Lenten Lament

Midweek Lenten Lament for Illness

Mark 5:25 – 34

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”


Most of us know what I mean when I refer to “the world’s oldest profession.” I’m not sure what the sociology is behind that understanding, but I’ve often suspected that “healer” or “medicine man” or “sage” or “doctor” were a close second on the list of ancient occupations.

The desire for healing from sickness; and for comfort from pain; and for survival from dying is such a natural, instinctive, basic desire for living creatures that humanity, no doubt, has turned to ‘healers’ from the beginning of time for answers and rescue. And, as you know, we still regularly turn to medicine – whether it be a doctor, a nurse, a counselor, a pharmacist, or a drug – for healing, for comfort and even for our very survival.

(Raise your hand if you do or have worked in a hospital, in a doctor’s office, a pharmacy, lab, at Eli Lilly, or anywhere connected to the health care industry in some way? How many here have been to see a doctor of some kind, for any reason, recently?)

So, without a whole lot of work, we can see – or at least imagine – where the woman in this Gospel is coming from. If you need some help with that, consider the list of our prayer concerns we included in tonight’s bulletin. You won’t find “hemorrhaging for 12 years” anywhere on it, but you will find pretty much everything else, it seems – cancer, broken bones, lymphoma, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, transplants, death, and more …

Like the woman in tonight’s Gospel, we’ve either been there ourselves or we’ve loved someone who is or has been … sick for years, I mean; sick and tired of wrong answers; sick and fed up with expensive treatments that may or may not work; sick and out of money, out of energy, out of patience, and out of time, even.

You name it and we need to be healed of it. You name it and it’s in our life or in our family or in our house or in our bodies. You name it and we want it gone – or fixed – or healed.

And the temptation is to read tonight’s Gospel and pray for a miracle – and we have likely done that. The temptation is to search for a quick fix or a magic pill – and maybe we have tried that, too. The temptation is to reach out and try to touch someone or find some thing that will make the sickness and disease just go away.

And that’s why faith healers are a thing. I don’t see them on TV as much as I used to – they were really a thing back in the 80’s and 90’s – these men and women who feed that temptation. And they’re still around. On my way to Vegas a few weeks ago, I saw a church sign advertising a “Miraculous Night of Healing,” sometime in March – like there was a time and a place and a party planned for when your healing would come. (That church wasn’t in Vegas, by the way. It was off of I-74, in Indiana, between here and Cincinnati.)

Anyway, while Jesus played doctor and miracle-worker in some really wonderful ways, as far as the Gospels tell it, he never claimed to be an easy answer or a quick fix or a magic pill for anyone and everyone. Jesus was smart and sensitive enough to know that for every hemorrhage that stopped, for every demon that was quieted, for every crippled person who walked, and for every blind man that regained his vision there were plenty of others left bleeding, screaming, stumbling, and lost in the dark.

And it’s no different today. For every tumor that shrinks, for every surgery that’s successful, for every addiction that’s under control, there are millions of others left suffering and hurting and, literally, dying to be healed.

So, the answer for Jesus wasn’t easy because it wasn’t always, only about abracadabra or hocus pocus or magic of any kind – otherwise, I think he would have healed everyone, all of the time, and made a big show of it like some sort of televangelist. No, the answer for Jesus – and the answer for the bleeding woman tonight – was about faith, really, in a way that this story hit me differently during this season of “Lenten Laments,” than it has in the past.

See, I’ve been wondering if what healed the woman in this Gospel story – as much as whatever happened with her body when she touched Jesus’ cloak – was that her utter desperation, her total vulnerability, her powerful lament that she was at the end of her rope, out of options, entirely at the mercy of whatever grace she could receive from God, in Jesus … that that depth of humble faith … is what healed, not just her broken, bleeding body – but healed her soul and her spirit, too.

And there’s hope in that for me, because isn’t that what we need as much as anything when we’re falling down, sick and suffering, fear-and-trembling kind of scared?

