were getting it didn’t look like them, or love like them, or act like them, or exist in society like them.
To avoid contracting this unknown disease, anyone who wanted to visit these patients had to go into the hospital room wearing hazmat suits and were not allowed to touch the patient with their bare hands. The story is told that the aforementioned high-ranking Church official was visiting the hospital at the time and he said to one of the patients, “What is it that you need the most?” And the patient said “Father, I haven’t felt human touch for so many months.” I heard this story from a man who was with this priest visiting patients at the time, and he said he watched in disbelief as this high-ranking priest, second in command to the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, slowly removed the gear given to protect him. And my friend watched as this priest bent down and held this man in his arms, and gave him the first human touch that he had felt in way too long. This priest broke the boundaries to show that God’s boundless love calls for way more.
What boundaries are we putting around God, siblings in Christ?
What boundaries are we putting around one another?
What walls are we building that have no business being built?
Whatever they are, I hope that we hear Jesus as he comes to us today and teaches us that we serve a God of boundless, limitless love.
Amen.
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