Talitha Cum

Sermon preached June 28, 2015. Texts: Lamentations 3:22-26 and Mark 5:21-43. 

I’ve been thinking a lot, the last couple of days, about beloved friends and former parishioners who are horrified by the news of the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to legalize marriage for all. For me and many, many of my friends and family, this has been unutterably good news. But for others, it’s awful. Unbearable.

I’ve especially remembered a Bible study discussion of one of the Old Testament’s passages about exile, when several of the people there agreed that that’s what they felt like: that they were in exile. In exile from the country of their childhood and youth, their young adulthood and their middle age. In exile from a country in which blue laws ensured that Sundays would be kept as Sabbaths; a country in which being an American and being a Christian were almost synonymous; a country in which a girl who got pregnant in high school went away to live with an “aunt,” and even if people knew where she’d really gone, they didn’t speak of it so as not to embarrass her family; a country in which being heterosexual was so much the norm (and so entirely normative) that homosexuality was spoken of only in whispers.

There was right, and there was wrong, and that’s what the church was all about.

Now here they are, living in a country that looks very different, and even churches seem to have given up teaching right and wrong, instead going on and on about loving everyone and even having the gall to suggest that not accepting sinful people might be sinful itself.

The grief is real. The holding on to what was taught and lived feels desperate. The fear of what will come in a country that has turned from those traditional understandings of right and wrong—whether those teachings be about what a family looks like, or the appropriate relationships between races, or the role of Christians in elected positions, or even the ‘meaning’ of the Confederate flag—that fear is real. What kind of country are we leaving for our grandchildren?

My heart goes out to them. I hear their pain. I wish I knew what to say to relieve their fears, their grief, their anger. I imagine how hurt they must feel when around them people are rejoicing at the very things that make them most afraid and most angry.

These are the times, of course, when pastors turn to scripture. And so I want to talk about the Mark text we just heard, about Jesus’ two very different healings, interwoven in this scripture.

First comes the call from Jairus, one of the leaders of the synagogue, to heal his young daughter. He was a leader in the synagogue—the group of people who had been expending a lot of effort to prove that Jesus was up to no good. Jairus had a vested interest in adhering to the party line of the Jewish authorities. But when his daughter was desperately ill, he came to Jesus for help.

And then there was the woman with the hemorrhage—a condition that she’d had for 12 years. Mark doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but his first readers would have known that a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years had been “unclean” for 12 years. Anyone who so much as touched her or touched her clothing or her belongings would need to go through several days’ worth of ritual cleansing before they could be part of the world again. Talk about being in exile! She didn’t dare speak to Jesus; she just touched the hem of his robe.

Imagine yourself as this woman for a moment. Imagine how lonely her life was, how desperate for healing she was. And then imagine that here is a prophet, a healer, and there’s a chance, a small possibility, that he might be able to help her. Imagine crawling on the road, weak because of the loss of blood, and reaching out—reaching out to touch just the tip of your finger to the hem of his robe.

Imagine what it must have felt like when her finger—your finger—came into contact with Jesus’ robe and the power came surging into you. Like electricity, maybe. Like wind, like the breath of life. Like joy. Your life is changed, utterly. You are healed. You are whole. You have been transformed. Hallelujah!

And then we’re back, in Mark, to Jairus and his daughter. (It’s interesting how Mark interweaves the two stories—kind of underscores that we should read them together, doesn’t it?) This is a 12-year-old girl. She’s on the cusp of becoming a woman, very likely soon to be betrothed and even married. She’s at the opposite end of the spectrum from the woman who had been hemorrhaging for as many years as this child has been alive. At this point in her life she should be looking forward to all that is coming.

But she’s ill. Dying. And her father has reached out to someone his colleagues would say he shouldn’t even be talking with—reached out to this itinerant teacher, this roving healer, to come and heal her. “Come and lay your hands on her,” he says to Jesus, “so that she may be made well, and live.”

Imagine that you are this father. Feel his desperation—he is so distraught by his daughter’s illness that he’s willing to reach out to someone not approved of by his traditional religious community. The man agrees to come, but it takes so long that the news comes of his daughter’s death. Ohh! My little girl! Ohh! Oh, God!

