He Saw a Commotion

Mark 5:21-43

Back when I was in seminary I did some hospital chaplain work and my instructors told us to be aware that people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds handle the news of death quite differently than what we are accustomed to seeing.  For example, one of my colleagues was with a family from a different background than him when they got the news of death.  It was about twenty members of a big extended family packed into this small little family waiting room outside the ER.  As soon as the doctor said, “I’m sorry…” they all started screaming and most of them just fell to the floor and rolled around wailing loudly and then the whole thing spilled over into the hallway.  My colleague had no idea what to do.  I was once with a young woman when she got the news that her father had just died on the table.  Sadly, they had only recently begun to mend years of estrangement.  As soon as the doctor walked in, she saw it in his face and started screaming “No. No. No.”  Then, she started bouncing against the walls.  She was big; well over 6’ tall and pushing 230lbs.  A sizable orderly managed to get himself between her and the wall.  Those folks don’t get paid enough.  It took over a half an hour for a well-experienced nurse to talk her down. 

Looking at our passage, if you can imagine the most of a small village caught up in grief in a way similar to what I’ve just described, well then that’s the situation we’re talking about Jesus walking into.  Mark calls it a commotion, a commotion of people weeping and wailing loudly.  The Greek word for commotion there is pretty potent.  It means a great disturbance, like a riot. 

These people were very broke up over the death of this child.  A little twelve-year-old girl had died.  Children aren’t supposed to die.  She was also the daughter of a well-respected leader of the synagogue.  That’s just not supposed to happen either.  This was a terribly unfair, unjust situation that forces one not simply to question but to challenge the steadfast love and faithfulness of God.  One should fully expect there to a “commotion”.

Jesus arrived on the scene and he aced the pastoral care exam (yes, that’s sarcasm.).  Jesus said to the people, “Why are you making such a commotion and weeping?  The child is not dead but sleeping.”  That’s like beaucoup notches worse than saying to your significant other who is a bit upset about his or her weight, “Ewe’s not fat. Ewe’s fluffy.”  These people would have loved to believe him but like Sarah laughed when she heard that she would be bearing a child in her nineties, they mocked Jesus even though they knew he had done some pretty remarkable things.  This was just not the time and the place to be hoping against hope.  They knew the child was dead!

I wonder what the disciples were thinking about all this.  They had been on a boat with Jesus that was being waved swamped during a windstorm that seemed to be after them personally.  Jesus spoke against the wind and it stopped and there was a great calm, not a ripple on the water.  They were filled with fearful awe. Immediately after that, they watched Jesus cast 1,000 demons out of a man and restore him to his right mind.  People were afraid and amazed.  Just an hour or so before this commotion, they were in a crowd of people and a woman simply touched his cloak and was healed of a menstrual haemorrhage that she had suffered from for twelve years and wasted everything she had on useless doctors.  She got her life back - Salvation.  But, it was just at that moment that people from the house of Jairus came with the news.  “Your daughter is dead.  Why still bother the Teacher?”  Uncanny timing, don’t you think?  For the disciples, Jesus had proven more powerful than chaos, evil, and incurable disease.  How would he fair now against death?

Looking at what Jesus said to Jairus upon hearing the news his young daughter had died, I once again say that Jesus aced the pastoral care exam, “Do not fear, only believe.”  Faith? Believe?  Believe what?  Jesus had just told a woman that her faith or rather her faithfulness had made her well from twelve years of suffering; faithfulness she demonstrated by sneaking up on Jesus to touch his clothes in a desperate attempt to be healed.  Jairus had made his desperate attempt at faithfulness by him, being a synagogue leader, even coming to Jesus in the first place.  What was left for him to do?

Let me take a brief excursion and talk about faith for a minute.  Faith in the Bible isn’t just the mental act of believing something or the emotional act of trusting someone.  Faith is our active participation in the reality where the hidden reign of God is becoming manifest in and around us.  It’s like taking a glass of pond water and letting it sit.  The water will seem clear but after a couple of days there will be sedimentation in the bottom of the glass.  Hidden stuff you couldn’t see before become visible.  Sometimes if you let pond water sit long enough, little living things will start to appear.  Faith is being a part of what God is doing to manifest his hidden reign and bring new life into this corrupted creation that is threated by chaos, evil, disease, and death.  Jesus told Jairus, “Don’t be afraid only be faithful.”  All Jairus has to do to be faithful is keep walking Jesus to his house, take him in, and let Jesus be God. 

