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Friday, June 26, 2009

Healing touch of the Master

Dear Friends:  In preparation for this week's message, please take a look at Mark 5:21-43; although not all of this is part of the lectionary reading for this week, the reader really needs it all to get the jist of what is going on.
 
The story is a shorter narrative inside a longer narrative.  The shorter narrative concerns a woman who has a long-standing bleeding problem, and she seek out help from Jesus.  But this has another story wrapped around it, namely, the story of Jairus, whose little daughter is deathly ill.  He too needs the healing touch of the Master.
 
Both stories are a study in contrasts.  Jairus is an important and respected figure in the religious community.  The woman is an outcast, poor and without a supportive family structure.  Her bleeding ailment makes her religiously unclean, so she is cut off from all contact with others.  Jairus is a strong leader; he strides right up to Jesus to ask for help.  The woman merely reaches out to touch the hem of His garment, all the while trying to be secret about the whole thing, because she is unclean, and cannot touch another person.
 
But both have a need.  And both have the faith enough to seek Jesus out, and they both receive the healing touch of the Master.  The best way to follow the story line here is to watch the hands of the people involved.  They go from the outstretched, needy, begging hands of Jairus asking for help, to the fearful touch of the woman afraid of getting caught but still needing the Master, to the compassionate hands of Jesus placed upon the woman and then Jairus' daughter.  If we watch the hands we see out own story.  We see that in desperation, or in any situation for that matter, when we reach out to Christ in faith, His compassionate touch is always there to bring healing to our lives.
 
But there's still more to the story.  Come join us on Sunday, and we'll talk about it!

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Miraculous stilling of Sea of Galilee

Dear Friends:

This Sunday we are considering a very famous passage, the miraculous stilling of the Sea of Galilee by Jesus during a violent storm (Mark 4:35-41). The storyline is simple enough. Jesus has just finished teaching the disciples about the meaning of His parables on the Kingdom of God (we talked about this last week). In a nutshell, Jesus said that the Kingdom of God progresses slowly and subtly, powered by God and using the talents and abilities of God's disciples.

Now we are about to see the Kingdom, subtle as it is, break through dramatically into the lives of those disciples. Jesus invites the disciples to embark with him across the Sea of Galilee to the "other side.", i.e. the land of Gad. Gad's reputation was not a good one. It was a place populated by non-Jewish pagans and strange forces. Sure enough, as we continue to read in Mark, Jesus and His disciples do indeed encounter a strange thing in Gad -- a man who was possessed by a Legion of demons! But even this strange land needed Jesus, and so they went.

While on the lake, this tiny boat in which they journeyed was caught in a violent windstorm. The disciples were terrified, and they go to Jesus (who is sleeping through the whole thing!), awaken Him, and ask Him "Do you not care if we perish?" He stills the storm, amazing the disciples, and they wonder "Who is this man, that even wind and sea obey Him?!"

These are key questions. For when we are faced with the storms of life, we often wonder of God, "Do you not care if we perish?" My loved one sick. My marriage is a wreck. My job is threatened with extinction. How often have we thrown these angry words to Heaven, convinced that the evidence indeed shows that God doesn't care if we perish?

But the way we answer the second question determines how we answer the first one. Who is this Man? Do we see Him as being the Lord of Life, who loves us more than we can imagine, and who is always close as our very breathing? If so, then we know He cares what happens to us. This Sunday, we're going to talk at length about some of these matters. I'll see you in church.