Weekly Bible Readings, Sunday 2 July 2000
(Second
Sunday after Trinity, Year B)
Verse from scripture
'Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths;
guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Saviour, and my
hope is in you all day long. Psalm 25:4-5
Lamentations 3:22-33
The LORD's compassions are new every morning; great is your
faithfulness. I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion; therefore I
will wait for him." The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of
the LORD. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young. Let him
sit alone in silence, for the LORD has laid it on him. Let him bury his
face in the dust - there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to one
who would strike him, and let him be filled with disgrace.For men are not
cast off by the LORD for ever. Though he brings grief, he will show
compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly
bring affliction or grief to the children of men.
Mark 5.21-43
When Jesus had crossed over by boat to the other side of
the lake, a large crowd gathered round him while he was by the lake. Then
one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he
fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, "My little daughter
is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed
and live." So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed
around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for
twelve years.
She had suffered a great deal under the care of many
doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew
worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and
touched his cloak, because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes,
I will be healed." Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in
her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realised
that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked,
"Who touched my clothes?" "You see the people crowding
against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, 'Who
touched me?'" But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.
Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his
feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter,
your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."
While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus,
the synagogue ruler. "Your daughter is dead," they said. "Why
bother the teacher any more?" Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the
synagogue ruler, "Don't be afraid; just believe." He did not let
anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James.
When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus
saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and
said to them, "Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not
dead but asleep." But they laughed at him. After he put them all out,
he took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him,
and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her,
"Talitha koum!" (which means, "Little girl, I say to you,
get up!"). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was
twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict
orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her
something to eat.
Collect Prayer
Lord, you have taught us, that all our doings without love
are nothing worth: send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that
most excellent gift of love, the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whoever lives is counted dead before you. Grant this for
your only Son Jesus Christ's sake, who is alive and reigns with you, in
the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Lamentations - ‘Poems of
heartbreak’
Sandwiched between Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the Old Testament of your
Bible you will find Lamentations. It has traditionally been attributed to
the prophet Jeremiah but we do not really know who wrote it. What we do
know is that it was written after 587/596 BC and expresses tremendous
grief at the destruction of Jerusalem. The writer pours out the feelings
of his heart, the people have been vanquished and taken into captivity;
the city has been set on fire and totally destroyed. Reading Lamentations
we can sense the impact of the national disaster of the destruction of
Jerusalem. It is a study in sorrow, poems of heartbreak. As the writer was
looking out over Jerusalem, he saw its desolation and he remembered the
terrible, bloody battle in which Nebuchadnezzar had taken the city and
sacked it, destroying the temple and killing the inhabitants. As we read
through we begin to understand how miserable things became as the writer
speaks from the heart and vents deep emotion. It might be a good idea not
to let the children read it, they might not be able to sleep well at night
if they do! For example take Chapter 4 verses 4-10 - a horrible climax is
reached here when the writer speaks of mothers preparing their own
children as food!
It is written in a very clever way with some of the chapters (1,2, and
4) having 22 verses and beginning each verse with a different consecutive
letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 5 doesn’t have this ‘alphabetic
acrostic’ but it too has 22 verses. Chapter three is interesting in
that it consists of sixty-six verses in triads, or triplets, in which
every verse making up each triad begins with the same letter of the
alphabet, so that there are twenty-two groups of three altogether, one for
each letter of the alphabet. Don’t try too hard to understand this
but it is impressive! Each chapter stresses and develops a particular
aspect of sorrow and there is a view of the utter depths of sorrow, the
desolation of spirit that can come upon the human heart, the sense of
abandonment, of complete loneliness.
