Sunday, July 22, 2012

Faith back home and abroad


This weekend we explored the scriptures through conversation and discussion. Breaking the text in half, two groups dove into each part of this text from Mark 6:1-13.  The following is closing reflections on the two halves of the text.

Mark 6:1-6
He left that place and came to his home town, and his disciples followed him. On the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him.
Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.

He left that place. The place where the hemorrhaging woman took her healing and Jesus blessed her for it.  The place where the dead girl came back to life and Jesus kept it a secret.   The place where we talked about “faithing” that after the question of faith – who then is this??? – comes the action of faith – help me, Jesus!  As though perhaps this One may be the one to ask that to.  
And we saw how that action, that longing sometimes looks like words – my little daughter is dying!, and sometimes it is just reaching out and hoping.

But now he’s in his hometown, among his home people. This is mom and dad’s world. This is brothers and sisters and long memory: mischief and mudpies, first steps, forged friendships, lost teeth and puberty, for the love of God.  So here’s Jesus with his peeps – the place and people that made him - in the nurture, not nature way – and he’s there with his disciples. His followers are seeing him mollycoddled, disregarded and ribbed. (Mom, please! You’re embarrassing me in front of my disciples)! 
We all know that the people who heard your voice change are going to have a hard time taking you seriously if you’re important and official now-  especially when the claim is that you’re from God and everyone knows you come from right down the street.

But even more than amused, when he comes speaking with authority and they see the deeds of power that he does -  they take offense. 
Just who does he think he is? What is he trying to pull?

And he could do no deed of power among them – except lay his hands on a few people and cure them. (which sound like deeds of power to me- and felt like it to the sick people who got cured). But it wouldn’t have mattered what he did.   He could do no deeds of power among them. They knew who he was, and he was one of them.   Those people were probably getting better anyway.  Their illness must have just run its course. It was all in their heads. 
As far as they were concerned- it simply couldn’t be. Period. He was limited by their unbelief.

Does faith allow God to do more in our lives? Very possibly. 
Does faith allow us to see the things God is already doing in our lives? Absolutely. 
Does even stopping long enough to look past what we think we already know, and ask the question of faith – wait, then, who IS this?  open us up to encounter God and be encountered- most definitely. 
Because without faith- without that question bubbling within us, the encounter can’t really happen.  We won’t be open to it, or recognize it even if it does. 
Does it take our faith for God to work in the world? 
For God to meet us, do we have to be willing to be met? 
For us to see God, do we have to be willing for God to look different than we might expect?  Faith is not a closed conclusion. It is an open awareness.  It is a willingness to be encountered by God. 
Can God do deeds of power among us?



Mark 6:6-13
Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, ‘Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.’ So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

When we look at the second pericope – unified chunk – of our scripture, we see the disciples now being sent out, and ironically, doing deeds of great power.  Doing more, it seems, than Jesus himself could do in his hometown.
And, they are receiving hospitality from total strangers. In fact, the disciples don’t come bearing great power to dispense to others. They come in a very powerless form –needing a place to rest, needing coats for the cold, somewhere to use the bathroom, basic food and sustenance, when you get right down to it.    Help me, stranger.

Jesus sends them out needing fellow human beings.  And not just for what they provide, or as a ready audience for their message – this is not a commercial exchange, and people are never merely consumers and providers, individuals, numbers.  They are forced to rely on other people’s compassion and openness. They must allow themselves –and their need- to be seen and allow others to step up to meet it.  What an interesting way to kick off living the ministry of God.  You cannot do this alone.  You are not strong, invincible, independent.

And they need to stay with folks- to form relationships, not just bounce around getting what they can from people.  So not only do they need fellow human beings, they also need to join fellow human beings. And while they are there, God works through their connection – and people receive healing, wholeness and care in multiple ways.