But Jesus is calm. “Do not fear,” he says to you, “only believe.”

And sure enough, when you arrive at the house, Jesus tells everyone not to worry, that the child is just sleeping. And he goes to her and says, “Talitha cum,” which means ‘Little girl, get up.’ Life is not over. Give her something to eat!

These two healings are very different. Among the things that these two stories have in common, though, are two of the few Greek words I remember from my studies in seminary. The first is pistis (noun), pisteue (verb). We generally translate the word as faith when it’s a noun and believe when it’s a verb, but another translation for both forms is trust. Jesus says to the hemorrhaging woman, “Daughter, your pistis—your trust—has made you well.” And he says to Jairus, “Don’t fear, just pisteue—trust.”

I like to use the word trust when it comes to pistis or pisteue in the scriptures because I think sometimes we’ve got the wrong emphasis on “faith” and “believing.” It’s like we think of faith as an intellectual agreement to certain tenets. When we hear, “You must have faith,” or “You must believe,” we think there are certain things that we must agree are true. But when Jesus turns to Jairus and says, “Don’t be afraid, just pisteue,” he’s asking Jairus to trust him. Just trust him. And when he says to the woman who touched his garment, “Your pistis has made you well,” he’s not saying that she has believed certain things about him but simply that she has trusted him.

The second word that the two stories have in common is the concept of sozo, which means both healing and saving. “My little daughter is at the point of death,” Jairus said. “Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well”—that she may be sozo’d—saved, healed, made whole.

“Daughter,” Jesus said to the hemorrhaging woman, “your trust has sozo’d you—saved you, healed you well, made you whole.” It’s not just physical healing, and it’s not just spiritual “saving.” It’s making whole what was broken, giving life to what was unresponsive, bringing hope where there has been despair. It’s not just a return to health but a move forward into wholeness, for when Jesus sozo’s us, we are always transformed.

And that is the gospel this morning for the people who feel that they are in exile … and for the people who feel that their exile is over. Trust, and being made whole.

Your trust in God has made you whole. Don’t be afraid, only trust.

Whether you feel that you have been in exile for years—not really part of the community, looked on as “less than,” and avoided as unclean—and now Christ’s power has come into you and you are rejoicing … or whether you feel that life as you’ve known it and looked forward to it has come to an end … the key is trust.

Trust. Not worrying about what exactly is right and what is wrong. Only trust.

Talitha cum. It’s going to be okay. It may not look like what you expected, because you have been sozo’d and your life has been transformed, but it’s going to be okay. More than okay.

Talitha cum.

For the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in the LORD.”

I will trust in the Lord.

Talitha cum. You are made whole.

Amen.

Five Smooth Stones

Sermon preached June 21, 2015 at Havenwood Presbyterian Church, Lutherville-Timonium, MD
1 Samuel 17:1-23, 32-49               Mark 4:35-41

We begin with lamentation. Is there one among us whose heart didn’t break this week when we learned of the young shooter who killed nine people gathered for Bible study? Bible Study! Shouldn’t we be safe when we gather to study God’s word?

Lamentation. The words of the prophet Jeremiah ring true for us.

O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people! (Jer 9:1)

But there’s more going on for us than lamentation. This was not a tsunami or a hurricane—a natural event, an “act of God.” No, this time it was a young man choosing to go into a church with a long history of seeking justice for black people in this country. A church where he chose to sit with the people in prayer and in the study God’s Word—the parable of the sower, I understand—and then he chose to shoot and kill nine of them.

• Cynthia Hurd
• Susie Jackson
• Ethel Lance
• DePayn Middleton-Doctor
• The Honorable Rev. Clementa Pinckney
• Tywanza Sanders
• Daniel Simmons, Sr.
• Sharonda Singleton
• Myra Thompson

We’re angry! How can we help but be angry? This is horrible! Another mass shooting in the United States. Another act of terrorism by a white supremacist against black people. We’re horrified.

