"Get Up."
Mark 5:21-43
June 29, 1997
In her novel The Living, Annie Dillard describes this scene from a funeral:
"Hugh stood with stiff Lulu and supple Bert at the graveside. The Nooksacks stood together with their preacher. "Before the funeral, in mourning for his father, they had shrieked and pounded on boards...
"At last big-faced Norval Tawes read Scripture and prayed. 'O Death, where is they sting?' Norval Tawes called out, and his little black eyes glittered on Hugh.
"Hugh thought, 'Just about everywhere, since you ask.'"
And it is. Death stings just about everywhere. In today's gospel, there is death. A woman is dying because of a seemingly incurable, chronic illness; a little girl has already died. A father stands helpless, as helpless as if he were dead. The grieving father is a "ruler of the synagogue," so I suppose that he had sat through thousands of sermons, heard all the slogans and scripture texts. Yet now, standing face-to-face with death, with the loss of his beloved little daughter, I wonder if he recalls any of the comforting words of scripture. What can he do to defend himself against the sting, the sting of death?
Among us, not only when we are threatened by a serious illness, not only when we stand beside the grave of someone we love, but each day, there is death. "I'm always having funerals," she said to me after the collapse of her second marriage. And you know what she means, don't you?
A friend of mine is working on a book on funerals. We were discussing the basic question, "Who is a funeral for?" Well, it's for the grieving family, of course, those who are going through intense grief at that moment. Yet we also agreed that a funeral, a Christian funeral, is more. It is not only for the family which is experiencing acute grief, it is for all of us. All of us are either dealing with past grief or else preparing to grieve. The sun may shine for you today, but life being what it is, you know that tomorrow may bring clouds. The sting of death.
Death meets us, not only in the grim face of our doctor, informing us of the onset of some dreaded illness, but also in the faces of the one who told us that we were not needed anymore at this job, or the one who asked out of a marriage, a friend who turns her back upon us, the family member who would not forgive.
And what does one do with so much dying? Resignation, noble acquiescence? That's one possibility. Accept it. Death is a natural part of life. Loss is inevitable. It all ends at the cemetery. Get used to it.
A popular poem of another day speaks romantically of resignation in the face of death, noble resignation:
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustain'd and sooth'd
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
--William Cullen Bryant, "Thanatopsis."
With whom do you most identify in today's gospel? There are plenty of characters here who are being stung by death. There is a woman whose whole life has been caught, dominated by a terrible, life-demanding illness. There is a distraught father. A little girl whose young life is being cut short. There are the baffled disciples, the crowd who doesn't know what to think of all this. Where are you?
And yet, intruding into the story is another face, the strong, live-giving face of Jesus. Mark says that Jesus was forever intruding into fixed, settled, hopeless situations and bringing life. Hear his strong voice speaking over the laments and dirges in today's gospel? Hear him as he calls to the little girl, "Get up!"
I think he may be calling to you. "Get up!" His voice is strong, commanding, vital. "Get up!" You have perhaps heard his comforting, soft voice before, stilling the waves of the storm, bringing peace to troubled waters. Now hear his other voice, that strong, shattering, enlivening voice. Evoking "fear and trembling" (verse 33) in all who heard it that day, it may do the same for us. Life is frightening, when it intrudes into the realm of death. Hear his voice now. I think it is a shout. There is so much death. We are asleep with death so it takes a loud voice to wake us.
The great tower of the Castle Church in Wittenberg overlooks the church where Luther preached and is today buried.
On the anniversary of the Reformation the Socialist government took it upon itself to paint, in large, tasteless letters, a quote for the first line of Luther's famous hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God, a bulwark never failing."
Believers in Wittenberg, for whom the words were more than an advertising slogan, whispered among themselves "The communists should have quoted from the first line of the second verse of the hymn, 'If we on our own strength confide, our striving would be loosing.'"
And it's true. Left to our own devices, we are caught, trapped, dead. Face facts. There's a lot of deadness out there and in here.
But Jesus does not leave us be. In this story, we don't have to wait to Easter for life to intrude and death to be defeated. Get up! he says. In the name of Jesus Christ, the victor over pain and death, enslavement and despair, Get up!
I know people who have problems with the Christian faith. They can't understand Christian belief. They have difficulty with some of Jesus' teachings. They are perplexed by the Bible. They have failed at their attempts at prayer.
I wonder if I as a preacher have helped them or not. Too many of my sermons implicitly suggest that in order to be a Christian you have got to try hard to believe this, or that. You have got to straighten up and get your life together. You have got to feel this or that in your heart. One of you told me that this is why you come to church, even in the summer. "I come to church to learn where I have gone wrong and to be motivated to live a better life."
Pay attention to this little story. In this story, no one does anything, except to cry out in the face of death. No one, far as I can tell, believes, or feels, or thinks. It's a story, not about us and what we are to do, but about Jesus and what he does.
Get it?
"Jesus came to raise the dead. The only qualification for the gift of the Gospel is to be dead. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be good. You don't have to be wise. You don't have to be wonderful. You don't have to be anything...you just have to be dead. That's it." (Robert Farrar Capon).
Prayer:
Lord, on this bright, summer morning, with all the world fresh and green, and everything full of promise and summer contentment, we appear to be so full of life.
Yet you know, seeing into our souls, deeper than we ourselves see, that all is not well with us. Some of us here feel hopeless. We grow old, become weaker, less able to care for and to be with ourselves. We fear the future.
Others of us face some seemingly impossible situation. We don't know whether to turn to the left or to the right. We feel trapped, caught, paralyzed by fear.
And there are those today who wonder if they can go on, so bleak and unpromising seems tomorrow.
In all our caughtness, in the depressing fixedness of the world, come to us, call to us, raise us up, bring us life. Great master over death who raised the dead and healed the sick in body and soul, bring us life.
Amen.
______________
Notes:
Today's gospel exemplifies a stylistic characteristic of Mark. A story is begun, in this case, a story about the gravely ill daughter of a ruler of the synagogue, and then that story is interrupted or split by an intervening story, the story of a woman ill with an issue of blood. Perhaps Mark inserts a story into a story in order to build tension and interest -- we want to know how the first story ends. Perhaps the stories compliment and interpret one another.
We are back in Jewish territory now, on the western side of the Sea of Galilee (verse 21). A "ruler of the synagogue," a man who knows about the God of Israel, is about to receive expanded wisdom in the form of a mighty act of healing power. A woman, a person on the bottom of society, a one without rights or hope in her condition, is about to be set free.
All of this is meant to demonstrate that Jesus is stronger than the one who binds us (a frequent theme throughout these first five chapters of Mark). These mighty acts confound those who witness them, evoking "fear and trembling" (verse 33), "amazement" (verse 42).
What if, in Jesus, we are confronted with a power which heals the sick and raises the dead? What does this mean for the future of all of our sick, settled arrangements with death?
As Jesus calls a little girl to "get up" we somehow feel that he is calling to all those who are enslaved, trapped, fixed, and hopeless; he is calling even unto us.