July 18, 2010
The Bleeding Woman - Luke 8:40-48
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadA large part of my job as a pastor is to show up at things. I have decided that showing up is half the battle. In fact, in many cases, there’s not much else that I can do other than show up. But I can show up, and show up I must. Our faith is incarnational, which is a fancy way of saying that God showed up for us in Jesus, and we believe that God still shows up in Jesus’ followers through the Holy Spirit. All of which means that we must show up. Showing up is huge, not just for a minister, but for any disciple of Jesus Christ.
So here I am, and so here we are, right? Well actually, we’re not here. Half of us are here, roughly. Three hundred people have committed to living out their lives of discipleship in this community of faith called Central Steele Creek Presbyterian Church. Yet only, roughly, 150 are here, which begs the question of where in the world is everybody else? Maybe they’re sick, or infirmed, or out of town. Rhonda Smith is seeing her great grand-niece in Atlanta, the first boy born into Bud Shaney’s family since, well, Bud. We’ll give her an out today. But where is everybody else? Maybe some people are sleeping in. Maybe they just didn’t feel up to it this morning. Showing up in the Christian life is huge, and it’s not always easy. When people become members, the biggest thing that they pledge to do is to show up. And I really think that showing up, week after week, month and after month, year after year, transforms us. The chances of having a successful marriage are significantly higher for people who show up to Church, simply because showing up changes us. Showing up is key. I know that sometimes you don’t really want to show up, and get dressed, and sing the Gloria Patri and not even know what the words mean, and listen to a sermon, and so on. But you come any way. You show up. You can’t be much of a disciple if you don’t show up.
The people in this passage were really good at showing up. You can say what you want to about the Pharisees and ancient Jews and so forth, but one thing they did very well was to show up. If it was the Sabbath, it was not Meet the Press. It was time to go to Church. And I think it’s fair to say that sometimes going to Church, or synagogue as they called it, was an exercise in going through the motions, like it can be for us. But they did it anyway and they were transformed through it. They knew their Bible, far better than we do. In fact, they even had it memorized, in some cases literally. The Jews in this passage – and this passage is full of them – were experts in showing up.
But they also demonstrate how inadequate showing up can be inadequate. Enter this bleeding woman. This woman had been bleeding, Luke tells us, for 12 long years. It was not pretty. It was almost certainly menstrual bleeding. In those days, when women were bleeding that way, according to Leviticus 15, they were considered unclean. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it was. For almost all women, the bleeding was temporary, and they would become clean again. But for this woman, it was permanent. She was never clean. She was an outcast. She could never get married or have children. In fact, her family had long since disowned her. Her community had disowned her. She was nothing.
But she heard about Jesus, and she apparently heard that he could make something out of nothing, that he could make dead things live again. Well she had been dead for a long time, really, so she thought she would take what little dignity she had left and put it all on the line. And she did. All those other people had shown up, you see, kind of like we have now. They had shown up to get a glimpse of Jesus, kind of like we have now. And this nasty, unclean, filthy, bleeding outcast comes barreling up and touches him. She stood up in front of the whole community that had long since disowned her, and she took a stand. The great theologian Janis Joplin once said that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, which I guess might have been true for this nameless bleeding woman. Faith for her meant showing up and standing up.
She did more, you see, than everybody else had done. She did more than we have done this morning. She did more than simply show up. As important as showing up is, the nameless bleeding woman teaches us that discipleship requires more. I wrote a check several months ago on behalf of our Church that I really needed you to cash. A lady from the YMCA emailed me and told me about this Starfish program that takes kids from low-income families who are reading below grade level. The program tutors them in the summer to get them caught back up. As a reward for catching back up, the children are presented with a book bag full of school supplies, which they would otherwise not have. So this woman asked if we could supply the book bags. I told her that we probably could, and then I passed the buck on the Richard Moss, who said the same thing. She emailed me back and told me that she needed more than this probably stuff. We were either in or out. So I committed. I wrote a check and, to be brutally honest, I wasn’t so sure that we could cash it.
But, by golly, we did cash it. Instead of 64 book bags, we ended up raising closer to 70 book bags. I’m proud of that, and you should be, too. Those children are reading at grade-level now, thanks in part to you. That’s a great example of doing more than showing up. Fifteen or twenty of us will show up in West Virginia in a few weeks, and we will do more than just show up. When Matthews Presbyterian first went up there, we painted this house, and we got to know one of the boys who lived in the house. We got to know him well, actually. He was about thirteen then and was a great kid. We would go back at Christmas and then in the summer, and we would always see him. In fact, he even helped us on our other projects. We also always some money left over, so we pooled it together and formed a scholarship. Central Steele Creek is part of that scholarship. Now, that boy is nineteen, and he’s at West Virginia University, and the first in his family to attend college. And he’s going thanks largely to that scholarship.
Discipleship requires that we show up, but it also requires more than that. You can see the results of it. One of the things that I tell couples before they get married is that love is an action and not a feeling. Love means choosing to forgive him, when you feel like killing him. Love means choosing to stop on the way home and buy a few flowers for her when you feel like stopping by a bar. Love is an action. Faith is an action. Showing up is a necessary part of that action, but it’s not all of it. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ requires that we do more.
For the bleeding woman, it meant crossing centuries and centuries of cultural barriers. What does it mean for us? What does discipleship require of us? What does it require that you do at work? What does it require that you do at Church? What does it require that you do in the community? Whatever it is, it’s far more than going back to the grind. It’s far more than going back to what we know. It’s far more than showing up on occasion. Maybe it means inviting more people to Church. Maybe it means taking an unpopular stand. Maybe it means spending more time with your family. Maybe it means reconciling with an enemy. Maybe it means saying, “I’m sorry,” or “I forgive you.”
Whatever it is, it will not be easy. It never is. And it may well be that the only reason in the whole wide world that you would do it is because you have shown up here, to Church, and you believe what you said you believed here. Or, maybe we’ve gotten something wrong here, and maybe you feel called to help correct it. It’s interesting that this story basically happens in Church. It happens with a bunch of churchy people. Yet the churchy people had gotten it all wrong somehow, and God used this nameless outcast to correct it. Jesus told her that her faith had healed her, and yet never once does Luke even tell us that she had faith at all. Luke never had to tell us, of course, because faith is an action. Faith is not intellectual consent and faith is not stagnant. Faith is more than showing up. Faith is doing something. Faith is the bleeding woman not settling for the status quo. Faith is the starfish program. Faith is sending a kid to college. Faith for you is, well, I’m not 100% sure, but I’ll bet if you pray about it you can find out, and I’ll bet you can do it, too.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
