First Baptist Church of Asheville Podcast
Sermon: The Faith That Halted Everything
May God bless the hearing and the reading of these words today. God of healing made the words of my mouth and the meditations of each heart coming into this space for worship today. Be pleasing unto you, Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Friends, as I begin today, I would like to draw our attention to the phrase, Lord, our rock and our redeemer because our God is both. We have a God who is our rock, the God of firm foundations, and we have a God who is redeemer, the God of saving vulnerable souls and vulnerable hearts. Sometimes God establishes organized systems of being for us to live by and laws for us to obey. Sometimes God challenges us to reconsider those systems and look again. In this passage, we see how God walks with us towards great things and forces us to turn and look back to see who is pulling on the hem of our cloaks and we're suddenly thrust into seeing what God sees and will never be the same. I've been thinking a lot this week about how God tells us in the midst of our great plans to stop, look, and listen. When our hustle towards the next thing can make us leave some important things and people behind. This is the God I wanna talk about today in the context of Mark V, where plans are stopped, halted, and modified for one woman. In this story, Jesus stops everything. He stops the flow of traffic, usual programming, going towards a great thing, healing a dying little girl, but all of that stopped for one. This story places us not just in the shoes of the woman, Jesus saves who is redeemed and beloved by Jesus, but also it places us in the shoes of the surrounding group of people, them then, us now, looking on and growing frustrated with this interruption. Distraction from our goals frustrates us. When a great thing gets spoiled or interrupted, we feel it rising in us and get agitated. When someone interrupts a great thing that we're trying to do, we have a hard time recognizing where that person might be coming from. When a woman interrupts a crowd healing in a undignified way for her own healing needs, it's easy for the crowd to not recognize where she comes from, not see the years of hurt that she has endured and become frustrated. How could she think her needs are greater than a dying child? Did this one woman's request even stand a chance against this crowd? For this was a woman who had been crying out to God from the depths for several long years, who had been waiting and waiting for God more than those who watch for the morning. To her, it wouldn't have been surprising if she had been disappointed yet again, as she had been disappointed many times before, but here he was. That hope, forgiveness, steadfast love that could stand the test of illness and pain right in front of her. And if the rest of the world disappointed her, it didn't matter if she could just touch his cloak, the coming disappointment and agitation would all be worth it. Jesus halted the traffic to give love to one woman. Why? Was this a good enough reason to let a child go ahead and die? Even though this traffic was headed towards a beautiful thing, saving a child from death, he stopped it. We often think, if a great system gets interrupted, if a great plan gets interrupted, there has to be a condition, some sort of payoff. If our great thing is gonna get interrupted, there'd better be a good enough reason for it. And in this way, one reading of the story that some might say, well, it's presupposed that this woman made enough of a stink to get what she wanted, as if the crowd, them and now us, would only pay attention to her, only pay attention to the least of these, on the condition that she has, enough faith, enough of a case, and only here does she deserve traffic to stop for her. But Jesus says and does otherwise. The faith of this one woman did not, it did stop everything, but it was not just because she believed enough. Her worth wasn't conditional on her faith. These crowds were about to trample over her anyway. Leave her behind. No matter how much faith she did or didn't have, how much pain she was or wasn't in, how much struggle or need she did or didn't have, they were going to leave her behind, without even a glance, until Jesus stopped this traffic. Traffic. Let's talk about the power and impact of big crowds moving in one direction. I've gone to many Carolina basketball games in the past, and when we storm Franklin Street, there's no turning around. Crowds are great, they're fun. How beautiful is it to sing with a huge choir of voices, everyone singing together, will you come and follow me if I but call your name? A very model here of the kingdom of heaven. Big crowds are good and we're better together. Numbers, even often in marketability, indicate success a lot of the time, as if the thing itself wasn't already enough before you showed a big picture of everybody. Humans love the idea of everyone doing the same thing together. They make us more comfortable. But sometimes, as we know, mob mentality can lead us into some funky fresh places. As Christians, we've often following a city on the hill example as a mindset that's an easy trap to fall into, as we're often tempted to be the ones that shift the evil and terrible big bad world in the right direction. Ignorant of our own, ignorance in doing so. But luckily, to keep us from falling into this trap, we have a God that breaks the mold, who while he came to walk among the masses and teach us, he lived among the marginalized, those cast out of the crowd. But though groupthink can have toxic effects and act like that sometimes, that doesn't make following the crowd a bad thing. Look at this crowd, in this passage, they were trying to heal a dying little girl. What's