New Life and the Church (mark 5: 21-43)

Now, there are certain rhetorical tools and poetry Mark uses here when conveying these stories of healing this morning.  We begin by Jesus being introduced into the story of the dying daughter and then get interrupted by the woman who’s been suffering for 12 years and then Jesus goes and resurrects this 12 year old girl.  You notice that?  A woman suffering for 12 years and a girl who’s been alive 12 years? Mark is trying to get us to think metaphorically or symbolically.  Theres a connection here.  There’s a deeper truth here. And Mark will use this rhetorical device throughout the Gospel.  He brackets what he thinks is important.  So you will have a story of blind man gaining his sight, then some things will happen and then you’ll have another blind man being healed.  Or like this morning, one story will start, something will happen that interrupts the story and then the original story will continue.  It’s Marks way of telling us to pay attention because what’s happening in the middle is important.  So, like I said, Mark is saying Hey! Pay attention here!

Sometimes I wonder why the Gospel writers include these stories of miracles.  If it’s just to report what happened… ok… that’s really cool but honestly who really cares anymore?  It’s may be the greatest magic show ever recorded but it’s still just a magic show.  It doesn’t really affect me or change anything.  It’s not like Jesus has brought back to life the people I love like he does here in Mark.  And why this girl and not another?  Kids back then died with even more frequency than they do today.  Did this girl go on to do something amazing?  Why was her life more worth saving than the kid down the street?  I almost want to say who is God to choose who lives and who dies or who’s more worthy of more life, but you know… I guess God is God and if anyone gets to decide these things… it’s God…

But it becomes problematic and irrelevant to me and my life today if we just stop at the literal story. There’s a deeper meaning than just the literal reading.   So, lets look at this:  This woman is bleeding for 12 years.  In the Greek, It’s a specific bleeding only women do.  She’s been menstruating for 12 years which is awful all by itself.  But back then it’s even worse because it made you untouchable.  No one could sit where you’ve sat or touch anything you’ve touched and even worse, you can’t touch anyone and no one can touch you because they’d become unclean. So she would have been homeless and literally untouched for 12 years. Jesus may very well have been the very first person she’s intentionally touched in 12 years. And notice that Jesus doesn’t freak out about becoming unclean.  Instead He responds with concern and compassion and the woman is healed.  Her old life of being homeless and literally untouchable, of being outcast and unlovable, of constant pain and suffering, of being defined by the role of unclean person - that old life has died away a new life emerges. It’s that theme of Restoration that we’ve been talking about as we’ve been moving through Mark.   

And we don’t know what happens to her after this just like we don’t know what happens to this little girl after she’s brought back to life. So it may be conjecture - but I can’t imagine that if you die and then come back to life again - that you’re the same person either.  Everyone I’ve talked to that’s either been that close to death or has died and come back will be the first ones to tell you that they aren’t the same person they were before it.  And maybe Mark connects the story of the little girl being brought back to life here to this woman being healed not just to give us yet another example of Jesus’ power to work miracles, but maybe Mark connects these two stories  to reinforce and drive home the point that the old life is gone and a new life has begun.  That we have to die to our old ways, our old understandings, our old definitions,  and our old perceptions of who we think we are and how we define ourselves in order to embrace the life God truly intends for us and to become who God truly intends us to be.

Amazingly, it’s a very similar situation as to what we find our church in these days.  The old life is gone. The old way of being church is gone.  And something new is beginning.  And I want to talk about that for a moment this morning.  The other night, Session and I sat and talked for a few hours about the situation we find ourselves in as a church.  There’s a universal recognition that things aren’t as they once were. And the brutal truth is that if we look at every study, every survey, and all the research, it’s undeniable that the institutional church, the way its traditionally existed in our world, is dying.  It’s not just true of churches. It’s true of every religious institution no matter the faith.  Even evangelical mega-churches aren’t immune from this trend.  There are some notable exceptions of individual places of worship growing. But they’re notable because they are bucking the trend.

