Pentecost 4B, 2009
Mark 5: 21-43
AGAINST THE STREAM, WHILE CONTINUING THE JOURNEY
As you would all know, this is my last sermon as minister in this place.
And who knows, as I move into retirement, it just might be my last!
I am also aware some of you are here this morning because of this event.
Thank you. I am most grateful for your presence.
I have also been told I had better make this sermon a good one!
Well… I have thought long and hard about what I should say.
And having discussed the matter with the ‘Worship-in-the-Round’ folk,
we have decided I should speak on the church’s two favourite subjects: ‘sex’ and ‘alcohol’.
We reckoned they might be two sure-fire winners!
Well… maybe something similar to those issues.
Certainly something equally very human.
oo0oo
“Should I touch him?
The pain of stretching.
Pushing my way through.
Touching.
Touching just his dangling tassel.
No one will know.
No one needs to know…
No one knows what I've been through.
No one knows the shame...” (Loader/web site 2003).
So begins a poetic reflection on today’s gospel story
by Perth new testament scholar, Bill Loader.
A reflection which touches the pain of the story.
A story which touches a woman’s pain of living with loss.
The loss of health.
The loss of respect.
The loss of intimacy.
The loss of social standing and her place in the community.
Throughout many years, or at least, for as long as her money had lasted,
the woman has repeatedly explored every possibility
of obtaining relief from her embarrassing and isolating complaint.
“It is… with the desperation born of this wearisome history, that the woman now clutches at the straw which Jesus’ presence affords”
(Cairns 2004:70).
When we are pushed to our limit, we will do anything
to find relief or help for ourselves, and for those whom we love.
Even if it means breaking social and religious taboos.
Even if it means sailing from Indonesia to Australia in an old, leaky, wooden boat.
oo0oo
The woman with the haemorrhage (permanent menstruation),
a seemingly hopeless situation, knows what it is like
to be pushed to the limits - physically, emotionally, and of her resources.
“Doctors of the body merely aggravated her suffering” (Carroll 2007: 48).
Yet, as I am reminded by the not-so-progressive Melbourne
new testament lecturer, Dorothy Lee:
“She is not a timid character, but extraordinarily courageous. By being present in the crowd and by touching Jesus, she is taking a great risk. She steals her healing because she is not free for it openly...” (Lee 1993: 66).
Pushing her way through the crowd she touches Jesus.
And a power, a wholeness, shaped by a profound
“sensitivity which is finely attuned to the feelings and emotions of the people around him” (Cairns 2004:71)
rather than any supernatural insight, transforms her life.
Her “intuitive trust” (Carroll 2007:49) is acknowledged.
Her dignity and respect are restored.
oo0oo
I am not unmindful that today, this lectionary reading should be about two women:
one 12 years young, perhaps surrounded by a caring family;
one ill, disabled, a living death for 12 years, all alone.
Both marginalised because of their gender.
Not unmindful… also, that I am male. But mindful of the role
many males have had during my 40+ years of ministry.
And the irony of these stories about women and the ‘power of faith’,
compared to last weeks ‘storm’ story, about a
group of male disciples and the ‘power of fear’.
Male disciples who were afraid of themselves.
Who had lost their courage.
Who experienced the storm not as challenge, but as evil threat... (Wink/LookSmart web site 2006).
By contrast the woman in this week’s story, acts courageously.
She claims her health.
Her faith or trust is in the pre-eminence of wellbeing
“over the forces that diminish and detract from life…” (Cairns 2004:71).
oo0oo
Mark the storyteller has shaped this story so as to meet his community’s need.
A need to be empowered by a renewed vision of the ‘realm of God’.
And he uses stories and imagination to do just that.
After a bit of reflection I also want to claim there have been
people and issues, stories and imagination, challenge and wilderness,
which have also embraced and empowered my 40+ years in ministry.
At times the response to new initiatives and change has been warm and positive.
At other times I copped a bollocking as I irritated the presumptions of my critics.
Both in the car park after meetings or a service, and in church magazines
following views expressed.
Both in this congregation and in others.
But on all those occasions I declined to be intimidated by bullying tactics,
emotional blackmail, or the threatened withdrawal of financial support.
To a fault, I have never tolerated fools easily!
Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed it well when he said:
‘Do not be timid and squeamish. All of life is an experiment.
