Glorious Insurrections - July 2, 2006
Mark 5: 21-43This was one of those weeks in ministry that I had heard about in seminary. It's not as if I wasn't warned that weeks like this can happen. It's especially likely, it seems, that something like this week will happen right after a pastor comes back from a trip, or right around a holiday or special celebration in the church. I have a friend whose clerk of session and director of music died within days of each other just days before the brand new commissioned hymn for the church was to be played in worship the first time.
Weeks like this past one are not unheard of—they're legend. And what a pastor does is to cow-girl up, prioritize, make quick decisions, reschedule, and pray. Mostly pray. Lest it sound as if I am complaining about this week, let me set the record straight: a week like I just had, although I'm glad its' not every week, is what I got into ministry for. It's not an interruption into my job, it is my job. And so I try to do this the best that I can, with God's help. I count it as a privilege to have a week like I just had—as long as is not too frequent, you understand.
I think Jesus had had one of those weeks—maybe more like one of those months, to be accurate. His ministry was really getting a full head of steam, and he had garnered quite a reputation for it. Sending two thousand pigs running in to the sea to drown after the demons were cast into them must have been very dramatic, and by the time he had gotten into the boat to cross over to the other side of that same sea, the word had gotten around, and the crowd had already formed at the boat dock, to see what Jesus would do next.
The text does not sharply characterize the crowd, we don't know if they simply stood around at a polite distance and watched to see what Jesus' next move would be, or if they were a demanding, noisy crowd asking him questions and pressing in around him like paparazzi, or something in between.
But suddenly there was the kind of interruption that no one in the crowd expected. I heard Jairus' pleading described like this: picture a business man or a very highly powered politician dressed in an Armani suit, with a Rolex watch catching the sunlight on his wrist, with expensive Italian shoes polished to a high shine. Now picture him rolling in the dirt, writhing in agony, begging Jesus for the one thing his money and his power cannot buy. The whole crowd must have stood and watched in horror and embarrassment as the man ruined his expensive, fine clothes, muddied his shoes beyond recognition, and soiled his fine reputation forever. Rulers of the synagogue didn't do such a thing, you see. Not in public, not ever, and for what? A daughter.
Throughout most of the world's history, in most places, a daughter has been a tough thing to be. Our family had Korean American neighbors in seminary. The student in the family happened to be the young wife, who was in what is called the 1.5 Korean-American generation, meaning that although she was born in Korea, she was raised in the US. Her parents came to Korea as adults, and are therefore First generation Korean-American. Her husband was in the same situation—born in the mother country, raised in northern California, by very traditional parents.
My friend Jane had a very young son when she came to seminary, and her first year there had a daughter. Her third year at seminary she became pregnant again. This is the point in the story where I have to admit my cultural ignorance. It is hard for westerners to understand the difference between boys and girls in traditional Asian culture. I tell you the next part of the story not to make my friend's family seem ignorant or old-fashioned, or cruel, but to show you the importance of the difference between having a girl and having a boy in some parts of the world.
When my friend's mother-in-law found out that she was pregnant, the prayer chain started—not just for a healthy baby, or a safe delivery, or a gentle transition for the two older siblings, or for Jane to be able to finish her studies, but for one specific thing—that the baby would be a boy. My friend had been ”forgiven” by her mother-in-law for having a girl, since she gave birth to a boy first, but a family in which girls outnumbered boys was considered a personal failure on the part of the mother. Yes, we know that genetically, gender is determined by the father, and not the mother, but these ideas and feelings are not based on genetic science, they are steeped in thousands of years of deeply held, highly revered tradition.
You can guess what happened next. My friend had a very difficult pregnancy, and at times it was thought that she would lose her baby, and as a result, lots of testing was done on the fetus, and it was determined that she was carrying a girl. The mother-in-law found out, eventually, and her prayer changed. Her new prayer was for healing for her grandchild—that God would miraculously turn her daughter-in-law's baby into a boy while it was still in the womb. The grandmother's prayer was not answered. Or maybe it was.
