Beggars and Choosers
Some fragmented thoughts on Mark 5, a desperate dad, a bleeding woman, everyday miracles, and wonderful signs
Tuesday, July 2
Grand Rapids, Mich.
This past Sunday, I was the guest preacher at Westminster Presbyterian Church here in Grand Rapids. It’s a lovely congregation. I’ve preached there before, though this was my first visit with them since being ordained.
As the associate pastor, Jen Porter, finished up the announcements, she invited me up to the front, which I knew she would do, and asked the congregation to join her in celebrating my ordination, which I didn’t know she would do. I loathe the spotlight. But the congregation’s applause was so warm, their encouragement so deeply moving. As I stood there, I wondered: How did it come to this? When so many people I know and respect have left the Church, why am I still part of this odd institution—and now even ordained to a particular role in it?
While I’d like simply to say that it’s a mix of stubbornness and divine mystery, that wouldn’t be completely honest. A big part of it is that I actually don’t think much of humanity’s ability to be our best selves without some outside help. We will make mistakes. We will behave badly. We will hurt one another. And I’d rather we did so in a context that nudges us beyond ourselves, points us toward God, and promises redemption. Better together… I guess?
My friend Eliza Griswold, a brilliant, Pulitzer-winning reporter, has a book coming out in August called Circle of Hope. It’s about a Philadelphia church of the same name, and an edited excerpt of the book was just published in The New Yorker a couple of days ago. You can read that piece here. (Full disclosure: I was part of a team that provided feedback to Eliza as she was writing.)
In the excerpt, Eliza mentions the passage that I preached on, that famous healing of a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years. “Go in peace,” Jesus says to the woman, a benediction that Eliza confesses she hadn’t really ever contemplated, despite growing up as the child of an Episcopal priest. As she spends time at the church in Philadelphia, she writes, “I began to understand that this command, which I’d mistaken for a ceremonial gesture, carried a responsibility.”
Mutual responsibility is a noble goal and a perennial challenge. A major problem, both in the church that Eliza profiles as well as the Church writ large, is a lack of shared understanding about what that responsibility looks like in practice. We will make mistakes. We will behave badly. We will hurt one another. What then?
“We confess that we have not lived as you have called us to live—as your people, as people of courage, as people of love,” the congregation prayed together on Sunday. “Stir us out of our complacency. Trouble our hearts in the ways they need to be troubled. Remind us how to be peacemakers and hopemongers—and even just loving neighbors and good friends.”
We will make mistakes. We will behave badly. We will hurt one another. That is the human condition. But this is the divine hope—and a reminder of why I’m still in church: Together, we confess our sins, and we turn our faces once again toward love. Together, we then try again.
With gratitude and in hope,
Jeff
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A sermon preached at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, on Sunday, June 30th, 2024, on Psalm 30 and Mark 5:21-43. If you prefer to watch or listen, the sermon begins at about minute 30 in this video of the worship service.
God is here.
God is here in the midst of the messy humanity of the stacked stories in today’s Gospel reading. And amidst the clamoring crowds, you can hear the echoes of the ancient psalmist: “Hear me, O Lord! O Lord, be my helper!”
God is here in the midst of our complicated reality. Perhaps we’re politely sat in the pews, none of the pushing and the shoving and the invasion of personal space that would have marked the scene two millennia ago. But I have no doubt that some of the sentiments are much the same—that some of you, like the psalmist, have cried to God for help, and that some of you, like the psalmist, have felt that God might be hiding God’s face. “I was dismayed,” the psalmist says. Relatable.
God is here in our text, in the person of Jesus, particularly with a beggar named Jairus and a chooser who doesn’t even get the dignity of a name.
I call Jairus a beggar because the text does. Mark names him as a leader of his faith community, but what do such titles and responsibilities matter in a moment like this one? What’s bearing down on Jairus’s mind, what’s weighing on his heart, is another title, another responsibility: Father. And this man, this distraught dad, falls at the feet of Jesus, the text tells us, and begs him repeatedly: Come. Come with me. Come with me and with your hands, pull my little girl back from the brink of death.
I call the nameless woman a chooser because she boldly makes a series of unusual and countercultural choices. Because she has been bleeding—and not just for days or for months but for twelve long years—she is ritually unclean, she isn’t even allowed to approach the temple, and anyone and anything she touches will also be rendered unclean. The text identifies her to us purely by what might be the worst thing ever to have happened to her. She has no place in polite society, and still, she chooses. She chooses to wade into the midst of this crowd. She chooses to push her way through to Jesus. She chooses to reach out a desperate hand, merely to touch the cloak of this holy man.