So what does Lamentations have to say to us today? Well, this is the
kind of book you might read when sorrow strikes your own heart, and sorrow
comes to all of us at times. Death and disaster can meet us all in
different ways, when a doctor gives us the results of a test we have been
worrying about and advises us of the onset of some dreaded illness. It is
a form of bereavement too when we are confronted by a manager who tells us
that we are not needed anymore at our job and we become yet another
redundant worker. Part of us dies when a partner walks out of a marriage
and leaves us feeling even worse than if they had died, because we have
not even the happy memories to hold onto. We live with a form death when a
friend turns their back upon us or a family member refuses to forgive.
Lamentations does not try to be logical and clever in such times of grief,
it just expresses the pain and heartache. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her
book ‘On death and Dying’ identified five stages connected with
the experience of both grieving and death. These stages of loss and
grieving can be identified in the Book of Lamentations and they help us to
understand the outcry of the writer. Each of the five poems has a
distinctive message usually expressed in the first line
The first poem surveys the ‘lonely city’ Jerusalem in
ruin, that is left without comforter (Stage one Isolation)
The second poem speaks of the destruction by an angry God and a
bitter response 2:18-20. (Stage 2 Anger)
The third poem attempts to provide hope for the destitute, to
get God back on their side, ‘The Lord is good to those who wait for
him, ‘let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord 3:25,
40. (Stage 3 Bargaining)
The fourth poem sinks back into despair, comparing how good
things were with how horrible they have become. It is the only poem in the
book which lacks prayer (Stage 4 Depression).
The fifth poem break with Ross’ pattern, her fifth stage is
acceptance and a gradual coming to terms with our loss. In Lamentations
the writer reaches a final crescendo of complaint, urging God to restore
the relationship and life itself. (5:1, 21) There is no acceptance, only
the desolation of a people abandoned by God.
The poet writing Lamentations has not moved on from his grief and
torment, but of course for us we must. We should draw strength from the
words of loss and suffering expressed in Lamentation, for they reassure us
that it is normal sometimes to feel that life is no longer worth living.
Only as we move through the stages of grief and suffering, at times
painfully, do we discover that this is the pathway to healing. No matter
what we face God intends to bring us good even in the face of suffering
and pain.
Prayers
for Sunday
Almighty God, in
whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge: open our eyes
to your presence, and make us more responsive to your call, that we may
grow in the wisdom and grace you offer us in Christ Jesus our Lord, who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
We acknowledge, O God, the ease with we can be so
overwhelmed by life that your presence becomes difficult to discern.
So many voices bombard our lives that we fail to recognise your
voice amongst them. But when we remember your past dealings with
people, we recover our confidence to trust you in the present and the
future. Your steadfast love resonates through the witness of lives
touched by grace. Love and grace experienced by hearing your word
clearly spoken by Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. We
pray that our lives may be lived in worship which reflects our praise and
thanksgiving for your blessings. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen
Food for thought
"I have a mission... "I am a link in a chain, a bond of
connection between persons. God has not created me for naught... Therefore
I will trust him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. God
does nothing in vain. "He knows what he is about." J. H. Newman
Today is new unlike any other day, for God makes each day different.
Today God's everyday grace falls on my soul like abundant seed, though I
may hardly see it. Today is one of those days Jesus promised to be with
me, a companion on my journey, And my life today, if I trust him, has
consequences unseen. My life has a purpose.
Hymns for this Sunday
(Hymns for Today Church)
- New every morning is the love
- Let us sing to the God of our salvation (Tune : Sing Hosanna)
- I want to walk with Jesus Christ
- Lord of creation to you be all praise (Mission Praise 440)
The answer to the riddle from last week
What is greater than God,
More evil than the devil,
The poor have it,
The rich need it,
And if you eat it, you'll die
Answer - Nothing
Sermon preached by
The Reverend Charles Royden
2 July 2000
Introduction
We had a problem with the Garden of Remembrance last week. As you will
know we have just bought a piece of land from Bedford Borough Council to
extend the Garden of Remembrance at St Mark's. And we arranged to have a
fence erected around it, six feet high and of metal link design. We have
now planted a cedar hedge around it and in five years time it should look
very nice. But! No sooner had the fence gone up than I found half a dozen
young lads inside the new grounds, they had not come through the church
gate and walked all the way round, they had climbed over the new fence. I
was not amused!
