This post is the flip-side to an angry rant about the evil side of our American health care debate posted earlier today. Both that, and this post below are inspired by the powerful week I've just had. So what happened? Well, I've spent the last week talking with and listening to the teaching of a very gifted South African pastor, Alan Storey. He finished a day of teaching yesterday at Zumbro Lutheran in Rochester, MN, with a powerful sermon on Mark 5. His basic point was that suffering pushes us beyond the ideological boundaries that keep us from one another. Jesus is coming from Gentile territory where he's just healed a lunatic in a graveyard. He crosses the sea to Jewish territory and a religious leader, Jairus, comes pleading for Jesus to lay hands on his dying daughter. He should have shuttered at the impurity of Jesus who kept crossing divides between clean and unclean, outsider and insider, and yet his desperation drove him to seek the power he found in Jesus. On his way, a woman sick for years with what seems like ongoing menstruation reaches out to touch Jesus believing that if she could she would be well. She felt the healing immediately, and when Jesus located her, for he felt what had happened despite the crush of the crowd around him, he blessed here with peace as he sent her freed to a new life healed from her malady. Freed, of course, both physically and socially, since the blood would have made her perpetually unclean, a social outcast. Then on to Jairus' house where in the meantime the daughter has died. Jesus arrived saying she was just sleeping and the mourners ridiculed him but he called to her and she arose and he asked them to feed her.
Alan's sermon was a brilliant exposition of the text in relation to what he's observed of our health care debate over the past week of his stay in the US. I can't do justice to it, but I recorded it and will post an audio file if I can. Yet the simple, powerful point he made in relation to the text was that those who were suffering terribly overcame ideology and welcomed the indiscriminate healing of Jesus, who regardless of social status or physical malady reached out in love and compassion to restore and make whole. That is the goal for Christians with regard to health care--that we should live 'as Christ' in our day, seeking to overcome the divide between those who are 'worthy' and those who are 'unworthy' to seek a way for any and all to be restored and made whole. That's the principle that our debates as Christians then seek to embody in policy and practice. In so far as we embody this principle we can measure our faithfulness in relation to the risk of love God in Christ has made for us while each of us were mired in sickness and sin. Lost, I was found. Blind, now I see.
Anon and peace,
Chris
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