When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, "My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live." So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?" "You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, 'Who touched me?'" But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering." While Jesus was still speaking some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. "Your daughter is dead," they said. "Why bother the teacher anymore?" Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, "Don't be afraid; just believe." He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, "Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep." But they laughed at him. After he put them all out, he took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha koum!" (which means "Little girl, I say to you, get up!"). Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat. -Mark 5:21-43
Can you recall.. can you recall the last time you house broke a puppy, right? You think you got it down, and then boom, that dog goes back into that corner of the carpet and does its thing again, number one, or number two, it doesn't matter. Okay. And then after another few days, it's like, Oh god, we got this done, and you come into the room and there you see what we're going off and they're not, Oh no, no. And you pick them up and you take them outside where he's supposed to go, does his thing, but two hours later he's back in that corner of the carpet doing his thing again, frustrating. That's where that default is. And what you want is for that God to be able to see that, Hey, you don't have to go in that corner. There's a whole wonderful world out there. Our Dog, Gracie, when I take her out in the morning, the first thing she does is wanna go to the neighbors or daycare center next door to us, wanna go there and check out the rabbits in the bushes.
And then she goes to the neighbor, the daycare gal that comes, she parks her car on that curve. And grace, he... First thing, the next thing grace he does is go down and sniff the tires on the car, and
Then she goes along the bottom and where the doors are and sniff that to see if there's anything there, and then we walk behind there we have... Behind our house is a community walk, and they have these large light posts, about four or five-inch metal posts that have a light at the top, and every time every morning Gracie goes, smells that post at the bottom, smells it... Marty and I joked that she's checking pee-mail, but she discovered that there's a whole world of here, she doesn't have to use the corner of the carpet, and this morning in the text, in such a wonderful text.
The desperation of two people, and they decided to give up on the corner of the carpet and realize... There's a man named Jesus with a whole new world out there. Jesus is bringing in a kingdom unlike he had ever seen or heard of before. They heard that this man does miracles, healings. So this woman, hemorrhaging for 12 years, we were... How many complaints did we have for 14 months from March till now, when things open up. She was financially drained, she physically suffered from the hemorrhaging in and she was like a leper, she was a social outcast because flowing blood was unclean to Jews. So wherever she sat wherever she lay down in bed, it always had to be cleaned, she was unclean, which meant, he was socially distanced for 12 years. We couldn't take 14 months, isolated. And then she hears about this, me and Jesus.
Forget getting doctors to get that corner on the carpet, I am going to try to just simply touch His clothes, if I can just maybe get a hold of that maybe something will happen to me and maybe I'll just get healed. And so she goes through the crowd, I think it takes a dive, grabs the other Gospels, says the hem of his garment, and all of a sudden she feels this surge inside her, that the blood stops flowing and she's healed, except that Jesus feels ... Something flow out of him.
I couldn't help but smile. When Jesus turns and says, Who touched me? And like What?
The disciples are going, You gotta be kidding. All these people gathered, bumped shoulder to shoulder, and you're asking us, Who touched me, but Jesus doesn't let her alone, he's got a purpose here. Who is it that touches me? And finally, she feels like she's been caught and she has no idea what Jesus is gonna do, whether she had done the right thing or not, so she gets very trembling and afraid, and she comes to Jesus and she confesses to Jesus that she was the one that touched him, out of desperation.
Jesus says, Daughter, daughter, catch that. Family, he calls her daughter. Daughter, your faith has healed you. You are well.
And why did Jesus do the... Why did he wanna single her out, why did he want her to come back? Number one, I think is because he wanted the public to see that she's no longer to be isolated, that she's not unclean anymore, she's now clean and can associate with you, she can talk, she can be close to you, eat together again. But More than that, I think Jesus didn't want people to think his clothes were magic. If I just touched Jesus's clothes, I get healed. It's her faith that saved her, not the touching of his garments, in spite of the TV preachers over the years who have you send them money and we will mail you a cloth for healing, right? Yeah, in spite of that, Jesus says, Daughter, your faith has saved you. Basically, go in peace.
And then there's Jairus, a synagogue executive, and official. Alright, he's a high influential guy among the Jews. Forget that. My daughter is dying. Okay, forget dignity. Forget being distinguished. Forget who I am in that class level. My daughter is dying, and he sees Jesus and he says... He comes to Jesus, he kneels, falls on his face, and begs Jesus, Hey, my daughter is dying. Is there anything you can do?
So Jesus goes with him. And after her, the woman is healed, all of a sudden people come from Jairus house and say, Oh, don't bother Jesus, don't believe that teacher anymore, your daughter is dead. And Jesus says, whoa, the text says. overhearing this, Jesus says, Hey, don't believe it. Keep faith, believe.