The thing is, though, that we can turn away. A week from now this will be old news, and while we won’t forget it, we’ll be able to turn away from it because, really, it’s so unpleasant, and really, it’s not our problem.

But as much as, really, I’d like to do that, I have to recognize that turning away from this act of terror in Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church is sin.

I’m not talking about “personal” sin here. My personal sinfulness—greed, avarice, wrath, pride—any of the seven deadlies or others. This is not about my personal sinfulness; it’s about my participation in corporate sin.

Corporate sin is a concept I’d never heard of until I went to seminary. It may be the most important concept I learned there. Corporate sin—sin of the corpus, the body, the community—is sinfulness that I participate in because I am part of the corpus. Whether I’m aware of it or not, whether I recognize it or not, I participate in this sinfulness because I participate in a society that is tainted by it.

Example: When I decide what to buy based mostly on its cost, it’s very likely that I am inadvertently supporting sweatshops around the world. How is it that a pair of jeans or a sweater is so inexpensive? Probably because it was made by people working 16 hours a day for almost nothing. And some of those people were indentured to those jobs at the age of 10—for 20 or 30 years.

There’s a fascinating website I’ve seen called slaveryfootprint.org. You can take a survey on that site to figure out how many slaves “work for you.” I took the survey again yesterday and was told that 40 slaves work for me. How is that? Well, I own a cell phone. I wear cotton clothing. I eat fish. I own jewelry. … And slaves are involved in the production of all of these and many more.

These aren’t bad things in and of themselves. I’m not sinning every time I eat fish. But some of that fish was pulled from the ocean by men who are imprisoned on boats and forced to work at the point of a gun. That’s slavery. That’s corporate sin. And because I benefit—even unknowingly—from the slavery of those fishermen, I am complicit in it.

Racism in this country is also corporate sin.

We ourselves may not be prejudiced, personally. I have good friends who are Black and family members who are persons of color. I imagine you do too. I hope and trust that you are not people who tell derogatory jokes or use offensive language about people of other races.

We speak and sing week after week in this church about everyone being a child of God, about seeing the face of Jesus in everyone we meet, about loving our neighbors—all of our neighbors. I’m hoping and trusting that you take all that “Jesus stuff” seriously.

But whether we individually are racists or not, we are part of a culture that is racist. Some people call it “America’s original sin.” It’s so pervasive that most of the time we don’t even notice it.

Being white in this country means we benefit. We’re far less likely to be stopped or ticketed when driving. We’re far more likely to have had parents and grandparents who weren’t “red-lined” and thus able to own homes in areas where the schools were good and the crime rate low—and because they earned equity on those homes, they were in many cases able to help us do the same. We’re far more likely to have had family or school connections with people who helped us find jobs.

Most of the time we don’t notice these things. Almost everyone we know is in the same situation, after all. It’s “the norm.”

But it’s not the norm for Black people in this country.

There are other examples.

When a young Black man kills or rampages, our media calls him a thug. When a Muslim man kills or rampages, he is labeled a terrorist. When a white man kills or rampages, we assume he must be mentally ill.

Do you see what that difference in labeling does? A thug or a terrorist is an “other.” He is dangerous—to be feared and punished. Someone who is mentally ill is to be pitied, to be cared for.

And that is sin. Different norms for different groups of people is not what Jesus came to teach. What was Paul’s theme? “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no male and female.” We are all one in Christ Jesus.

I’m hearing from Black friends around the country, many of them saying that they’re feeling numb. And terrified. Like the disciples in the ship when the storm ranged around them, what my Black friends and colleagues are experiencing is a very real danger. Will they be shot in their church this morning? Will their teenaged son be the next to be killed for the crime of “walking while black”? Will their bikini-clad granddaughter be thrown to the ground and restrained there by a police officer who assumes she doesn’t belong at the swimming pool?

When the disciples were terrified in their boat, as the waves swamped over the sides and the wind battered, they cried out to Jesus, who was sleeping in the stern. “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And Jesus woke up. He rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was calm.

The disciples thought they were perishing. But then Jesus made everything all right.

When we think we are perishing—when we’re up against powers that are greater than we are—our faith reminds us that Jesus is in the boat with us. And Jesus cares. Jesus loves.

