ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
TRINITY 3, 2010 EVENSONG & BENEDICTION
Sermon preached by the Vicar.
Readings: Genesis 24,1-27; Mark 6.21-end.
Earlier this year, the senior staff of the Two Cities Episcopal Area - that is the Cities of London and Westminster - met at the church of St. Katherine Cree in the City. After our meeting, the Area Dean of the City took us to lunch at the restaurant attached to the Bevis Marks Synagogue. Bevis Mark is the oldest synagogue in London, established after Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews to return to England. They came from the Netherlands and were Sephardi Jews whose forebears had been expelled from Spain after the reconquest of the country from the Moors.
After lunch we were given a guided tour of the synagogue itself. In appearance it is very like many of the churches in the City rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. On the wooden wall panelling there are inscribed the names of synagogue wardens. Our guide pointed out one that was of particular interest: the father of Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli senior never actually served as warden; like many others he was asked to but declined the honour and paid the substantial fine which was the penalty for not accepting. This seems to have been a clever way of boosting synagogue finds: ask people you knew would be willing to pay to avoid the job and its financial and other responsibilities.
Jairus who appears in tonight's passage from Mark is called in Greek and archisynagogus and warden would be an apt translation. He is the equivalent of John and Chris here at All Saints. He would be responsible, as wardens are in the Church of England, for the property. But he does not come to Jesus on synagogue business. He comes as a distraught parent seeking healing for a beloved daughter who is close to death. Despite his social and spiritual standing, he is willing to cast aside all thought of dignity and throws himself at the feet of Jesus begging for him to come and heal his daughter.
Jesus is on the way to do just that when something happens which delays him. Another desperate supplicant comes on the scene. She is from the opposite end of the spiritual and social scale. Her illness which she has been suffering for as long as Jairus' daughter has been alive, is not just physically debilitating and probably a threat to her life as well as having ruined her financially. It also has spiritual consequences based on the purity legislation in the Book of Leviticus. Her bleeding would make her ritually impure for as long as it lasted. This would bar her from participation in the worship of synagogue and temple, but also from contact with others. Physical contact with her would have rendered anyone else impure as well, so that they would need to go through a period of purification. She would be expected to avoid the company of others and they would certainly shun hers.
Like Jairus, she has heard of Jesus and his ministry of healing. In her desperation, she seeks him out too. She cannot approach him directly, so she thinks that if she can touch the hem of his garment, she will be healed and that she can in the crowd without detection. She is taking a considerable risk: if detected she might well have been stone by an outraged mob. It was widely believed that those who had gifts of healing transmitted them by touch, so their garments came to have healing properties.
She succeeds in touching the hem of his robe and feels instantly that she has been healed. She goes unnoticed by the disciples and the crowd, but not by Jesus. He perceives as instantly that power has gone out of him. He stops and turns to seek out the one who has touched him. His disciples, shown by Mark as obtuse, think it is ridiculous to try to find who has touched in Jesus in the kind of crowded Near Eastern street where all sorts of people were jostling against him. But he persists and the woman comes forward to identify herself. In fear and trembling she comes and falls down before him, just as Jairus had, and tells him the whole truth. He says to her "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease." In one sense she has been healed already, as a consequence of her faith. But her physical healing also brings her peace, shalom, wholeness and restoration to society.
Meantime, things have taken a turn for the worse at Jairus's house. Messengers come to tell him the news that his daughter has died. "Why trouble the teacher any further?", they say in a common-sense sort of way. Just as he had known that he had been touched by someone, so now Jesus overhears what they say. He ignores what they say, their conclusion and says to Jairus, "Do not fear, only believe."
They continue to the house. When they get there he allows only that inner trio of disciples who will also be present at the Transfiguration and in Gethsemane, to accompany him and the parents into the house. The mourning has already begun; perhaps being led by professional mourners paid on such occasions to weep and wail. Jesus addresses this scene: "Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping."
They simply laugh at him. They know better! But "sleep" has a double meaning in the New Testament. It can mean ordinary sleep from which we wake, or the sleep from which the faithful dead will also awake. Jesus turns them all out. When peace has been restored, takes the girl by the hand. A natural human gesture, we would think, but more than that here. Those same rules of ritual purity which had blighted the woman's life further , decreed that contact with a dead body also brought with it spiritual impurity. Jesus defies that taboo also. He says simply to the girl, "Talitha cum". Mark records it in Aramaic, the language spoke at the time and then translates it into Greek for his readers who would not understand otherwise. "Little girl", (or "little lamb"), "get up, arise".
