The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
June 28, 2009

Proper 8 – B
Deuteronomy 15:7-11
2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15
Mark 5:22-43

Well. Time is a mystery, isn’t it? What once was yet to come has a way of becoming what is. There is a time for everything under heaven, as the preacher reminds us. And today, sadly, is the time to say goodbye. To say goodbye as rector and congregation, but not as friends and brothers and sisters in Christ, because, to God’s faithful people, every ending is but a new beginning. A beginning of new relationships, new ministries, and new life.

For Judy and me, our time here, almost twenty three years now, has blessed us beyond my ability to acknowledge adequately. The Chapel of Our Saviour has been home for us for almost one-third of our lives, and we want to thank you for all your love for us. Beyond that, however, I want to thank you for faithfully being Christ’s Body in this place, for seeking faithfully to love and serve all those Jesus loves. Thank you for working so hard to make our worship and ministry in Christ here what it is. Thank you for all the offerings of your ministries in Christ’s Name. Thank you for your presence and prayer week after week, faithfully bearing the presence of Christ to the world.

Our relationship as rector and congregation ends this week, but our mutual ministry of prayer and our shared vocation of proclaiming Christ to the world does not end. It simply makes a new beginning, which, for God’s faithful people, promises to be fuller and richer than either you or I can imagine this morning. For to your faithful people, O Lord, even when our mortal body lies in death, life is changed, not ended.

Today is not a day for heavy theology. If I haven’t shared what I believe about God in the past twenty years, I’m certainly not going to be able to do it in the next twenty minutes. Today is a day for basics, for keeping the main thing the main thing. Today is a day for remembering that the foundation of all we are as church is who we sang about a moment ago – Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Today is a day for fixing our eyes on Jesus.

Did you notice where Jesus is leading us in the Gospel reading this morning? Once again this morning we find Jesus where we always find Jesus, among the children of the world, among the weak, the last, the least, and the lost. We find Jesus spending his spiritual energy, not worrying about religious or political correctness, not worrying about who has the right formula and who doesn’t, but in strengthening the little and the weak. When we watch Jesus respond to Jairus’s need in Galilee and to the need of the unnamed woman on the road, we see the revealed truth of God healing the sick and the lonely and raising the dead.

“Who is it who touched me?” Jesus asked. “Where is she?” The disciples wanted to get on with their business, or what they thought was their business. “The crowd is huge,” they whined. “Dozens of people have touched you. Let’s keep moving.” But Jesus kept looking around, persevering, knowing that something unusual had happened, sensing that someone needed him. And he persisted until the woman finally came up to him, trembling with fear to tell him that she was the one who touched him.

Who was she? And why was she afraid? She had only touched the hem of his garment. Why would that make her afraid? She was afraid because of who she thought she was, because she was an outcast, one of the last and least of the world, helpless as a child, a social pariah. She had been bleeding continuously for twelve years and, according to the thinking of the people of God at that time, according to the accepted religious formulas, that made her continuously unclean, unacceptable to the righteous of the world. In the Torah the rules were clear: during the time of a woman’s menstrual period, and for seven days afterward, she was ritually unclean. Anyone who touched her, or who touched anything she had sat on or lain upon, also became unclean, unfit for human relationships. So, for twelve years, she had not been able to share food, or even to sit on a simple wooden bench, with another human being.

Imagine the emotional and spiritual state of someone in those circumstances! The very law of God, she had been told, denied her simple human companionship. And she had believed it. She was afraid, because for her to touch Jesus as she did was an act of presumption, an act that made him, the teacher, unclean, just as she was. And having presumed to touch him, she was now afraid to face him.

But Jesus was not like the others. Jesus wanted to know who she was. Jesus wanted to speak to her, wanted to share with her his word and his love. He was willing, if necessary, even to become poor for her, that she might be enriched. And when he did, he assured her that she was a somebody, a child of God whom God loved. “Daughter,” he said, “you took a risk of faith, and the response was not what you feared, was it? You see that I care for you; know that God loves you. Now go and live that way. No more cringing in the shadows and corners of life. Live as a whole person. Live as the daughter God loves, raised and healed from your fears.”

This, friends, is what Jesus does for each of us on the Cross. This is the main thing we are to carry forward today. “Covenant to carry the Cross,” said Thomas a Kempis, “and in the end the Cross will carry you.” It will carry us to places and insights and truths and life we can’t even imagine at the moment! For the power of the Cross – or better, the power of the person on the Cross – is able to speak in ways we cannot, is able to reach the hearts of people that our feeble religious formulas can never reach. Remember that Peter himself, after all, once had the right formula. He was certain that one could not be a follower of Jesus unless he was ritually clean, unless he was circumcised as part of the right group. Peter was certain of it, that is, until the Holy Spirit showed even Peter that God’s Church was bigger than he thought!

