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This morning I begin a new series of messages titled Rebooting Life. In this series I will be following the same basic theme I have followed since the beginning of the pandemic, which is the way our faith can carry us through all the challenges that have come, and will come, our way.
A more spiritual term for rebooting life would be resurrection. Resurrection, of course, has the primary meaning of the raising of Jesus on the first Easter morning. It also refers to our own future resurrection into eternity. But resurrection can also refer a new beginning in life, and that is the sense in which I am using the phrase rebooting life. Rebooting life is a time of new beginning, a new start, a time of resurrection.
Of the many things I love about the Bible, one is that it is full of stories of people who have rebooted their lives. The stories tell of people who had a new start to life, a change of life, a rebooting, a resurrection. People such as Moses, who fled from Egypt to save his life, but then was called by God to return, in order to lead the people out of bondage. David, who had more than one reboot to his life. The woman taken in adultery, who was under the threat of stoning, until Jesus gave her life a reboot. Mary Magdalene, who had been possessed by seven demons, until they were cast out by Jesus (Mark 16:9). Paul, whose life had a very dramatic reboot on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-9). The list in the Bible of rebooted lives is really long, and from that list we will talk about two of those people.
For our Scripture text, I am using a passage from Mark’s gospel that weaves together two stories of healing, and which tell of people who received a new start in life. The first story is that of Jairus, a synagogue official whose young daughter is dying. The second is a woman who presses through the large crowd that gathered around Jesus and Jairus as they traveled to the home of Jairus. The woman had been ill for 12 years, and she wants to get close enough to Jesus to only touch his cloak, knowing that the touch can heal her. Mark makes a point to tell us that it’s not just the disease that has made her life difficult, but also the fact that she had spent all of her money on medical care and, instead of any improvement, had actually grown worse. These are the stories of people who were in very dire straits, and had come to Jesus in desperation.
Follow along as I read Mark 5:21-34 –
21 When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake.
22 Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet.
23 He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.”
24 So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him.
25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years.
26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.
27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,
28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.”
29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.
33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.
34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
I have titled this message Everywhere You Turn, Everywhere You Look, because everywhere Jesus went, everywhere Jesus turned, everywhere he looked, there was need, everywhere. There was so much need, at times the crowds swarmed around him. One time the crowd was so great that a man’s friends dug a hole in the roof of the home where Jesus was in order to lower their friend down in front of Jesus, hoping Jesus would heal their friend (Mark 2:1-12).
There is always need; always. What the pandemic has done is multiply that need many times over, and we find that everywhere we turn, and everywhere we look, we are surrounded by need. There are a lot of people who need for their lives to receive a reboot.
So, let’s talk about each of these characters in this morning’s Scripture text, and what we learn from their circumstances, and their reboot in life.
First, let’s look at Jairus, the synagogue official, who comes to Jesus on behalf of his daughter, who is dying. It is a heart-wrenching scene Mark describes, as Jairus comes to Jesus and he pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” My little daughter is dying. He gets right to the point, doesn’t he? There is no time for introductions or small talk. What is more heartbreaking than a parent pleading for the life of their child?
There are a couple interesting things about Jairus. First, he was an official in the synagogue, which meant he was in an administrative position. His position would have been one that was more organizational than public. His task was to keep everything in order and see that everything functioned just as it was supposed to function. He was invisible for the most part, unless something went wrong, and if he was good at what he did, not much went wrong. Jairus was someone, by virtue of his position, probably liked order and liked for everything to be in its place. People who like order and organization don’t do well with surprises or the unexpected. They don’t generally do well with chaos and disorder. But here’s one of the truths about life – life does not care about or respect order and organization. Life is messy. You can work your heart out to create order and organization and strive to keep your life in perfect order, and something happens to your child. And then what do you do? There is no order or organization that can bring to you what you need in that moment.
Talk about the need for a reboot. Jairus, the behind the scenes, organized guy, suddenly found his life with no order, and he couldn’t have cared less about remaining invisible and behind the scenes. He bursts into this crowd, throws himself at the feet of Jesus, and begins to plead with him, because his little girl is dying.
There was a lot of need surrounding Jesus that day, but it’s hard to imagine a need tougher than that of Jairus. When you get hit with a great need, that need strips away all pretense and all pride. There’s no room for anything but finding help. And here is what is beautiful about the response of Jesus – he went with Jairus. Mark is always very economical with his words. Mark generally doesn’t spend a lot of extra words describing the scene or sharing more than is needed, and he is really economical with his words here. The description of Jesus’s reaction is five simple words – so Jesus went with him. What do we need when we are struggling in life? What do we need when the chaos of life overtakes us? What do we need when the unexpected arrives on our doorstep and wreaks havoc on our carefully planned agenda for life? We need someone with us. We need someone to walk with us, someone to listen to us, someone to encourage us, and someone to love us. Jairus received all that with Jesus, and then, he also received the great gift of healing for his daughter.