God is here with a beggar named Jairus and a chooser who doesn’t even get the dignity of a name. And not only is God here; God in the person of Jesus listens to Jairus and goes with him, and God in the person of Jesus feels this connection with the woman and gives her an honorific: Daughter, he calls her.
God is here in the midst of this wild, almost unbelievable pair of stories. These are stories about ailing bodies and human blood, about uncleanness and impurity and suffering. They both also happen to be about men seeking wholeness for those whom they call “Daughter.” Do you notice that neat little parallel? Do you see the tender love, care for another, shameless vulnerability?
I suppose I could just leave it at that—and this would be a nice, short sermon: God is here, in the empathetic action of Jesus the healer, who knows and sees and comes alongside, who embodies mercy and radiates grace and offers salvation like no other, who is willing to take on not just uncleanness and impurity but also exclusion and isolation himself for the sake of others. I suppose I could just leave it at that, because that seems like good news.
Here’s a challenge, though: The beggar and the chooser and the beggar’s daughter are the identified beneficiaries of healing in this episode. What about everyone else? No doubt there were others in the crowd who wondered, Well, what about me? No doubt there are some of you who might join them in echoing the psalmist, who felt at one point as if God were hiding God’s face. As the poem goes: “I was dismayed.” So where is the good news for those of us who are still dismayed?
Mark 5 is actually a series of three miracles and comes in the stunning wake of a fourth—and I want to take us back to the beginning of this series so that we can see the fuller context, because I think this might matter.
At the end of chapter 4, Mark brings us out onto the waters, where he tells us that a windstorm has stirred huge swells, both on the lake and in the hearts of the frightened disciples. They wake Jesus, who has been annoyingly napping. “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” they say. And in response, Jesus slows the winds and tells the waters to be still and he says to his friends, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
Once they’re back on dry land, I think Jesus doesn’t stop answering the disciples’ question, except that he keeps broadening the scope of his embodied reply: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
Because the next person they encounter might as well be dead, at least from a societal standpoint. He’s a demon-possessed man, so beset by troubles of the mind and of the spirit that they also become problems of the body. His neighbors have shackled him, and somehow he manages to break free even of those chains. Jesus sees him, and he loves him, and he liberates him from all that has colonized his spirit, and he says: “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you.”
And then Jesus and the disciples go back to the other side of the lake, and once again, I think Jesus keeps answering that question: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Except he keeps redefining who gets included in the “we.”
Because right there on the shore, amidst the gathered crowds, there’s Jairus, whose daughter is dying. And as Jesus heads toward Jairus’s house, the hemorrhaging woman pushes her way through to touch Jesus’s cloak. And she is healed, and then Jairus’s daughter is too. “Go in peace,” he says to one. “Give her something to eat,” he says of the other.
And in this remarkable run of stories, Jesus answers the disciples’ question again and again. “Do you not care that we are perishing?” they said.
In stilling the winds, Jesus shows that he cares about their fear. In meeting the demoniac where he is, he demonstrates that he understands what affects our spirits. In hearing Jairus’s plea and in honoring the woman’s tug on the edge of his cloak, he acknowledges a parent’s love, an ailing woman’s long-suffering, and indeed the woes that can afflict the human body.
In all these acts, in all these things, and I cannot emphasize this enough—he returns each person to belonging, resurrecting them from the death of isolation and even from the isolation of death and delivering them back into community. He takes away fear, he removes all that has separated a man from home and neighbor, he obliterates the uncleanness that has marked a woman out as “other,” and he even goes out onto that precipice between this life and the abyss of death to pull a little girl back into the land of the living. In every single instance, he brings people back into community, restoring what has been broken, making new what has been frayed, and saying, “Yes, of course I care. And yes, there is still hope.”
Taken together, this is a stunning series of holistic miracles, a concerto of goodness in four movements, declaring the glory and the power of a God who creates, a God who knows, a God who sees, a God who hears, a God who does not ignore the voices of his friends, a God whose love outshouts the demons, a God who listens for the cry of the beggar, a God who honors the courageous chooser—a God who pays attention to body and mind, soul and spirit, community and belonging, and does not wish for a single beloved to be dismayed.
“O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me,” the psalmist sang. “You have turned my mourning into dancing, you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.”
