Strong Enough to Deal with the Sickness Mark 5:21-43 6/28/15 In a pastoral letter written almost immediately after learning of the tragic shooting of 9 people in their church in Charleston, South Carolina, our Presiding Bishop shared these remarks: June 18, 2015 It has been a long season of disquiet in our country. From Ferguson to Baltimore, simmering racial tensions have boiled over into violence. But this the fatal shooting of nine African Americans in a church is a stark, raw manifestation of the sin that is racism. The church was desecrated. The people of that congregation were desecrated. The aspiration voiced in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are one nation under God was desecrated. Mother Emanuel AME s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, as was the Rev. Daniel Simmons, associate pastor at Mother Emanuel. The suspected shooter is a member of an ELCA congregation. All of a sudden and for all of us, this is an intensely personal tragedy. One of our own is alleged to have shot and killed two who adopted us as their own. We might say that this was an isolated act by a deeply disturbed man. But we know that is not the whole truth. It is not an isolated event. And even if the shooter was unstable, the framework upon which he built his vision of race is not. Racism is a fact in American culture. Denial and avoidance of this fact are deadly. The Rev. Mr. Pinckney leaves a wife and children. The other eight victims leave grieving families. The family of the suspected killer and two congregations are broken. When will this end? The nine dead in Charleston are not the first innocent victims killed by violence. Our only hope rests in the innocent One, who was violently executed on Good Friday. Emmanuel, God with us, carried our grief and sorrow the grief and sorrow of Mother Emanuel AME church and he was wounded for our transgressions the deadly sin of racism. I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we
need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray for insight, for forgiveness, for courage. Kyrie Eleison. The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton Presiding Bishop Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Our service this morning has been modified to comply with her suggestions. Bill chose the music to fit the theme, and he will play the same song as a postlude that was led by the president at the funeral for Pastor Pinkney on Friday. Choir members volunteered to extend their ministry season by another week to offer support for worship so that we might better express ourselves as Bishop Eaton reminds us we should, because at least this time, it confronts us in such a way that we in the ELCA cannot delude ourselves into thinking that racism is only somebody else s problem. We cannot afford to avoid this sad truth, and we dare not be complacent. We need to take full advantage of the opportunity we are given to seek healing from the one person who is strong enough to deal with our sickness. I am encouraged by today s gospel text from Mark to trust that our actions in response to her request can put
us into close touch with the power for change that we seek the powerful authority of God s living Word. We listened as the evangelist rushed to tell us of two households with such a deep desire for healing that it thrust them into the presence of Jesus in search of a miracle. They saw him as their last hope, and both of their stories are so amazing and so important that they are joined at the hip, almost becoming one. Mark can t even wait for the first to be finished before he launches into the other one. The healing of the woman with the 12-year-long flow of blood and the raising back to life of the 12-year-old girl literally interrupt each other in their effort to witness to the good news of the Lord Jesus in action. By using this unusual technique, in which the separate stories are woven together in a pointcounterpoint conversation with each other, the gospel writer thereby magnifies their impact. He is able to underscore for us how the Christ possesses the divine power of authority and of right. He has the ability and strength to heal and raise up. We are invited to turn to this power greater than ourselves this morning so that we, too, might have the hope of being healed from our disease of a racism that has proven to be every bit as persistent and as deadly as the terrible sicknesses that afflicted the two people
we heard about who were smart enough to seek the direct intervention of Jesus. It is a sin that catches us up in subtle ways, infecting our thoughts and feelings, establishing itself deep within our soul where we host it even without our conscious realization or consent. But if we really want to be made well, we are given a pattern to follow in the example of that two-part confession set for us in the Biblical text. Like those who came to fall at the feet of Jesus, we can begin with the acknowledgment of our desperate need for God s help and then we can express our confident trust in God s willingness to help. Today is a good time for us to approach Jesus with complete honesty and confess our sin as individuals, as a church, and as the larger community. The reality for us is that racism is an evil from which we have no built in immunity. We need to admit that our heart rate is not the same when we are hurrying along the sidewalk at night in a predominantly African-American or Latino neighborhood as it is when we take a leisurely stroll of the same length where we have chosen to make our home. Our interactions with people of color are not as easy and natural as they are with those who more closely resemble us in skin tone, if only because we are afraid to say the wrong thing due to our lack of
familiarity. We don t risk commenting on inappropriate stereotypes we hear being expressed. And we are quick to shore up our own fragile egos, by generously labelling ourselves one of the few good guys whose social behavior is, if not entirely blameless, at least far better than that of most, and who doesn t contribute in any significant way to the problem we continue to have in our nation. The first step in our healing is to recognize that we are indeed incapable of fixing these things by ourselves so that we can look for and welcome the help of a power that is the real thing. And despite all that is horrible in what we saw on the far side of our continent and find impossible to dismiss, something took place there that serves to encourage our belief that the power of Jesus that healed human brokenness here on earth long ago is still at work. After confessing our sin, we also want to confess our faith that it was this supernatural power of the Christ crucified and raised from the dead that we saw on display in the people of Emanuel AME Church when they welcomed a stranger into their midst and opened the Word of God with him. We want to confess our faith that it was this same supernatural power of Christ crucified and raised from the dead that drew thousands of people of every race into churches to pray after an
ugly act of unspeakable violence. And we definitely want to confess that it was this same supernatural power of Christ crucified and raised from the dead that made it possible somehow for the families of those who were killed to speak baffling and defiant words of forgiveness to the one who coldly took the lives of their loved ones, drawing a line that said to hatred and evil, Thus far you shall come, and no further. So we come here today to mourn and repent with our brothers and sisters throughout the ELCA. But we also come, I hope, because we believe there is still available to us here a power that is strong enough to heal the brokenness we have been so unsuccessful in eliminating from our lives after centuries of trying. We know all too well what it is like to be ill and at the point of death, to feel the despair of a disease that is slowly but surely bleeding our spirits dry. We are tired of it, and desperate for lasting relief, but we have no idea what the ultimate dismantling of racism and all other forms of discrimination even looks like. Still, we are confident that God does, and we trust that God will work the miracle. We dare to hope one day soon to hear Jesus say to us also Your faith has made you well. Go in peace, healed of your disease. Amen.