This is faithing again.  As in, you’ve asked the question and continue to do so – you feel comfortable constantly reasking – who is the Jesus who meets me right now? Who calls me out? Who sends me to others?
But instead of “Help me Jesus!”  the question leads you to continue meeting God, and in their case, trusting that through love and generosity of strangers, God will provide. Trusting that through the story you have to share, God will connect with others.  
And the faith encounters you’ve had- where you must see God and be seen, lead you to see others and let them see you – sweaty, dusty, hungry, cranky you- and to be seen yet again by God in the strangers care of you.  It’s a lot easier to give than receive, and receiving keeps us human. It keeps us connected. It keeps us encountering and reencountering God in our lives.  This is what Jesus wants for the disciples.
Who is this Jesus?
The one who comes into this earth as vulnerable and needy as it gets, is raised in the loving care of these that God loves, and who likewise sends the message of God’s love and hope out through people, who must come vulnerable to share their lives with those who can care for them. 

There is great mutuality in this faith thing.  We need each other, God and people. This is a relationship, it wouldn’t do at all for one party to be absent, or be fine without the other. We belong to God, and in Jesus, God belongs to humanity as well.
This is how God arranged it. So we may know the interdependence of life.
Faithing presses us into this relationship.
Faith helps us belong to the love of God as we live out our belonging on earth. 
What does faithing look like for you right now?
How are you being called to press into belonging?


Aurora, Earthquakes and Emotional Paralysis


The shooting in Aurora has brought up feelings of grief, sadness, horror, and wondering how to respond when such terrible things happen to people far away.  This post was written in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster. 
I am reposting because, while we add anger, politicizing about guns, and a single person to blame to the mix, in many respects, this post deals with the same feelings and questions that arise in every distant tragedy.




My sister had to take a break from Facebook. She was feeling so overwhelmed by the situation in Japan, the conflict in Libya, the high school friend whose daughter died, that she was finding herself only half-present with her own kids, only partly engaged in her own life.  
The horror can be paralyzing.  And yet we cannot turn away.  Turning away would feel like abandoning them – not that we are actually WITH them anyway. We’re just watching their nightmare from afar, glued to every news story, every image, every facebook link, drunk on a stomach-churning cocktail of fascination and pity.  What are we to do?

The other day a pastor friend of mine shared with me that on 9/11, while the rest of the world shut down – neighborhood Starbucks closed, nobody outside, everyone glued to their TV screens, grieving, dismayed, afraid - the AA groups at his church still met. People still pulled up to the church building in their cars and filed inside to sit on folding chairs and share their struggle. They still came to offer one another support, to stand together in their common need.  My friend still marveled at what an impact that made on him.

We could use a little of that. 
Yesterday another friend sent an email asking for prayers for an upcoming job interview, but followed her request by immediately saying that her little need was nothing compared to all the suffering in Japan and the struggles in the Middle East, and so please, of course pray for those places first, but if we didn’t mind tacking on a prayer for her too, she’d appreciate it.  And I know she meant well – we all feel, in one way or another, so overwhelmed by the tragedy that we don’t know where we fit. Any needs we have pale in comparison. Anything happening in our neighborhood or home is nothing next to the sadness and horror of losing everything. 
We don’t want their tragedy to touch us-  West Coast pharmacies sell out of iodine pills because our fear-marinated society has people clamoring for protection against some effects of radiation, 5000 impossible miles away. We hold these tragedies at arm’s length with our prayers too, not intentionally, but it’s too much to take in.  We pray for the people in Japan. For Libya. For New Zealand and Egypt and Iraq and Haiti and Tunisia and the Gulf Coast of the United States and the homeless people in our own town. We pray for those people over there.  And we watch them like a movie.  Our lives colored by their suffering, but our sympathy making no impact on their situation whatsoever.  Soon it becomes something we say to placate our discomfort. We pray for them over there. Amen.  And if it goes on for too long, we become numb. We shut it off. They cease to exist and the next movie star scandal edges out their suffering on CNN.

So how do we live faithfully? How do we pray? How do we balance our own lives and needs and celebrations and struggles with what is happening in the world? 

 1- We live our lives. 
We are people grounded in time and space. We are embodied, in flesh and blood and experiences; we live in one place, and exist in one time.  And our lives are a gift. We are given to each other – family, friends, communities, to share life with one another.  We are called to do that faithfully. To be faithful friends, parents, brothers and sisters, faithful members of our communities and responsible for the place we’ve been planted for this time in life.  I cannot save anyone in Japan. Not even if I watch the news every second of every day.  Truth be told, I can’t even save the very people I love most on earth from suffering.  But I can be with them. I can stand by them and share their suffering. I can share joy and life with them, and that is being faithful.  Everywhere in the world right now, Japan included, there are people standing with other people, sharing suffering and joy, and that is the place God is present.  We are called to live faithfully where we are.

