13th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle B 20-21

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24 | 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15 | Mark 5:21-43

Oh God, who the grace of the adoption chose us to be children of the light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.  We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

As many of you know, I record my programs at the studios of WRR at Fair Park, and I’ve been doing that for 33 years.  The interesting thing today is that I’m not recording there, but I’m recording in a beautiful place in Tuscany, a farm house.  It’s on a working vineyard, olive trees everywhere.  And somehow through the magic of technology, I’m able to record my voice here, and then it’s sent to the radio station.   And they’ll tweak it and clean it up, my mistakes, and then present it to you.  But the reason I want you to know where I am is because I’ve been, I think, deeply impacted by this environment.  As you know, well, I live in Dallas.  East Dallas is a beautiful part of Dallas, and I love it, but nothing is quite like being in Tuscany and the hills.  And with everything around you producing not just beauty but crops that sustain the families, there’s just something about this ecological system.  It so struck me this morning as I was sitting there having my coffee.  It was still cool from last night’s 60-degree low, and the high this afternoon will be somewhere around 90.  But anyway, it just struck me as how everything working together has created this life force, and no one’s been here since the pandemic, for almost two years.  And it just looks fine, like it doesn’t really need a caretaker, because in the very nature of the way this whole system works, everything is cared for by something else that’s in that environmental system. 

And that just really struck me because of the way in which I have seen these readings work inside of me as I have worked with them all week, getting ready to share some thoughts, and that is that God has created a similar kind of ecological system within communities.  And I’ve always loved talking about the fact that we’re not responsible for the world, though some people may be called to do something that does affect great numbers of people.  But most of us live in a circle of friends, and that circle of friends, I truly believe, are not by accident.  They are chosen, and we make up our own ecological spiritual system.  And Paul gives such an interesting image of what it means to live in community as a spiritual person, as a person who believes in the mystery of what God is trying to share with us through Jesus about his power dwelling in each of us.  And Jesus is the quintessential symbol of this indwelling presence, and what an incredibly beautiful thing that we can see in this image of Jesus.  He was filled with such strength and power to effect any change he wanted in the world, and he was able to do that in extraordinary ways.  And yet it’s so clear that what he was teaching us over and over again is, “Who I am you also may be.  The things I do you can do.” 

So if you take that image of Paul, he’s talking about the graciousness of Jesus — graciousness, grace.  Grace is some way of describing what I would call mercy.  Mercy is unmerited love.  It is this energy, this life force in Jesus.  As you [sic] walk this earth, when things were not as they intended them to be, as God the Father did not want them to be, meaning everything working for life, when he saw something not working for life, Jesus entered in and performed miracles.  And of all the things that Jesus did in his life, the miracles are what stand out so dramatically as who is he, and how does he do this, and where does he get the power, and what does he mean that we can do the same thing.  Jesus is the model of who we are to become.  We are like him, and as he moved around in the world and made a difference, he emptied himself, in the sense that he put himself on our level.  He didn’t claim something that would make him more than we are, but he also experienced our humanity.  And that humanity, at times where he felt that he was empty and he needed support from his disciples, like the night in the garden — he said, “Why aren’t you with me?  Why aren’t you staying with me?  I need you.”  And at the same time, he’s so full of life that we have in the gospel the story of healing a woman whose life was pouring out of her through a disease and healing her and then also lifting Jairus’ daughter from death to life.  He had this power to be able to do that, and what he’s saying to us, it seems to me, that in our ecological system, we’re going to find ourselves, in every situation we’re in where somebody in our circle of friends is going to need something from us, and we are in a place where we’re filled with enough sense of what it is a person needs, and if we are in touch with two things, our own intention and the power that we have as believers, when those two things kick in, we are going to be there to be a source of whatever that person needs.  And that’s an incredibly exciting way of imagining life,  because it means that you’re not responsible 24/7 to take care of the needs of your friends or your family, but there are times when you have something that they need.  And you can give it to them, and they have that need that you can fulfill.  And sometimes they’re the ones that are filled with something that you need, and you receive it.  And so there’s that beautiful, beautiful flow, and the thing that I want to talk about is how does it happen.  How does it work?  It takes belief, faith and a conviction that I want to be of service to other people.  I don’t want to be a person that takes life out of people.  I’m not here to get as much as I want from other people.  I’m here to be both receiving and giving, and probably for those of us who are mature in our spiritual journey, the thought of giving is much more comforting than the thought of needing, but both — both are always going to be there. 