It isn’t that anybody did anything wrong or that the church didn’t do something it was supposed to or we’ve focused on the wrong things or anything like that.  It’s nobody’s fault.  Society has changed.  People’s interests and what lays claim to their heart and their time have shifted.  And things that once worked, no longer do.  And for those of us who care about the church like we do, it’s become a scary and uncertain moment.  I wish I could tell you that I have a magic answer that could fix this or that I was the type of pastor that could just show up and people would start flocking to the church.  But even if I were, that never works out well. Then you have a church built around a single personality and from what I’ve seen, that usually ends in ruin. Either the personality leaves and things fall apart or the personality does some really sketchy and bad things and the church rips apart.

But I wonder about something here.  I wonder if Mark isn’t trying to tell us what the church should be and what the church should focus on in order to be a successful church in some way. One of the main messages or points that Mark makes in this passage and in several other passages, is that when it comes to Jesus, there’s a dramatic shift in how we define worth and in how we measure success.  Society deems this woman untouchable, yet she touches Jesus and he’s not worried about whether or not he’s clean or dirty now.  He worries about whether or not she’s healed.  Jesus has a very distinct and different criteria when it comes to the worth of a person.  There’s nothing special about the people he heals in this morning’s reading.  Old untouchable women don’t have worth. Young girls didn’t mean much back then.  In many cases, they were viewed more as property than people back then.  But not for Jesus.  His standard is different.

In our case, we’re told and tell ourselves that quantity is what makes a successful church. How many people are coming?  What’s the budget look like? Do we have programs people participate in? How do we grow the church? And when people ask the question of church growth, they aren’t asking if or how we’re growing spiritually, growing in our faith, growing as people who follow Jesus, They’re asking about numbers and numbers somehow determine worth and value.  But Jesus seems to be more interested in quality over quantity.

I used to say that at every church I’ve pastored. And yet, after worship the first thing I would do is check the attendance count.  And I would let that count affect my mood every Sunday. If they were up, I was happy.  If they were down, I took it personally.  I’d start looking over sermons and worship trying to figure out what I had to do to change it in order to try to attract more people. And the quality of my research and sermons dipped because I was more concerned with filling pews than I was paying attention to the Gospel.  So that’s a cautionary tale.  We cannot mistake quantity for quality.  Qualitative change is what we need to be looking for; not quantitative change.

The other very big, very important point Mark makes that is often overlooked is where the ministry of Jesus happens.  He doesn’t find a building, open up the doors, and expect people to come to him. He doesn’t wait for people to show up out of curiosity. He’s not interested in what they can do for him in order to grow his ministry. 

He’s not trying to find new and creative ways to bring people to him.  But instead, he’s out on the street. He’s mixing with people where they are.  He’s reaching out and touching people and letting them touch him.  He’s seeing where there’s a need in his community and then he’s trying to meet that need.  He’s going out to the people worried about what they need and not trying to attract them to him by trying to give them what he thinks they may want.

And so the question I’ve been thinking about this week is this: How do we as a church better serve this community?  How do we shift our focus away from ourselves and getting people in the building and instead look at what God may be calling us to do as a church?  What does it look like to meet people’s needs?  How do we become a church that isn’t a place that people go to but how do we become a church that we go out from? How do we shift our focus from coming coming in to a focus of people going out?

Out into the world. Out into our ministry and mission field. Out to where there’s a greater need for the love of Jesus and the Grace of God to be felt.  And how then do we begin to focus our ministry and communal life to be a training ground and a source of rejuvenation and restoration for us to go out into the world as Jesus did to find needs and meet them?  How do we find and help people find their worth in God when they, like the woman in this story, may feel themselves untouchable?

This is where I’m most proud of the leadership of the church. Because they’re dreaming with me.  We’re asking these questions and struggling with the answers together.  Here’s what I know to be true. That just like in these stories, our old lives are dying away. Our old life as a church is fading. And that’s a good thing because it means a new life is emerging.  It’s scary and its different and embracing it means we need to change and shift our focus.

But the reward for embracing this new life and new way of being in the world is extremely high because it means that there are people out there who need to touch Jesus right now in order to be healed and there are people out there right now who need Jesus to speak these words of new life into them.  And I believe that God is calling us to go out and bring Jesus to them - to BE Jesus to them.  Our worth and success isn’t limited by how many people come in here, but rather its by how many people we meet and take the love of Christ to out there by seeing their need and filling it…