“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – Amen”
People who know me well know that I spend a lot of time inside of my own head. It is a constant chatter and conversation between these two ears. The positive side of this experience is that I am comfortable being alone, I am my own best company. The negative side of this experience is that I can’t turn the chatter off and it can make sleep difficult. I like to take outdoor walks when the weather is pretty to sort through all the chatter and make sense of it. While in seminary I took a lot of these walks because I was given a lot to think about and sort through. One of my favorite places to take these walks is English Landing Park just north of here in Parkville. English Landing Park was the place where my husband and I shared our first date, and the Missouri river gives a lovely cool breeze. This park has a lot of trees. Through the years I began to pay close attention to these trees along the main trail. I named several of these trees, watched for when the park service would tag them, if they suffered storm damage or when the leaves began to change color in the fall and then bud out in the spring. My imagination goes wild for trees, and I find them to be a great comfort. I imagine they are symmetrical their tops mirroring their root systems – I imagine that trees might be the same deep under the soil as they appear to us in the sky. One of my favorite books is “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. Wohlleben explores how trees feel and communicate with one another in elaborate and deeply rooted communities. When one tree flourishes, other trees around it flourish. When one tree suffers, other trees nearby notice distress signals and send “help” by way of nutrients to help aid in its restoration and health. Some species of trees even synchronize their reproductive cycles to ensure a season of new saplings and growth. Trees are magnificent evidence of a creation that is intimately woven together. Peter, the author, describes a time in his life when he was an arborist and worked specifically with beech trees in a forest. To encourage growth in the forest he would “girdle” some select trees. Girdling a tree looks like stripping off a wide ring of bark which results in a tree that is unable to send nutrients from its foliage to its roots. Girdling starves a tree to death. The tree will eventually lose its leaves, allowing for more sunlight to reach younger shorter trees and the forest floor. Girdling is a brutal treatment for trees, the death of the tree is slow and painful to watch. Peter has regret for participating in this practice. To his amazement after several years of coming back to monitor those girdled trees he would find some of the beech trees more or less surviving because of neighboring trees sending help and nutrients through their shared root network. I often look to creation to see what it shows us about the nature and character of God. Trees are a wonderful place to observe the nature and character of God. Today’s gospel message brings us the stories of a woman and a young girl who were the recipients of great miracles. One woman is suffering from what could be described as a 12-year uterine bleed which rendered her ritually unclean and therefore unable to fully participate in her community and the practice of her faith. The other was a young girl who died at the age of 12. She died while the first woman was experiencing her healing miracle. In tandem, twelve years prior, one woman had entered a time of ritual impurity while the second was being born with life and vigor. The young girl died while the older woman was made whole again. There seems something meaningful in our gospel story about this juxtaposition. I don’t think it has anything to do with a capricious god who trades a good thing for a bad thing – trading life or healing for death, tit for tat. I think maybe these stories teach us something very important about the nature and character of God. When Peter Wohlleben the arborist was girdling beech trees, he had one simple goal and that was the preservation of the whole forest even if it meant death for a few other trees. The woman with the bleeding had experienced her own social “girdling”. She had spent her fortune on healers and doctors that brought no relief for her bleeding. To add insult to injury she became sicker. She was a woman who at one time had wealth and protection, to be out publically, unaccompanied was not a cultural norm. She showed great bravery and desperation to touch a strange man’s robe. When she touches the robe of Jesus he suddenly stops and asks what seems to be a ridiculous question – “Who touched me?” This was a ridiculous question because of the size and chaos of the crowd around him. He knew and experienced the miracle in tandem with the bleeding woman. Jesus felt power leave from him as the woman felt herself healed. The woman stepped forward, terrified and told him the truth. He gently calls her “daughter”, acknowledges that she has been made well and bids her to leave in peace. Brenee Brown in her 2015 work “Daring Greatly” described empathy. She determined that empathy involves listening, holding space, withholding judgement, emotionally connecting, and communicating the incredibly healing message “you are not alone”. At their core, empathizers are co-sufferers who understand. Jesus showed many empathizing behaviors and gifts in this miraculous moment with the healed woman. Meanwhile, during this interruption of Jesus’ walking to Jairus’ house, Jairus’ 12-year-old daughter dies. When he arrives at the house with the dead girl, he is greeted with wails and cries of deep mourning. Jesus makes the decision to only allow a few people into the room with him and calls the girl to life while again using a name laced with fatherly affection. Jesus orders everyone in the room to keep this miracle quiet and to give the girl something to eat. The girl, brought back to life is not a spirit, ghost or apparition. She has been raised to life with wholeness. Typically