I sent some money to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance for Japan. But I also got an email yesterday from the owner of a little shop in our neighborhood that I frequent. The store, which was her dream for years, and then became reality, has been a source of joy and fun for my daughter and me.  It is now in financial trouble and may have to close if they don’t increase their business soon.  My mom loves their necklaces and I plan to go down there tomorrow and buy one for her.  I am here and need to live where I am.

2- We can pray from our reality.  
That God in Jesus Christ came into a specific time and place, embodied in flesh and blood and experiences means something.  And we meet Christ who shared life with us and bore death for us, when we share life and bear death with one another, in our concrete time and place.  We are called to live fully with the people to whom we’ve been given, the people who are given to us.

I cannot do that with people in Japan. I don’t know anyone there. I have never been there.  It might as well be a bad disaster movie, looping in the background of my life, for as much as it impacts my own world.  But my son has a friend in his kindergarten class who is from Japan. His dad is still over there. Out of harm’s way, he tells my son, but in Japan.  He must be afraid. And worried.  And how painful to be separated from your family when such a thing is going on?  Together my son and I can pray for his friend, and his dad, and the people they know and love who are impacted by the tragedy. That’s my human connection, my embodiment, my experience.

If you have no human connection to any of those places, you might find a single story, or a handful of stories, to follow. Something that connects to your own experience, that touches your life. The young mother your own age who lost both of her children, searching now on the Red Cross Lists for news of her own mother. Pray for her for a few weeks.  Or for the guy whose story gripped you because left his home to go help others and returned to find his home and family washed away.  Or the Red Cross team your niece's college roommate is working with. Pick one person or group and pray for them.

Or maybe give yourself 5 minutes a day to pray for these faraway places and people. Name the places of need, or write them down in a list. Hold them up to God. For 5 minutes give yourself over to the sadness and even pleading, that God would do something there. Haiti. Libya. Japan. Darfur. Afghanistan.  For five minutes pray for all the things you would otherwise carry around feeling heavy about. Then set it down. Leave it with God – who is there, with them, as they are bearing this with each other. You are here. Be here, with the ones you’ve been given to.

3 - We can notice beauty and speak hope.
Finally, as followers of Christ, as people with “eschatological imagination,” resurrection faith, hope in the God of eternity who is not bound by time and place, we are called to live from God’s promises and not from our fear. To notice what God is doing in the world and talk about it when we see it. We are called to join and participate in what God is doing in and around us.  
So another thing I can do is notice the stories of hope coming from these tragedies and share them. Against the cacophonic backdrop of incessant minute-by-minute reporting of horror and calamity, I can listen for and repeat the stories where people are sharing each other’s suffering. Stories of hope and solidarity; stories of life out of death and hope from despair.  Stories of beauty and of the presence of God.  For that matter, I can do that wherever I hear them, from whatever circumstances, communities or lives they arise.  I can practice seeing and saying hope.

A friend sent me this poem yesterday:
If you ignore beauty, 
you will soon find
yourself without it.

But if you invest in beauty,
it will remain with you
All the days of your life.
-Frank Lloyd Wright-

This is my stab at a faithful response: Turn off the never-ending news and live your life.  It's not very long. Invest in beauty and point out hope.  Love those around you. Bear their suffering.  Share their joy. Notice the connections - between people and people and people - that reach often into these situations of crisis so far away, and certainly into the ones right nearby. Be gentle with those connections and nurture them, you never know where they might lead.  Pray for the world from your own reality, and live faithfully in the time and place you have been planted.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Anatomy of a Miracle




Have you ever experienced a miracle? 
How do we know if something is a miracle?

Six months wages wouldn’t buy enough for all these people to have even a little, they said. What are five loaves among so many people?