Then we have another case of what is known as the Messianic Secret. "He strictly ordered them that no one should know this." We cannot imagine that it was remotely possible to keep such an event secret. What Mark seems to be getting at here is his conviction that these actions of Jesus, his works of healing and the link, cannot be understood for what they truly are, works of God rather than magic, until after the death of resurrection of Jesus.
Mark tells these stories in his Gospel in order to show that Jesus, the risen Jesus as well as the one who walked the roads of Galilee and Judea, is the bringer of healing and life, the restorer of peace and wholeness; the one who brings joy in the place of mourning.
The disciples do not recognise it then, but later they will see that they and all who follow Christ are called to be his agents in transmitting healing, peace and life in the world; to whomever may be in need of it.
Well of course, we are the first who are in need of it. One of the spiritual dangers which besets us is an embarrassment about asking God for things. It is part embarrassment and part spiritual pride. We feel uncomfortable with such desperate people. Can you imagine them turning up at Evensong? Well we should, because Jesus does not seem in the least bit embarrassed by them. We might ask them to make an appointment to come back at another time but Jesus does not seem to mind being interrupted. In fact interruptions play a major role in his ministry.
Now your clergy do try to be efficient and organise our day to make the best use of our time; keeping periods clear for prayer and study; writing sermons and the like. The early morning is a good time because people don't normally ring us up then and we can get a lot done. But we know that however well planned things are, "stuff happens" and we have to drop what we are doing and deal with it. More than that, we have to see it not just as an irritating interruption, but as potentially the opportunity to do something for God. Of course, there are occasions when it is just an irritating interruption, but we don't know until we respond. What is true for the ordained is just as true for lay people as they seek to live out their Christian responsibilities in all sorts of areas of life; work, family, community.
Jesus senses that "power has gone out of him". Anyone involved in pastoral ministry knows that feeling in a sense. Not perhaps as instantly, but there will be a sense of being drained of strength. This may be sheer physical exhaustion: too many long days and not enough sleep or time off. It may be the psychological and spiritual exhaustion that can come with the demands of others.
That is why prayer and communion with God were so important in the life of Jesus. It was not because he wished to flee from people, but because he knew that if he were to help them, then he must be with God.
Again that is true for all Christian ministry. One response to a full diary and endless demands is to give up on prayer; so much wasted time. But if we take our Christian calling seriously, we should find that we need to pray more rather than less. We find too, in my experience, that the more committed and disciplined we are in our prayer life, the more time and energy we have.
When I first came to All Saints, I preached at the Friends Festival which took place at Michaelmas in those days. I spoke of how a church like all Saints, with its reputation for holiness, and indeed something of the reality, inevitably attracted some who were severely disturbed and others who were downright malevolent. Some people were rather shocked that I should say something like that about their beloved church. It was as if I was maligning its reputation. But I had spent most of my ministry in a church with a similar character, so I knew what I was talking about.
As Fr. Gerald told us in his sermon this morning we have had two incidents in the last couple of weeks which illustrate this point: the anonymous vandal who defaced many copies of our Parish Paper to make a political point, but clearly lacked the courage of their convictions, or any willingness to pay for the damage, and the person in the street who launched a vicious verbal assault on Fr. Julian when he was on his way the church last Sunday morning. Those clergy who still wear clerical dress are on the receiving end of a good deal of abuse these days, for reasons I hardly need mention; although it is worth saying that in my experience most people remain well-disposed towards us.
These things take their toll. So it important that we swallow our pride, our pretended self-sufficiency, and throw ourselves at the feet Jesus like Jairus, or just reach out and touch the hem of his robe like the woman with the haemorrhage. It is vital too, that we allow Jesus to clear out the voices of gloom and death, the professional wailers whose counsels of despair simply make matters worse - we need to beware of becoming such ourselves, especially if we are naturally disposed to look on the dark side of things. We are hear to speak words of life not death.
We all need the gift of silence so that we can apprehend the healing presence of Christ.
As Whittier's hymn, inspired by tonight's lesson puts it:
"But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
A present help is he:
And faith has still its Olivet,
And love its Galilee.
The healing of his seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch him in life's throng and press,
And we are whole again."
When the little girl has risen from the bed of death and is walking about, Jesus says, "Give her something to eat." As our blessing with the Holy Sacrament and will remind us at the end of this service, Jesus gives us something to eat. He feeds us in Holy Communion with the bread of eternal life; the bread of his life which we can share now.
People sometimes ask me why I go to church so much: all those masses and communions and offices. My response is that I wouldn't be able to do what I'm called to do without them. That is why when God blesses us at the end of this service, I will bless him in return.