The Greek word can also be not only overheard but ignoring, Jesus says, say... Ignore what these people are saying. And so they come to the house, and all of a sudden, the professional mourners are, they are ready, they got all these people wailing loudly in grief for what all this commotion going on, the professional mourners are already there because she is dead.
Now, I wanna give them some credit, they know death when they see death, but Jesus comes in there, it says, What's all this commotion about? And He says, Hey, she's not dead. She's only sleeping. And they do what? They laugh at him. There are two Greek words for a laugh. It's not the normal Greek word for a laugh, it's the one that's lasted with scorn, they're scornful that Jesus... Don't tell us, Jesus, that. She's not dead but sleeping. We know better.
So Jesus says, Hey, come on, parents. Peter, James, and John, the inner search circle of the disciples Come, come with me. And so they go into the house, and Jesus takes her by the hand and lifts her up. “Talitha Cum” I say to you, arise.
And when she gets up, Jesus says, You know what? Give her some food. And why would that be recorded? He doesn't have them to think that it's a ghost. Okay, 'cause doubters and skeptics could go away from that miracles... Oh, that was... She was just a ghost at that point, Jesus says, No, give her some food. Made her use may be hungry from her time in a coma for so long.
Jairus/ hemorrhaging woman for 12 years. What about us? What do we do when things get desperate, those two people left the carpet corner and went outside because they were... In the whole new world, there was a new kingdom coming, Jesus had brought forth the Kingdom of God in ways of healing and miracles like they had never seen before. So what about us? When we get desperate, when life smacks us hard when we feel down and out...
what about us?
Believe it or not, this past week, I thought of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. I thought I was Sylvester the cat and tweety bird. I thought of Wylie Coyote and the Road Runner, right. Don't you love those cartoons back in the 50s and 60s, there were such great cartoons, but what I realized this week was this, we love those cartoons because we could identify with the failures of Elmer Wiley and Sylvester, no matter all of the contraptions that they would make all of them manipulating, all the maneuvering to get their object, they always failed. WE can identify with failure, right? I think that's why we like it too much, should we like the game that they played, trying to get at each other.
But at the heart of it, it was a failure. In recovery programs, they say that insanity is doing the same thing over... It's going to the corner of the carpet, doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result,
oh. This time it's gonna work out, and it doesn't.
And so, Jesus, these two give us a great example here of what it is to have abandoned trust when you abandon something.
When we talk about abandonment, there is nothing material earthly that we hold on to, but we just give ourselves entirely over... Like the hemorrhaging woman taking the dive at Jesus’ clothes like Jairus throwing himself in Jesus's feet and begging Jesus to come to see his daughter.
It was embodied in action, there was kneeling, there was pleading, there was begging, and there was reaching out to touch.
And you know what, they didn't have any content of Jesus, and in Jesus Christ, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin, Mary suffered under Pontius Pilot was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell, the third day, He rose again from the dead, He sent it into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, from then he shall come to judge to living on the dead.
They had none of that. That was centuries later. They knew nothing about Jesus, no context to who Jesus was, but they trust Jesus with everything. And so when we get down and out, when we get abandoned, when we feel like life is smacking us hard, try just try to give yourself over completely to God.
That’s what this is about persistence. In overcoming obstacles.
What did Jairus do? He disregarded Jesus. Jairus and Jesus disregarded the people who came with the sad announcement that your daughter's death, they ignored the mourners who were there wailing all that commotion.
And What Jairus did was trust Jesus, his verdict, I'm gonna take your word for it, that my daughter is not dead, but she's only sleeping.
In other words, it's looking at desperation, not through our 100% worst-case scenario, but looking at it through the putting on the lens of Jesus, that situation is not 100% disastrous, but in Jesus’ eyes, Hey, it's probably 30% or 40% disastrous. That girl was dead. But Jesus knew she was only sleeping because of the healing He was gonna do.
Jesus knows what you feel is disastrous and ready to throw into the towel and ready to give up is not as bad as what it seems to be. And that's where the abandoned trust comes in.
I read about an executive who had started his own company, did very, very well with the starting of the company. And any of the workers that would go into his office on the wall hung a huge painting, and that painting was simply a coastline with the tide out on the right edge of the painting was just a little bit of water, which meant at the low tide... There we go, which meant was low tied, and that boat was about a 16-foot rowboat and the only thing that was showing where the two oars and the one or was stuck in the sand, showing how the boat was useless, so when the time comes out, big boat, just two hours. And that's the way it was. Unless one of those workers would walk up to the painting and at the bottom of the painting in small print, it simply said this, The tide always comes back.
The tide always comes back.
And when that owner of that business would go through a time of frustration and difficulty and almost bankruptcy, he would go up to that painting and look at that bottom line where the tide always comes back. It gave him hope. And
So for us this morning. I don't care what you're going through today. It doesn't matter... Just trust with abandonment because the tide always... comes back.
Amen.