Pastor’s Corner – June 30, 2024
Faith Reaching Out
Mark 5:21-43
It’s been 32 years since I graduated from seminary, and 30 years since I took the ordination vows and said yes to, “Will you pray for and seek to serve God with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?” Imagination is part of the ministry. However, over the years, it’s easy to fall into the trappings of the familiar and ordinary, and feeling safe and secure in the ministry you are used to as a “seasoned minister.” Meanwhile, the world has changed dramatically and broken in ways that call us to serve with creative ways to make a difference with our faith.
The gospel of Mark for this coming Sunday tells us a story of a woman who was hemorrhaging for many years and spent all that she had, yet her suffering became worse. At the end of her rope, she heard about Jesus, and in the midst of the crowd, she dared to reach out and take hold of his cloak. The healing took place very quietly. The woman tried her best not to be noticed. But something snapped with a powershift. Jesus noticed her. “Who touched me?” Jesus said to the crowd (in famine-who in Greek). His disciples were perplexed and oblivious: how can he ask such a question when the crowd was pressing on him? The woman came forward in trembling, knowing that she was the culprit, but this healing moment ends with tender words from Jesus, “Daughter, your faith has made you well, go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
This story of the woman reaching out in faith is what we need to hear today. After years in ministry, I often look out the office window and wonder if what I am doing is making any difference. When ministry falls into basic routine and cycles of communal life, however important it is to maintain and lead a congregation, I ask myself how we are connecting with the world and their needs? Sometimes we live in our own little bubble with self-importance when the world ignores us as irrelevant. We are no longer mainline church but “side-line.” Some even call it a sinking ship, implying the days of religious institutions are over. The signs on the walls seem to be everywhere. The numbers are not adding up anymore. Perhaps like the woman in the story we are at the end of our rope. it’s all in or nothing. So, we reach out in our moment of desperation because that’s all we can do. We can no longer imagine our future. What happened to the kind of faith where we take refuge in God as our firm foundation that has sustained us? Or the kind of faith where we live and move and have our being in Christ kind of faith?
The faith of this woman reaching out calls us to leave our comfort zone, from a safe and secure place of ministry, to reach out to Jesus and touch his cloak kind of faith! This stretch requires imagination and faith. It requires acknowledging that we have reached the limits of what we can do and that we need Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Dae