First United Methodist Church of Reno

⁷If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. ⁸You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. ⁹Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, “The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,” and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing; your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt. ¹⁰Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. ¹¹Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

²⁶Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. ²⁷And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

²⁸We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. ²⁹For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. ³⁰And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

³¹What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

²¹When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. …. ²⁴^bAnd a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. ²⁵Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. ²⁶She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. ²⁷She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, ²⁸for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” ²⁹Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” ³¹And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” ³²He looked all around to see who had done it. ³³But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Should I touch him? The pain of stretching. Pushing my way through. Touching. Touching just his dangling tassel. No one will know. No one needs to know…. No one knows what I've been through. No one knows the shame....^⁴

So begins a poetic reflection on today’s gospel story by the biblical scholar, Bill Loader – a reflection which reveals the true depth of pain which touches a woman’s reality of living with immense losses: the loss of health, the loss of respect, the loss of intimacy, the loss of social standing and even her place in the community.

Here’s a woman with a truly crippling and debilitating illness. In the context of our own day she would be a woman who’s spent every last penny on quack doctors, mail-order remedies, electroshock therapy and herbal diets, and has found no relief. In both desperation and hope she then reached out to one Jesus of Nazareth and literally laid hold of what had eluded her for so long.

If any one of us were pushed to our limit, wouldn’t we do the same? Wouldn’t we do just about anything to find relief or help for ourselves and for those whom we love – even if it means breaking social and religious taboos? We don’t need to look very far to find this nameless woman in our own culture. We have our own codes for defining what makes somebody unclean – unfit even to be touched. It is precisely the people whom we have unfairly judged to be “unclean” who most need the loving outreach of our community: the homeless who come into this space seeking sanctuary on a Sunday morning, women who flee from abuse to the Napa Emergency Women’s Services^⁵, the gay community who simply want their love to be recognized as sacred, the divorced who need to grieve and heal in a Christ-lit context. Will they experience a blessing here among us, or be turned away, as – expressing their longing for a new life – they reach out to touch the clothes of Jesus that we, now, wear? If they are turned away, in whose name does that happen?

At a time like this I’m struck – yet again – by the words of Alice Walker:

love is not concerned
with whom you pray
or where you slept
the night you ran away
from home
love is concerned
that the beating of your heart
should kill no one.^⁶

Our world, sadly, has become largely desensitized to violence. Twenty-four hour cable network news gives us instant access to bloodshed in every corner of the world as well as just around the block. Our children are being raised in an environment that’s saturated with violent video games, “gangsta rap”^⁷ and “slasher” movies. It’s hard for them, and for us, to understand the powerful taboo associated with blood in many ancient cultures, including that of Israel. The chronic illness of this woman in our gospel story would not have evoked any sympathy at all from others in her culture; instead, she would have been reviled. She was effectively cut off from human society, from family life, from communal worship. She must’ve had incredible courage to approach Jesus, then, even as secretly as she did. She must’ve known, herself, that she risked ritually contaminating this holy man.

It’s been said that the physical cure happened instantly, but I think that the real miracle was that Jesus turned to face her. Think of it: he was the first person to engage her in anything like a relationship in twelve years! The furtive touch of his tassel may have led to her physical health, but it was her relationship with Jesus that gave her the way back into beloved community.^⁸ Freed from her status as an object of revulsion, she could now acknowledge herself to be what she’d been all along: a faithful daughter of Israel – as Jesus calls her – a beloved child of God.

There is much, much more involved here in this story than first meets the eye. This isn’t just a “and-she-lived-happily-ever-after” story. A woman who formerly had a chronic hemorrhage will eventually die, as all of the other people Jesus supposedly cures will die – as Jesus himself will die. The enemy that Jesus defeats in these stories is not illness and disease, but things that are far more fatal: collective prejudice, religious bigotry, culturally ingrained cynicism and despair. The focus of stories such as these is not the value of health, but a more radical affirmation of human life in community as God intended it to be. Jesus is the companion to be found in every human experience, the one who always turns to face us, who reaches out to us to say, “Take my hand. Do not be afraid.”

Usually we think of the healer doing the touching – as, more often than not, is true in the stories of Jesus as healer. In this case, though, it’s the woman herself reaching out to the source of divine healing and power. For centuries the church has offered worship services for healing through “laying on of hands” or “anointing with oil” – all bearing witness to the Christ’s healing presence among us. Even though we may not be “cured” of what ails us, we may nonetheless be healed.

