No Need to Dress Up

Polk City UMC

July 2, 2000

Mark Haverland

Mark 5:21-43 Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, "If I but touch his clothes, I will be well." Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, 'Who touched me?' " He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease."

Kathleen Norris, in her book The Cloister Walk, describes what church was like for her as a child. She writes:

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 "His" church. Such a God was of little use to me in 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 rules, not giving voice to anger or resentment, and not complaining. ⁽¹⁾

Norris stayed away from the church and from God for twenty-five years--that is until she inherited her grandmother's house in Lemmon, South Dakota and rediscovered spiritual community--first in a simple, northern plains Presbyterian Church--and then in a Benedictine Monastery where she went to live for a year. The Benedictines read the Psalms three times a day--morning, noon, and night. They work through the entire Psalter every three or four 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 all together. 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 the most.

And so it is that a woman approaches Jesus - a woman clearly not "dressed up" enough to be in church with Jesus. We don't know this woman's name. We know nothing of her family circumstance. All we know is that she is a woman whose body and probably spirit are in trouble. She is a person in pain. She is a person who is unclean. She is a person unworthy to be in the crowd and unworthy to touch Jesus. She was a person who was not dressed up enough to be in church.

We also learn that she had "endured much under many physicians." It's only recently that "physicians" were more help than harm in the healing process. But this process is not complete. Patients have always and continue to suffer at the hands of healers who do not know what they are doing. Today we continue to know her frantic pursuit of well-being, spending days in waiting rooms, in emergency rooms. We too have filled out endless insurance forms and waited. We, as she, have been poked at, tested, discussed, humiliated, lost dignity, and still suffered. The surgery was a success. The patient died. This, I understand, is not a joke in some medical circles.

Now she has nothing. Medicine has done all it could for her, and to what end? She is still poor and still sick. She has no hope, no hope it would appear except for Jesus.

At the end of her rope, she makes one last effort to live. She reaches out, she pushes out from the margins to move toward the power of Jesus. Jesus always attracts people from the margins. They seem to sense that he won't tell them to go away.

Can you see her hand moving out to touch Jesus? You know the picture by Michelangelo of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel? There the hand of the almighty God the Father reaches out to touch the listless, lifeless hand of Adam, to give him the spark of life.

Here the action moves in a different direction. Here, the woman reaches out to Jesus. Her lifeless, bloody finger reaches out toward Jesus, toward life.

She had said to herself. "If I can only touch the hem of his garment, I will be well."

This is one of the strongest images of faith in the New Testament - her hand, reaching out from the margins of the crowd to where she had been pushed by her poverty, her pain, her gender, reaching out to touch Jesus, the Lord, the giver of life.

Jesus speaks and we can't tell from the tone of his voice if he is upset with this intrusive woman, or anxious because some of the power has left him, or compassionate toward this hurting person. I think he wants to know who this person with such faith is.

This may be the most important healing moment in the story. This woman who was an unknown, identified only by her bleeding and her pain is now going to be known by her face and her name. Often, I think, what we really want is to be noticed. There's lots of evidence that the relationship between patient and physician has enormous power to heal above and beyond the medicines and procedures. We want the doctor know us and care about us.

The woman steps up and identifies herself - a bold, decisive move. All of her upbringing and her culture told her not to touch Jesus. She has been told to be merely a passive recipient of whatever life there was. But she reached out and seized life for herself. She touched the center of power.

Jesus speaks to her. He recognizes her as a partner, family. He calls her "daughter." Unlike everything else in their world which screamed that she was not dressed well enough to be in church, Jesus places her within the family of God.

As I have mentioned before, my business in health information has recently failed. I think in part this happened because I could not make the case that employers, insurance companies and associations should pay to help their people be empowered. The powers that control our lives don't want us to be empowered. Individual people loved the information that gave them more control over their health and health care choices. Most of the rest of the world makes money on our sickness and our powerlessness. They resent it when we cure ourselves. Those who reached out of the crowd to get information about their illnesses, were like the woman reaching out of an unfriendly crowd who preferred that she stay in her debilitating sickness, or that she accept her dependency on them to be the only source of healing.

Sickness is all about losing control. I notice this every time I visit people in the hospital. They are invariably helpless and dependent in ways that make them uncomfortable. Suddenly we are in the hands, like this woman, of "diverse physicians." We become not a person, but a patient. We are forced to take off our clothes, to wear odd hospital garments. We go through the indignity of having our bodies poked at and prodded. Needles are stuck in us, blood is drawn. We spend hours lying on a Gurney, waiting for the doctor to come and give us a test. People come in and tell us to take this, drink that. We are out of control.

In the story, a woman comes forward, touches Jesus, becomes empowered, and thereby regains control. This is all that matters. She is healed, of course, but the important part of the story is when she gets her new name. Her real healing takes place when Jesus calls her "daughter."

A year ago, when the prospect of losing my business and suffering serious financial loss as a result hit me, I nearly got sick with anxiety. This year, the news hit me again and for real this time when I was in Atlanta at a preaching conference. I was surrounded by faithful people, unaware of my crisis of course, but full of the message that God cares not a whit about how successful we are in the ways the world judges success. God is totally unconcerned with how well dressed we are. God calls us only to struggle through the crowd to touch the hem of Jesus' coat and be welcomed as a son or daughter. In the presence of so many people of such strong faith, the really bad news barely affected me. Touching the hem of Jesus's coat was a far more important task.

When Gary Hart was forced out of the presidential race years ago because of embarrassing photos of him with women in compromising situations, some suggested that he had brought this on himself because of some inner need to fail. Arm chair psychologists around the nation concluded that he sabotaged his own prospects. Bruce Babbitt opined that if Gary Hart had seen Fatal Attraction in time, he would have become president.

I don't know if Gary Hart was self destructive in this way. He denies it vehemently. I do know many of us fail to fight our way through the crowd to find the rescue we need. We accept if not invite defeat rather than make the effort to change.

I am discussing a possible opportunity to work part time at Des Moines University in their public policy department. The dean called me the other day enthusiastic about my resume. "You have done such an enormous variety of things in your life," he told me. "I suppose so," I responded. "But I have always thought moving from one thing to another so often and so many times kept me from getting really good or at least successful at anything." I secretly fear that my need to move from one place to another every few years reflects my fears about actually succeeding at anything. I can dream wonderful dreams. But I find it excruciating to put in the dreary effort necessary to accomplish anything. When people give me good advice about difficult changes I need to make, I have to resist the temptation to think it too much work, too much trouble, too difficult to do what could lead to success. My pastoral work tells me I am not alone in this.

No doubt someone said to our heroine, "Hey, Jesus is coming. Maybe you can get close enough to get healed." And she didn't say, "Oh, that's way too much work," or "I just can't bring myself to do that, it'd be too embarrassing." She was willing to fight her way through the crowd to get healed.

In today's gospel, a woman moves from the margins where her sickness has placed her toward the center, toward Jesus. Interestingly, Jesus is the one who sees people on the margins, who calls them forth to him, blesses them, gives them an identity and a place. In the story, a woman come forward, touches Jesus, becomes empowered, and thereby regains control of her life and become the person God wants her to be.

1. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, pp 90-91.