So, against the reality of his peoples’ advice, Jairus takes Jesus to his house.  Jesus then clears the house and takes Jairus, his wife, and Peter, James, and John to the little girls room.  Mark says they “went in where the child was.”  In Greek what we translate here in English as “went in” does not accurately reflect what’s there in the Greek.  The word that is there is the word that gets used for when people metaphorically talk about taking that journey into death, like crossing the River Styx.  Going into where the little girl was here means Jesus by touching her entered into her death, the realm of death where she was and gave her the command, “Little girl, I say to you get up.”  The command to “get up” is the command to get up from the dead.  It’s resurrection language.  I like how Mark ends this.  A literal translation would read, “They were immediately overcome with great ecstasy (of the experience of God kind).”  A death riot turns to spiritual ecstasy, that’s what happens we Jesus comes against death.

So, what to say about all this? Jesus, great winds and stormy seas obey him, evil flees before him, incurable disease turns to restored life, death is undone, great calm, amazement, sanity, salvation, spiritual ecstasy – and he did it all by touching people whom the religious authorities labelled unclean and unwelcome in the presence of God.  Jesus goes to the root of everything that’s twisted and diseased in God’s good creation and sets it right.  So, what about us when it seems life is personally out to get us, or when evil has beset us, or incurable disease strikes us, or death turns our lives upside down, or when our little Cooperative of churches faces a leadership challenge?  Jesus’ command to Jairus – “Don’t be afraid only faithful” – may not top the list of best things to say in a pastoral care crisis, but it works.  In all things we must not let fear rule us, but instead keep walking Jesus into our house, our lives, and let him be God and in time the hidden reign of God will become evident.  In time there will be calm, amazement, sanity, new vitality, new life, and that peace we get from being in the presence of God.  Amen.

From Fear to Worship

Mark 4:35-41

Jesus said “Road trip”; except back then that meant getting into a boat and crossing over to the other side.  The disciples didn’t know why.  Didn’t ask.  They were faithfully, dutifully just doing what Jesus asked.  Then, like an episode from that psychic show back in the early 2000’s called Crossing over with John Edwards where people talked to the dead, things got weird.

It’s quite placid at the end of the day on the lake.  Jesus takes advantage of the opportunity and falls asleep on a pillow in the stern and – spoiler alert! –  this is when the disciples discover that they are more or less on their own in the middle of a big lake with a Jesus who’s checked out.  And wouldn’t you know it – wouldn’t you know it – it’s right then that a great windstorm comes up causing monstrous waves to break over into the boat and it begins to fill. 

Though it’s the wind at play here, it’s not the Holy Spirit.  The way Mark tells the story we are supposed to think that Creation, or at least the chaotic unknown elements of Creation, the wind and the sea, have personally decided to come after the disciples with the intent to destroy them.  The wind and the sea and storms often showed up back then in a particular genre of writing known as apocalyptic of which the Book of Revelation is one.  They represent the unknown and its destructive powers sort of like what we mean when saying things come flying at us out of left field.  What will the disciples do in this massively overwhelmed with fear moment?  What can they do? – and Jesus is sleeping.

Now, I said Mark is telling the story here in such a way as to make it sound like the wind and the sea are coming after them, like the Creation itself has got it in for them.  I say that because Mark says that when Jesus finally did do something he rebuked the wind.  He did not just command it.  He rebuked it, scolded it as we would someone who has done something terribly shameful.

 Now, we’ve all had days where it seems the world is out to get us.  But this is a bit different.  Here it seems the creation is out to get the fledgling church.  The same creation that Paul says in Romans 8 is groaning in labour pains and eagerly waiting the day when the children of God will be revealed and it will be set free from the futility of death.  We see here just how deep sin, our sin, affects the whole universe.  Sin affects everything to the extent that the creation itself would try to destroy the children of God who signal its liberation from the futility of decay to which it has been subjected because of sin, our sin.

Moving on, the disciples believe they are going to die.  They are utterly powerless before these chaotic, uncontrollable elements of creation.  No technology is going to save them.  They are utterly powerless.  They are perishing.  So they go to the sleeping Jesus with the complaint, “Teacher, we are perishing and you don’t seem to care.” 

I think life gets that way at times.  Things can come out of left field and the next thing we know life is careening in a half-million different directions and none of them look safe and we are powerless before it.  And then, where is our Lord in the midst of it…asleep on a pillow?  That’s early church code for enthroned way far off in glory.  We, like the Twelve complain, “Jesus, we’re perishing.  Don’t you care?”  I think that is a legitimate complaint. 

Well, as a matter of fact he does care and this is what he does and I have to warn you that the next couple of verses (actually the whole vignette) are full of code words and phrases that the early church used to describe its situation and its beliefs.  Jesus comes wide-awake, rebukes the wind, and calms the sea and it is a great calm not a ripple on the water. 

