Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 28, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

If my years of study of scripture and of work as a professional Christian has convinced me of one thing, it is that God desires life for each and every one of God’s children. That may seem paradoxical, given the fact that because we are creatures not gods we are all mortal; but then all profound religious truth is paradoxical. If someone is pushing something as religious truth that is not paradoxical, be very suspicious. God desires life for God’s mortal children, of that I have no doubt. One of the foundational lines from the Bible for me is John 10:10, where the Evangelist has Jesus say “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Life is God’s desire for each and every one of us.

Yet that statement, like all profound statements, raises as many questions as it answers. We have to ask: What is life? What kind of life does God want for God’s people? Are we talking about mere biological life, a state of being physically alive as opposed to being physically dead? Or are we talking about something more meaningful than that, something more significant, something more complex? I am convinced that when scripture tells us that God’s desire for us is life it really is talking about far more than mere biological life. There are in fact many facets to the life that God desires for us. I can’t possibly go into all of them this morning. I want only to focus on one aspect of the life that God desires for us that is raised, I believe, by the passage we just heard from the Gospel of Mark.

That passage is actually rather complex. It consists of two stories, one the raising to life of a young girl who has died, the other the restoring to health of a women who has suffered for many years from unstoppable bleeding. The author probably means us to understand the hemorrhage as uncontrolled menstrual bleeding, or so the scholars tell me. But did you notice an odd thing about the way Mark tells these two stories? They aren’t told consecutively. Mark doesn’t finish one story, then move on to the next. Instead, one of the stories interrupts the other. The passage starts with the first part of the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter. But before that story is finished we get the story of the healing of the women with the flow of blood. Once that story is finished, Mark returns to and completes the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter.

The scholars tell us that that structure is significant for our understanding of the meaning of the stories, especially for the meaning of the story in the middle that is bracketed by the two parts of the other story. The way Mark intertwines the two stories tells us that we are to read them together, to understand them together. The interrupted story, the one that brackets the other, is supposed to shed light on the meaning of the story in the middle. So let’s see what looking at these two stories that way tells about their meaning.

It is pretty obvious that the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter is about God’s desire that God’s children have life. Jesus restores a dead girl to life. Yes, he says she’s just sleeping, but I think we have assume that she was dead. If she had only been sleeping the people around her could have awakened her. They wouldn’t have needed Jesus. This story is like the story of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Jesus restores a deceased person to life. The interrupted story, the one that brackets the other one, is about God’s preference for life over death for God’s people.

Which tells us that the story of the healing of the woman with the flow of blood may also be in some way about life. Yet it isn’t obvious that that’s what that story is about. The women in that story isn’t dead, she’s just ill. Or so it seems to us. Yet when we understand the mores and customs of Jesus’ time and place, we come to see that there was a way in which this woman was as dead as Jairus’ daughter, at least in a figurative sense. The Jewish society of Jesus’ time lived according to the purity or holiness code of the Jewish Torah, especially as it appears in the book of Leviticus. Many of the laws from the purity code are about ritual purity or cleanliness. Those were the laws with which the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were most concerned. The life of righteousness was for them the life of ritual purity as prescribed in the purity code. Anyone who did not comply with those laws was labeled a sinner. Indeed, when in the Gospels the Pharisees accuse Jesus of consorting with sinners they mean that he consorts with people who do not meet the standards of the purity code.

The consequence of being considered unclean or impure under that code was exclusion from society. People who were righteous, that is, people who complied with the requirements of the purity code, were not supposed to have contact with those who did not. People who were in some way impure were excluded from proper society. They were ostracized. Those whom the culture of the time called decent, honorable people shunned them. It is not an exaggeration to say that they were socially dead. They were excluded and despised. They were dead to society.

It may not be obvious to us, but the woman with the flow of blood in our passage from Mark was ritually impure in this way. Blood was considered unclean. Any contact with it rendered a person unclean. All women were unclean during their menstrual periods. That meant that any women of the right age was unclean for several days a month, but the poor woman in Mark’s story has been unclean for twelve years. She would have been shunned by her family and by everyone who knew of her condition. She was excluded from society. She was socially dead.

That, I think, is the connection between the two stories here. The story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter tells us to look for a similar meaning in the story of the woman with the flow of blood, and we find that meaning in what her medical condition would have meant in those days for her social condition. She was socially dead, metaphorically dead, as dead in her own way as Jairus’ daughter had been. And Jesus healed her. He cured her medical condition. He made her healthy in body, but he did a lot more than that. He brought her back to life, back to life in society, back to life in the company of her family and friends.

We learn, then, from these two stories that God desires life for God’s children, and we learn something about the kind of life that God desires for God’s children. We learn that the life God desires for us is life in community. It is life in human society. It is not mere biological life but life in relationship with our fellow humans. We learn that life excluded from society is not the kind of life God wants for us. And so we learn that when we exclude people from society, when we reject them because of who they are or because of something about them, we deprive them of the life that God wants for them. When we exclude people we frustrate the will of God for God’s people, God’s people being of course all people.

We don’t exclude women during their menstrual periods of course, but that hardly means that these stories have nothing to teach us. They compel us to ask: Who do we exclude? Who do we treat as ritually unclean? Our society in fact treats a great many people that way. They include the homeless, the mentally ill, the foreigner (especially the foreigner we call “illegal,” although how a human being can be illegal escapes me). They include shut ins about whom we so easily forget. The lonely elderly no one visits. The disabled against whom we throw up barrier after barrier. Still in many segments of society they include God’s gay and lesbian children. You can probably think of others. Our stories this morning and their lesson that God’s desire for us is life in society is hardly irrelevant to us because we no longer exclude women on the basis on which the woman with the flow of blood was excluded. We have plenty of other bases of our own on which we exclude people from society.

And here’s the thing: God will have none of it. That’s our lesson for this morning. One important aspect of the abundant life that Jesus came to give all people is life in society. That’s not the only aspect of it to be sure, but it is a vitally important one. In both of these stories people are restored to life. A girl is restored to physical life. A woman is restored to life in her community. We can’t bring the dead back to physical life the way the Gospels say Jesus did, but we can restore people to life in community. We can reach out to those whom society scorns and excludes. We can search our own souls to discover our own prejudices, and we can work to set them aside. That’s the challenge to us this morning. It’s not easy. We all grew up internalizing society’s prejudices without even realizing that we were doing it. It’s not easy, but with God’s grace we can do it. Amen.