The more experiments you make, the better.’
Or as this (show) 1960’s Argus pop-poster, which used to be on my study wall
in Wendouree, my first parish, says:
Behold the turtle who makes progress only when he sticks his neck out (CParker).
Some of my personal ‘church-type’ experiences have included:
• the establishment within the UCA Assembly of a national office of communications, followed by a National Communications Group;
• being ordered off a bus at gun point, in Suva, while on assignment with the Fijian Council of Churches, when I was caught taking photos during the first army coup;
• fighting bushfires, and later being part of the Uniting Church counselling team, as I was sent into the fire ravaged areas of the Western District of Victoria after Ash Wednesday 1983;
• meeting with young workers in South Korea after they had been attacked with broken bricks by the bosses ‘thugs’, because they were protesting for a fair wage;
• the founding of The Network of Biblical Storytellers, Australia/New Zealand, as well as being a founding member of the Provisional Council of the Wellspring Community: An Australian community inspired by Iona in Scotland;
• the exacting work at Hobart Royal Hospital when, as Senior Uniting Church chaplain, I was part of a larger team supporting victims, survivors, and the accused, of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
While other experiences have seen both Dylis and I involved in:
• establishing playgroups, an infant welfare clinic, and ‘meals on wheels’ as a congregation’s response to growing, community needs;
• grief counselling, and the commencement of a branch of Do-Care for the elderly and shut-ins;
• the planning of Court Support with the Tasmanian Attorney General, for families prior to the proposed trial in the aftermath of Port Arthur; while
• Dylis has made two sets of liturgical banners – in Hobart and Canberra,
as well as my Albs and Aboriginal desert-design mono-stoles.
And the one or two things overseen here in Canberra, including:
• the re-development of this St James property,
• the crafting of the magnificent sanctuary quilt by Margaret Rolfe, and
• the establishment of the important separate but parallel Centre for Progressive Religious Thought,
which has helped organise the progressive or ‘emerging’ religion movement in Australia,
and incidently, put St James “on the map”.
‘Against the stream’ – a phrase from my early theology mentor,
Henry Nelson Wieman, has been a personal motto, as I have sought
to counter the ‘dumbing down’ of religion and biblical literacy.
Hence, to reimagine, reconceive and reconstruct, rather than just restate.
Several people have travelled with me on my theological journeys.
Those whose thought I have encountered in books and web sites.
Especially those deemed by others to be ‘heretics’!
And those whom I have had the privilege of engaging with personally:
Robert Funk, Brandon Scott, Val Webb, Lloyd Geering, Andrew Pratt,
Jack Spong, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Greg Jenks, Gretta Vosper,
Ian Lawton, Fred Plumer, Francis Macnab, and many others.
While much of my energy has been taken up by communication and theology,
a renewed interest in critical biblical scholarship was awakened 20 years ago,
when I encountered the work of the Westar Institute
and its famous (or infamous) Jesus Seminar.
As an Associate colleague has said, the Jesus Seminar’s work
on the ‘historical Jesus’ has been very important because:
(i) it publicly tells a family secret, in a loud voice, in order to encourage
open dialog about the scriptures, and
(ii) it models a collegial rather than an hierarchical way of operating (Schweitzer-Mordecai 2007:66).
And, because neither are the accepted processes of the existing church system,
its actions are a threat (Schweitzer-Mordecai 2007:70) as can be seen and experienced
in nearly every Uniting Church theological college today.
All of you:
• those who are part of this congregation called St James, a rainbow of
Uniting, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, Assembly of God, ‘church alumni’,
Home church, Orthodox; young and older, abled and differently abled, gay and straight;
• those of you who have been part of other congregations and placements and community groups along the way, in Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and the ACT;
• those of you who have joined me in the ‘progressive religion movement’,
especially through the Common Dreams Conference;
• those of you who have regularly visited my web site and been encouraging with your comments… and
• not forgetting those important and loving people called my family,
you have all been part of this personal journey.
I regard myself as extremely fortunate that it was during the late 60s and early 70s
which set the matrix for my theological and ministry formation.
For they were exciting days to be doing theology:
• post ‘death-of-God’ days,
• in the midst of ‘process and empirical theology’ days,
and before the onslaught of conservative orthodoxy
which has shackled the church ever since.