When we get too concerned about our religious formulas and creeds, we are sometimes blinded to the truth who is standing right in front of us, blinded to Jesus. And blinded to Jesus, we do not touch him. At such times it is helpful to call to mind what the great missionary E. Stanley Jones said about Jesus and Gandhi. “Mahatma Gandhi was a Hindu and perhaps the greatest soul in Indian history,” said Jones. “And Gandhi once said to us Christians in India, ‘I would suggest, first, that all of you Christians, missionaries and all, must begin to live more like Christ. If you will come to us in the spirit of your Master, we cannot resist you. I would suggest that you must put your emphasis on love, for love is the center and soul of Christianity.’

“[Gandhi] did not mean love as a sentiment,” Jones added, “but love as a working force,” – love like the love of Jesus embracing the unclean woman in Galilee – “which is the one real power in a moral universe.” It is the kind of love an ardent opponent of Christianity saw in Gandhi himself, Jones added. This passionate opponent of Christianity later confessed that he “never understood the meaning of Christianity until [he] saw it in Gandhi.” But “it will never do,” Jones added, “to have it said that the [life] of Jesus [is] better [reflected in] those we call nonbelievers than [in] ourselves.” (The Christ of the Indian Road, Abingdon Press)

“Give Jesus of Nazareth back to us,” demanded the Marxist philosopher Roger Garaudy. “Give him back to non-churchmen, back even to unbelievers in God. You church people can’t keep him for yourselves.” Which led Edward Schillebeeckx, a contemporary Christian theologian, to remind us that Jesus does not belong to us Christians. “Jesus is for the world,” he said, “and we belong to Jesus.”

What Schillebeeckx wants us in the Church to see is that Jesus the person, Jesus the Savior, Jesus the Truth, speaks to people, even to people beyond the Church, perhaps especially to people beyond the Church, in ways we in the Church may not even be able to imagine. And we must not try to limit the way Jesus speaks.

So today let us remember Jesus as he is, and to live him forward. Remember that before Christianity is a religion, it is a way of life, Jesus’ way of life. Remember always to greet each other as brothers and sisters in the Lord. Remember that music and laughter are God’s favorite sounds. That’s why God told ninety-year-old Sarah she was going to have a baby. He wanted to hear her laugh and sing and live again.

Remember that the Bible is not a weapon, but a love story. Remember that God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it. “Remember always to welcome strangers, for by so doing some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those in prison, as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” Remember always to fix your eyes on Jesus as God raised him to be remembered, as the author and perfecter of our faith, as the One who endured the cross, scorning its shame, for the sake of tax-collectors and sinners like you and me.

Remember how the old preacher on the slave plantation always did that, how he always took the slaves by Calvary, where Jesus died, because slaves could relate to “a story of a man who was treated like dirt, abused, beaten down, and left for dead.” And remember how, whenever the old preacher took them by Calvary, he was always moved to shout: “But God raised him again! And he is seated at the right hand of God in heaven!” Then remember how Howard Thurman’s old grandmother, a former slave, told him that “the preacher would take off his glasses, and lean over the pulpit and look straight into our eyes, and [then he would] say to [us] in words undeniable [the same thing that Jesus said to that woman in the Gospel this morning]: ‘But slaves, you are not any man’s property. You are children of God Almighty! Never forget it!’”

And remember how Thurman’s grandmother told him that whenever the preacher would come to that part of the story, her spine would stiffen, and she was ready for a new day. Just like that woman in the Gospel this morning when Jesus spoke to her. Her spine stiffened, and she was ready for a new day.

Just as Mary Magdalene’s spine stiffened and she was ready for a new day when her risen Lord spoke to her and called her by name. You remember when it was. It was just when Mary thought everything had ended. But like the old preacher, Mary had not neglected to go by Calvary that Friday we call Good. She went to be with him in his suffering and in his death. And then on Sunday she went to anoint his body for burial, but she found only someone she thought was the gardener. But then he spoke to her and called her by name, and she recognized him. “Mary,” he said, ”you’ve got work to do and a life to live. Go tell Peter and the others that I want to see them again. Remind them that I came to love the world, and to save it, not to condemn it.” And while you’re at it, teach them a new Easter song, a song they are to live in the world, a song that shows me forth as I am:

Jesus calls the children dear,
“Come to me and never fear,
For I love the little children of the world;
I will take you by the hand,
Lead you to the promised land.
For I love the little children of the world.”


And you all know the refrain:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.


God bless you all.


In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.