Rev. Grace Imathiu is the pastor of Brown Deer United Methodist Church and a world-famous preacher. I have heard her preach at the Festival of Homiletics the past two years. This year, in Atlanta she told the story of preaching today's text in her native Kenya. In the middle of her sermon, a worn and bedraggled-looking woman wearing tattered clothes and muddy bare feet stood up in the middle of the church and interrupted Grace as she was speaking.
“Excuse me, preacher, did you say that Jairus' child was…a girl? Read the Scripture to me again. I must have misunderstood you.” “Yes,” said Grace, “It says that the child was a girl, a little daughter.”
“But preacher, what Bible are you reading from? Are you reading from the King James Version? I'm sure it doesn't say girl in the King James Version.” “Well, I'm reading from something better than the King James Version. I have the Greek right here in my hands.” “Look at it again.” insisted the woman, “It surely says that Jairus had a son. I'm sure of it.”
Grace looked at the text one more time and reported back to the woman, “It very clearly says 'little daughter' right here in the Greek.” The woman became rather agitated, as if she was angry. “I've never heard it that way before. No one has ever read to me that Jairus' would be concerned about a daughter. Why would anyone care about a girl child? And if what you are telling me is true, that Jesus healed a daughter, why hasn't anyone ever told me this before?”
Why indeed. It's easy for us to sit in our relatively cushy North American middle class context and to forget that there are still places in this world where a girl child is nothing to get excited, or agitated, or worried about. Places where young girls, not even physically mature yet, girls as young as ten years old are given up to adult men for marriage, because it is assumed that girls that young are free from the HIV virus. Places where those young girls are often pregnant as soon as their tiny bodies are capable of conceiving, and whose pregnancies and prolonged labors rip apart their delicate insides to the point that, if not repaired, they will have life-long infections from permanent tears to their urinary systems. Places where young girls such as these are shunned to live in the dirt outside their villages, with the wild dogs.
When Scripture tells us that Jesus encounters women in the Bible, the apostles are using code language. But we might miss that in our context. We might overlook the fact that in our passage for today Jesus gets up close and personal with not one female, but two—even going so far as to allow one of the females to touch his clothes. We might miss those acts of insurrection—those glorious acts of insurrection committed by Jesus.
How is that insurrection you might ask? Webster' dictionary defines Insurrection this way: “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” Jesus healing a girl child, Jesus allowing a bleeding woman to touch the hem of his garment goes against every law of common decency that existed in his time. It was the equivalent of his thumbing his nose at those in power, those with influence. It's as insurrectionary as dumping tea in a harbor, or firing on Fort Sumter, or sticking a bumper sticker that reads “No War” on the back of a minivan.
If the gospel writers are using code language in their stories of Jesus' encounters with the unclean, the untouchable, the unaccounted-for, the unacceptable of his day and time, what is their message to us? Perhaps it is telling us that there is no place that the gospel does not beak through; that there is no earthly authority that God's love cannot overrule, that there is no person that cannot be loved, healed, forgiven, and accepted into God's grace.
The Kenyan woman had never been told, had never really believed that she was God's beloved child. In fact, she had come to believe quite the opposite, even though what she had been taught was a lie.
What are the lies we believe about ourselves? Do we believe that we are outside of God's grace, or that the gospel message of radical, insurrectionary love does not somehow apply to us because we do not look the way we think we ought, or do not make the money we think we should, or that we don't come to church as often as we think we should, or that we have things in our past that we wish we didn't, or that we have not found acceptance from other people?
The gospel message is very clear: there is no place that God's grace does not break through. In Jesus Christ, there is no east or west, no Jew or Greek, no male and female, no mighty or lowly. And so we are called to practice that radical insurrectionary love that Jesus lived, that no one, no one, least of all our selves, should believe the lies anymore.
Thanks be to God.