That orthodoxy wants to elevate the place of belief and creeds and
the Basis of Union, to forms of control, policing the ‘boundaries of faith’.
That orthodoxy sees a broad, genuine, and open ‘inclusiveness’, as a threat
to the viability of the church.
That orthodoxy is frightened of honest and serious scholarship, especially
scholarship which is seeking to discover the fragments
of the vision of the sage, we call Jesus.
This fear is often palpable and has made the Uniting Church an unsafe place
for open biblical and theological scholarship, outside its preferred ‘square’.
No wonder church numbers are continuing to shrink
and progressive religion and the ‘church alumni’ are growing!
So the urgent questions facing the church right now are:
• How long can we count on suspended disbelief to shore up our
outworn religious myths? (Hedrick 2004)
• What are the new religious myths we need to be shaping?
Myths are not stories that are not true. Myth-making is about engaging
our imagination. As Matthew Fox writes:
“…myths are stories that are too true and too large for facts alone, for the left hemisphere of the brain alone. A myth is not primarily
about analysis but about seizing imagination” (Fox 2004: 436).
oo0oo
Jesus’ vision or myth of the ‘realm of God’, as we can sense it in the
stories of the bloke we call Mark, and discover in critical
biblical scholarship, warts and all, appears to have been
one of inclusive wholeness.
It restored people’s humanity and life.
It invited people to grasp new opportunities.
It draws people “on to a more authentic humanness” (Kaufman 1993: 308).
The ‘historical’ Jesus rather than the mythical Christ of faith and creed, can
“yet become the Jesus of the future by providing for us the model of that human wisdom which our age so desperately needs” (Geering 2000:145).
So whether your response to Mark’s story be ‘faith’ or ‘fear’
will be in direct relationship to the way you view this sage called Jesus.
The choice is yours to make.
True, the old reality is tenacious. Even with colleagues, and within
committees and councils and fellowship groups in progressive congregations!
So to further the ‘progressive’ challenge, it will need grassroots people
of courage, imagination, and determination to continue the journey.
But too many progressives choose to remain silent, seemingly afraid to use
the word ‘progressive’ to describe their stance.
That leaves them lying low, sitting quietly in their pews in church,
or in meditation groups, or leaving altogether
and joining the ‘church alumni’.
But Rabbi Abraham Heschel, refuses to let institutional religion off the hook.
In a collection of articles honouring his thought, Heschel reflects:
“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.”
And then these some-what telling words:
“Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline; love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless” (Quoted in Fox 2004:426).
And as for me…? Well as this is the last sermon as your minister, perhaps
the words of the Russian writer, Rozanov, will now help shape my new life
of sun, sand and surf on the Central Coast – well, for a while at least:
“All religions will pass, but this will remain. Simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance” (Quoted in Holloway 2001).
I wish you well as together and separately, you continue the journey.
Notes:
Cairns, I. J. 2004. Mark of a non-realist. A contemporary reading of the second gospel. NZ: Masterton. Fraser Books.
Carroll, J. 2007. The existential Jesus. VIC: Carlton North. Scribe Publications.
Fox, M. 2004. One river, many wells. Wisdom springing from global faiths. NY: New York. Tarcher/Penguin Publishing.
Geering, L. 2000. “The legacy of Christianity” in R. W. Funk/Jesus Seminar (ed) The once and future Jesus. CA: Santa Rosa. Polebridge Press.
Hedrick, C. W. 2004. “The ‘good news’ about the historical Jesus” in A. Dewey. (ed) The historical Jesus goes to church. CA: Santa Rosa. Polebridge Press.
Holloway, R. 2001. Doubts and loves. What is left of Christianity. GtB: Edinburgh. Canongate Books.
Kaufman, G. D. 1993. In face of mystery. A constructive theology. MA: Cambridge. Harvard University Press.
Lee, D. A; J Honner. (ed) 1993. Wisdom and demons. Meditations on scripture. VIC: Richmond. David Lovell Books.
Parker, C. “Behold the turtle…”. Argus Communications. ILL: Niles.
Schweitzer-Mordecai, R. 2007. “The Jesus intervention” in B. B. Scott. (ed) Jesus reconsidered. Scholarship in the public eye. CA: Santa Rosa. Polebridge Press.