The second character enters the story as Jesus and Jairus were walking along, surrounded by the large crowd of people. The crowd probably didn’t help matters any, as Jesus and Jairus were certainly hurrying along, and it is not easy to move quickly when you are surrounded by a crowd. When I was a student minister, and when we took the kids somewhere, I would give them these instruction – I would hold out my arms and say, draw an imaginary circle around the ends of my arms, and do not step inside of that circle. I would offer those instructions because, for one, I didn’t like having a group of kids under my feet while I was trying to walk, and two, because I like my personal space. I was social distancing long before the pandemic began! The kids would laugh at my instructions and then promptly ignore them. But there wasn’t anything funny about this crowd, as it slowed down Jesus and Jairus.
The circumstances of the woman were very dire. As I mentioned, Mark tells us that she had been dealing with a hemorrhage for 12 years, had spent all of her money on doctors, and was in worse shape after all of her efforts. I did a little research on the type of cures that might have been offered to her at that point in history, and some of them were really bizarre. When Jesus passed by, she saw her opportunity. To just tough the edge of her clothes, she hoped, would bring healing to her. She did manage to push through the crowd enough to touch him, and her faith was rewarded, as she was healed. After she touched him, Mark tells us that Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned in the crowd and asked, “Who touched me?” (verse 30).
The woman does come forward to reveal that she was the one who had touched Jesus. Mark says she came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth (verse 33). I have often wondered why the woman was afraid to come forward and admit that she was the one who had touched Jesus. I wonder if she was afraid because of a sense of shame and stigma related to her physical suffering. In that day, there was a good deal of shame and stigma attached to physical ailments, especially when those ailments were believed to be a result of a person’s sin, which led to even more suffering, as that shame and stigma separated them from others, even, many times, from their families. But even in our modern age there remains a good deal of shame around certain ailments. If you were around in the 80s, you probably remember the tremendous stigma attached to AIDS. Many people wouldn’t even speak the word, and of those who had a family member with the disease, it was often kept hidden and was never revealed. The first time I visited and AIDS patient, the word AIDS was never spoken, not by the family or by the hospital personnel. I was required to be covered head to toe in protective gear, which was an obvious sign that something very serious was confronting the patient, but no one dared to speak the word AIDS. Addiction, we now recognize as a disease, but many people continue to see it as a moral failure, and as something that will go away if the person would just “try harder.” They are told if you loved me more than that bottle, you would get better. But trying harder isn’t enough. Mental illness also carries a great deal of stigma, and that stigma drives the illness out of sight, out of conversations, and thus out of the hope of healing. Even Covid, sometimes, has a sense of shame and stigma surrounding it. Some people believe that if you contract Covid, you must have done something careless, but I can attest that is not true. Stigmatizing illnesses prevents people from seeking help, remaining, instead, in their suffering. Stigmatizing disease is the unfortunate reality that sometimes we attack one another rather than the diseases that plague us. Look at what the pandemic has done, in terms of turning us against one another, as an example.
When Jesus asked who touched him, he was not out to shame this woman, this woman who had suffered so much for so long. No, Jesus sought to bring her out of the shadows and into the open, into the light. By doing so, he gave her personhood back to her.
I find it interesting also that Jesus felt power go out of him. I think, for us, it’s a reminder that when we deal with need it does take something out of us, there is no doubt about that. When you walk with someone whose child is dying, you are not going to be left untouched, and it will change you. To experience such suffering takes an emotional toll on us. When you reach out to someone who has been struggling for well over a decade with a chronic medical condition, you are going to feel something go out of you as well. Maybe that’s why the disciples reacted in the way they did, asking who in the crowd didn’t touch Jesus, which was a way of saying, let’s not stop and get involved in anything else, okay? We’ve got enough going on as it is.
The past year has brought incalculable suffering to so many, and the number of people who need a reboot in life are countless. All of us, to some extent, are numbered among those. We can, thankfully, get a reboot in life.
I don’t know how many times this week I rebooted one of my devices. I rebooted my laptop several times in order to try and stop iTunes from reminding me that I was logged out of my session. I only need a single reminder, but it gives me about 20 at a time. I rebooted my tablet to try and get it operation more efficiently. I may need to reboot my phone after the service ends. If you notice me looking at my phone during the service, it’s because I like to read the comments people are leaving during the course of the service. I can also see who is watching, as the livestream is on my Facebook page. For some reason, today it keeps telling me Tanya is watching. Before beginning my sermon, I counted 37 times that it told me Tanya is watching. Now, I assume she is always watching me, actually, but I don’t need my phone telling me. I guess I will reboot my phone when the service ends, especially as that is the only way I know to fix something.
I wish a reboot in life were that simple, but it’s not. We do, however, have the presence of God in our lives, and God is the one who can provide us with a reboot, a rebirth, a resurrection, every day.
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