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Romans 10:14-21

But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ But not all have obeyed the good news;* for Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our message?’ So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.*
But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have; for
‘Their voice has gone out to all the earth,
and their words to the ends of the world.’
Again I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says,
‘I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation;
with a foolish nation I will make you angry.’
Then Isaiah is so bold as to say,
‘I have been found by those who did not seek me;
I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.’
But of Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.’

I have gone back and forth with these verses for about a week now, feeling both overwhelmed with things to say and unsure of how to put them. I grew up very religious in a fundamentalist Christian church, but I really only think of my current spiritual development as starting a year and a half ago, when I started attending Holy Apostles with my family. It has been a process of both learning what I truly believe about God and Christ, as well as identifying and unlearning harmful ideas I carried with me from my earliest church experiences.

This process has also been very difficult to explain, both to myself and my friends. I cannot really enunciate why I wanted to come back to Christianity, and many of my friends who have traumatic memories of their own associated with Christianity have been perplexed and, sometimes, hurt. And I can’t help but think, when I find scriptures difficult to understand or infuriating, and when prayer isn’t doing anything, that things might be a lot easier if I just didn’t think about this stuff, like I did for so many years.

In the poet and theologian Christian Wiman’s memoir of faith, My Bright Abyss, he writes:

If God is a salve applied to unbearable psychic wounds, or a dream figure conjured out of memory and mortal terror, or an escape from a life that has become either too appalling or too banal to bear, then I have to admit: it is not working for me.

I laughed out loud reading this, because in the purely instrumental sense Christianity is not working for me. I am not necessarily happier, I am not more at peace. I feel as broken and anxious as I did two years ago, now I am just anxious about this.

With this in mind, I don’t know how to explain why I am a Christian, much less how to proclaim Christ, and in a world where mainstream white Christianity has hurt so many people - when the motivations behind a recent mass shooting have been characterized, offhand, as inspired by the murderer’s “Christian faith,” when Christianity in the public space is characterized by inequality and war and injustice, and when every year we must become more aware of the past atrocities that have used Christianity as justification - it feels impossible.

When I was a kid, I was told that everyone who did not belong to our incredibly tiny sect of Christianity was bound for an eternity of suffering. This horrified me beyond words. I couldn’t sleep at night; thinking about billions of people in pain forever while I would hypothetically be in heaven with my co-congregants, who I didn’t even like, made me feel sick, and it caused me to recoil from the people at my church who didn’t seem bothered by this prospect but actively enjoyed it. I don’t believe this anymore - I can’t - but if I can’t promise any benefit in this life or salvation in the next, what good news am I sharing?

But maybe, for me at least, that isn’t the point. Just existing in our society, I am constantly bombarded by messages about all of the different things I can do to make myself “better” - thinner, calmer, more effective - from standing desks to the pomodoro method psychedelic therapy. Maybe God is not a new meditation app for me to use to fix myself. Maybe being a Christian isn’t a magic wand but a calling, something I will struggle with every day but which will structure my life.

And maybe being honest about this - that I can be depressed and feel broken and be totally infuriated by the Bible and alienated in prayer - is a proclamation of Christ I can make. I can share the things that I love about my church community and the things I love about the Bible and even the things I struggle with in the Bible, with my friends within the church and outside of it. Maybe that can be beautiful news in and of itself.

Mark 5:21-43

²¹ When Jesus had crossed again in the boat^* to the other side, a great crowd gathered round him; and he was by the lake. ²²Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet ²³and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ ²⁴So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. ²⁵Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.²⁶She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. ²⁷She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,²⁸for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’²⁹Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ³¹And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ ³²He looked all round to see who had done it. ³³But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

³⁵ While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ ³⁶But overhearing^* what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ ³⁷He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. ³⁸When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ ⁴⁰And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ ⁴²And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. ⁴³He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Do not fear, only believe. 

I honestly can’t believe how lucky I am to get to talk about this scene from the Gospels, which I have always loved - not the least because there’s a beautiful Sam Cooke song about it. But reading this story again and trying to see it with fresh eyes was extremely surprising to me. I had always remembered the woman who was healed by touching Jesus’s cloak, but had completely forgotten two crucial elements of the story.
 
The first was the woman’s motivation for touching Jesus. In my dim recollection of the story I always grouped this healing in with Jesus’s healing of the paralyzed man and the man with the withered hand. But reading these stories now it feels important to note that Jesus doesn’t heal people simply because it’s a nice thing to do; in both of those other cases he’s proving a point to onlookers, using a miracle just like a parable - to provoke a discussion. 
 
When the woman approaches Jesus to touch his garment, she is not doing this because Jesus heals indiscriminately. Jesus doesn’t have a special cloak, he hasn’t said that anyone who touches his cloak will be healed, there isn’t a long line of people touching his cloak and being healed. In fact, the space is so crowded that Jesus is constantly being pressed and jostled, to the point where the apostles are surprised he would notice a particular touch - but none of the other members of the crowd receive any miraculous benefit. 
 
When this woman touches Jesus, however, she instantly feels that she is healed. It’s an incredibly beautiful and very private moment - unlike Christ’s miracles up unto this point, there’s no indication that anyone else notices or could notice. She feels her body heal, and he feels the power moving through him. Why does she receive this blessing, which is so spontaneous it seems to surprise Christ? We don’t know whether she was a good person, or whether she was a committed follower of Jesus. All we know about her is that she was suffering, and she had faith - she says, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well’ - and Christ replies, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

The second thing I forgot about this miracle is that it happens entirely inside the story of another, arguably greater miracle! This entire scene occurs while Jesus is on his way to perform another miracle - raising a young girl from the dead. And it honestly seems a little strange, narratively, for these two events to happen one after the other, especially when one is kind of weird and the other fits a familiar pattern - where Jesus says something a little difficult to understand and then performs a miracle to make his point. But there is something different about this second miracle. 
 
When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead he did so in front of a crowd, explicitly stating that he was doing so in order to show that he was the son of God. But here he leaves the crowd outside, wakes the girl gently, tells her family to feed her and to not talk about what has just happened. The scene feels very gentle and very private - exactly how you would want to wake a child who has fallen asleep.  

I think that these miracles are bound together because they are both quiet, private miracles. A wound deep in the body is healed; a terrible loss in a family is restored. Something very important is changed, in a place that very few people can see, and it is changed by faith. I am not certain if we get any of the big ticket miracles anymore but I think these private ones can be just as impactful.

Six months ago it would have been impossible for me to imagine how much of a difference Holy Apostles has made in my life - it was almost impossible for me to imagine going to church, much less praying and reading the Bible on a regular basis. I didn’t come because I had a spiritual awakening or epiphany or felt I desperately needed a relationship with God. Something deep inside me simply changed, quietly and without any obvious outward signs. 
 
Right now I am feeling a lot of fear. I cannot predict what tomorrow will bring - I honestly can’t tell you what the next six hours are going to bring. What a perfect story for us to read right now.
Do not fear, only believe. Do not fear, only believe.
 
P.S. If you liked the Sam Cooke song Basia Bulat also has an incredible cover!