Mark 5:21-43

There is tremendous power in this gospel, more power than one sermon can bear. Two females, one is a young girl, poised on the edge of womanhood, full of 12 years of living – yet, she is dying. The other is menopausal, drained of womanhood – full of 12 years of dying, – and yet she is living. Both these women are called "daughters." Both are desperate. And both, worn out and weary, decide to depend upon Jesus. When all else fails, they grab for grace.

Mark is vivid, blunt, graphic, earthy and to the point about human fear and human foibles, so unlike the proper, polite religion many of us were introduced to as children. Kathleen Norris, in her book The Cloister Walk, describes what church was like for her as a child:

I have lately realized that what went wrong for me in my Christian upbringing is centered in the belief that one had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God; the insidious notion that I need be a firm and even cheerful believer before I dare show my face in God’s church. Such a God was of little use to me in my adolescence, and like many women of my generation, I simply stopped going to church when I could no longer be "good," which for girls especially meant not breaking the rules, not giving voice to my anger or  resentment, not complaining.

Norris stayed away from the church and from God for 25 years, until she inherited her grandmother’s house in South Dakota, and rediscovered spiritual community – first in a simple, northern plains Presbyterian church, and then in a Benedictine Monastery, where she lived for a year. The Benedictines read the Psalms three times a day – morning, noon and night. They worked through the entire book of Psalms every 3 or 4 weeks. What Norris discovered in this relentless recitation of scripture was that the Bible is not a very polite book, that the writers of the Psalms took great pleasure in complaining, voicing not only anger and resentment, but also revenge and despair – and that trying to be "good" is a sure way of missing God altogether. She discovered the comforting truth that it is in the "bad" parts of our living – the failures, the disappointments, the resentments, the broken and deformed parts of our spirit that God’s grace can touch us and heal us most.

Psalm 130, for example, could have been a mantra embedded in the arid souls of the seekers we meet in today’s Gospel: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice." For Jairus, a respected and powerful leader in the community, his was the depths of grief, for despite all his connections and influence, he was unable to make his little girl well.

For the woman lurking in the crowd, hers was a different depth – the depth of loneliness, of embarrassment, of fatigue, of disease. For 12 years she had been bleeding, unlovable, sick, disgusted with herself and with her body. In fact, she is so desperate that she breaks the law – as a bleeding woman she touches the crowd – touches the rabbi! – willingly offending others in order to reclaim her own life. Her chronic disease has worn her to the bone, and so with brutal honesty and raw need, she grabs for grace.

Today these powerful healing stories invite each one of us to engage in some serious self-reflection. What are the depths out of which our own souls are crying this day? What is the disease that is draining us, afflicting us, slowly killing us? What are the chronic pains, the persistent pressures, the debilitating dysfunctions that for 12 years or for 20 years or 35 years have kept re-emerging in our lives?

For some of us it may be physical disease which raises daily the specter of death. But for all of us, there is spiritual disease: dreams that are dead, relationships that are chronically broken and bitter, fears and anxiety that so absorb us till we have little room or space to connect with a spirit and a world bigger than ourselves.

According to a recent Harris poll, over 85% of us carry around unhealthy levels of stress, 2/3 of all doctor visits are stress-related; fatigue is one of the top five reasons people are sick. Though faith by definition is rooted in trust, in hunger for wholeness, in joyful dependence upon God’s grace, most of us live unfaithful lives of little faith.

Yes, all too often we distrust God. We imprison ourselves in lonely fortresses of self-sufficiency. We isolate our physical distress from our spiritual distress. We cut ourselves off from healing and healthy relationships. In other words, in the ways that really matter, our faith is a fiction.

But our healing stories for today make it very clear that if we want to be whole, balanced, well, then we must first be honest, honest about what is wrong, honest about what is right, honest about what we can do for ourselves, and honest about when and where we need God. We must be willing to fall on our knees, to beg for help, to offend the crowd, to deliberately admit dependency, to grab for grace and grab for God.

In his oncology practice, Dr. Bernie Siegel interviews people before he accepts them as patients. For him, the state of their mind is just as important as the state of their body. He asks these potential patients four questions:

1) Do you want to live to be 100 years old? (In other words, just how hungry for life are you?)

2) What happened to you the two or three years before you discovered your cancer? (In other words, what life-denying stresses, patterns, habits, fears, relationships are there in your life that may be killing you?)

3) What does your illness mean to you? (Do you see this illness as a failure? Is it unfair? Do you see it as the beginning of death? Or do you see it as an opportunity to stretch and grow – to learn to live in a new way?)

4) Why do you need this illness? (In other words, is there something that this illness does for you: focus attention on you; allow you to control relationships; giving you a way out of facing things about yourself you would rather not face?)

These are brutal questions, but they can uncover the real depth out of which a patient is coming. What Siegel has discovered is that sometimes physical healing is not needed as much as spiritual and emotional healing.

Friends, the purpose of healing in a biblical sense is restoration to wholeness – restoration and peace with oneself, restoration and peace with one’s God, restoration and peace with the community, restoration and peace with the important relationships in one’s life. Physical healing may or may not be a consequence of this greater spiritual healing. But when we decided to ask God for healing, we better be careful about what we ask for. Because God’s healing will knock the life into us, in more ways than one.

The woman in our story this morning ceases to bleed. But Jesus does not stop there. He finds her, names her as "daughter!" gives her back to the community, so that she no longer feels fragmented or alone. She is in relationship.

In raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead, Jesus wows us with an impossible impossibility. The point of the miracle is not resuscitation, but the restored relationship between father and daughter. Healing is about restoration, reconnecting with the Source of Life, which is why the final and most complete healing of all is what happens after death. Even when death is tragic, premature, connected with much suffering, even then, eventually, death can bring spiritual healing.