As I lay awake that night troubled by this, thinking about whether we
could electrify the fence or put a shark infested moat around it, I
suddenly realised how to stop the unwanted visitors. Anti vandal paint is
wonderful. It is a thick black horrible paint that never dries. It gets on
your clothes and your hands and it is unpleasant to get off. So I bought a
large tin and I went round and painted the top of the fence all along for
the top 3 inches. Low and behold we have had no further visitors! It
doesn't hurt anybody, it's not like the barbed wire which we have been told
by the insurance company that we have to remove from the hedge in case an
intruder hurts themselves (the world really has gone mad). But vandals
will not want to get black paint on the hands because it is dirty, it is
unclean!
What does unclean mean in the Old Testament of the Bible. For
reasons we don't fully understand, the ancient Hebrews felt the same about
a few things. Certain animals, foods, diseases, body fluids, and dead
things made the people say, 'Ugh! Don't touch them!' Such things were
'unclean' or 'impure'. If you touched them you became unclean. If you had
one of the diseases, you became unclean. Anything or anyone that you
touched became unclean. Being unclean was the opposite of being holy.
Being unclean meant that you couldn't come to the holy temple to worship
the holy God. Anything unclean was unfit or unworthy to be in the presence
of the holy God. If you were unclean, you had to go through a rite of
purification or cleansing in order to be welcomed back into society and
into the presence of God.
Now I want to you to imagine that I had this anti-vandal paint on my
hands. If I wanted to shake hands with you when you left church this
morning, how would you feel? You would not want to go near me! In fact you
might go out of the church by another door to avoid me. I would become
isolated and people would say 'Don't touch me!' In the same way in the
Bible it was taught that unclean things and people were estranged from God
and each other. They weren't supposed to touch each other. Uncleanness,
especially the three big ones—leprosy, bodily discharge, or corpse
touching—were about relationships. They put one outside of the
community. Since in priestly thought uncleanness was infectious, a human
being might incur it by contact with any unclean person or thing (Lev.
5:3); but the law regarded three forms of uncleanness as serious enough to
exclude the infected person from society. These were 1. leprosy 2.
uncleanness caused by bodily discharges 3. and impurity resulting from
contact with the dead (Num. 5:2-4). And these rules were enforced with
discipline. A whole religious culture was built up which tried to keep
everything in its place, everything in order, nothing upsetting,
maintaining the old prejudices and exclusive systems.
Explanation
And so in our story today we see a little girl who is dead and a woman
who is like the living dead! They have things in common,
- They are both utterly desperate
- They both come to Jesus as their last and only hope.
When Jesus calls the woman who touched him "daughter," he
established a relationship with one with whom he should not have a
relationship. Her illness made her unclean he should not allow her to
touch him. In some ways their view of unclean things is like our saying, "One
bad apple spoils the whole bunch." Contact with one of these unclean
things made you an unclean person. There is some truth to this. If you
hang around someone with a contagious disease, you are likely to end up
with the same sickness. If you hang around with the wrong group of people,
their bad influence may "spoil" you. There are some good reasons
to stay away from certain people and things. Jesus should have made
himself unclean by the contact with the woman and the little girl, but
instead Jesus mixes everything up. Jesus doesn't become unclean by contact
with the unclean people. They don't bring him down to their level. Jesus'
holiness transforms their uncleanness. The flow of blood is stopped. The
woman is healed. The corpse comes back to life. The young girl gets out of
bed. God participates in a feast with tax collectors and sinners. With
people in situations that others said, "Ugh" to, Jesus has no
ughs!! He has a healing touch. Jesus' holiness transforms the people's
uncleanness. Jesus raises them up to his level. Jesus makes them worthy to
be in the presence of God. Jesus, as the one good, holy apple, can make
all the bad apples become good.