If we really hear this story – which chances are, many of us don’t because if we’ve heard it before we heard it in Sunday school and so instead of listening to it we are mostly just remembering it – but if we really hear this story, it messes with us a little.
Because the most interesting part, the part we might fixate on- or at least I am, is HOW this thing happens.   Did the bread just multiply? Did Jesus keep ripping and ripping and it never got smaller?  Did people decide when it got to them to reach into their own pockets and bags and add to the stash?  How?
But the story doesn’t get into the details of how it happened, that is not important, I guess. You’ll just have to wonder.  Most miracles, it turns out, are that way.

 So when I think about how it happened, I realize I always imagined that Jesus, with holy hands sanitized, tore up the bread and piled it into some nice clean baskets or giant tupperware containers and the disciples politely passed them down the straight, organized rows, (fifty rows of one hundred?), in perfect usher offering synchronization. 
But it sounds instead like Jesus picked up the rolls, and maybe also the small, slimy fish?, ripped them in half with his grubby hands and placed them in the grubby hands of the person sitting closest, who tore off a chunk (or took a bite?) and reached over, handing the rest into the grubby hands of the next person, willy nilly, germs and dirt everywhere, munching away, wiping dirty fingers on tunics and grass, until all were filled. 
And the disciple’s didn’t supervise this mayhem- making sure the bread reached the end of the row, skipping the next row (because it’s heading the opposite direction there) and handing it off down the line, personally responsible for each mouth.  No.
The people passed it to each other in their haphazard sitting groups, clumped in the shade of trees or spread in awkward smatterings of reclining bodies. Reaching out to each other, looking in a stranger’s eyes, here, did you get some? 
What about her?
 Can you hand this to them? No, that guy there, with the kid on his lap. Yeah, them. I don’t think they have any yet.

And this miracle, this being fed one and all from one kids’ lunchbox, they didn’t conjure it or pray for it, they didn’t faith hard enough, think the right thoughts or please God in any particular way. They were not deserving of this miracle in any extraordinary respect, nor did they even ask for it, in fact.  It just happened. Because God decided to do it, and for no other reason, really.  
They were hungry.  Jesus fed them.  That’s it.

And this also wasn’t an individual miracle. Individual people had been miraculously healed in font of them that very week, in fact, that does happen from time to time, miracles for individuals, healing and spectacular  transformations of soul or body, but this wasn’t that.  
This was a healing of the whole.  A healing, in some way, of them all.  The whole crowd shared this food, passing it hand to hand, person to person.  Some may not even have realized they were hungry, and yet they too were fed.

 I came alone today to hear the preacher.
I came with a friend to find the healer and watch him work. 
I’m an observer, just one of the crowd.
But suddenly the focus shifts from the stage to the spectators, and the camera pans onto them, and like Oprah’s audience reaching under their seat for the keys to a new car, now we’re all part of this thing. 
But unlike Oprah’s surprise new car- which feels like a miracle in the moment (and later looks like taxes and paperwork and insurance, and latte spilled on your lap and a fender bender down the road) -this one feels completely ordinary in the moment, not really special at all. 
Real. Earthy. Food. Sweat and grass, and buzzing insects, hot sunshine and animated conversation. 
It feels like life, not shiny or special, no screaming and weeping and jumping up and down and thinking, How did I get SO LUCKY?
In fact, perhaps not even grasping how very lucky you are.
Most miracles feel kind of normal.  
Because in a way, all of life is a miracle.  
After all, the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.

In fact, it was not until they saw the baskets filled with leftovers that these people realized there had been a miracle. 
Miracles look like someone passing you ordinary food, and they taste like crusty bread and salty fish and bubbly laughter, and they smell like human bodies and summer warmth.  They don’t often seem extraordinary in the least, and most often, we miss miracles. 
And if we do happen to recognize miracles, it’s after the leftovers have been all cleaned up.

 It’s later on, when we realize a prayer has been answered: when a phone call from the right person at just the right time made a difference.  When we leave the AA meeting with the one particular story holding us up – propelling us forward. 
When we get the offer to help move, the sharing of garden wealth, the neighbor who brings your kid home from school and gives them a snack when you’re stuck on the other side of town. 
When you’ve made a surprise friend you never thought you’d have, or endured a situation of such suffering as you never thought you’d have the strength to sit in with another, but you did.  It’s when you’ve really listened and heard someone’s soul, or when you’ve been truly, deeply heard.

