4 Pentecost, Year B

“CHANGE”
A sermon by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois, on Sunday, June 28, 2009
Proper 8: Deuteronomy 15:7–11; Psalm 112; II Corinthians 8:1–9,13–15; Mark 5:22–24, 35b–43

The French have a wonderful saying, “Plus ça change, plus le même chose.” Or, translated, this means, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Is that our attitude toward life? “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Or, put another way, “Give it up! This/that (situation/problem) will never change.”

Today’s gospel account is all about change. Or, more accurately put, about changing human attitudes concerning what God can do, versus what we humans can do.

So, with this thought in mind, let’s turn to today’s text….

We see that one of the rulers of the local synagogue, named Jairus, approaches Jesus, asking that her little daughter might be healed. As Jesus makes His way to the little girl, word comes that she has died. (One is reminded of the similarities to the account of the raising of Lazarus (see John chapter 11), who died as Jesus was on His way to go to Lazarus.)

Mark then tells us that, “There came from the ruler’s house some who said, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?’”

If I were writing a paraphrase of this event, I’d characterize the response of those who said “Your daughter is dead, why trouble the Teacher any further” this way: I’d write, “Give it up! It’s over. Your daughter is dead, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that.”

But, you see, these folk are seeing the situation from a human point-of-view, not from God’s point-of-view….Their experience tells them that, once a person has died, “It’s over! There’s no more hope for change or improvement in the situation.”

Our experience tells us the same thing, or tries to, anyway.

Allow me to explain.

We live in a world where our experience, as we make our way through life, tells us what to expect in the situations we encounter. We need this experience in order to live, it’s a basic tool that our God-given reason needs in order to survive, and even to thrive.

But this wonderful reasoning power, combined with our life’s experience, can also blind us to an ability to see things as God sees them, not as we might see them.

For, you see, God has the power to change things, power that we don’t have.

That’s the point of today’s gospel account….When all hope is gone, when the little girl is dead, we are right to say, “All hope for change/improvement is gone.” That’s what our life’s experience tells us.

But Jesus comes into the situation, and demonstrates God’s power over the forces of life and of death. Jesus raises the little girl to life again, saying (in Aramaic) “Talitha, cum,” “Little girl, arise.”

For us, as 21st century believers, God’s hands, God’s mind, God’s heart in this world, how can our senses, our ability to reason and to make rational sense out of the world with respect to what is possible and what is impossible be transformed in order to see things as God sees them?

After all, the dead aren’t being raised these days, are they?

Or, are they?

The answer is that, “Yes” the dead are being raised. Perhaps not quite in the way that Jesus raised the 12 year old girl in today’s gospel, but in every case where divine intervention has brought delivery from a fatal disease or condition where human efforts had done all they could do to improve the situation. Situations when the doctors throw up their hands and say, “We’ve done all we know how to do.”

Perhaps you know of a situation like that. I do.

The dead are being raised to new life again whenever medical science and the skilled hands of doctors, nurses and medical technicians use God-given abilities to solve health issues that only a few years ago would have led to inevitable death. Yes, the dead are being raised these days.

And, the dead come back to life whenever intractable, seemingly unsolvable problems or differences between human beings are resolved, when ancient hurts and hatreds succumb to the power of God’s love to heal and to reconcile.

New life is found when a person who seemed beyond hope and redemption finds God and is found by Him. (We spoke last week of the situation with my father, whose addictions seemed beyond the power of human agency to redeem…..Just when all seemed lost, and we human beings were tempted to say, “Give it up! This situation will never change,” God stepped into the situation, and redeemed my father, reclaiming him from the destructive powers that seek to estrange us from God and from each other.)

You see, we are called to “see things as God sees them”, not as our experience dictates that they should be seen.

That transformation in our sight and in our insight begins in the heart, the mind and the soul. It requires giving up the sense that we human beings are totally in control of every situation, and that our strength, our efforts will dictate what situations we can change, and those that we can’t, for nothing is outside of God’s ability to redeem, either in this life, or in the life of the world to come.

AMEN.