wrong with that? It's difficult to break away from the group, especially when you can't see there's anything wrong with it. It was difficult for even Jesus' disciples to break from the crowd and defend their friend and not deny him before a bunch of different people around the time of his death. While they slept in the garden, Jesus bled, pleading to God from the depths to take his suffering from him, to lift him out of the depths while he watched for the morning. I wonder how often this woman prayed the prayer in Psalm 130 that we just did together. How often those ostracized from the crowd trampled over pray this prayer. For ultimately, crowds have the power to do a lot of damage, ostracizing and loving people only on condition, but Jesus breaks that, stops it in its tracks and calls us to be different. Jesus halts everything to make sure that she knows that her Psalm 130 prayer is heard and received and that he walks with her. Not to change the subject, but I wanna present you all with something that I've had trouble with to see what you think. Looking at this with our, Jesus stops the traffic glasses on. I'm a music teacher and that directly influences music ministry. And it's interesting how much bleeds in into music ministry and leadership and all the things that you do. And I've been surrounded by a lot of conversations about leadership recently in music classrooms. And I've heard the philosophy that when children maybe or kids inquire, start misbehaving and have persistent and persistent over and over again disruptions that keep causing problems and make children struggle focusing, it's better to just go ahead and nip that in the bud and tell that kid that behavior is not appropriate, tell them that it's better to tell them that they're not allowed to ruin this great musical thing for the rest of the kids and sometimes even remove them from the group, rather than letting them continue acting in an unhelpful way. I've dealt with children. You've dealt with children. Children are a lot to do with. And I should say that that's not a bad thing to do. In no way, shape or form, I'm here to tell you that's a bad thing to do. For teachers, aiming for musical beauty in order in the classroom and respect for leaders is vastly important. And if there's a lot of noise going on, some kids get overstimulated and really can't focus and might have meltdowns. And so in order to care for those kids, we try to simmer down the noise for others' well-being. That can be inclusive. That can be care. Once in another place in scripture, when a woman shattered a bottle of perfume on Jesus' feet and wiped it with her hair, something loud and rash and undignified, it wasn't necessarily wrong for somebody to point out how the money for that perfume could have been given to the poor. That could have been care. I've been looking and thinking again about this philosophy with our Jesus stops the traffic glasses on. And it's made me wonder in the last few weeks looking at this, if I'm even supposed to be a music minister, if it hints in any way that choosing an ensemble and order and decorum for the ensemble over a kid is the way to go. Man, music ministers have it rough with the expectations placed on them because we're expected to produce ensembles with an excellent, beautiful sound and do all the time and be an extension of the body of Christ at work in the community. We're told to not let that child disrupt, but not always are we having that lengthy of a conversation about how to navigate based on prior knowledge of what that child may be going through, which a church is far more responsible for pastoral care needs of that child within the ensemble. That's an opportunity. Whether they do or do not have a diagnosable behavior issue or disability, that the home structure can or can't maybe afford to get diagnosed or has time to take to get diagnosed, or whether that child has within the home structure, other issues going on behind the scenes that's hard to see, whether that child has literacy skills enforced in the home, let alone music literacy skills that then translate into frustration in the classroom when they can't catch up. If these kids are already falling behind, already bleeding out, is it right to save everyone else, the other 99 journeying towards a great thing and leave the one who is bleeding? I don't think any of y'all think that way. I'm sure none of us feel that it's worth it as a church to allow a child to feel like they're in any way a social contagion to the group among an ensemble of right behaving musicians whose parents strove them there. All are welcome in our ensemble, but the ensemble is the focus. All are welcome, but, has the danger in the midst of a crowd saying it to sound a little bit too much like, all should be healed by Jesus of their bleeding, but the dying girl is the focus who is left out and not healed here. This is impossible. It's quite easy to prioritize the needs of the 99 sheep over the one, the ensemble over the individual, but somehow Jesus here heals both of them, like the father of the prodigal son loving both of his children, halts the celebration of the older son to give a party for his younger son's return. God calls us here to shift our gaze sometimes from this direction that we were walking back towards what we have left behind and evaluate. I want to refer to this picture that Heather so thoughtfully put into the bulletin today. And on the way towards looking back at the cloaked woman in the dark colored cloak, reaching out towards Jesus, Jesus makes intense investigative eye contact with members of the crowd first. Take a look, pretty piercing. Sometimes that evaluation and looking at ourselves can completely reshape the way that we thought about our goals and ministry. Sometimes