“Do not fear, only believe”

There is a lot going on here.

Well, I don’t mean here, I mean in the morning lesson from Mark’s gospel.

The pace of Mark’s accounting of the life of Jesus is always running faster than any of the other gospels, but here we have wheels inside of wheels, turning and churning. We have people with questions and doubts and great needs and so they are pushing and calling out to Jesus, trying to get the disciples aside to have them put in a good word, trying to find some resolution for their problems.

We have a man, a good man, Jairus. He is one of the leaders of the faith community, one of the people who see Jesus as a threat to their stability and tranquility, but he is also a father whose 12 year old daughter lies dying and so he breaks with his tradition and he begs Jesus, repeatedly, to come to his daughters aid.

The needs of a child will do that to you, won’t they?

How many parents of 40 years ago, good people, broke with what they believed in, with their tradition, when their children refused to fight in a meaningless war or when their children fell in love with someone of another faith tradition or a different race? And I know a number of parents today whose views of gay marriage have been dramatically altered by a child who is gay. The needs of a child, the love for a child, can change the way we see the world and the places we turn for help.

And in the middle of that whole scene, as they push through the crowds and the word spreads that Jesus is on his way to perform a healing miracle, there is one desperate woman, who has suffered for 12 years and spent all of her resources on doctors who can’t help her. She violates the social standards of the day by reaching out to touch a man, in public, who is not a part of her family.

And suddenly Jesus puts a screeching halt to the chaos and bedlam around him: “Who touched me?”

There is a lot going on here.

Jairus and the woman were not very different.

Their needs were, but they weren’t.

They were both down to their last-ditch attempt.

He wanted to save his daughter’s life.

She wanted to bring relief and end the misery that had been her life for a dozen years.

He fell at the feet of Jesus and begged and begged and begged.

She snuck around behind him and reached out and touched him, and when he stopped to find out who had touched him, she fell at his feet in fear and trembling.

They were desperate.

And so they reached out to Christ.

Somehow they knew that he was something special and that he had the power that could aid them and that he would, despite the fact that they waited so long.

You see, and this is so important for us to remember when people turn to us for help, it didn’t matter that Jairus was part of a group that opposes Jesus, he isn’t told to go find his daughter’s healing among the leaders of Israel, he comes to Christ and Christ heals. And the same is true with the woman. She isn’t told that she should wait for Jesus’ touch, or that she should have turned to God sooner, or that she shouldn’t sneak up on people and touch them uninvited, she comes to Christ and Christ heals.

And it doesn’t matter that Jesus interrupts his journey to the first healing miracle in order to attend to the second, both are healed. It doesn’t even matter that the report comes that the young girl has died or that the woman had been seeking healing, without success, for 12 years, healing comes.

Oh there is a lot going on here.

And perhaps I was wrong.

Perhaps it is here, not only in Mark’s gospel, but in this room and in this community, perhaps it is here that there is a lot going on. Are there not people here, and people we know of, who are worried and fearful for their children or their parents or their spouses or their friends? And yet are they, or we, willing to be vulnerable? Do we realize, even now, that not only do we have no place else to turn but to God, but that we never really have had anyplace else to turn? Do we believe that when we finally do turn to God, there is no reproach, only healing; there is no “it’s about time, where have you been”, only “get up” and get her something to eat; there is no time for hashing and rehashing yesterday’s dead horse meat that we seem to thrive on, there is only life and forgiveness and today and tomorrow.

If Jairus had been like too many of us, he would have been unable to go to this strange young teacher, he would have limited his efforts to the traditional truths, unwilling to learn that God continually comes to us in unexpected ways and words. And his daughter would have been dead.

How many relationships have we let die because of our pride, our pain, our intellect, our stubbornness?

How many more is it going to take before we learn that our relationships – not our jobs, not our homes, not our possessions – but our sacred relationships that are the only things of value in our lives.

Take them to Jesus, where else is there to go?

Fall to your knees and beg him for healing.

Don’t worry about who’s right and who’s wrong, you be faithful and the rest will take care of itself.

“Do not fear, only believe”

And are there not people here, and people we know of, who have suffered with something for years and years and they have sought help with it and spent money on it and yet they have kept it away from God?

And so we suffer and continue to suffer and yet we learn to live with it, never realizing that relief, healing, forgiveness, meaning, peace and joy are all just a touch away.

The power of God is freely available, not only when we are at the end of our rope, but every day.

Do the miracles get interrupted? Sure they do, but they get completed.

Do the healings come when we demand them? Of course they don’t, they come on God’s schedule, not ours. But to those who will be vulnerable, those who will find a way to seek and touch, the healings are inevitable.

So we wait, as the Psalmist urged the people of Israel to wait, in God’s word.

And as we wait we are to anticipate not the worst that can happen, but the best, the very best, God’s best.

We anticipate the ways in which the broken hearts will be comforted.

We anticipate the ways in which the fractured relationships will be healed.

We anticipate the ways in which the angry words and hurt feelings will be swallowed up in a forgiveness and reconciliation.

There is a lot going on here, in Mark’s gospel and in our lives.

Too much, at times, for us to keep up with.

Too many balls in the air all at once.

This is why God invented summer.

Find ways to slow it all down, to go off-line more often, for these next couple of months. Check the lightening bugs instead of your email, be vulnerable and open to God by being vulnerable and open to the people in your life and let God heal you through them.

Oh what peace we often forfeit. Oh, what needless pain we bear.

All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Discover, in the spinning, whirling, frustrating, confusion of our chaos, the intimacy that we can trust, the God who takes the time for each one of us and who tells us, time and time and time again:

“Do not fear, only believe”

Clover Hill Reformed Church 1834-2009 A 175 Day Scriptural Companion Dear Friends, As we progress through our Anniversary Year, I invite you to join together in a shared reading of scripture. I have selected 175 passages, from Genesis through Revelation, that have had special meaning in our Congregational life. Go Here