Lord God, as we know that nothing has been able to separate us from you, that your death,
your life cannot change, cannot bridge.
Lord God, nothing can stop what you did on Calvary from bringing us salvation and hope.
Lord God, our life is new because of you.
We thank you that nothing else can take that away.
In Christ Jesus.
Amen.
Howdy.
Well, now, you all know me for a little bit now.
And I try to make sure that from time to time, I make sure you realize just how quirky and
odd I really am.
So I know, just in case you weren't sure.
But with it is that some years back, we talked a little bit about how oftentimes people can
be a little bit different, divergent neurologically and different minds to think in different
ways.
And one of the things that has come up quite often is the idea of what is obsessive compulsive
disorder.
Now, you may have heard of this OCD in the past.
I am here to tell you it is a just an absolute pain in the butt.
It is terrible and annoying and frustrating.
You may see somebody standing at a light switch, flicking it on and off 72 times.
And you may be wondering why in the world do you need to do that 72 times?
But for the person standing there, in their mind is there constantly saying, did I do
it right?
And if I do it eight more times, do I know that now it will be done especially correctly?
Or otherwise, if I don't know for sure if I did it perfectly, then will there be some
electrical short in the walls and the entire building will burn down?
Or if you were to have a person that you see washing their hands for three, four, five
minutes at a time, and this isn't even the time of COVID, all right?
And you're wondering why it is that they are washing to the palm, to the wrist, sometimes
even to the elbow, is that then there might be this thought on the person's mind of, if
I did not wash completely, thoroughly, and get every single spot on every single place,
then there will be some disease from the other side of the world that I will somehow contract
and die.
And if you've ever read Reader's Digest, you know where those come from.
With it is that you might see a person constantly trying to line things up, or if they do something
with the right hand, they have to do it with the left, making sure things are in patterns
of four, and you wonder what is going on.
This is what it is to struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Because what happens is that thoughts of anxiety and fear will be in a person's mind so much
that then they have to compulsively do things to try to relieve the anxiety.
And while it doesn't make any sense, even to the person doing it, it is somehow what
they must do to try to find some sort of relief.
Welcome to my teenage years.
Not a very enjoyable experience at all.
And even more than that is trying to do so while even having friendships and trying
to live a life and try to do things outside of your little habits and rituals.
The thing is that not everybody has that extreme of behavior, but the idea of being
afraid and trying to find things that make us feel less anxious, that is something that
many of us do.
Especially when we're asking questions of whether or not something is or is not clean.
How many times, how many ways, we are just making sure that whatever we are doing somehow
does not make us unclean.
And this idea, this struggle, is where we actually find ourselves when we're looking
at the Gospel of Mark today.
You see, in our Gospel reading, we actually have two specific individuals that are going
to help us to understand the idea of what it was to struggle with being unclean.
See, the idea of what it is to be unclean is something that people didn't necessarily
understand as well back in the days of Jesus.
But they did know what it was to carry disease, and they knew what it was to wash their hands.
But many of the practices that are in Scripture were just ways of trying to make sure that
you got everything clean.
See, they didn't have washing machines and dryers back then.
There were no dish machines that could get things incredibly hot and sterilize the dishes.
There weren't little hand wipes that you could carry with you everywhere, or little bottles
of antibacterial gel, just in case.
They didn't have all those things.
So when we look through and we read parts of Scripture, is we see chapter after chapter
just trying to make sure that they have practices just to make sure that their hands are clean.
And all of these specifics can oftentimes become what would obsess the people.
You see, in the Levitical Law, the laws that are in the book of Leviticus, is that they
would specify things for people, especially when you might have a discharge.
People were sometimes kind of gross.
There are things that come from us whether we like it or not.
Whether we are thinking about guys or whether we are thinking about women, there are different
things in the world that are gross.
And frankly, that in the Scriptures, it goes into it and tries to spell things out.
That for young men, what it's like when they're going through puberty and struggling with
things that they were not expecting or planning.
Or for women, when they go through their time of the month and guys like to just be snide
and make comments of, oh, well, it's that time of the month.
And it's like, you should probably be slapped.
With it, though, is that in a time and a day and age, when it wasn't that easy to just
take care of it, clean things, be done, how do you make sure that we not only stay clean,
but take care of the issue at hand?
And all of these rules would even say things like, if a person is in their impurity, their
uncleanness, do not even touch them.
