5th Sunday after Pentecost/Proper 8 B
2 Samuel 1:1,17-27; Ps 130; 2 Cor 8:7-15; Mark 5: 21-43
I think today’s readings are out of order.
To me, the Gospel should be first. I need to hear the promises of Jesus first. To live my life each day I need the promise and the presence of the living Jesus who brings hope and life.
The crowd felt that. Today everyone looks for Jesus, everyone knows that God is doing something extraordinary in and through this man. Later will come abandonment, doubt, and fear. Now there is wild hope and the baring of wounds.
The wildest hope of all is beating death.
No despair is so deep, no hope is so desperate as a parent’s hope when their child is near death. Down into the dust goes that good religious man, pillar of his community, down go his inhibitions and status in this desperate thought—is God so great in this man Jesus that there is hope in the face of death?
As a parent, I am moved to tears that Jesus does not question or wait—he simply goes to the man’s house.
God’s power is abundant and God’s hope is so wild and free that it cannot be contained. All my life I have struggled to do one thing at a time, to stay focused, to not dilute my energy. But God’s energy doesn’t get diluted with all our needs—it expands. On the way to the man’s house a woman waits. She has lived with illness and weakness and shame and despair—remember that her “hemorrhages” kept her ritually unclean. She dares to hope that God’s power is abundant and free to anyone who ask. She reaches out, she touches, she is healed. “It’s your faith,” says Jesus. Believe abundantly, receive abundantly. It is not magic thinking—it’s not “believe hard enough and in the right way and you’ll get what you want.” No, it’s like this—we live in an abundant universe, loved by and filled with an abundant God. Invite, accept, ask, breathe…and we live in that abundance and trust the God who is abundance.
Jesus gets to the house, and he enters and takes the hand of the dead young woman. Touching the dead made you unclean, and remember that this girl was 12 and of marriageable age. Jesus set aside all taboos by taking the hand of that young dead girl alone. His words in Aramaic are tender and intimate, “Talitha cum.” And hope and God’s abundance are born again into the world. There are no barriers to the love of God.
Some people ask, “Are you saved?” or “Have you accepted Jesus Christ?” I do not despise any question that might move someone into new life. But the question that speaks to me is, “Do I wish to live in an abundant universe?”
The answer to that question isn’t easy. We get used to our lives being small, risk-free, and predictable. If we expect the big bad to come down, we’re set for it when it does.
But the abundance of God frees us to live with passion even in the face of death.
Today David lamented over Saul and his son Jonathan. The love between these three broke all sorts of barriers and tradition and politics and reason. David and Jonathan loved each other “like their own souls,” and David’s other loves after Jonathan never seem to work out well. As for Saul, even when he turned to madness and violence David remained his wounded but loving foster-son. I really don’t think David was ever the same after the death of these two men that he loved so much—there was a shadow over his life and his family that emerges over and over. But David had this great gift—to embrace hope and an abundant God. David re-invented his own life and faith many times, and so he is free to mourn because he holds to hope.
When we mourn and lament, are we open to the new thing that God will do in our lives and in those around us? Do we cry because once again the world has proved to be as disappointing as we expected? Or does God hear our every cry and cries with us, and in God’s cry a new creation is born in ways we cannot understand?
Paul says, Christ who was rich became poor for us, so we may become rich.
We feel the pinch of loss and fear these days—downsizing, layoffs, fear, more impoverished people coming to us. The abundance of God is strange news at such times. But the abundance of God is always strange, and Paul asks the community to follow through with their promise to finish the collection for the poor community in Jerusalem. There was a recession in those days too. But finish your generous plan, says Paul, not with what you don’t have, but with what you do have. It will be enough. God will make sure that it is enough.
Do we wish to live in an abundant universe? Do we love and seek an abundant God? Do we think that this church community is a community of abundance? Is the God we worship in many voices an abundant God?