That’s exactly what I believe Brad Crane felt as he held my hand that day before he died. As I mentioned during that celebration of his life that we had here in this sanctuary two weeks ago, I’d been telling Brad of all of the love and heartfelt prayers that were, even at that moment, embracing him, when he reached out and took my hand. He told me of something that had happened to him in the middle of the night. He’d felt someone nearby take his hand – just like this – and, holding it firmly, had moved it gently just over his heart. At that moment he’d opened his eyes …and nobody was there.

He was overcome with emotion sharing that experience with his sister and me – as were Nancy and I. He continued to hold my hand. The precious silence that we shared was only broken by Nancy saying gently to him, “It was probably Mom.” Again, nobody could convince me that it wasn’t, because I believe in angels, and Brad had been touched and healed by one – even though, later, sadly, he died.

I think that what we’re being shown in this story is a Jesus for whom healing isn’t so much something that happens as it is a way of being. Jesus doesn’t heal like some kind of circus-tent professional – a heavenly pharmacist shouting down a prescription from God. He wheels around in the crowd to engage this bleeding woman in a relationship of compassion and remarkable intimacy. Again, at that very moment she ceases to be a nameless face and becomes a member of his family. Sister Macrina Wiederkehr caught this relationship very well, I think, in her reflection on the healing of this woman; she writes:

To bless a person…means to leave behind a little bit of yourself with them. To bless is to leave some of your energy, your power, your goodness and mercy behind you, or to send it on ahead…. I love the memory of the woman with the flow of blood creeping up behind Jesus and touching the hem of his garment. The story goes that Jesus knew that she had touched him because power went out of him. He had blessed her, and he felt his blessing go forth. I would like to take that story a bit further and suggest that when the woman touched him he also felt energy coming in. He felt her blessing. Can you imagine what it felt like after a hard week of ministry to find at least one person of faith, to find someone so believing that she was willing to touch just the hem of his garment? …. The woman left a part of herself with Jesus, and Jesus left a part of himself with her. I want to learn to bless like that.^⁹

As you and I may struggle to live more out of such a sense of blessedness and less out of fear, we might be surprised to discover just these kinds of new resources within ourselves, a hidden richness, blessed to be a blessing. At the same time we might be able to admit our own poverty, to risk expressing our deep need – as this woman did – and to allow others in the beloved community to reach out and help us.

There will be times in our lives when we feel secure and confident, and yet there will also be those times when the news of a sudden death or illness or tragedy reaches out and grips us by the throat, reminding us again of our own mortality. Ever since human beings could conceive of a deity they’ve asked why. Why would a loving God allow such deep human suffering? I can’t answer that question for you, and yet I can tell you the stories of Jesus, and offer them as the sign of God’s healing presence come among the most vulnerable and deeply wounded of his day. To every such situation of despair Jesus brings the realm of new possibility, new life, and hope for a better tomorrow. This must be the same gift that you and I bring to each other in the midst of suffering, pain and loss. The real miracle, finally, is that there are still people who refuse to descend into lives of cynicism and self-centeredness, and insist on trying to live into a new kind of loving covenant with God and with their neighbor.

Being “a child of water” that I am, I was drawn back this week, yet again, to a poem that the American poet, Philip Booth wrote about the intimate moment of a father teaching his little daughter how to swim. I was deeply touched by remembering it, because I can still feel the hand of my own father cradling me as I learned how to swim. In the poem the father says this:

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.^¹⁰

None of us is a stranger to moments when fear has cramped our hearts and either we’ve thrashed around in panic or been frozen into moments of seemingly helpless immobility. At times such as those we need to hear the voice of Jesus ourselves saying to us: “Take my hand. Do not be afraid.” We need to feel his touch as truly as the woman with the hemorrhage did, and then turn around and touch another in the same way that he has touched us.

1 This first reading is part of Deuteronomy’s explication of the Sabbath commandment. It’s supposed to bring the Kingdom of God closer to the human experience. In Jewish tradition God has created the Sabbath (the seventh day, the seventh year and the jubilee year) as a means of release and restitution, recalling the redemptive acts of God throughout history. The Sabbath was meant to be a proclamation of the end to “business as usual,” to be a time to free people burdened by social conventions and economic systems that have kept them marginalized, a means for such people to be restored into full life in the community.