See, that's the thing about this, is that in the Scriptures, it's trying to make sure
that everybody stays clean.
But when you take it out of context, it can basically be taking a person going through
something normal that everybody goes through and starts making them sound like some sort
of a strange freak, some sort of a weirdo that you want to stay away from.
And that's one of the difficult parts about this, is that while the laws that are given
in Scripture are good, what we oftentimes do with them and the way that we obsess can oftentimes
be not so good, can be harmful, in fact.
See, we're not supposed to spend the time asking whether or not this person is good
or evil.
And spending so much time asking about whether or not you accidentally touched somebody on
the shoulder, or whether or not you shook their hand, or whether or not you were anywhere
close to them.
That wasn't the goal.
That wasn't the point.
The point was merely saying, if you are the people of God, then you will look for ways
to care for your bodies, to do what is right, and to live your lives as showing that God
is expecting us to be pure in his sight.
But that's not always what we end up doing with people around us.
See oftentimes whenever somebody feels that they are unclean, that they are impure in the
eyes of people around them, it's very easy for them to feel unwanted, unloved, and
loved, and rejected by the world around them.
See that's the struggle that we end up seeing in the woman that is there, in the crowd,
reaching to grab Jesus' garments.
See the thing is, is that Jesus is heading off to go help someone who would be considered
clean at the time.
Jesus is on his way to help a little girl, whose father is somebody who's a leader in
the synagogue.
This is somebody who would be considered the right kind of person to go help out.
Someone that, oh you can let them know, oh I'm going to go help Jairus and his family,
and everybody would be happy to hear about it.
But on the way, all of these people are just trying to get close to Jesus.
All these people who know that they are in need.
All these people who just want to be able, maybe just to touch him or hear him.
And then out of nowhere, Jesus says, who touched my garments?
I'm sorry, but if there were ever a time when Jesus were to sound a little OCD, this would
be the moment.
You've got all these people pushing up against you, and this one person that somehow stands
out in your mind, somebody touched me, somebody touched me, I know somebody touched me.
There's like dozens of people I know, but somebody touched me, okay Jesus, could you
just calm down a little bit.
Look, it could have been anybody.
Well, I know that somebody touched me.
The thing is, is that this woman who is there, is somebody that for 12 years has struggled
with being marked as unclean.
Every day that there had been something, some reason why her body wasn't working the way
that it's supposed to.
Something, some reason that has nothing to do with her, and her choices, the what it
is that she's doing, but she can't seem to stop it.
It won't seem to change.
And that every single day, she is now unclean.
Not only does she have to go down and find a place to wash her clothing over and over
and over, but that time and time again, she has to take a step back from anything that
might lead her to worship, or the temple, certain parties get together.
How many times that she has to say, I'm sorry, I can't go, spend time with you, I'm unclean
today.
How many times that she's waiting until evening and saying, will tomorrow be different?
Do I need to wait another seven days and another seven days?
And now at this moment is after 12 years of this, times where if you're unclean and nobody
thinks that they can touch you, how many times she's been waiting just for somebody to hug
her, to spend time around her, just to welcome her into their home.
How many years of feeling alone, because there is something that she cannot shake to obsess
and to have to deal with each and every day.
And there's Jesus.
Now she has reached out and touched him, and he can tell that the power has gone out from
him.
Did everybody else feel the power?
No.
And Jesus is standing there and his power somehow kind of leaked out.
And it's like, oh, you touched me.
All right, you get a little Jesus power.
Oh, you shook my hand.
You get a little Jesus power.
Everybody gets a little Jesus power.
He's not the Oprah of the Middle East.
We end up seeing is that Jesus is not there somehow leaking it out.
Is that instead, he knows specifically who needed it and whose heart was open in saying,
I need you.
Because that power went exactly where it needed to go.
So was he angry?
Was he upset that this unclean person touched him?
Is that what this is about?
I need to know, because now you and me, we got to go be unclean for the next seven days.
In the Greek, there are two words that are used for healing in this passage.
One is, Iaomai.
Yeah, try to say that five times fast.
With it, Iaomai, yes, it really is pronounced that way, is meaning healing in a sense that
you can see.
The obvious thing, like your body is healed.
It's meant to be kind of a general term for what you can see, touch and all.
But sozo is different.
It is healing from the sense of salvation.
It is a deeper word.
It's like going the difference between I like or prefer you to, I love you.
