Pentecost 5 – Year B
July 1, 2012
Mark
5:21-43
Faith
– What Kind of Faith
Do
you know that in Turkey, every Imam receives their sermon in the mail, prior to
the weekly worship service? As I was
having one flight then another canceled on my attempts to return from Turkey to
the US, I thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
To have a central authority tell you what you were to say during weekly
prayers. It would remove all the stress
over preparing something (and all the embarrassment over not spending as much
time preparing as you ought.) Gone would
be the competition to be the congregation with the popular preacher. And none of the tension which arises when the
preacher says something which steps on the toes of the congregation’s members –
always with the accusation that said toe stepping avoids the issue of which the
preacher is most blinded.
But
if there was a central structure, providing the text for Sunday sermons, what
would they do with today’s Gospel? I am
not really asking a question; I am pretty sure what they would say. And, what they would say would please most of
us; hardly stepping on any toes at all. (Except
maybe mine.)
This
section of Mark’s gospel is all about “Faith.”
Last week’s calming of the storm at sea was about the lack of faith in
the disciples. Today’s reading lifts up
the faith of the woman with the flow of blood and a leader of the
synagogue. If there was a centrally
prepared sermon, distributed and gleefully read in all of our congregations
would no doubt end with, “See, it is possible to have faith. Now do it!”
Simple
enough. Easy enough. Enough said?
Maybe.
The
only fly in the ointment is the identity of the two characters in these
stories. They aren’t just anyone; they
aren’t just foils for what the writer of the Gospel wants to say about having
faith. With just a few simple phrases
Mark makes it clear that his locus for “faith” is rooted in those who ought not
to be lifted up by those with the power to write a centralized sermon on what
all this means. Mark choses a renegade
leader of the religious community and a woman whose medical condition rendered
her unacceptable in the eyes of the folks who had a reserved pew at the local
house of worship.
Jairus
is described as “one of the leaders of the synagogue.” Remember that Jesus was not welcomed in synagogues. Recall that it was the religious leaders who
arranged for his arrest and took him to Pilot with the insistence that Pilot
crucify Jesus. Whether there had been an
official decree by this time is unknown.
We are only in the fifth chapter.
There probably hasn’t been anything official. But by the time this was written down,
everyone familiar with the story knew that synagogue leaders were heavily
involved in preventing Jesus from raising any more little girls from their
death beds.
Jairus
is the one who comes to Jesus. One who
steps outside the acceptable or accepted circle and invites in the one who
serves God.
The
woman, whose faith “made (her) well,” wasn’t even self-confident enough to face
Jesus. She was so convinced of her un-cleanliness
that she slips up behind him and touches the hem of his robe. She is the one who KNOWS that there is something going on here; she also knows that
those seeking to control what is going on here won’t let her within miles of
the action.
These
stories are about having “faith,” but the writer of the Gospel lifts up an
image of what it means to have faith which challenges those of us who feel
quite at home and comfortable in our religious houses and neatly pressed
Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
I
have preached on this text before. In the
previous sermon I outlined the four differing ways of speaking of “faith.” You have heard all that, so I don’t need to
repeat it. If you don’t remember it, go
to my blog and you will find the 1999 sermon posted there. Today, I only want to review the summary and draw
some conclusions.
We
suffer from thinking of “faith” as a concept interchangeable with “belief.” We have allowed “having faith” to become synonymous
with “believing this or giving assent to that.”
There is such an understanding of what it means to have faith, and I
have no doubt that such an understanding is what would burst forth from any official,
centrally written sermon on this passage.
“Have faith,” is spoken of as “believe this,” primarily meant to
communicate “believe what it is that I am telling you in this sermon.”
But
that is only one understanding of what it means to have faith; only one
possible approach.
It
is an approach which became significantly more important in the 4th
Century. Remember what happened to
Christianity in the 4th Century?
A guy by the name of Constantine became a believer. He made Christianity the official religion of
his Holy Roman Empire. As the official
religion, it was important that everyone believe the “right” thing, so he began
a process of getting folks together to set forth the right thing, then using
those statements of what were the right things to determine who was and who was
not close enough in their understanding to be allowed to think of themselves as
a part of the church of the Holy Roman Empire.
By
the way – two weeks ago – on Sunday – I was in the Church built for the
coronation of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. I am dying to tell you all about it, but that
is a travel-log, not a sermon.
This kind of “faith” is faith
as assensus. It is a faith rooted in
believing the right thing. It happens
primarily in our heads. It is the kind
of faith which is clean and pure and well defined. It is the kind of faith that has the official
stamp of the empire – whether that be the empire of Rome, or the empire known
as the ELCA, or the Southern Baptist Convention, or if even if that empire is
as local as the Congregation in Clemson known as University Lutheran. This kind of faith would have kept Jairus
from ever reaching out to Jesus and it would have ensured that the bleeding
woman would not have touched Jesus.
There
are other ways to speak of faith. And the
one with which I want to leave you is Visio. This way of speaking of faith addresses the
way we see the world. It calls upon us
to see the world, not as we are inclined to see the world, but as God sees the
world.
Jesus
didn’t see Jairus as a member of the band of brothers which would eventually succeed
in having him put to death. Jesus didn’t
see the woman as filthy and dirty. He sees
them differently. And in retelling this
story, the Gospel calls upon us to see differently, too. It calls upon us to have the faith which
allows us to see the world as God sees the world.
How
do we see the world? Does the faith
within us see the world in terms of those who are right and those who are
wrong? Or does our faith encourage us to
see the world as God sees the world?
If
there was some centralized source for the sermons to be read at this morning’s
prayer services – it probably would have been written before the Supreme Court
decisions handed down this week. The official,
universally read sermon would have had to allow for any outcome, so it would
have been totally useless in addressing the fallout associated with the
decisions on Arizona’s immigration laws or the Health Care Reform Act. It probably would have just avoided
mentioning the Court’s actions. And if
you understand the wisdom of avoiding talk about that civil event, why speak of
other civil events – like the 4th of July. What good does it do to talk about universal
ideals of freedom and justice and opportunity unless you are going to speak of
where those cherished and costly defended ideals are lived out in the current context?
If the gathered faithful are incapable of a civil, respectable discussion on
contemporary expressions of the constitution, what makes us think we can talk
about the first issuance of that document?
If it is about being right or wrong, then 5 against 4 is “right” and
gone is a shared struggle to understand what we are to do.
In
a world where faith is a matter of giving assent to the correct things you cannot
risk saying much. You might be
wrong. Wrong wrong, or at least wrong in
the minds of your hearers. So you say
nothing.
When
faith is a matter of the way we look out upon the world, one is free to say, “I
think this might work. It might
not. I am going to act upon my hope and I
invite you to act on yours, too. And,
should one of us come to realize our actions aren’t working, then let’s return
to this place and come up with new ideas, once more. And let’s avoid thinking that we were locked
into camps with that first attempt and that we can’t return to this spot in
order to help each other see the shortcomings of what we have previously
offered as a solution.”
Jairus
knew that he was deep sixing his future when he went to the heretic to plead
for his daughter’s life. The woman with
the hemorrhage understood that she could be stoned to death for ignoring the
purity laws of the synagogue. But they
acted on faith – a faith which said to them, there is another way to see the
world, and I am going to follow Jesus and see the world that way.
Amen.
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