Touching Jesus
Mark 6:53-56, Mark 5:25-34
Prayer:     Lord Jesus, we know the Sabbath is holy.
We also know that you will break the Sabbath for the holy purposes of healing and feeding.
Lord, heal us on this Sabbath day and make us whole.
Lord, feed us on this Sabbath day and fill us with your love.
Amen.

Love has a hem to her garment
That reaches the very dust.
Love sweeps the stains from streets and lanes,
And because love can it must.

That little poem of Teresa of Calcutta describes the work of her Missionaries of Charity whose blue and white robes sweep the stains from streets and lanes in the poorest places in the world and bring healing and wholeness to the poorest of the poor in the name of Jesus.
Jesus also wears a robe and those who beg him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak can be healed and made whole. Jesus rarely if ever heals at a distance. You have to be touched or touch him. He puts his fingers into the ears of the deaf man. He rubs spittle into the eyes of blind Bartimaeus. He takes the hand of the little girl and says: “Little girl, get up.” He never says: “Let all the people who are lepers over there in Sidon be healed.” Healing does not happen at a distance. It is always in person. Jesus touches or is touched.
Willa Cather, the American novelist writes that “the miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear and our fingers can touch what is there about us always.”
So today let us refine our perceptions so that we might touch Jesus.
Let’s talk about touch for a moment. Do you remember when our sabbatical started we were at the height of the H1N1 virus scare and decided that it would be best if we did not touch each other? And so we gave the greeting of peace to each other by bowing rather than shaking hands or hugging each other. Do you remember how awkward that was not to be able to reach out and touch someone? For me it was impossible and not even the threat of catching the disease could keep me from touching.
And when we joined hands to create the human vine which connected us to each other and to Christ and we laid our hands on Wendy and Bernie and Carol and Ruth to commission them for ministry, we experienced the power of the Holy Spirit moving through our touch. Touch is powerful. Touch is healing.
My daughter went to a Bruce Springsteen concert not long ago and was chosen in a lottery to be right up front within touching distance of The Boss. I saw her on YouTube along with hundreds of others trying to touch him. She called me on her cell phone directly from the concert and said: “Dad, he sweated on me!” She was ecstatic! Can you imagine if she had been able to touch him!
Now Jesus isn’t a rock star but there are millions of people who would like to touch him. I don’t care if I ever touch Bruce Springsteen but I would like to touch Jesus. I would like to touch Jesus not because of his celebrity but because I would like to know what God’s love feels like. I would like to touch Love and be healed.
Jesus wasn’t a rock star but he was surrounded by huge, jostling crowds and he had to be protected. He was always trying to escape from the demands of the crowd so that he could have some peace and quiet. People were forever following him, begging to touch him.

Do you remember when he went over into the land of the Gennesaret? There was another huge crowd around him, pushing and jostling him
A woman who had suffered a condition of hemorrhaging for twelve years—a long succession of physicians had treated her, and treated her badly, taking all her money and leaving her worse off than before—had heard about Jesus. She slipped in from behind and touched his robe. She was thinking to herself, “If I can put a finger on his robe, I can get well.” The moment she did it, the flow of blood dried up. She could feel the change and knew her plague was over and done with.
Now that woman had no business touching Jesus. First of all she was a woman and her sex made it unseemly for her to touch him. And secondly she was unclean, she had an issue of blood, she was impure according to Jewish law, she had no business tainting a rabbi. She was supposed to avoid all human contact. Yet she pushed into the crowd… She must have been on her knees and using her elbows to hammer aside the legs of the disciples who were struggling to hold the crowds back. She must have elbowed aside other petitioners who were as desperate as she was. And then, without even being able to see whose cloak it was, she stretched out her long, bony arm and touched what she believed to be the robe of Jesus. And she was healed.
Jesus is impressed by persistence. People who will not give up are the faithful ones. And they are included by Mark in his gospel because for Mark the truest test of faith is whether it will let anything stand in its way. This woman would let nothing stand between her and Jesus.
And if we won’t let anything stand in our way, Jesus will let us touch him. Kate Layzer writes: “Jesus is waiting and longing for us to throw off all constraints and obey only our need for him.”
Let’s take a risk of faith this morning to do everything that we can to touch Christ. Let’s not let anything stand in our way. We know that we need healing. We know that we need to be made whole. What would keep us from touching Jesus? We are completely free to do anything that we can do to reach him and to touch him.

Raymond Foss’ poem “Touching Christ” tells of how our healing occurs:

Like the Lady in the crowd
We reach out to Christ
From out of the crowd
Emboldened by our faith
By that touch, we are healed.
Let us do everything we can to touch Jesus. Let me guide you towards him in meditation. I suggest that you pray by touching. Clasp you own hands together in prayer. Or grasp the hand of the person next to you. Or touch the shoulder of the person in front of you. But let your sense of touch be switched on so that you are reminded what touch feels like. That’s what touch is about; you feel it.

Guided Meditation
Word is that Jesus is in the neighborhood. Word is that he is a healer. And even if he cannot heal our bodies he can heal our souls and make us whole.
We are fully aware of how we are hurting. We suffer from disease. We have been hurt emotionally. Our relationship with someone has been injured or broken. We need to be loved and accepted. We know how we are hurting. And we desperately want to be in the presence of Jesus so that he can heal us. We are bringing this injury to Jesus and there is nothing that is going to keep us away.
There is a huge throng of people like us all around him. Many of them are hurting like you and I and all of them are trying to reach him. All of them are worthy. All of them deserve healing and wholeness. You are tempted to give up because there is no way that all of you can touch him. You think that maybe you are the least worthy and you begin to back away.
But someone else in their struggle to reach Jesus pushes hard against you and knocks you to the ground. No one bothers to try to help you get up because all are intent on just one thing. You are in danger of being trampled because no one is caring enough to lift you up. You struggle to get up but there is no room and other people are pressing down on you. You begin to suffocate. There is nothing but dust and feet and legs all around you. You realize that touching Jesus is more than being healed. It is the struggle for life itself.
Suddenly you discover that if you are going to reach Jesus, the best path and the only path is down here on your knees. Here among this forest of moving legs you might be able to find a twisting path to him. You crawl forward. You scratch at the legs of the people in your way. You use your elbows to hammer on their ankle bones. You claw your way along. Everything that would keep you from moving forward you push aside- all of your doubts, all of your distrust of religion, all of the pastors who have tried to protect Jesus from you, all of the obstacles that other people have put in your way, all the barriers you yourself have made to keep yourself from reaching Christ.
You know that touching Jesus is not about religion. It is not about what you believe. It is not about the Bible. It is not about the church. It’s not about being a Lutheran. Touching Jesus is about touching Jesus and that is all that you care about and all you are concentrated on. There is nothing that will prevent you from doing it.
Your outstretched body twists as you reach out toward him but your fingers cannot quite reach him. Someone yells: “Unclean!” and that is you. You are unclean and you know it. You lunge one last time but your fingers find only dust. Dust! That is all that you are left with.
Then the one you are reaching for takes an awkward step which brings him towards you. The crowd has pushed against him and falling in your direction, he catches his balance. And you lift your hand and the tip of your finger grazes the fringe of his garment. You touch Jesus. That is all that you wanted to do. That is all that you needed to do. You touch Jesus. Nothing else is important. You touch Jesus.

Benediction
The woman touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be well.
Sons and daughters of Christ, your faith has healed you; go in peace and be well.

To the glory of God for the congregation of Our Savior Lutheran Church,
Hanover, NH

July 19, 2009

Gregory W. Marshall
Sabbatical Pastor

Macrina Wiederkehr from Seasons of Your Heart.

Once there was a wound
It was no ordinary wound
It was my wound
We had lived together long.

I yearned to be free of this wound
I wanted the bleeding to stop
Yet if the truth be known
I felt a strange kind of gratitude
for this wound
It made me
tremendously open to grace
vulnerable to God’s mercy.
A beautiful believing in me
that I have named Faith
kept growing, daring me
to reach for what I could not see.
This wound had made me open.
I was ready for grace
And so one day, I reached.

There I was thick in the crowd
bleeding and believing
and I reached.
At first I reached
for what I could see
the fringe of a garment,
But my reaching didn’t stop there
for Someone reached back into
me.
A grace I couldn’t see
flowed through me.
A power I didn’t understand
began to fill the depths of me.

Trembling I was called forth
to claim my wholeness.
The bleeding had left me.
The believing remained
And strange as this may sound
I have never lost my gratitude
for the wound
that made me so open
to grace

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