And if we’re going to recognize the miracle, it’s then, looking back, that we suddenly notice the abundance instead of the scarcity, that we feel peace washing over us, or gratitude or love, wonder and awe at the hope that peeks through the cracks of this world with relentless persistence, and in shock we realize, we ourselves were part of a miracle. That what just happened was nothing short of miraculous.
And in the insight of retrospect, the mundane becomes sacred. 

What are five loaves among so many people?  they ask, so utterly aware of the scarcity.  This kid has something, but what is his something among so many people?  It’s nothing!  One little lunch isn’t going to make a difference to the hungry masses.
What can we possibly do?
What is my dollar bill and friendly greeting to the whole of her homelessness and unemployment?
What are my words to such grief and loss? 
What is my puny internet credit card donation against such catastrophic loss of life, livelihood and home?
What is my wordless hug against the force of such devastating news? 
What difference could what I do possibly make?
And in the world’ scarcity mindset – no real difference. None at all. It’s laughable to even try.  In the world’s mindset miracles don’t happen, and most of us are alone.  So it’s almost mocking the seriousness of the situation to even suggest it, so utterly insignificant is my little contribution.  So pathetic what I have to offer in the big scheme of things. 

But Who is this king of glory? 
This one comes from different mindset than the world, a different reality completely– a way of living and being where gifts multiply and miracles happen.  
This one is operating with different rules altogether, where people – in their most insignificant offering of hope or help, do make a difference. Where lives are changed on small choices. And where all people are connected.  Where miracles happen and we’re part of them, and most of the time we don’t even realize it because they are ordinary, which is also another way to say, so extremely prevalent.  
This one is a God of abundance and not scarcity.  The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.
And they ate their fill.

We’ve been talking lately in church about faith. Not faith as some kind of doubtless belief.  Not a muster yourself kind of certitude. Faith not as the guts to pray for miracles or the audacity to try to convert your neighbor, not even as any kind of conclusion whatsoever.  We’ve been talking about faith as being the moment when you are stirred to ask, “Who is this Jesus? Who is this God who encounters me in this way in this moment?”

Faith doesn’t give you answers – at least not many, but it may make you have to question what you’ve ever known or believed. And faith may open your eyes to something wonderful that you had never before noticed.  It may reveal the miracles around you.

And Faith calls out of us trust, or at least stirs in us a tentative wonder that gently invites trust.  Faith in God can never be about facts or conclusions. 
It is always about the person of God and your person coming into contact in one way or another. 
The response of faith is wonder and gratitude, – even if explanations and understanding are nowhere to be seen.  Maybe especially then. In those times where you might always be left wondering.  How in the world did so much come from what seemed like so little?

Your life is filled with miracles. And you are a part of more miracles than you will ever know.  Because the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.
I dare you to live that way.



Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Faithing






 Idealistically, perhaps, Jeanne and I were imagining that we’d find a way to focus our worship this summer each week on the theme of love. This was to be the Summer of Love. But once we began reading the stories in Mark that the lectionary has lined up for us, we quickly realized, with a little disappointment, that there is another theme emerging in different forms, week after week.
And so instead, we are in the Summer of Faith.

But as we’ve gotten into it, I’ve been kind of amazed about how faith doesn’t really mean exactly what I thought it meant, and that it comes out in people’s lives in all sorts of interesting ways.

Last week, when we watched Jesus still the storm we heard the disciple’s question, Wait, who then is THIS? And we explored the idea that faith might be that point when, whether because of God’s tangible presence or noticeable absence, you are drawn to ask the question, Who is this God?

This week we see two other encounters with Jesus that pull us into the question of faith, Who is this? But also then get led by the question to some kind of faithful action, some kind of faithing.

So we meet some people.  First, Jairus - a man with a name. A man with respect and reputation, pressed suits and polished shoes. A leader in the temple, presumably composed, upright and influential. Jairus approaches Jesus in the midst of this crowd, and of course the crowd parts, he’s a man for whom crowds part – but when he gets to Jesus, everything they’ve known of him crumbles in an instant.

Because this put-together man, this reputable man, falls on his face in the dust before Jesus.  And suddenly, crumpled there, smudged with tears, he is a desperate man, a man full of fear, despairing and pleading. And in front of them all, he begs this Jesus, “My little daughter is dying, dying! Please. Do what it is you do. Come to my house, Put your hands on her and heal her!” 
And they watch, astonished, as he oozes honesty.

