Sunday, July 1, 2018

13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (6^th Sunday after Pentecost/Proper 8)

The Revised Common Lectionary passages for the Lord’s Day are:

First Reading: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27, Psalm 130
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Gospel Reading: Mark 5:21-43

The liturgical color for the day is: Green

“If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”  Wow!  What vision!  “It is decision, and it is most certainly vision.

Vision must be a verb.  Verbs are the words that describe actions.  They describe what you do.  Want to see if the vision for your life (or church) matches the way you are living it out, then look at the actions in your days.  What are those actions?   What are the verbs in your living?  Where are the places that there is movement?  Those places more adequately describe the vision in your life (or church).

Ultimately, lived any real vision comes down to seeing the world as a place where we are connected together in a real way.

When, having felt that power had gone out from him, Jesus stopped in the street and he called out the woman who had touched him.  It was in fear and trembling that she came and knelt down before him.

One might wonder if she would have been tempted to run and hide at that point.  Rather than admitting that she had reached out and touched—in that culture she would have been forbidden to do so—one would think it would have been a whole lot easier for her to bolt than own up to her actions.  She does not run or hide.  She comes forward.

When she does come forward—Jesus lifts her up and proclaims, “Woman it is your faith that has made you well.”  See, there is this connection that Jesus wants her, and the crowd, and those of us reading and participating in this story through the centuries to see—we are to see that it is the connection between the woman and God’s realm in her life (call it the Kingdom of God or the presence of God) that is the source of healing.

That woman had been labeled unclean because of her disease.  She could have settled into that label and just been stuck with that as her lot in life.  But we know that she pushed against it.  We know that not only had she spent all she had to seek a cure, but when Jesus comes by she does not let the public label of “unclean” keep her from pushing through the crowd.

Whatever label you/I/we have imposed—whether it is from the world or your own doing—whatever label that is being used to hold you back…  Push through that.  Push through that and realize that the hem of life is there for you to touch.  You are more than any label that you impose or have imposed on you.

In the church and as the church, we have labeled ourselves as “dying,” “shrinking,” and “small getting smaller.”  What if, those labels alone are preventing us from having the vision to reach out to touch the hem of the Christ who has vision yet-to-be fulfilled for the church?  What if we were not afraid to step out, reach out, and touch?