“Great calm” is early church code referring us to the day Jesus finally returns and puts things to right and also to the fact that he does now for us in his time and in his way put things right in our lives in a way that gives us a new start when things otherwise seem to have ended, a way that causes or learns us to lean on him in faith, a way that creates in us a deeper trust in him and his steadfast love and faithfulness. 

Then he turns to the disciples saying not, “Why are you so afraid?”  But rather, “Why are you so cowardly?  Do you not yet have faith?”  Cowardly, Jesus calls them cowardly.  The Greek word there isn't the word for afraid.  It is the word for cowardly, deilos.  A word was used in the early church for Christians who renounced faith in Jesus Christ in order to escape persecution, for turning away from Jesus in the midst of those struggles that test our faith, for turning away from Jesus rather than going to him when he seems so obviously asleep on the pillow.  I think what Jesus was expecting from them was their standing firm in the face of the storm because they knew Jesus was in the boat with them; indeed, high expectations for so early in their relationship.  They did the next best thing and confronted the sleeping Jesus, something I'm quite prone to do.

After this rebuke to disciples Mark says that the disciples were filled with great fear or as the Greek says afraid with great fearful awe.  Fearful awe is also early church code for worship, worship that arises when we find ourselves utterly depending on Jesus for life come what may.  Before they were looking at the storm but after seeing Jesus and experiencing the calm they worship.  This experience taught them to worship in the face of fear. 

True worship arises in us when in the midst of the storms we realize that Jesus really is with us and our lives really are in his caring hands.  The hymn How Great Thou Art attempts to capture this fearful awe.  That worship is the stilled waters of what once were howling winds and a raging sea.

Worship begins with this question the disciples asked, “Who then is this that the wind and the sea obey him?”  Who is this Jesus who can take the most messed up of circumstances and turn them to good for us.  Who is this Jesus?  The point to this road trip that Jesus took his disciples out on a stormy sea to learn is that Jesus is himself God.  The Jesus we meet by the working of the Holy Spirit is God and as I like to say there is no other God hidden behind Jesus who is other than Jesus in the way he is towards us, steadfastly loving and faithful.  God may have to tell us we’re being cowardly at times but even that is meant to move us to worship, to calm, to peace, to restful assurance of the loving care with which God regards us, as we are his beloved children.  So, friends, stand firm.  Whatever may come Jesus is still in the boat.  Life quite often feels like all Hell is breaking loose around us and Jesus, if he’s there, he must be asleep on a pillow somewhere in the back of the boat.  But he’s still in the boat and he is God and he absolutely will not let anything separate us from the great love he has for us.  Stand firm and remember who he is and stand waiting in fearful awe for what he is going to do for you in his great love for you.

To Wait in Eager Expectation

Romans 8:12-28

Back when Dana was pregnant with William and Alice I went with her for the ultrasounds.  The very first one with William is probably the most memorable simply because it was the first time we would have such an experience.  The technician lubed the ultrasound device and began to roll it around on Dana’s barely beginning to have a baby-bump belly.  Then she focused in on William and there was the sound of a little heart beating.  We could see him move and he had little fingers.  He wasn’t even a big as the palm of my hand, but on the screen he was the biggest thing in our universe. Although, his disproportionately huge head and eyes had me a little suspicious that he was an alien baby. 

Pre-natal ultrasounds are surreal experiences, but one thing they do is help the reality set in that there’s a baby on the way, a new human life, a child, your child.  That realization brings with it a few questions?  What will this child be like?  What will it grow up to be?  What will it be like to be a parent?  What do we have to do now to get ready for it?  Some things are obvious – paint a room, get a crib, buy clothes and toys.  Go to the pre-natal classes.  For certain, the new baby meant life was going to be very different; but, how different?  In all these questions one thing was certain – this baby was indeed coming.

Looking here at Romans this eager expectation of a baby about to be born, is what Paul says the Creation is presently experiencing.  The Creation eagerly waits with patient endurance and groaning like a woman in labour pain.  The baby is in there coming to term and in the violent miracle called birth it will arrive.  

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia from Hebrew for your enjoyment.  The Hebrew word for the created Earth is Adamah.  This is the feminine version of the word for humanity – Adam.  The first child born of Adamah was Adam and he ruined things.  He was made in the image of God but tries to be God and that’s just twisted.  The result is that Adamah, like the parent of a disappointing child, is subject to futility and death.  But these new children that are about to appear, Paul says they are the children of God and they are not only made in God’s image but are actually indwelt by the Spirit of God.  When they are born the Creation will be free from its bondage to futility and decay.  It will be healed.

