Mark 5:21-43
The Reverend Paul DeLain Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, June 28, 2009

When I go home for a visit I enter a vast network of relatives and family friends. There are a lot of us! And what I find time and time again is that the vast majority of my family and friends have one thing in common: they aren’t going to Church. The sad thing is that none of them are unbelievers; they believe in God and Jesus. They just don’t believe in the Church. And those who are going to Church are struggling to stay put.

Here are the top two reasons:

First, they find way too much judgment in the Church. They are going there to be fed and supported and what they find are more rules and regulations that disenfranchise them. Life is complicated. Folks are working through all kinds of issues: depression, marriage problems, work problems, problems with intimacy, struggles to understand the world. And what they too often find in Church are answers that seem to simplistic or that they are in trouble with God for some difficult decisions they have had to make in their lives.

Second, they can’t stand the hypocrisy. Jesus Christ calls us to love one another and what they find in Church is a bunch of fussing and bickering. There just too much drama in the institutional Church for most people. They don’t go to Church to fight over decorations, music, and administrative issues they come to find a relationship with God through Christ.

The Catechism teaches that the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. The word on the street is that folks are not finding us at our mission. Today’s generation

is not looking for another social organization to join; they are looking for hope and healing.

The Good News is that we have a two volume manual for mission: The Holy Scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer. When we are engaged in living with and into these guides for life folks will find us about our mission.

There are few Gospel stories that live as metaphors of mission for me. Today’s is one of them.

Jesus has just returned from the “other side”. He was over in the Decapolis which was a large collection of communities which were mixed among Gentile and Jew. While he was over there he healed a possessed man in a Gentile community by throwing the legion of demons into a herd of pigs. Jesus was re-imaging all moral codes of his day to reach out to everyone. He was about restoring all people to unity with God and each other not just the ones who thought, acted and looked like himself.

And now he comes back to the side of his kinfolk. One of the clergy, Jairus, comes to him to save his daughter who is almost dead. As Jesus is on his way a woman who has been hemorrhaging blood for 12 years reaches out to him. She has the kind of faith I find in many believers who don’t come to Church. She knows if she can just get to Jesus and just touch him she can find healing but the disciples try to prevent her. She is unclean. Blood was not to be touched. The Church gets in her way but her faith heals her.

As they continue people keep telling Jairus to give it up; his daughter is already dead. When Jesus gets to the house he tells them, “Why are you all acting like this girl has died; she isn’t dead, she’s sleeping.” And they laughed at him. The world does that to us believers a lot; we do it to ourselves and too often we send that message to the outside world: we laugh at the mission of the Church. We know that it is unreasonable to think that we can all live at peace with each other and with God. We know that you just can’t change some things.

Jesus doesn’t buy that. He goes in and tells the little girl to get up. She rises. And just as Jesus in his resurrection, she doesn’t rise as a ghost, she rises in flesh and blood and has something to eat.

God sent Jesus into the world because he knows that humanity is hemorrhaging with the blood of despair, sick with the disease of disunity and possessed with demons that keep us from loving each other.

Our mission is much like Jesus’ in this Gospel lesson. We are called to go into foreign places and heal; to re-imagine our moral codes as to reach out in love; to keep a hope in eternal life that is so strong that all the things we get caught up in, especially in the institutional Church, become more and more irrelevant. We put the mission first and our desires, customs and sentiments second.

It is hard to do this. It is painful at times. It feels like we are being crucified because we are. We are dying to ourselves and living in Christ.