Let me return to that tricky challenge that I named earlier, from a slightly different angle: Most of us couldn’t count ourselves among Jesus’s close friends in the boat. Most of us are not the demoniac who was healed. Most of us have not been Jairus or his daughter. Most of us are not the formerly hemorrhaging woman who finally finds her liberation. If we’re like anyone in these stories, it’s probably the clamoring crowds or maybe even a bystander who’s just observing the commotion. You might still feel as if your voice has been lost in the din—and maybe you don’t even dare raise it, given how much else is going on in the world. You might barely even be able to whisper, in the faintest echo of the disciples’ words, “Teacher, do you not care that I am perishing?”
What then? Where is the good news then?
The good news is here, because God is here.
I wonder whether, in our tendency to focus on the end result of Jesus’s action, we overlook something that is also important: Jesus’s presence. We might not have the power to orchestrate supernatural miracles, but we do have the ability to emulate the ordinary ones. The word “miracle” comes from the Latin word mirus, which means “wonderful.” And semeia, the Biblical Greek word often translated “miracles,” can also mean “signs.” A miracle is a wonderful sign.
In these stories, there weren’t just three wonderful signs. There were many: Jesus saw, Jesus listened, Jesus exhorted, Jesus accompanied, Jesus asked questions, Jesus eased fear, Jesus paid attention, Jesus bore witness, Jesus acknowledged a woman’s pain, Jesus endured others’ mocking laughter, Jesus held an ailing girl’s hand, Jesus recognized that a girl might be hungry.
And there’s some good news: We can do these things. You, the members of Christ’s body, can do these things. We are in fact called to do these things—these everyday miracles, these wonderful signs.
It is an everyday miracle when a friend knocks on your door with an unexpected bouquet of flowers she grew.
It is a wonderful sign when someone invites you for a much-needed night out at a show.
It is an everyday miracle when a stranger recognizes your grief and says, with open heart, “I’m so sorry.”
It is a wonderful sign when a loved one meets you in your fear and lends you a shoulder, so that you don’t feel so alone.
It is an everyday miracle when a pair of ready hands comes alongside to help carry some of that heavy burden.
It is a wonderful sign when another person bears witness to a success or a triumph and says with no reservation, “Yes!”
It is an everyday miracle when a listener receives your story of angst or hardship and doesn’t rush to fill the silence afterward with platitudes, instead making space for quiet solidarity.
It is a wonderful sign when those who have extra food and drink make a plate and fill a cup for someone who has none.
It is an everyday miracle when someone at coffee hour summons the resolve to grit her teeth and keep that conversation going, knowing that the other person just needs to be heard.
It is a wonderful sign when a text message pops up to say, “I was just thinking of you.”
It is an everyday miracle to pay attention to the butterflies fluttering around the milkweed and the bees that are pollinating the flourishing tomatoes.
It is a wonderful sign to listen to the psalms of praise that the birds sing.
It is an everyday miracle to fend off complacency in a jaded world.
It is a wonderful sign to remain warmhearted and to show vulnerability in a world that can be so cold and hard.
It is an everyday miracle to get up on a Sunday morning and be in the midst of this crowd that clamors for good news.
It is a wonderful sign that this congregation has been gathered around Jesus for one hundred and sixty-three years.
We can do these things. You, the members of Christ’s body, can do these things. We are in fact called to do these things—these everyday miracles, these wonderful signs.
We might crave the whiz-bang spectacle and those wow moments, but tucked in their midst are everyday miracles and wonderful signs that remind us of Jesus’s posture as depicted in Mark 5: Jesus who was attentive to longing, Jesus who inclined himself toward aching humanity, Jesus who gave divine love a sympathetic face and hands of healing and feet that accompanied the troubled, Jesus who blessed the beggar and the chooser.
God was there, and God is still here.
“Sing praises to the Lord, O you God’s faithful ones,” the psalmist sang, “and give thanks to God’s holy name.”
Amen.
“It’s a wonderful thing” when someone whose words and emotions you respect shares them in a way that touches your spirit, heals, and sends you to a place of peace. Thank you and may you receive the blessings you have given.
Thank you for sharing the link to the sermon, Jeff. I always appreciate your writing and ordinarily I would just read it but today for whatever reason I clicked the link and watched it. It’s been so long. It felt like much needed water on a thirsty plant. I needed to hear another human voice reminding me that God is here. Blessings to you.