Who are these children of God?  They are us, the followers of Jesus who have been born from above by God’s pouring himself, the Holy Spirit, into us bonding us to Jesus.  By this bond, we partake of the new humanity that God the Father created when by the power of the Holy Spirit when he raised Jesus from the dead, the firstborn of the New Creation. If an ultrasound of the belly of the Creation (Adamah) were taken, we, us, Christian community who in the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, are the image of Jesus, we would be the alien-looking foetus obliviously growing away in the Creation’s belly until the time is right for us to be born by resurrection into a Creation made new.

Now, I bet you folks haven’t heard anything like this before.  The image of pregnancy and the Creation giving birth to a new humanity by means of the resurrection probably wasn’t one of the stories we all heard in Sunday School when we were young.  Just as Genesis 1-3 is the foundational story that gives meaning to the present Creation, Romans chapter 8 is the foundational story that gives understanding of the New Creation that is coming.  Paul says that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.  This entails that the Holy Spirit with us is the proof this is really happening.  The day will come when God makes all creation new and all creation will be healed of the futility of sin and death and we will be raised from the dead as part of that healing.

The certainty of the arrival of this New Creation is the root of Christian hope.  A pregnant woman doesn’t look at her unbelievably expanded belly and say, “Oh, I hope I have a baby.”  No.  She says, “Oh my God.  I’m going to have a baby.”  Then she cycles through every emotion you can think of on a spectrum from panic to awe and begins to prepare for it.  Hope leads to action.  With the same certainty that a baby is going to be born from a very pregnant woman so the Creation is pregnant with a new humanity that is for now, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, embodied in the fellowship of the followers of Jesus.  God is preparing the Creation in ways that we can’t see even through telescopes or microscopes, in ways that we can’t begin to imagine.  The prophet Isaiah said “The Earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

Anyway, Paul also says that we the children of God also groan and wait eagerly for the Day of New Creation.  This waiting involves living by the Spirit, not the flesh.  We don’t please ourselves, we love our neighbours.  The Holy Spirit living in us teaches us who Jesus is and makes us want to instinctually live according to Jesus’ ways. The Spirit causes a profound discontent in us, a discontent with the world and the way it is.  Dissatisfied with the world, we can find ourselves in conflict with the world and ourselves.  If we act too much like Jesus, the world shames us.  If we act too much like the world, we feel ashamed of ourselves.

We begin to suffer with Christ as we start to struggle with making our lives, our home life, our friendships, our relationships with neighbours more in the image of the New Creation coming, the healed Creation coming, the New and healed Humanity that’s about to be born.

Waiting in eager expectation for the Day of New Creation also involves praying.  Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu who spearheaded the work of reconciliation in South Africa arose everyday at 3:00AM to pray for the healing of South Africa.  It would be prudent to say that the ardent prayers of that one man stayed off a civil war in South Africa that would have been as disgustingly evil as the genocide that happened in Rwanda in the early 1990’s.

            Jesus taught his disciples a prayer that begins, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Praying this from the heart continuously and in turn living accordingly will bear its fruit and be the proof that a new day is surely coming. Amen.

The Creme Filling

2 Corinthians 4:5-12
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Yes, I’m a preacher and we all know how preachers are – always looking for a gimmicky sermon illustration.  For preachers, life's just one big, gimmicky sermon illustration.  Being that way as I am, I've always got my eyes open to see what gimmicks are working out there in the marketing world.  I take note of the gimmicks that really make stuff sell.  The gimmicks that’ll make a right-handed wombat buy a left-handed smoke shifter.  I want the gimmicks that everybody can relate too and say, "You know, that's the way it really is.  Ford is tough and Dodge does have Ram Power." 

Well, I've had my eyes on something here lately that is "it" - The Primo Gimmick - crème filling.  I've noticed that if you want to sell something, something that's really ordinary, something that people wouldn't be crazy about otherwise, you need to stick some sort of crème filling in it.  I think Hostess has really been the Pioneer in this area.  You know, who's going to buy a packaged cupcake that's full of preservatives and a little on the soggy side - hardly anybody, right?  But I tell you what, you put crème filling into that same cupcake and you have one of the best selling snacks of all time, the Hostess Cupcake.  They didn't stop with cupcakes.  They took two slabs of chocolate cake and smeared a little crème filling between them and wound up with America's favorite snack, a Ding Dong and a Diet Coke.  Up here it’s a Joe Louis and a Diet Coke.  Hostess is really good at this crème filling stuff.   Oh and then, they had the ultimate idea – a sponge cake that was cooked by blowing it with steam rather than baking it in an oven.  Steam cooked sponge cake has got to be one of the grossest things imaginable (next to the Cheezie), but hey, stick some crème filling in it - the Twinkie.  I ate so many Twinkies growing up, it’s a wonder I ain’t one.

