IN THAT MOMENT

Exodus 3:1-6

Mark 5:21-43

If you’ve ever been close to a child who was critically ill, you can easily identify with the repeated pleas of Jairus that Jesus come and heal his daughter who is at the point of death.  So desperate is this man that he sets aside his social and religious position as a leader of the synagogue and falls at Jesus’ feet.

It’s surprising that someone in Jairus’ position would come to Jesus so publicly.  I wonder how he had come to know Jesus and believe in his power to restore health and wholeness.  You notice he didn’t say, “If you can heal my daughter, come…”  No, he said, “Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” 

Jesus responds immediately.  He stops whatever he’s doing with the crowd by the sea and heads with Jairus to his house.  But then… just as quickly… the scene changes.

In the midst of the crowd there is a woman… she is physically drained by 12 years of hemorrhaging… and financially drained by all the doctors who haven’t helped her.  She takes a big risk coming to Jesus, but he is her last hope.  She can’t approach him directly, like Jairus did.  She must reach out anonymously from behind, because, as a woman, she is not allowed to touch a man in public, and in this case it’s really a big taboo because she’s bleeding.  Blood makes her ritually unclean, and if she touches him, Jesus will be unclean too.

But she is desperate.  So she figures that if she can just touch Jesus’ clothing, she’ll be healed, and no one will be the wiser.  He doesn’t even have to know she’s there.  So, she reaches out and touches his cloak.  Mark says, “Immediately her bleeding stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.”  Immediately!  Imagine!  It must have been really hard to contain her joy, but she had to keep quiet or she’d be detected.

But, Jesus realized right away that something powerful had happened, and he asked who had touched his clothes.  Which was a pretty silly thing to say in the middle of a crowd, and his disciples gave him a bad time about that.  But Jesus persisted.

Finally, the woman comes forward and tells Jesus her story… and the unexpected happens.  Instead of blaming her for transferring her uncleanness to him, Jesus commends her for her faith.  “Daughter”… he calls her “daughter”… that’s a strong relationship word.  “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.”

Again, the focus shifts quickly.  People now come from Jairus’ house to tell him that his daughter has died and he needn’t trouble the rabbi any more.  Jesus quickly steps in and tells Jairus not to fear, but to believe.  He sends the crowds away and heads for Jairus’ house.  The people there laugh at him when he says the girl is just sleeping, but he goes to her side and raises her up to life once more.

The juxtaposition of these two stories is very interesting to me… especially since all three synoptic gospel writers group them this way.  They are put together kind of like a sandwich, with the Jairus story as the bread, and the woman’s story as the filling.  It’s very unusual…  I can’t think of another example.  It could be because they have several things in common… 

1)  Both Jairus and the woman took the initiative and came to Jesus with faith that he could heal;

2)  Both were desperate – Jesus was their last hope;

3)  Through faith, both received the gift of healing, of wholeness, that they were seeking.

But I want’ to lift up something that I believe happened in each situation that isn’t obvious or explicitly mentioned in the passage.  The awareness of this came to me through the writing of Kathleen Casey in her book, Sabbath Presence.  I’m reading it in preparation for this program that I’ll begin at Seattle U in September.

So, I’ve been plodding along dutifully reading and underlining… and then… in chapter seven, she really got my attention.  She begins by saying, “Sabbath is about being present in the moment.  It’s about God’s presence.  We can only experience God in the present moment.”

 We can read about God’s activity in the past… we can even reflect upon our own experiences of God in the past.  We can think about what God may do in the future… but we can only actually connect with God in the present moment.  I hadn’t really thought about it like that before.  The only opportunity we have to experience the presence of God is in this moment… or this one… etc.  We are captives of linear time… the Greek term for that kind of time is chronos.  We are tied to the clock, the tides, the rising and setting of the sun...

But there is another kind of time… kairos… God’s time… time out of time… time when there is no time… when time is suspended.  It can’t be measured in minutes or hours.  It’s that time when everything exists at once… or as one.  It’s been called “God’s time of grace.”  “It is the time and space where we can meet God.”  (Casey, pg. 69)

We know from scripture that God enters chronos and wants to be in relationship with us.  In the Exodus, God was present with the people through the pillars of fire and smoke that led and protected them.  God spoke to Moses and to the other prophets, sometimes in a thunderous voice, at other times in a still, small one.  Mary felt the presence of God though an angelic messenger.  But Jesus was really the one who brought God down to earth for us. 

And that’s exactly what happened for Jairus and the woman in our scripture passage.  Jesus became God’s presence for each of them.  And I’m guessing that happened for them when they looked into his eyes. 

Can’t you see it?  The woman comes to Jesus in fear and trembling, having been caught touching him.  But he raises her up and calls her “daughter.”  At the sound of that word alone, there’s no doubt in my mind that she lifted her eyes and looked into his.  Can you see it?  The two of them with their eyes locked?  Can you feel it?  That kairos moment… when the world stood still, and she knew who he was and she felt known, loved, whole.

And what about Jairus?  It doesn’t say that he thanked Jesus, but you know he did.  You know he flew across the room after Jesus raised his daughter from her deathbed.  He probably fell at Jesus’ feet again… and Jesus would have had to raise him up too and tell him not to tell anyone.  I suspect Jairus never heard that last admonition because he was lost in Jesus’ eyes and the enormous gift of grace that had just washed over him.