prioritizing the one can shape the outlook and goals of the group for the better. Jesus teaches us to look back as we move forward, look back before we move forward, but evaluation can be painful. And it smacks us faithful followers in the face sometimes to realize that the thing that we love that we're aiming for, beautiful and right, absolutely right though it is, can still possibly somehow miss the point and miss great opportunities for God's goodness to speak through unlikely voices right here before our eyes right here at our feet. But God points out these times when we in our lives don't realize that we're saying all are welcome, but. And it's really, really hard to see where exactly God's great new, beautiful, justice-oriented, inclusive thing is happening. Trying to heal a dead girl is great. Stopping that girl and waiting to heal a bleeding woman is great, which wins? Jesus says that that's asking the wrong question. If we're looking for the right answer, we can certainly count on God doing things that are the opposite of what the crowd might suspect. We can count on God flipping our ways of thinking about the world upside down and making us question everything. Jesus halts the traffic, stops everything, good and bad to meet her right where she is, indicating that she deserves to be acknowledged right where she is. Not on the condition of, okay, come with me over here, I'll heal you in a minute if you're on your best behavior. He looks her in the eyes while the crowds and the 99 wait and watch and calls her worthy of love. Friends, if our crowd as the body of Christ moves in directions that trample, that cause some to sit out, then the kingdom of God isn't complete. I recently was able to spend some time with children here this week and then the week before with some children at my home church. And we can learn a lot from the way children in this space and otherwise include and love each other. I visited my home church kids while they were at Brevard for passport kids and they're a really, really diverse group by accident of some children being, ministers children, some growing up in the church, some being friends of friends, others mostly unchurched coming from the neighborhood across the street or friends of friends coming and all these kids were trying to figure out how to become a family together that week. And I witnessed them make up a new game to play together called jackpot, which they took a little girl's crock shoe and tossed it around like a football intensely. And in this game, the rules could be easily bent and moved around so that each kid was able to take a turn tossing and catching and each kid was cheered on for exactly what they could uniquely bring. Some kids were loud and wanted to wrestle and were hyperactive and wanted to just beat each other up and they could do that and were praised. Some children were quieter and unsure, but the path was made for them so that they could finagle through and score. There were some children, one in particular, who has a few social needs, but was just happy to be included and he was just vibing on the side, just like a part of the game in it listening, watching. But these kids didn't just include him by letting him stand there. They would arrange among themselves for this child to score and cheered him on for what he uniquely brought to that game. This group of kids arranged for everyone to be a part of the game and no one was left behind or forgotten. I saw that if the standards and the rules are so high that people are the problem to be fixed rather than the game, then are we really loving unconditionally? Life is to be done together. Systems are worth halting, modifying so that all can come and receive healing. Where have we prioritized the dying girl over the trampled instead of healing both? Are there conditions in place that determine what society deems valuable? Some of those conditions in this world, in this country, in this place, are found in behavior some are built directly into our buildings and systems. But this church works to push past those. This chancell itself, ironically, one of the first thing I noticed within a huge, beautiful church that loves all and includes all, people of all abilities, is the one place that you can't access unless you can walk up the stairs. Very ironic for the group that this is in, but some of you were the ones who, when I was here, one of the first things I saw when there was a guest choir, y'all lifted a little girl in her wheelchair up onto the chancell so that she could lead us with her group, y'all did that. You turned around to work against the infrastructure of the building, the status quo, like Jesus did when his cloak was pulled and you acted. God here says, the thing is great and evaluating it again and again and taking action is great. God calls us to be like impossibly busy, multifaceted, talented church music directors, who again produce great musicians and great environments of love and evaluate to make sure that each child knows that they are enough. In church where we are required to be the living, breathing, hands, feet, eyes, ears, and body of Christ himself, we exercise excellence and care. You exercise excellence and care. Friends, know today God will halt everything to embrace you exactly where you are. God's one amidst the 99. But ours is also a God who turns against the current when his cloak is pulled. What do we do with that? As we the vulnerable have been restored, we restore. Even when it means stopping the traffic. God our rock and redeemer ventures with us into the healing of all people. So let us be ready and willing for our heads to be turned. Now, we listen to those whom God has created and speaks through as they voice, they're rejoicing to their God. Amen. (silence) [ Silence ]