Deuteronomy 15.7-11
Psalm 112
2 Corinthians 8.1-9, 13-15
Mark 5.22-43
A God With Skin On
This season of Pentecost we celebrate the descent of the Spirit, God's very presence here in our world, at once palpable and elusive. But where in the world is he? How do we discern the Spirit? How do we know when and where and how God works? The question creates a dilemma: on the one hand, trying to get precise about where God's Spirit acts and where he doesn't gets pretty weird. I grew up in a denomination whose worship services had no liturgical structure; instead, we sat in silence until the Spirit moved one of the men – he didn’t believe in moving women – to stand up to say a prayer, call for the singing of a hymn, or to read and hold forth on a biblical text. This usually went pretty well, but occasionally two men rose to speak simultaneously. To me, this phenomenon posed the vexing question: which one of them wasn't moved by the Spirit? Which one was about to speak for God, which was just acting on his own recognizance? Where was the wind of the Spirit blowing and who was just a source of hot air? The Spirit wouldn't inspire both to talk at once, would he? When I was a boy I considered this a really interesting question, though my parents just found it annoying and wisely told me to shut up.
Later I lived in a southern city where an old lady owned a valuable piece of property on the edge of a famous fundamentalist university. One day the university’s president, Dr. Bob Jr., came to visit her. He told her that the night before God had spoken to him in a dream and told him that he wanted her to donate her property to the university. But she was unconvinced. She replied, “Well, Dr. Bob, I spoke to the Lord last night and he didn’t say a thing about it!” I confess that it’s hard to take seriously the claims people make about God’s Spirit guiding them in the here and now.
But on the other hand, we risk making our talk about the third person of the Holy Trinity empty, piously saying we believe God is at work here in the real world but never willing to say here he is! I want to look in today's lesson from Mark's gospel for some ideas on how the Spirit moves. For the one thing we know for sure is that Jesus did what he did because that’s how the Spirit led him. He wasn’t equipped with magical powers; everything he did he did because of his faithful obedience to his Father. That means everything Jesus did he did because God’s Spirit was directing him. So it makes sense to look to him as our model of what it means to discern the Spirit.
To set the stage here in Mark, Chapter Five: Jesus has just come from across the lake where he threw the demons out of ‘Legion’ and let them go to the pigs, who promptly ran into the water and drowned. Now Jesus meets Jairus, who pleads with him to heal his daughter, who is almost dead. I think it's important to note that Jesus really doesn’t want to do this – Mark says that Jairus has to beg him repeatedly -- but Jesus finally agrees and sets out toward the sick child. This is of a piece with what’s been happening since the beginning of Mark. Jesus has a plan, and it calls for teaching about the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, but things don’t always work out as he intends. His healings so excite people that soon he is pursued everywhere by crowds short on understanding but eager for miracles. He can hardly get away even to eat or to pray. Jesus’ agenda is to go into the towns, into the synagogues, to teach and to explain the Kingdom but because of the mobs he can’t; he has to hide out in the countryside. When he does come to town there’s that crazy scene where Simon and Andrew’s house is so overrun that some guys cut a hole in the roof to get their paralyzed friend to Jesus. He has the disciples ferry him back and forth across the lake in not very successful attempts to get away. Jesus must be frustrated, harassed and harried by the unruly hordes of frantic, desperate people. Any idea we might have of Jesus being serenely in charge, calmly moving through the steps of a prearranged scenario, with everything going according to plan, falls apart when we pay attention to Mark’s story.
Now here’s this important person, this leader of the synagogue, falling at Jesus’ feet and begging him to perform another healing. This can only further incite the crowds and further impede Jesus’ divine mission to lead Israel to embrace its long-awaited salvation. But Jesus agrees to go, even though it’s against his better judgment. Not for the first time, he lets someone in need get in the way of the plan. I suspect that precisely here is where we should be alert to the Spirit at work, precisely here where our efforts to do God’s business aren’t going too well, where things are getting out of control, where someone needs help but helping doesn’t fit into our larger schemes. There’s no reason to imagine, as so many do, that God’s Spirit can only act when we are spontaneous, and that he can’t be at work by way of our reasoning, our traditions, even our creaking Episcopal institutions. I truly believe he is. Yet God is a God who breaks into our world, his Spirit moving us toward the hurting people God loves, at cross purposes to our agendas, against the grain of our best religious understanding. I submit that when we find ourselves getting pushed in that direction, it’s a good bet that it’s God’s Spirit who is doing the pushing.