And I imagine in that crowd the mood shifts, first embarrassment, then intrigue, and restrained excitement builds as they press in and follow – this man!? This man’s house!  
Have you been inside? No! Have you?
This man’s little daughter- who isn’t really so little, is she? 12, why, almost a woman herself! 
We’re gonna see a heal-ing!
And perhaps their voyeurism trumps his panic and sadness as they scuttle off after Jesus to watch the big show.

But their progress is interrupted.
Jesus stops.
Who touched me? he asks.
Can he be serious? A million people are touching him. 
We’re a huddled mass of arms and feet and bodies and sweat and breathing, and everybody is touching everybody, Jesus, it’s crowded in this crowd!

Who touched my clothes?
But one person knew what he meant.
I did.  I touched your clothes.
And the crowd parts again, and we meet the second person, this woman, on the ground. 
And she tells him the whole truth. All of it.  
The way her life had been, the parts she hid from strangers, humiliation, pain, shame, and the miraculous healing she just now received. That she felt her body healed.
And the bleeding for 12 years -the whole lifetime of Jairus’ daughter -the suffering of this nameless woman, is thrust front and center. And she has been healed.
And the crowd watches astonished, as she oozes honesty.

She did it covertly, secretly, the desperation for healing no less intense, though perhaps after 12 years she could have waited one more day, no? Her need is not as important as this important man’s, is it? But no, she takes her healing, and Jesus touches her and tells her she is healed indeed.  
Indeed.
Who is this Jesus?
The one who stops the crowd on their way to the important man’s house and lifts up the hemorrhaging woman. Who takes her from the shadows to the light, and sends her from there healed of her ailment, but also her dis-ease. 
Daughter, he calls her. As important as this important man’s daughter. Your faith has healed you. Go and be healed.

And that’s one way of faithing. 
Trusting that this one is a healer, even if not necessarily for you. Believing God can do it, but not so sure God will.  She believes but won’t ask. That’s her kind of faith in this moment.

Jairus’ is the opposite.  He asks.  Perhaps he doesn’t believe, but that’s beside the point. Jesus will come if he asks, and Jairus will try anything. For love of his daughter.
 My baby girl, on the threshhold of her life, is about to die.  
So his way of faithing doesn’t give one whit what others will think of him – not the other religious leaders who distrust Jesus, not the crowd who is shocked to see him so pathetic.
His way of faithing is to ask, Help Me Jesus!

But it’s too late! Comes the word, the people rushing to tell him because who can resist being the bearer of bad news.  She’s already dead! Don’t trouble the teacher any more; it’s too late!

 And Jesus turns to him and says, Don’t be afraid. Believe.
Don’t be afraid of what?
Believe what?
It’s over.  My fears have already come true. What could there be left to believe?

Impossibility.  It’s impossible.
Disease a lifetime of doctoring can’t cure.
A lifetime cut short by death. Permanent and Final.
There’s nothing left to do.  Nothing to be done. It’s all over. Don’t bother the teacher any further if there is nothing that can be done.

And the festive mood of the crowd shifts as the reality sinks in.
Oh.
So, while he was caught up with that bleeding nobody woman, this man’s daughter died.

And then Jesus sends them all away. 
And they go. Because there’s nothing left to be done. 
What did they go off thinking, I wonder? What was the take-home lesson coloring sheet that day?  Did the question nag some of them, Who then is this Jesus?

When they arrive at the house, Jesus tells the wailing grievers that this man’s dead daughter is just sleeping. And they laugh at him. They laugh through their tears, because there’s nothing left to do, and crying - they’re already doing. It is so dark and terrible, and inappropriate of him to say. If only it were so.  Sleeping. Don’t we wish, Rabbi.  Don’t we wish.

And then they are sent away too. 
And they go, because there is nothing left to be done. 
And because this isn’t their story. Today isn’t the day of their faithing.

And then it’s just mom and dad, Jesus and his three friends, crammed into her room. Her body laid out.  Stillness. Emptiness.  The very air on their skin feels like too late.

