Sermon - Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
2024 Pentecost 6
Lamentations 3:22-33
2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15
Mark 5:21-43
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always pleasing before you, O Lord, my helper and my redeemer. Amen.
Psalm 121 is the Introit/Psalm for today. It focuses us on the desperation and source of hope that comes through the texts.
I remember the first time I experienced Psalm 121outside of church or devotional reading. I was in the audience watching a play based on the Diary of Anne Frank. There came a moment of stark desperation where several things came to a head. Anne and her family were hiding in the attic of a Christian home during the dark days of Nazi rule in Germany. Anyone deemed Jewish, regardless of their personal belief or that they actually worshiped God, was systematically hunted, forced into ghettos, and when taken to prison camps, annihilated. The Nazi’s created fear and out of fear non-Jewish people cooperated with them.
In the play, there was a climactic moment of great distress. The mother looks up, and quotes the first lines of Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.”
That scene always comes back to me. The Frank family was a praying family before. But, when they are at their wits end and mortal danger is coming with no escape possible, what are they to do? Do they give in to despair, or do they cry out to the Lord our God who is our only true and everlasting hope?
Over the years, my vocation has granted me the distinct privilege of being with people whose resources and choices are exhausted. What faces them, what is consuming them, is too much for them to handle on their own. Together, we cry out to the one who can help. Psalm 121 has been prayed in the midst of grief for loved ones; the horrible acknowledgement that the precious gift of medicine can no longer turn back the ravages of disease and death is imminent; the endgame of addiction when all is lost and the only person who will speak to you is the minister; when a series of financial decisions go the wrong way and they are left with nothing.
Where do we turn in situations like this? God’s Word gives us the vocabulary to use in order to express our desperation. God’s Word points us to the only one who can truly be with us in the depths of our fear and sorrow. The Lord is the source of our hope in this life and the next.
The prophet Jeremiah gives voice to the situation of the people of Jerusalem. He composes and prays five lamenting poems. The walls of Jerusalem are destroyed. The people of Judah are already captured. The land lay in ruins. The northern kingdom was already decimated. Oh, how far, God’s people have fallen since the golden days of King David. All because of pride, idolatry, the dismissal of God’s Word. God warned of a coming punishment. God sent the prophets: Micah, Habbakuk, and Jeremiah, just to name a few. All ignored by the leadership, both political and spiritual.
Now Babylon has won. Jeremiah laments the destruction, the killing, and the fate that awaits all those who are enslaved and forced into the 900 mile march to Babylon to meet an unknown fate.
The destruction of the city and its inhabitants is the result of unrepentant pride, idolatry, wickedness, and selfish living. Jeremiah laments their spiritual and material desperation. He begins the book with, “How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave. She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has not to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies.” Lamentations continues along a similar line. If any of you choose to read all five chapters of Lamentations, I do recommend that you choose a bright, cheerful day to do so.
Our first reading comes from chapter 3. It starts with a personal experience. “I am the man who has seen affliction, under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged me and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago.”
Suffering is personal and it is consuming. Yet, the great gift of God’s Word is that even as he speaks Law or renders a judgment or punishment upon the people, He does not leave them without hope. Buried in the middle of the Book of Lamentations is this beautiful statement of grace and hope. Remember, God speaks through Jeremiah, remember this! “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’ The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.” Remember this always!
So we wait. In our time of trial, we wait, we look to the hills, and we pray. In the Gospel reading, we meet Jairus, a man of prominence with a sick unto death child, and an unnamed woman with an ongoing and untreatable medical condition. They lift their eyes, and they see Jesus. He is the embodiment of the steadfast love of the Lord. The hope and mercy of God walks upon the earth. There he is right there. So they come to Him.
Mark, the man who wrote the Gospel of Mark, is not an eyewitness of the things that he reports on. Scholarship believes that this is the Mark that accompanied Peter and that Mark relays what Peter tells him. This is the one instance in the gospel where two healings are interwoven. Jesus is on the way to heal Jairus’ daughter when he stops to address the woman who was healed by discreetly touching him. The interlaying of the two incidents serves to remind us that Jesus is for everyone, regardless of station in life, regardless of anonymity or notoriety. The gift that is Jesus, the Son of God, is for everyone. And, what is essential to receive the gifts that Jesus brings is faith.
Both Jairus and the unnamed woman approach with faith. They trust that he is the savior and that he can do that which only God can do. When Jesus inquired, “who touched my garments?” the disciples state the obvious. There are people all around him trying to touch him. But, the crowd treats Jesus as if he is a celebrity. They are fascinated by him. He is mysterious, a wonderworker, a person who invokes curiosity. There is a certain entertainment is seeing people being healed as well as the Pharisees being put in their place. So, where Jesus is, there is a crowd. But on that day, there is one person who touches him with faith that he can heal her.
Mark reminds us that there is a world of difference between fascination and faith. Jesus responds to faith. “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Jairus and the unnamed woman lifted up their eyes upon the Lord Jesus and they received the gift that they sought and needed. They were both made whole through the gift of Jesus’ healing.
When we are thrust into times of trial, we lift up our eyes unto the Lord Jesus. We look up to him on the cross for He is our help, He is our Savior. In his sacrificial death on the cross, Jesus comes to heal all those who have faith in him. Every single person born on this planet is born with a sickness of the soul we call original sin. Jesus dies on the cross so that we can approach him with faith seeking his forgiveness. Jesus dies for you. We receive his gift of medicine, the forgiveness of our sins, through faith. Jesus continues to bless us with his gifts of faith, forgiveness, hope, and steadfast love, whenever we hear his Word and receive the sacraments. When we lift up our eyes upon Jesus, we receive his peace and the promise of everlasting life in God’s presence.
The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment