Sermon Notes on Mark

Transcription

1 Sermon Notes on Mark The point about the woman with a haemorrhage is that in Jesus society her illness made her ritually unclean and excluded her from religious and social life. Menstruation was literally regarded as God s curse on women for the sin of Eve, and this poor woman had suffered a constant haemorrhage for twelve years. To be unclean meant that you were literally untouchable. She could have been stoned for deliberately defiling a rabbi by touching him. Hence her terror when she is discovered and her relief at Jesus reaction. The story is a moving example of Jesus compassion and power to heal, but that it is not its main aim. The healing miracles in the Gospels have a specific theological purpose. They are selected to show Jesus including at least one of the different categories of untouchable people that the Law to varying degrees excluded people like women, Gentiles, Samaritans, homosexuals, or sufferers from many kinds of disease or disability all of whom had been regarded as unclean and literally hateful in God s sight. Now Jesus deliberately touches, heals, welcomes them all. So far from being hated by God, these are the ones God holds in his special care. So this particular miracle story is about nothing less than the fact that Jesus removed the menstrual taboo which subjugated and oppressed women in his own society, and still oppresses women in many parts of the world. It is of immense significance for half the human race, yet its lesson has still barely been understood by the Church. Still in many parts of the Church women are refused Communion at the wrong time of the month. Only recently has our own Church abandoned the rite of churching women after childbirth, which was based on the same taboo. And in the greater part of the Church, women are still treated unequally and still excluded from ordained ministry and the exercise of leadership. There is an important lesson here. The ability of the Church to ignore the deeper implications of its own scriptures is horribly plain throughout history. Remember it took eighteen centuries for Christians to realise that slavery is against the Gospel. Remember that those who supported slavery claimed to do so on biblical grounds, condemning emancipation as incompatible with scripture. Remember too that Jesus was condemned to death for his own inclusive attitudes by fundamentalist zealots who believed that they were obeying scripture.

2 In all these cases those who opposed change could quote the Bible in their defence. With hindsight, the Church sees that they were wrong; they were killing the spirit with the letter. It seems incredible now that sincere Christians could ever have thought it right and scriptural to exclude and subjugate people of a different race. In the same way the Church will one day look back on the issues that divide us today, and find it incredible that it once thought it right and scriptural to treat women and other minorities as it does now. Let s be clear then. The struggle to make the Church inclusive is not based on some secular, woolly, liberal agenda (the charge endlessly parroted against us) but on a scriptural imperative to do what Jesus did. It is the same struggle between the spirit and the letter recorded in the Gospels, the struggle to oppose prejudice, bigotry and oppression, and open the kingdom to everyone, especially the most marginalised. Inclusivity is not a soft option. It is harder to live in a truly diverse and welcoming community than it is to live in a community of the respectably like-minded, just as it is harder to be an intelligent student of scripture than it is to be a fundamentalist. In an inclusive Church the included do not simply expect to stay the same. All of us must be challenged and changed in every department of our life, by the Gospel and by one another, whether we are male or female, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor. All of us are called to holiness and continue to need forgiveness, healing and new growth. All of us can expect to bear a cross if we faithfully follow Christ and witness to him. But part of that following and witnessing to Christ must mean standing up for a Church which continues to welcome others as he has welcomed us and, especially in present circumstances, standing firmly against those who would turn it into a Sanhedrin of the Pharisees. By definition, a Church which lives in the Spirit of Jesus will be genuinely (not just theoretically or conditionally) open and welcoming to everyone. Building and defending that kind of Church is the most truly biblical thing any Christian can do. We need to say so now, loud and clear.

3 Material for quotation The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority. I myself could not have opposed the injustice of penalizing people for something about which they could do nothing - their race - and then have kept quiet as women were being penalized for something they could do nothing about - their gender, and hence my support inter alia, for the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate. And equally, I could not myself keep quiet whilst people were being penalized for something about which they could do nothing, their sexuality. For it is so improbable that any sane, normal person would deliberately choose a lifestyle exposing him or her to so much vilification, opprobrium and physical abuse, even death. To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as Apartheid ever was. (Desmond Tutu) Those who work for change suffer resistance. So make us strong. Those who do new things sometimes feel afraid. So make us brave. Those who challenge the worlds as it is arouse anger. So grant us inner peace. Those who live joyfully are envied. So make us generous. Those who try to love encounter hate. So make us steadfast in you. (The St Hilda Community) They drew a circle that shut me out Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win We drew a circle that took them in. (Edwin Markham)

4 We are tempted to think that the chief Christian sufferings should be those inflicted by the world upon the Church, as we rather naively think, by the wicked upon the good. Those sufferings however are easy to bear compared with the peculiar sufferings we bear as Christians within the Church. The Church is where the tensions of human life have to be confronted at their deepest level. (Eric Symes Abbott) You are not like us we are the normal ones you are the deviant we are the powerful ones you have no real power; if you try to behave like us we may accept you but that depends on us and on how deviant you are. Don t ever say your way is as valid as ours we might get worried we might attack. In fact we are who we are because you are not who we are. (Harvey Gillman) How can I love my neighbour as myself when I need him as my enemy when I see in him the self I fear to own and cannot love? How can there be peace on earth while our hostilities are our most cherished possessions defining our identity, confirming our innocence? (Eric Symes Abbott)

5 The crusading mind is rooted in intolerance, and its ultimate end is the destruction of its opposition. The crucified mind is rooted in the love which grows deeper through pain, and which seeks its end through what may seem a harsh and dreadful love, but whose aim is the transformation of its opponents. It is this mind which is expressed so often in the writings and speeches of the late Martin Luther King, and nowhere more powerfully than in his letter of May 1963 after the children s march. He wrote: We must say to our white brothers all over the south who are trying to keep us down: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with our soul force. We will not hate you. And yet we cannot in good conscience obey your evil laws. Do to us what you will. Threaten our children, and we will still love you. Say that we are too low, that we are too degraded, yet we will still love you. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and still to love. In winning the victory we will win not only our freedom. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you too in the process. (Kenneth Leech)