Woke up and made whole

Mark 5: 21-43
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
July 1, 2018

         

          The Bible is replete with nameless women and daughters. One interpretation for some of these stories is that these anonymous women and daughters represent not only all females but the whole of Israel itself. The text gives us a clue about this in the use of the number 12. The woman had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. Jairus’ daughter is 12 years old. The twelve tribes of Israel are God’s people joining together in wholeness, unity, and fullness.

         

         If we take all this symbolism as a metaphor, like the woman and the daughter, Jesus is speaking to a people who are exhausted, bleeding out, desperate and taken for dead. They are vulnerable, occupied once again by a foreign power, one that looks like it’s here to stay. The femaleness of these two characters also signifies Jesus’ mission to those who have the most to lose: the poor, the widow, the orphan, the marginalized, the isolated, the stranger, the victim, the other who have been criminalized by those who have power.



         

         Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it? We were asleep for too long, and now we’re woke up. We’re not only woke up, we’re rising up! We’re marching for the poor and protesting for families not our own. We’re posting videos of brutality against people of color and calling out those who are silent in the face of bigotry and those who normalize cruel, oppressive tactics. We’re writing letters and sending emails, texts, faxes, hounding those who represent us in the halls of power to fight for those whose voices, whose cries for justice are being ignored. We’re supporting candidates who will challenge the status quo.



         We’re outraged and scared and hopeful and overwhelmed and fed up and frustrated and tempted toward despair. We’re tired. We’re hurting. Some of us have endured much under many physicians, or our own ways of dealing with our pain, spending all we have, only to feel worse than when we started. We grab onto the hem of those whose garments we think have power. We listen to any voice we think can raise our spirits.



         

         We use whatever power we can in the face of our powerlessness. Our fight or flight response gets triggered daily, hourly, constantly for some of us, which can affect our health, our ability to make decisions, even the memory center of our brain. Some of us are fleeing into our safe lives and our privilege. Others who see no way out are fleeing by way of drugs and suicide. Some of us are fighting almost to the point of tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, because it feels like life or death, because we fear one day it could be life or death. We shut down the argument. We shame the behavior, the attitude, the bias. We shun those who refuse to see. We begin to build walls when once we decried them. Ever so slightly, step by step, we dehumanize the dehumanizer.



         

         I’m not talking about being civil. This is no time for civility, for polite talk when the children of asylum seekers are being warehoused, when reproductive justice might be set back 45 years, when LGBTQ persons are still not safe in public space, when black lives still do not matter. And yet…Friedrich Nietzsche warned that when we fight monsters, when we fight bullies, we take care that we do not ourselves become monsters, become bullies; that when we gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us. Most of us in this fight are not the victim; we are nowhere near the least of these. We do our best to fight on behalf the marginalized and dehumanized and criminalized. And so when we fight, we need to keep the faces, the lives, the pain, the anguish, the stories of these very human people in front of those who refuse to see. It is not our face that needs to get in their face, but our hearts, our compassion, our willingness to sacrifice, our courage to be vulnerable.



         

         A colleague said to me earlier this week that he’s done with inclusivity, that somehow we can make room for everyone. Even in the United Church of Christ we haven’t really succeeded; some would say we’ve failed at that. We’re just as hemmed in by our progressive stance as those we stand against. He said that what we need is mutual vulnerability: to create safe space where everyone can allow their whole selves to be seen and be willing to see others just as they are.



         

         Of course that only works if you’re privileged, if you’re not already vulnerable, if your existence isn’t outlawed. But if things are going to go differently than they have before, one of these days, someday, hopefully, we won’t be just at the same restaurant; we’ll all be at the same table rather than the battlefield and the bunker. And the table is a place of mutual vulnerability, where we have to put down our armor and our weapons before we can eat and be fed. But who will go first? Who will put themselves on the line first to show the way? How can we ever be one human race if none or not enough of us are willing to do this?



         At the table of betrayal and desertion, Jesus went first and made himself vulnerable even unto death. It’s not a story that any of us likes to hear. It feels like losing, like failure, but that’s only because violence, rage, power, and fear are still how we solve most of our problems. Jesus said, “Do not fear; only believe” or as Eugene Peterson puts in The Message: “Don’t listen to them; just trust me”.

       

         This table isn’t about winning or losing but about rising up and living: living with compassion as much as passion, living with acceptance of our whole selves—the betrayer, the denier, the deserter and the beloved disciple; living without losing our humanity and yet believing in humanity. Even if we can’t believe in humanity just now, Jesus says to us, “Do not fear. Don’t listen to them. Just trust me. Get up. Rise. Live.”
      

         

         Blogger Hannah Adair Bonner writes, “All it takes is you. You, creating a ripple in your neighborhood, that joins with all the others making ripples in their own, that turns into ‘justice running down like a river, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ That is what can push back this tide that feels like it will crush us all: you.”


         Amen.

            
This was the benediction:

By all that you hold dear on this good earth, 
I bid you STAND!