3 In the ancient Greco-Roman world, women received their very identity and status from kinship with men. But the woman who reaches out to Jesus on her own in this story had no standing in that society. She had once been a woman with some wealth, but her illness not only had depleted that resource, it had taken away her identity and status because the purity laws of her culture marked her as someone who was no longer fit for human relationship – she was ritually unclean.

Just what was the “flow of blood” that this woman was afflicted with? In ancient Jewish culture this would be immediately recognizable as a continuous menstrual condition, which not only caused her to be ritually unclean, but unable to have sexual intercourse – even if she were married. What’s more, anything she touched would become ritually unclean. From Leviticus 15: 19-28:

¹⁹When a woman has a discharge of blood that is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. ²⁰Everything upon which she lies during her impurity shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean. ²¹Whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening. ²²Whoever touches anything upon which she sits shall wash his clothes, and bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening; ²³whether it is the bed or anything upon which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening. ²⁴If any man lies with her, and her impurity falls on him, he shall be unclean seven days; and every bed on which he lies shall be unclean. ²⁵If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time of her impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her impurity, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness; as in the days of her impurity, she shall be unclean. ²⁶Every bed on which she lies during all the days of her discharge shall be treated as the bed of her impurity; and everything on which she sits shall be unclean, as in the uncleanness of her impurity. ²⁷Whoever touches these things shall be unclean, and shall wash his clothes, and bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening. ²⁸If she is cleansed of her discharge, she shall count seven days, and after that she shall be clean.

Even in today’s society some women have trouble during the time of menstruation; but just imagine dealing with this for twelve years! To make matters worse she experienced this condition in a society where ritual impurity was incredibly important, as the doctrines of the Temple stood in the foreground of daily life. She was probably avoided on all sides – from all people. If she had been married, it would have caused unbelievable stress upon that marriage, as physical intimacy would be absolutely forbidden. In essence, this flow of blood had probably destroyed her life. Given the significance of ritual purity in those days, we can see why this woman approaches Jesus from behind.

7 “Gangsta rap” is a genre of hip hop that reflects the violent lifestyles of some inner-city youths. “Gangsta,” of course, is just slang for the word “gangster.” Some say that the genre was pioneered around 1983 by Ice-T with songs of his like Cold Wind Madness and Body Rock/Killers and was popularized by groups like N.W.A. late 80s. Ironically enough, after the national attention that Ice-T & N.W.A created in the late 80's, “gangsta rap” became the most commercially lucrative subgenre of hip hop.

The subject matter inherent in “gangsta rap” has caused a great deal of controversy. Criticism has come from both left wing and right wing commentators, and religious leaders, who have accused the genre of promoting prejudice and evil as disparate as homophobia, violence, racism, profanity, promiscuity, misogyny, rape, street gangs, drive-by shootings, vandalism, thievery, drug dealing, alcohol abuse, substance abuse and materialism. Some commentators (for example, Spike Lee in his satirical film Bamboozled) have criticized it as analogous to black minstrel shows and blackface performance, in which performers – both black and white – were made up to look African American, and acted in a stereotypically uncultured and ignorant manner for the entertainment of audiences. Sadly, “gangsta” rappers often defend themselves by claiming that they are describing the reality of inner-city life, and that they’re only adopting a character, like an actor playing a role, which behaves in ways that they may not necessarily endorse.

8 In an article entitled “Martin Luther King’s Vision of the Beloved Community,” Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Jr. noted that central to the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his concept of the “Beloved Community.” Liberalism and personalism provided its theological and philosophical foundations, and nonviolence the means to attain it. King’s initial optimism about the possibility of actualizing that community in history may have been qualified by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, but the concept as such can be traced through all his speeches and writings, from the earliest to the last. In one of his first published articles he stated that the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott “is reconciliation, . . . redemption, the creation of the beloved community.” In 1957, writing in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he described the purpose and goal of that organization as follows: “The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living – integration.” And in his last book he declared: “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation . . .” So King’s was a vision of a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice in which a shared sense of family would be an actuality in all of social life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith. [See more of this article online at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1603].

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
June 28, 2009
The 4^th Sunday after Pentecost

Scripture Readings:

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CAJune 28, 2009The 4th Sunday after Pentecost

Scripture Readings:

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
June 28, 2009
The 4^th Sunday after Pentecost