On his way to Jairus’ daughter - this is the part the lectionary leaves out -- Jesus is swarmed by a crowd hoping for signs and wonders, just as he feared. In the melee a woman who has been afflicted with a hemorrhage for a dozen years manages to touch his robe and is healed. Keep in mind that according to the Law this unfortunate, bleeding woman was in a permanent state of uncleanness, an outcast. In fact anything and anyone she touched became ritually unclean too, separated from the community of God’s people. But when she touches Jesus something wonderful happens: Jesus is not made unclean; instead, she is healed, made whole, restored to her place in God’s world. This is not of course because Jesus has supernatural powers; it’s because her faith in Jesus is faith that God is at last fulfilling his promise to create a new Israel in which all are made whole. The Spirit draws Jesus into saving contact with this outcast woman; that too, seems to me to be characteristic of how the Spirit moves.
Indeed, the Holy Spirit seems to have a definite attraction for all that’s unclean and cast aside, for whatever’s dismissed as wicked and worthless, dirty and dead. Recall that Jesus has just come from the other side of the lake where he’s been consorting with Gentiles, demons, pigs and the dead (he meets Legion coming out of a graveyard). According to the rules, Jesus is unclean eight ways to Sunday even before the Spirit moves him into that crowd and into the reach of that bleeding woman, even before the Spirit sends him to the dead child.
For she is already dead when Jesus arrives. (In Matthew’s
version she’s dead when Jairus finds Jesus.) His efforts to fool
the people there into thinking she was really just asleep show that doesn’t
want to be raising the dead, that he’s doing it because he’s moved by a
reckless compassion and in that, I think, moved by God’s Spirit.
I imagine Jesus resonating to Jairus’ love for the child, a love that leads
him to humiliate himself. A girl child is, after all, essentially
a piece of property and only an inordinate amount of affection leads him,
a member of the religious establishment, to grovel at Jesus’ feet.
Jesus does not want the pandemonium that will ensue if it becomes known
that he can bring people back from death, but here, faced with human suffering,
with death and loss, he acts not in accord with the sensible plan, but
out of God’s implacable love for us, a love that can’t be contained, not
by law or propriety, not even by Jesus’ own conception of his mission.
This love leads Jesus to touch the dead. He takes the child by the
hand. Here again by rights he is ritually defiled but instead the
flow of uncleanness, of separation from God and from the human community
is reversed; the child returns to life and to the love of her family.
God’s Spirit moves with freedom and audacity; unpredictably yet not
at random. When we’re losing control, when the plan is going off
the rails, when human mess and need gets in the way of what we think we
should be doing, there we should get quiet and listen for the small voice
of God’s Spirit. His work in the world contrasts with the deep grooves
of caution, habit and superstition in which we so often move. There’s
a legend in the Armenian Orthodox Church that many years ago there was
a cat that kept interfering in a church service. One of the monks
decided to tie up the cat during the prayers and then release it afterward.
This became his job. Years later, after the monk died, people forgot
the original reason and went out and looked for a cat to tie up during
prayers. (Yossi Klein Halevi, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden,
p. 177).
Jesus has ascended but has given us his Spirit to show us the true shape of his work in this world. Probably a lot of what we think is that work amounts to tying up the cat. God was in Christ, God was in the flesh, Jesus was led by the Spirit to proclaim the good news, to heal, to make whole, to bring life out of death. Now he has made this work ours. Anne Lamott tells the story of a little girl who was crying in the night. When her mother came to comfort her the girl said she was too afraid of the dark to sleep. “But God’s with you, comforting and protecting you,” the mother said. “But I need someone with skin on, the little girl said” (Blue Shoe, p. 255). All this talk of the Holy Spirit can seem ethereal, having not much to do with this world’s insistent and all too real concerns, with its sorrows and fears, its need for a saving God. But to hear and follow God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus himself, is to be for this world God with skin on, God made real enough to heal and save.
Amen.