Now this crème filling stuff is a good idea.  It works.  It's like the perfect sermon illustration when you want to describe a follower of Jesus.  It answers the question: How does God take a bunch ordinary of dry, crusty or soggy, mushy people that you don’t know what they’re made of, people like us, and make us Christ's witnesses?  Well, it's in the crème filling.  You see, we humans are like soggy cup cakes sweating on a shelf in a gas station in the middle of the Mojave Desert.  There's nothing in us that's appealing especially if you have no milk.  But if God pours his Spirit into us, all of a sudden we're changed and people say, "I want what you got."   People want the crème filling.  So, God's Spirit is to us Jesus People what Crème filling is to a Hostess Cupcake or Twinkie.  The Spirit just seals the deal.  Without the crème filling we're just a plain old cupcake in a world of extravagant desserts like the Little Debbie Oatmeal Pie.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, "How tacky of an illustration could that be?"  Well, it may be tacky, but I'll tell you what, it's not tasteless.  Well anyway, I mention crème filling in a Hostess cupcake because I think it is a good example of what Paul is trying to get at here in 2 Corinthians.  He says, "we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us."  The treasure that Paul writes about is the Holy Spirit, the living presence of Christ, whom God pours into us and fills us with himself. The treasure is important.  Without it, we are just clay jars.  Can you imagine a Twinkie without the crème filling?

Now, I bring this treasure thing up, this crème filling, because without the treasure we, the clay jars, cannot call ourselves followers of Jesus.  The same is true for us as a congregation.  Without the crème filling we cannot call ourselves Christ's body.  If the Holy Spirit does not live in us, if God has not poured his Spirit into us, then we have a faith that has no power to change us, to transform us, to heal us, to renew us. 

As I understand it, what God is up to with respect to us humans is that he is transforming us into the image of the living Christ.  We are selfish, hurtful, hurt, and mis-driven by urgings, cravings, and false beliefs that we so helplessly give in to because we think they can fill that emptiness in us that we at times are very aware of.  Yet, God wants to take us and transform us into people who love as Christ Jesus loves each of us and who are driven to do God's will as he is.  That change, that transformation cannot happen unless the Holy Spirit lives in us.  Without the treasure we are just clay jars.

I remember when this first became clear to me.   For most of my university days I went to a Nazarene church.  It was a small fellowship of about 50 or so that met in a school cafeteria.  They worshipped Sunday morning and Sunday evening and Wednesday evening.  At the Sunday evening worship things were a bit less formal.  The pastor allowed time for us to stand up and share with each other what we were struggling with and people actually did that.  Imagine that.  They stood up right there in church and said "I'm hurting. I need help." 

Those days formed my belief about what church is.  Church is where hurting people can go to find God's presence and love and be healed by it; not this lecture hall where good people go because good people are supposed to.  Church is for hurting people. 

Well, I would sometimes share what I was going through so they could pray for me and it really helped.  If we cannot be weak in front of even God's people then Christ is not strong within us.  One time after the service a woman named Gabe came up to me and said, "You don't know that God loves you, do you?"  “Of course, I do.”  I said.  “God loves everybody.  Jesus died for me."  Gabe said again, "You don't know that God loves you, do you."  This time I just looked at her for a moment.  A third time she asked, "You don't know that God loves you, do you?"  And I said, “No, I don't.”  She took me under her wing for several months.  Helped me to forgive my parents for the abandonment that I felt because they divorced.  I had this mistaken idea that parents are superhuman and are supposed to be able to love their children as God loves us.  I can’t express to you the joy I felt the day that Jesus let me know he had forgiven my parents and so I could too…and so I did.  I learned that I needed to stop looking for God's love in my parents.  She helped me to understand that the reason my dating relationships always failed and I got hurt was because I was looking for God's love in another human being.  She helped me to understand that all I need in life is the security of knowing that God loves me.  It was during this time, about a three-month period, one afternoon I was in my dorm room having one of my lowest moments and it just felt like a door opened up inside of me and Jesus Christ stepped into my life.  And he has been with me ever since. 

To find the treasure I had to humble myself and share my pain. I had to realize that what I was searching for was God's love and that because I had unforgiveness in my heart that I had to own up to and bring to Jesus I was searching for it in all the wrong places.  I had to pray and wait.  God was simply waiting for me to come to the point of where I could accept that his strength, his love is sufficient for me. 

My friends, do you know that God loves you? 

Do you know that God loves you? 

Do you know that God loves you?  Amen.