When the pain and suffering and terror are so great… When we’re sick or scared and lonelier than we’ve ever been… When we’re in need of real healing – or when we care for someone who is – we’ll do anything to get it – just like the woman who touched Jesus’ cloak. She fought the crowd. She broke the rules. She forgot about her pride and her safety. She didn’t care about what all those people might have said about her. It was at her moment of greatest despair and lament when she found Jesus. And that’s when she found her healing, too.

And maybe that’s where we’ll find it – some measure of healing – not just in our bodies, but in our minds, our souls, and our spirits, too. Maybe the cancer won’t disappear, or go away forever. Maybe the surgery won’t fix everything. Maybe the addiction will be a constant, ever-present struggle. Maybe the cure won’t come in time, or as soon as we would like. And maybe our desperate lament can only be that that sucks; that the pain of it is unbearable; and that none of it seems fair. And God knows that’s true.

So let’s lament the illness and disease that plague us in so many ways in this life. And let’s let God receive the full measure of our anger, frustration, fear, trembling, and desperation for that – because God can handle the full measure of our anger, frustration, fear, trembling and desperation. And let’s make this lament because it really is an act of faith, after all – like it was for the hemorrhaging woman – that we aren’t in control of this; that we are humbled in the face of whatever afflicts us; but that we are more than our bodies and that God is more than all of it.

Because as unfair as all of our illness and disease can seem, it’s also not fair that we are loved so deeply and that we have the chance to experience and share that love with others. It’s also not fair that we are forgiven so graciously in ways we don’t deserve to be. It’s also not fair that we have been given the gift of faith in and hope for something greater than what our physical bodies can always endure on this side of heaven.

So let’s pray mightily about whatever healing we long for and need, here and now. And let’s expect God to do something good – miraculous, even – with those prayers and our deepest desires.

But let’s let our lament be honest and mighty, too. And let’s allow it to inspire or lead to faith that we will be well and healed … that we will be whole and redeemed … by God’s grace, on the other side of it all, come what may.

Amen

Midweek Lenten Lament for Greed

Matthew 19:16-26

Then someone came to him and said, "Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?" And he said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments." He said to him, "Which ones?" And Jesus said, "You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother; also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself." The young man said to him, "I have kept all these; what do I still lack?" Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, "Then who can be saved?" But Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."


In last week’s edition of “Christian Century” Peter Marty, the magazine’s editor and fellow Lutheran, told about a thing that happened in the late 19th Century, in New York City, that I was stunned to learn about. (Marty, himself, learned about it from a book by Stephen Nissenbaum, called The Battle for Christmas, which tells about the history of Christmas as a holiday of excess in our country and culture.)

Apparently, back in the late 1800’s, well-to-do New Yorkers paid admission to watch the city’s poor people eat.

They staged enormous public dinners at the old Madison Square Garden during the Christmas season, with more than 20,000 people in attendance. They called these events “galas” – (in my mind I see something like a modern-day Met Gala) – that featured galleries and box seating filled with wealthy people, dressed in their finest, ready, willing and eager to watch hungry children eat, like it were some kind of sporting event.

According to an 1899 New York Times article, titled “The Rich Saw Them Feast” children from, quote, “illimitable abodes of poverty and wretchedness,” stood in line to enter the arena for a meal while the wealthy, paying spectators found their seats. Those wealthy, paying spectators were described as “men in high hats, women in costly wraps . . . many who had come in carriages and were gorgeously gowned and wore many diamonds.” And it gets worse.

“As if to keep the rich from mingling too closely with the poor,” Marty explains, “gifts for the children were dangled from ropes and lowered by pulley systems attached to the roof.”

And, lest we think we’ve evolved beyond that sort of primitive, exploitative, obtuse expression of greed, privilege, classism, and humiliation, Peter Marty recalls that hockey game half-time in Sioux Falls, South Dakota – just last December – where a handful of public school teachers got on their hands and knees at center ice to scramble for and grab as many $1 bills as possible from a $5,000 pile of cash. (They’ve been doing this stunt since at least 2018, from what I could tell, so I’m not sure why it just made a stink last year.)

Anyway, whether we’re talking about the meals at Madison Square Garden in the 19th Century or the “Dash for Cash” sort of nonsense just last year, it all shines a bright light on our confused priorities, our misguided views about charity, and the power of greed’s sin in our lives, which is something worth lamenting in these Lenten days, it seems to me.