these two stories are taught to reinforce the importance of having faith. I also think that these stories point us to the nature and character of a deeply relational god. A relational god who not only is the facilitator of miracles but experiences them along with humankind. A relational god of empathy who experiences suffering with humankind, not just passively observing humankind’s suffering. A relational god who feels the tugging of creation itself. Returning to the story of the girdled beech trees Wohlleben observed that death can be mitigated by the active relational existence that is inherent to the shared root network. Imagine if you will that we pass around a ball of yarn, weaving it in and out of our chairs and rows. One person might tug at the place that they hold and people throughout our yarn web would experience that tug and pull. We do not experience life in a vacuum alone but with others who are inside and outside of our circle of our immediate influence. When one experiences suffering or healing, we all witness those moments. Many of us have a perception of an impassible and immutable god. An impassible god is a god incapable of suffering or being acted upon by sources outside of itself. A god that somehow intellectually “knows” of our suffering but is beyond suffering himself. A god that computes the human experience of suffering like a computer translating data of 1s and 0s. A god that is aware that suffering exists and what it might demand of humankind, yet remains observant, distant, and unmoved. Many of you know that I suffer from chronic illness. There is near daily suffering of weakness, pain, fatigue, aches, dehydration and deep grief of being acutely aware of what I pictured my life and body to look like, how it could work and knowing how far short of that vision I had for my life I am experiencing. Grief is simply that space between what is hoped for and what is reality. I am very lucky that I have a great number of friends, many in this room, who have sat and bore witness to that suffering and grief. Grief demands a witness. I also have a god who not only gives witness to that same suffering and grief but experiences it right with me and holds space with me. Not beside me, as if removed from it, but with me, right in the middle of the mess and muck of disease and brokenness. Likewise, God experiences healing with me. God is not outside of me and removed, watching it from across the room, but with me in all the healing and wholeness that I am able to experience. Our network has the capacity to send healing nutrients to each other for regrowth and healing. Just like you imagined holding yarn in your hands and feeling the tug of one person pass through each of your hands, God more infinitely and more intensely feels those tugs for help and healing throughout all of creation. God experiences the suffering of girdled beech trees and the suffering of humankind. God knows and experiences suffering happening in all of creation. God is moved and responds. God empathizes. I grew up in a tradition where children’s Christmas pageants were an annual undertaking. Pageants consisting of pre-school angel choirs, bath-robed shepherds, costume jewelry spangled wisemen, and 5th or 6th graders with trusted maturity to play Mary and Joseph. If we were lucky – a real live infant played the part of Baby Jesus. There were weekly rehearsals all through Advent with a line-memorization countdown that culminates in a Saturday afternoon dress rehearsal fueled by Kool-Aid, cold pizza and off-brand sandwich cookies. In one of those pageants, we sang a song that included the lyrics of “Emmanuel, God is with us” and that is never more so real than what the woman with the bleeding experienced. God was with her in that moment, trading his power for sickness. When Jairus’ daughter is raised from the dead God gives a peek at the miracle of resurrection – again trading his power for death. And to be sure, these women weren’t just healed they were made whole. The bleeding woman was restored socially with her physical healing. Jairus’ daughter wasn’t a ghost, apparition or spirit, she was brought back to life in wholeness, even being told to eat as proof! The miracles aren’t just healing they are wholeness! God wants wholeness for us and the world. That is Good News! The church is one of God’s ways of being in the world. The church as an institution has done its own share of bark stripping and, on the flip side, also has the capacity to assist in healing and recovery. Friends, each of you are God’s instruments of healing and hope. We are beech trees girdled in our own individual and unique ways AND we have a root network that reaches deep and wide to help share healing nutrients to one another and the world beyond us. It is not enough to be aware of social justice issues. Injustice and suffering rob others of wholeness. There are people beyond this building who are not plugged into their own root networks. We, as a church, receive distress signals and are called to be co-creators with God of healing and wholeness. The stronger and more vigorous our root system becomes the further it’s healing reach. This week may we go in peace. May we be exceptionally aware of an empathetic and relational God who is fully with us in both our suffering and our miracles. May we be exceptionally aware of others sending distress signals in their suffering. May we be exceptionally aware of our privilege to be so intimately connected and our opportunities to be a means of grace and presence for family and friends and our neighbors beyond our doors. “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – Amen” Leave a Reply. |
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To the Glory of God and in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary
St. Mary's is a parish of the Diocese of West Missouri, The Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion.
Address1307 Holmes Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64106 |
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