Conclusions
Sometimes our lives may seem full of ughs. We may think that we are
terrible, rotten, unclean people. Jesus doesn't think so. To him, there
are no such things as unclean people, just people who need his healing
touch. Whoever he touches becomes clean and holy and beautiful. The
woman's faith in Jesus' ability to heal her is so great that she is
convinced she need only reach out and touch the hem of his garment in
order to experience his healing power. The story tells us that this is
true. With faith like this in Jesus, even death's grip is broken. Faith in
action Jesus told the woman 'Your faith has saved/healed you' She
certainly believed that if she touched his clothes she would be
saved/healed. But the important thing about this woman was that she did
not 'just' have faith, she had the courage to act on it. She believed it
so strongly that she risked breaking all the ritual and societal rules
about cleanness to follow what she believed to be true. She had a belief
that Jesus would accept her and even though she was afraid and trembling,
she came to him. She told him the whole truth -- thus incriminating
herself. Then as a result of her faith in action, she was accepted as a
daughter. She was praised for her faith.
Verna Dozier in "The Dream of God," writes:
'The important question to ask is not, 'What do you
believe?' but 'What difference does it make that you believe?'
Does the world come nearer to the dream of God because of what you
believe?"
I am guessing now but indulge me.
I am guessing that this woman had been through a certain rough treatment
from a lot of men. Powerful religious men had told her that she was dirty.
Powerful medical men had told her that she had to go through loads of
treatment. I am guessing that when the treatment failed to heal her they
did not think of themselves as failures but rather of her as the failure,
what do you think? The doctor's diagnosis and 12 years of agony should
have reduced the haemorrhaging woman to hopelessness, yet she continued to
have faith in Jesus' ability to heal her. She was willing to transgress
the religious authority, willing to step outside the boundaries of social
behaviour for her faith. This was a strong woman. Despite her appearance,
her gender and her status, this woman surprisingly provides Mark with an
ideal model of faithfulness.
We do not hear enough examples of strong women, society still does not
like strong women. Women are supposed to do as they are told and not
encouraged to be strong and assertive. Job discrimination, sexual
harassment, unequal access to decision making, unequal pay, and simply
the continual social pressures to be polite, accommodating and nurturing,
submerge most women's true voices under a Barbie doll-like veneer of
compliance. Whereas a man who argues his corner is admired as strong and
brave, women are considered bolshy lesbians. They are often punished and
ostracised, both by men and by other women.
Small wonder, then, that many women have great difficulty about
conflict! Women often avoid disagreement in order to preserve
relationship, but often at the expense of their own truth and sometimes
their safety as well. Now I am not saying this to make women feel better
and men feel guilty. It is you as women who need to get out and be
assertive, don't expect a man to do it for you. Women have shrunk from
their responsibilities and they must look again to women like this one in
our story as examples of strength and courage. So it is that the faith of
this woman then becomes the model of faith demanded of the named more
worthy man in society Jairus.
The faith of the woman is demanded of the man. In the face of the
devastating news Jairus' companions bring to him, Jesus counsels in verse
36: "Do not fear, only believe (pisteuein)." Far from being a
bothersome, time-delaying interruption, the story of the haemorrhaging
woman serves as an example of the kind of faith true disciples must
maintain. Jesus has no truck with the social conventions. Although Jairus
is introduced in verse 22 as a significant member of society, his personal
pre-eminence is pushed aside just as his story is pushed right off the
pages by the determination of the nameless, powerless, bleeding woman. Her
long illness, personal struggles, failure to find healing and enforced
poverty are carefully detailed by Mark's text. But all these negatives
only serve to point up her story's positive thrust and focus -- her
tremendous faith in Jesus. Each one of us must seek to copy this woman. We
must have faith in action. Willing to be off side in the rules of the game
of social convention. Willing to transgress if necessary and be pushy.