You may not have had such huge experiences of God’s presence, but I know that you’ve had times in your life when the Spirit has broken through for you.  Haven’t we all been thrilled by a gorgeous, vibrant sunset or a majestic mountain or forest and felt awash with a feeling of gratitude and awe?  Or perhaps it happened when a child tugged on your sleeve in the midst of a busy day because he or she wanted to give you a kiss or say, “I love you.”  Or you were listening to a moving piece of music and found tears streaming down your face.   We have all had moments when our linear time has been made holy by God’s grace.

[Explain Felix’s situation…]

Tina, Felix’s mother:  “… we went out in the garden this morning and smelled fennel and rosemary, and then his preschool teacher came to visit and told him stories.  He listened for a whole hour attentively and quietly.  It was so beautiful to see, because for most of the past 20 hours he cried, moaned, grieved, struggled.  At one point, I stood in one corner of his room and peeled an orange while Nancy talked to him in her quiet voice.  Suddenly Nancy said, ‘hmmm, what's that good smell?’  And I went over to Felix's bed, and Nancy told me that she saw Felix reacting to the smell.  I held the peeled orange under his nose, and within 2 seconds he opened his mouth like a little baby bird waiting for me to feed him!!!  I squeezed 2 or 3 drops of juice into his mouth, and he closed it, tasted and swallowed!  I can't express my happiness about this simple moment of sharing -- it made my day.”  What an incredible moment of grace!

Then there’s the story of Moses… tending his father-in-law’s sheep…  it was a day like any other day… until it wasn’t.  There was this bush…  Rabbi Kushner suggests that there was a reason God came to Moses in a burning bush.  God could have encountered him in a much more spectacular way, but chose, instead, a quieter miracle.  Kushner says, “Moses had to stop and watch the flames long enough to realize that the branches were not being consumed.”  Exactly.  Moses had to pay attention to that outwardly ordinary thing in that ordinary moment; then God could speak to him.

Every time I read that story, I wonder… were there other burning bushes on other days that Moses didn’t see?  Did God have to keep trying until finally Moses was compelled to “turn aside and look at this great sight”?  I wonder about that because I know Moses was an ordinary person like us.  And I feel sure that we don’t recognize moments of grace as often as they happen.  How many times has each of us missed a miracle because we weren’t paying attention?  I wonder.

As Christians, we are called to live with one foot in chronos and the other in kairos.  Jesus is our model of how to be fully present in the physical world and yet fully tuned into God… fully tuned into the spiritual frequency.  There’s a dramatic example of this in our story.  How was it that Jesus felt that woman’s particular touch in the middle of that crowd?  He was tuned in.

Well, you might say, he was divine!  Yes, I would say, but he was also fully human… and those who followed him then and now have learned how to be present to both realms too. 

Let me tell you about my friend Liz.  She was a gift of grace I received back in 1980 when I enrolled at the UW to finish up my B. A. degree.  We met in Comparative Religion 101.  She was different from any one I’d ever met.  You couldn’t put a label on her religion, yet she was so deeply rooted in Spirit that I was constantly amazed by it.  She has an ability to “see” or “feel” people just walking by them…  I saw it when we were walking through throngs of students going from one class to another. 

We’d be wending our way through all those people… and I would see in someone’s face that they’d looked into Liz’s eyes and felt… a blessing… or something…  I don’t know how to describe it… I didn’t fully understand it… I just saw that something significant had happened.  I think they felt that she had really seen them… the real “them”… and fully affirmed them.  For some this was unsettling, but for most it was a blessing.

My relationship with Liz has shown me that it is possible to live with one foot in chronos and the other in kairos… to develop sensitivity to the transcendent in the midst of everyday life… to develop a way of being in the moment. 

Each of us will have our own way of doing this… but I’d like to offer you an opportunity to invite this possibility into your life by taking a page from Kathleen Casey’s book… her journal, to be exact.

In reflecting on the story of the woman Jesus healed, Kathleen Casey focuses on that moment when the woman’s eyes met Jesus and the world stood still.  She wonders what it might be like for her to look into the eyes of Jesus.  Then she realized that she had seen that look before.

She remembered looking at her own babies that way when they were new.  She says, “I could have looked at them for hours, not noticing the time.  The world is contained in that moment.  There is no rush to the next moment, no worry about the past, there is only now.”  Perhaps you can relate to that experience, too.  Children are often good transmitters of grace-filled moments.

After that reflection, Kathleen Casey wrote a prayer in her journal.  I invite you to join me in that responsive prayer as way of entering into that moment…

You looked deep into the eyes of the people you healed, Lord.

Do you look upon me that way, Lord?  Teach me how to return your gaze.  I feel unworthy, I tend to drop my eyes, but are you calling me to look back?

I am calling you, always.  Don’t let the moment pass in your anxiety, guilt, or fear.  Look to me and press on.  I will hold you in my gaze.

I’m afraid that if I look upon you I will be lost and not able to look away.

I will tell you, you will be lost, but lost in your deepest self.  Looking to me does not take you away from yourself, it brings you closer.  When you look upon me, you see the truest you and the whole of humanity as well.  You will see what can be, you will see hope.

If I look to you, it’s only for a moment.  It passes too quickly.  I retreat from you again.  How do I learn to live in the moment?

Just take the first step.  I show you how, when you look at your infants and when you see others do the same.  Walk as if you have faith and you will have it.  Retreating from me is merely another opportunity to come home to me.  Look at your children and see them look at you.  Really see them for who they are.  Love them for who I made them to be.  Allow them to love you.  Share the gaze with them – it will teach you both.