So what am I asking you to imagine?  Well, just imagine that this gift is something that happens in a similar way to the way in which the woman who had the hemorrhages believed so much that Jesus had something for her that she said, “If I can just get in touch with that power, just get in touch with that power —”  And I think it’s fascinating that she didn’t touch his body, because so many of the miracles that Jesus did, he would touch people, touch their eyes, touch their ears, eyes so that they could see and their ears so they could hear or put spittle on a man’s tongue so he could speak.  There was touch, but then in this miracle with the woman with the hemorrhage, there was no physical touch, just an awareness.  “If I could just be close to this man who has this intention of healing and giving life to everyone, if I could just have that, I could be in touch with it.”  And the interesting thing is — and I love this — Jesus felt something flow out of him, and she felt, at the same time, something flow into her.  And there was no touch involved, which means to me, this work of being a source of life to each other is not something we can take so literally.  Nobody wants somebody coming into your life, when you’re not feeling well, telling you what you should be doing to feel better.  And that’s probably one of our biggest problems with our desire to help people, is we come up with some very specific idea in our own mind of what they need, and then we force it on them or demand that they listen to us and wonder why they don’t change, because we’ve given such good advice.  No, we have to live in a different way than the literal.  We have to live in this mysterious, wonderful, spiritual world that God has created where this life flow happens in ways that we cannot describe or even feel necessarily.  But think of it as a power that we have within us because, again, we believe it’s possible, and we want it.  We want that to happen.  I don't know.  It changes everything.

And when I think about the other thing Jesus did in the gospel is when he healed Jairus’ daughter, and the fact that — this is a dramatic example, but the power that we have, this gracious, loving power that is somehow capable of overcoming all the negative things that death creates or disease creates — disease, we’re robbed of the use of our body, and we can’t do the things we want to do.  Death takes someone away from us, or we are taken from someone.  At times that’s the way we think about it.  If you can just understand that this gracious power of God that we possess and can give and receive is something not necessarily literally always to walk into a room and heal cancer or go to a funeral home and get the person to rise from the coffin, no, it’s whatever the negativity in disease, the negativity in someone being taken from us, whatever the pain is in that, we have the power, through this gracious act of God, to take away the real destructive qualities of disease and death.  And what are they?  “I can’t do what I’m supposed to.  I’ve lost someone so close to me.  I am devastated.  I am empty.  I am not capable of making it without this person.”  Those kind of negative things that happen in those dark moments, this gracious flow of life between us, that’s the thing that works.  Without it being described or told how it will work or just telling the person, “This is what you’ve got to think,” and those kind of things — when people lose someone in their life and you come up with these kind of quickie-fix answers, “Oh, they’re so much better off where they are.  They had a good life.  They were old.  Everything is fine.”  No.  If we step away from the literal and enter more into that spiritual world that is so mystical and magical in a way, we can begin to experience something, and that is a balance in our ecological system of friends, family where people are getting healthier, stronger, not even knowing who’s the one in need and who’s the one receiving. 

Sometimes yes, it is literal, but think about it as something that we have the power to do as we pause in the morning and go into the deepest part of ourselves and open ourselves to the God that is dwelling in our heart, and we say, “Please God, use me today for whatever need there is.  Let me be that flow of life that lifts someone out of a death, darkness or out of a painful separation from everything they want to accomplish.  Do that for me please.”  And he will, and when you say, “Do it for me please,” the next thought is, “Yes, I can do that.”  And then you sort of forget about it in a way, but then in another way, the day has a different feel.  The day has a different spirit, and sometimes you’ll be sitting there, talking to someone.  All of a sudden, you get a feel of something flowing out of you, and they get a feel of something flowing into them, and there’s a smile.  There’s a sense of something.  Maybe it’s a hug.  Maybe it’s a kiss, but that experience of that powerful life force, that flow of life that is our inheritance to be like Christ and bring it into — that is absolutely real.  And what a gift, to be in touch with it, because when we’re not, then what is it that life fills us with?  A daily list of all the things we have to do and the appointments we have to take, and there’s something good about fulfilling obligation in life.  There’s something fulfilling about getting a job done.  Creating something makes us feel good.  All that is good, but nothing quite matches the experience of that flow of life from you to another, from another to you.  And that is the greatest gift, I believe, God has given us, to participate in the quality and the growth and the development of our circle of friends.  It’s a great responsibility, but what a joy to be a part of making it more than it would have been without us.

Father, your healing presence changed the world, and now you invite us to believe that we, who participate in that same healing presence, can change the world we live in. Bless us with confidence in this great gift that you share with us. Let us not be proud that you use us nor let us — not fall into depression thinking that we have no power over those things that we long to change. We ask you to bless us within this awareness of our participation in your great gift of bringing life. You say that we need to believe, and we do. And you say that we should be this source of life, and we long to accomplish it. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.