Lectionary 13 (B) — Lamentations 3:22–33, Mark 5:21–43
It’s exciting to finally start your career, move into your own home, start your “adult” life. A month before I began my new church in New England, a real estate agent gave me a whirlwind tour of nearby apartments. I found the perfect one, and my application went through. I came back to Berks County, packed my things, and off I went. Everything was perfect, prepared, organized. I was a real adult.
I arrived, and met with—not the landlord, but his agent, and mine. I’d written the check ahead of time, so I could pack my checkbook along with everything else, in who knows which one of dozens of boxes piled on each other behind immovable pieces of furniture.
The agent looked at my check like I’d handed him a live porcupine. “No,” he said. “This needs to be made out to the agency, not the landlord. I can’t let you in until you fix it.” I was now homeless, stuck in a foreign land, so to speak. I don’t think I’ve ever felt less like an “adult.”
You’ve heard me talk a thousand times about the Israelites being captured by Babylonian armies, people taken away, stuck in a foreign land. How they believed God abandoned them, and began to lose their language and culture and faith. Usually I have to take those details from a history lesson, but today, they come from the book of Lamentations itself. Other than the brief, hopeful words today, the book is filled with trauma and despair. Listen to some of the poetry:
“Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” … “In God’s wrath, “He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones. He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation. He has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape. He has put heavy chins on me. Though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer.”
Lament is, should, be part of human experience. Something you learn in ministry is that no one is exempt from the real pains of life. If we really knew the lives of the people around us, we’d be very surprised. People live with deep pain, brokenness, abuse, loneliness, despair.
Of all places, we should be able to share these things in our Christian community. But most of us make sure we look like we’ve got it all together. We come to worship dressed in our Sunday best—well, Sunday sandals, but it’s church picnic day [at Bethany], and it’s 2021 now so most people are pretty causal, so okay not Sunday best, but still put together most days. Everything’s fine. Even me— I came up better stories to wrap this sermon in, but I wasn’t willing to use most of them. This moving day story wasa tough moment, to be sure, but hardly what I’d call “traumatic.”
Lament is foreign to us. Many people feel it’s unfaithful to be angry with God, to offer prayers that demand a reason for suffering, or simply cry out in pain. But even if we do ask God, we tend not to tell other people. We suffer alone, because we are “independent, self-sufficient.” Life is tough. We’re adults. Get on with it.
The Bible has a different witness. The Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Job, the Prophets, they’re all full of prayers of lament. And this book is named for it.
Our faith affirms reality: Suffering is real. Being Christian doesn’t make life perfect, despite what some people say. Real followers of Jesus are compelled to acknowledge that life is far from perfect. We destroy our lives, others tear us down, things just happen for, as I said last week, no reason. We dwell in the trauma of grief, broken relationships, the interruption of death. We dwell in the pain and fear of illness, trapped in bodies that don’t always (or often) work. We dwell in something the medieval monks called “ascedia,” the seeming repetitive meaninglessness of life, wondering what the point is.
As a community, we have trauma to lament, too. The trauma of pandemic this year, hundreds of thousands of lives pointlessly cut short. The trauma of racism and classism and other divisions that trap people in poverty and violence—or in power and greed. The trauma of political infighting and stagnation turning neighbors into competitors with petty lawn signs.
What do we do with this lament? What do with do with this pain and trauma? For the authors of Lamentations, we offer it to God. In their words, “There may yet be hope.”
Jesus is on his way to heal a twelve year-old girl when a woman touches his garment and is healed from a twelve year-old menstrual illness. Miraculous healings, but the real miracle here is elsewhere.
Jesus should hurry on his way. He needs to hurry. The girl is dying. Now.
Instead, he stops. “Who touched my clothes?” he asks. A silly question. The crowd is thick. Everyone touched, and pushed, and jostled him. But the woman comes, trembling. Jesus speaks to her of peace.
But Jesus was too slow. The girl dies. Why did he waste time? The woman was healed already when he stopped and spoke to her. A twelve year-old suffered death because of his foolishness. She’ll live again, but her suffering is still real. Why didn’t he hurry?
Jesus calls this woman, “Daughter.” She matters to him. HER pain, HER suffering, HER long-lasting trauma matter. Just healing her is not enough. He needs to see her, talk to her, proclaim that they she is his family, his love, his peace.
We so often say that Jesus suffered for “us,” a great, big, plural, abstract all of us. But in this moment, Jesus knows he goes to the cross for her. And he rises again for her.
And having reached out to him, having received his power, she knows it too.
The landlord’s real estate agent was belligerent, but mine was kind. She took me to dinner, made some phone calls, and soon I was inflating an air mattress in my new apartment to stay the night. In the morning, I ran to my bank to find some solution. Meanwhile, she also ran to her bank. This woman, almost a complete stranger, was willing to lend over a thousand dollars, cash, to get me in my new home. Maybe she saw a young, eager kid, excited about a first apartment, and couldn’t let me suffer with it. Maybe her deep Roman Catholic faith insisted she care for others in need when she could. Or maybe she remembered a time when she thought she was an “adult,” and discovered, like me, that there really is no such thing. We’re just a bunch of people with messy lives in a messy world, who struggle and suffer with things big and small. We try to go it alone. But when we do, we fail. We are not dependent, but we are also not independent. We are inter-dependent. We need to rely on one another, to rely on God. We need to authentically speak our challenges and suffering and pain. And we need someone to hear them.
And when you speak, Jesus stops, and says to you, “My daughter, my son, my child: Your faith has made you well. I see you. I hear you. Be at peace.” May we do the same for others. Amen.