But her he touches too.
And Mark wants you to hear his voice, so, unlike the rest of the gospel written in Greek, Mark uses the words Jesus actually said, in Aramaic, Talitha, Cum. Little girl, get up.
And she opens her eyes and gets up. She stands up and pushes past them and starts walking around.  Because she is alive.  She lives.  And Jesus tells them not to tell. And also to get her some food, because apparently dying and living again leaves one famished.  And also, I suspect, because seeing your daughter alive again after she has died would probably leave you at a loss for how to act.  And she’s really alive, like eating, sleeping, laughing, crying alive, so give your little daughter some food.

And that’s the story.  In all its ambiguous and unsettling glory.  
And we want to get some moral out of it, some way of having faith the right way, but it’s actually not too helpful there. So let’s start with the question that led the father and the woman to Jesus, the question the disciples gasped out after the storm was stilled in front of their eyes, Who then is this Jesus?

He’s the one who hears the father’s cry of faith, Help me!
And Jesus goes with him to heal his daughter
He is the one who feels the unspoken cry of faith the bleeding woman’s grasping hands convey Help Me!
And Jesus heals the bleeding woman without even meaning to
Jesus credits her for faith, and then tells her again that she is healed
He lifts up the woman and restores her story as well as her health
He tells the father of the dead girl not to be afraid, to believe
He sends away the gawkers and leaves the voyeurs unsatisfied and confused
He touches the girl and she comes alive
He tells them to give her some food
He wants them to keep the secret of her death and new life,
but he shares the story of the bleeding woman for all to hear, Why?
Perhaps because the bleeding woman’s healing becoming public makes her one of them, restores her to community.  
But the dead girl who now lives’s healing going public would set her apart, isolate her from community. She would be a freak, an anomaly, a symbol, a marvel.  And Jesus seems to want to heal them completely.
So he is the one who is interested in wholeness, and healing not only of the body but of the person’s personhood, and place within community.

And what is faith then?
After asking who is this Jesus, where does faith lead us? Some kind of action, right? Some kind of trust?
In this story, their faith action is to take some guesses and some risks.
Maybe he’s the one who can heal my kid. I’m going to act on that hope
So Jairus asks.  
And Jesus honors his faith.

And the bleeding woman’s faith? Maybe he can heal me if I only touch his clothes. She has faith, but also not really. She doesn’t’ trust that she can ask. She just takes. And Jesus honors her faith too.

And the daughter? The other one? She is dead, has not a bit of belief or faith or trust or even fear, for that matter. She takes no action and makes no guesses and doesn’t ask, and he heals her anyway.
 And now she too has experienced God.  And we know the question such experiences stir within us, Who then is this Jesus, who brought me from death into life?

The gospel of John talks about faith as trust.  And so it is. But rarely is faith a fully developed, arrived place, a conclusion.  Complete trust.  Sometimes, God-willing, we feel such trust, but rarely.

Faith is the experience, the encountering, the unfolding of trust.  It’s the learning of trust, the developing of the relationship that begins with a question and deepens as it continues to ask in each new situation, each new encounter – who is this one who loves me? Who cares for me? Who is this one who surprises me? Who sees me as I am? Who is this one who shares life with me? Who doesn’t act like I expect, who doesn’t give up on me? Who cares for the least more than the greatest? Who cares for the body as well as the soul, my community as well as my person? 
Who is this?  And the trust deepens, and the faith grows.

Faith looks different on everyone.  And it looks different at different times in our life. 
Sometimes faith begs for help. Unashamed, unabashed pleading.
Sometimes it creeps in and hopes to merely brush against glory, and that will be enough.
Sometimes it’s cold and dead. Beyond asking. Beyond hope.  And Jesus resurrects it.  And tells us to give it some food, for pete’s sake.  Because faith is nothing if not concrete and practical.  It means something real and tangible, faithing does.  Even if it’s whipping up a meal for someone who hasn’t eaten in a while.  Faith is acting on what hope gives you.

Where are you being invited to trust? 
What are your places of pleading?
Where are you afraid to even ask for help? 
Where do you need God to bring life, brand new, life that cannot come from you?

Your faithing starts there. At the place where you have nothing to lose, and you are willing to be met by the God of life. 
Go to that place that oozes honesty, and Jesus will meet you there. 
Amen.

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

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