Sometimes Jesus cares and loves through us. We are Christians—Christ followers—the Body of Christ—the hands and feet of Jesus. We are called repent of our sin and turn a different way.

Jesus calls us to repent of our complicity in corporate sin, whether it’s the sin of forced labor/slavery, the sin of racism, the sin of dishonoring the earth, or the sin of turning away from these things because they’re just too hard, too unpleasant. We might start, every Sunday when we pray the prayer of corporate confession during worship, by remembering and asking God’s forgiveness for our participation in these sins.

Jesus calls us to repent, to go in a different direction, when it comes to the corporate sin of racism. Perhaps simply to speak up when those around us are explicitly racist. Not to sit quietly when Uncle Harry tells another racist joke or when Aunt Matilda Sue talks about the “glory days” of the Confederacy when her ancestors held human beings as property. Or when the guy we work with complains about how “those people” are taking away our “rights” to hold all the power in this country. Or the woman down the street worries that the “thugs” in Baltimore will contaminate her neighborhood.

This young man who thought it was his duty to kill black people and wanted to start a race war—he did not arrive at his racism in a vacuum. We speak of American Muslims being “radicalized” by Islamic extremists. Who radicalized this young white supremacist? How did this kind of belief become “right” for him?

He was a member of a Lutheran church. Why weren’t there enough Christian people there speaking up enough to counteract the racist attitudes he was learning?

There are many things we can do to stand up against the corporate sin of racism. To begin with, though, we will need five smooth stones. That’s what Presbyterian pastor Thom Shuman wrote this week, saying that what we are not called to is hate.

It would be easy to put on that heavy armor of anger,
to slip our feet into the shoes of vengeance,
to pick up our own weapons, and rush into battle.

Instead, he says, “we are called to a more difficult task.”

To set aside the armor,
to lay down the weapons,
to reach deep down inside our hearts and our souls
[to] where they have been placed so long ago
and pull out those five smooth stones—
compassion, inclusion, love, goodness, and forgiveness. [Thom M. Shuman, June 18, 2015]

Compassion, inclusion, love, goodness, and forgiveness.

You may have a slightly different list. In a little while two newly elected elders in this church will promise to serve this congregation “with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.” That’s a good list. Maybe your smooth stones include peacefulness and justice, respect and welcome. Surely they all include love. And prayer.

And so let us pray.

Lord, we know that you care. We trust that your love for all of your children is more powerful than our hatred. Help us to recognize our participation in corporate sin, and forgive us, we pray. And guide us to dig into our hearts and souls to pull out those five smooth stones, the stones washed smooth by your love, so that we can stand up for your righteousness and justice.

And when we are afraid for ourselves, when racial tensions and religious tensions and political tensions threaten to overwhelm our boats, give us your smooth stones of peace and of trust.

Amen.

Following the sermon we sang this hymn. 

They Met to Read the Bible

1. They met to read the Bible,
   they gathered for a prayer,
   they worshiped God and shared with friends
   and welcomed strangers there.
   They went to church to speak of love,
   to celebrate God’s grace.
   O Lord, we tremble when we hear
   what happened in that place.
2. O God of love and justice,
   we thank you for the nine.
   They served in their communities
   and made the world more kind.
   They preached and sang and coached and taught,
   and cared for children, too.
   They blessed your church and blessed your world
   with gifts they used for you.
3. We grieve a wounded culture
   where fear and terror thrive,
   where some hate others for their race,
   and guns are glorified.
   We grieve for sons and daughters lost,
   for grandmas who are gone.
   O God, we cry with broken hearts:
   This can’t continue on!
4. God, may we keep on sowing
   the seeds of justice here,
   till guns are silent, people sing,
   and hope replaces fear.
   May seeds of understanding grow
   and flourish all our days.
   May justice, love and mercy be
   the banner that we raise.

Tune: Frederick Charles Maker, 1881 (“Beneath the Cross of Jesus”)
Text: Copyright © 2015 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved.

Permission is given for free use by local churches and in ecumenical services.