Greed is the sin that blinds us to what’s most valuable in our lives and in this world. And it’s more than that, too.

Greed makes us imagine all the things and stuff and money that we COULD have, or SHOULD have, or DESERVE to have. Greed is that sinfulness in each of us that compares ourselves with the neighbors or with our friends or with our family members even. Greed is that broken, shallow sinfulness that keeps track of what we don't have; it's that sin that turns wants into needs; it's that incompleteness within us that convinces us that having more will make more of us – either because life will be easier then, or because we'll have succeeded then, or because we'll finally have as much as _____________ (you fill in the blank).

And I'm not just pointing the finger, believe me. I had to look in the mirror more than once as I prepared for this evening. And one thing I see there, more often than I’d like to admit, is the way I keep track of things; how I compare with others; how I rationalize what I deserve or what I could get or what I should be able to have. (more square footage, more retirement savings, more money for college, more whatever …)

But what I try to do – even though it's harder to swallow – is imagine what others might be giving up in order for me to have all of that “more.” Which hits me hard whenever I consider things like those meals at Madison Square Garden, those teachers on their hands and knees at the hockey game, my friends in Haiti, the refugees fleeing Ukraine, or those suffering so mightily in other places, like Yemen, these days.

Because, if we're honest with ourselves – whether it's groceries or gasoline, square footage or our life savings, even – if we have more of whatever it is, it means there are people out there in the world who may not have as much, or even enough of what they need.

Some of you have heard my spiel about Mary Poppins and stewardship before, so I’ll keep it short and spare you the “Spoonful of Sugar” song and dance. But there’s this point in the movie where Mary Poppins sings that song and shows the kids how fun it can be to clean the nursery, to the point that they want to keep cleaning the nursery, even when the job has been done. Mary Poppins tells them, simply, "Come now. Enough is as good as a feast." Which is the lesson and the challenge for me, where the lament of my greed is concerned.

"Enough is as good as a feast." “Enough is as good as a feast.”

In other words, you can only get a room so clean all at one time. Just like you can only wear so many shoes at once. Or eat so much food. Or live in so many rooms. Or drive so many cars. Or whatever.

And while I'm pretty sure Jesus wasn't thinking a thing about Mary Poppins at the time, I do believe this is what he was getting at in tonight’s Gospel. This rich man wants to know what it takes to enter into the Kingdom of God, and Jesus doesn't pull any punches. "If you really want to know, sell your possessions, give the money to the poor and follow me." And he goes on, "It is harder for a rich person to enter into the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle."

It’s not as sweet as Mary Poppins, so before we start rationalizing about how rich we aren't compared to those sitting around us … or about how much less we have than those who live next door … or about how much more we give away than some friends and family we know … let's notice that (even more clearly in Luke’s Gospel) Jesus says to sell all of your possessions – ALL of them – not 10%, not half, not what we might comfortably be able to do without – but ALL. (This is where every Christian I know forgets about their need to take the Bible so literally.)

Now, I happen to believe that grace changes hearts and lives more meaningfully than judgment and shame ever could, which is why I want us to see that Jesus gives us his own holy shot of sugar to help this medicine go down. Jesus says that, for us mortals it is, indeed, impossible. But for God, all things are possible. The power of God's resurrection in Jesus is our spoonful of sugar. The joy of God's forgiveness in spite of ourselves is our encouragement for tomorrow. The promise of God's unconditional love is all we need to make sharing our selves and our stuff – and wanting and needing less of it – part of our way of life in this world.

So, in these days, as we recall the sacrifice of God in Jesus Christ for the sake of creation – and as we lament our greed for such small things in the face of that cosmic kind of sacrifice, generosity, and abundant love – let’s recognize when enough is enough for us.

Let’s lament and be liberated from our greed.

Let’s lament for and with those who have less and let’s make due with less, ourselves, so that they might have enough, for a change.

Let’s lament and learn to give freely, with gratitude and joy, because Jesus promises, when we do, that we'll know more about the Kingdom of God – on this side of heaven, right where we live.

Amen