It's the idea of taking something that you can kind of sort of see and fulfilling it
more deeply.
And that's what Jesus needs to know.
Who is it that touched me?
Because I need to see you and I need you to know.
Your faith has healed you, not just what you've been dreading and dealing with for 12 years,
but your heart, your soul, your life, sozo.
Your soul is saved.
Because that's the thing about this, is that instead of just fearing the unclean, is asking
the point of how can Jesus strengthen her faith.
And we may take this for granted so many times.
Okay, yes, we know that, you know, yeah, you want to be careful about, you know, when you're
around sick people, okay, yeah.
Make sure you go and wash your hands.
You know, do you really want to hug the person who's coughing?
Do you really want to be that close to them?
You don't know what they may have.
But isn't it also times where someone feels so lonely in their life that they're looking
to get affection in any way that they can?
And we know what kind of a lifestyle they live and we're not sure we really want to be
associated with that person?
Or the times whenever we know, hey, I think this person doesn't have a roof over their
head.
And automatically you start to kind of like back away.
Because immediately you're pretty sure that they're dangerous or that there's probably
something on them that you don't want to get on you.
Or even the times whenever we say, I don't know how you got into the community here.
I don't know if you did it the right way.
So therefore I don't know if you're somebody that I want to be close to.
The times whenever we in our lives figure out who is unclean in our minds.
But the difference from going to clean to unclean can happen like that.
And that's what we end up finding for the second person.
Because there's Jesus took the time, didn't rush off to go help out the clean people.
He stayed there to help the unclean.
And finding out that the daughter has now died.
And now the clean is unclean.
Now you may be thinking to yourself, okay well if she's dead then she probably has bigger
issues than whether or not she's clean.
But putting these two together is meant to be something that we realize because of how
Jesus responds.
Jesus can heal from a distance.
He could have just said the words and called forth and she could have been healed.
But what does he do?
He goes to her and he grabs her hand.
Jesus is not afraid of the unclean.
He's not afraid that somehow they're going to get on him and harm him in some way.
But rather is he was willing to get there into the thick of it and to bring healing.
And that's also where we are meant to find ourselves as well.
Is that we're meant to be there with the people who need healing the most.
That kid in high school trying to deal with all of the intrusive thoughts and trying not
to completely obsess about whether or not he was clean or unclean, what happened to
him?
Well he had a friend named Andy.
And you see Andy was the complete opposite.
Had no interest in obsessing about anything or everything.
And you see whenever I went to go hang out with Andy is I would begin to try to do my
little rituals.
I would check the light switch, try to take care of it time and time again.
And he would be like, hey we've got stuff to do.
Let's get in the car.
We need to go.
And if I wanted to go hang out with my friend I didn't have time for all of this.
Or I'm washing and it's been maybe about a minute and he's like, dude we got it.
We got stuff to do.
Come on let's go.
And what I realized was not only that he wasn't focused on whether I was clean enough or not.
All he was focused on was that he cared about me.
But more than that is that he brought me into his life.
See that's the thing is that in so many ways when I was able to pause and realize that
my thoughts were the only problem is that I was finally able to start letting things
go.
I still have my issues.
I think we all do.
But that doesn't stop us from being able to know that we're welcomed and that we matter.
And that at that moment is to know that while yeah we struggle with things, the things that
take our mind whether it's things that we've done that people can see or the things that
are in our minds and in our hearts that we hope and pray nobody ever knows.
We know the things that sometimes we focus on too much.
And yet what has God done is that he has come to us to bring us healing, to bring us cleanliness
because of what he did on the cross for us.
Is that this is not a Jesus who is now afraid to be with us.
So why are we so afraid to go to the ends of the earth and to see and be with the people
who need us?
Because that's the thing about this is that the only way for them to truly find the healing,
the sense of peace is to know the Savior that we know.
See we don't need to avoid the issues.
We don't need to pretend that they're not important because God still meets us exactly
where we are and brings us healing not as much to focus on the outside but the place
where it actually matters.
And more than that is that we then get to bring that to the rest of the world.
So maybe we pause for a moment and we think about who are the ones in our life, the ones
that we try to avoid.
And we realize that even when we were those people, God met us and brought us healing
and salvation.
So may we be willing to meet them and bring them hope and love because that peace that
surpasses all understanding is the only thing that will clean and purify others and to change
us to be like Him.
Thanks be to God.