Those of you who serve on board in this church know that I am usually the one who is asked to offer the prayer at the beginning or the end of the meeting – sometimes, it’s the beginning AND the end!  Now, I understand that some of you may not be at ease leading a group in prayer, and I hope that, as part of your spiritual journey, you will grow more comfortable in doing so.  In the meantime, it is my joy to offer a prayer to God, and I will never turn down an invitation to do so.

 

But I will share with you that I often find my eyes welling up with tears when I pray, whether I am alone or in a group.  Perhaps you have experienced the same thing.

I believe that these tears result from the very intimate connection we feel with God when we pray, and such emotional closeness can occur only when we open ourselves up and allow ourselves to be vulnerable.  I have found myself at times wanting to avoid deep prayer, because I know where the journey will lead – down through the protective layers of time and denial and rationalization, to the place where my deepest pains and losses and brokenness dwell, uncovered and raw.  I am renewed and comforted and energized by prayer – but, it can be frightening to open up and become so vulnerable.

I think this is a struggle that many of us go through; deeply desiring connectedness – whether with God or another individual or with a community – and yet, simultaneously fearing it.  One can read in the daily papers how people are searching for community, how people long for connections in a disconnected world.  And yet, it seems we also fear the vulnerability necessary for such intimacy to occur.  So we get online and tap into the “virtual community” of the internet – safe, distant, and anonymous.

 

But emotional closeness is not possible without revealing to ourselves and others who we genuinely are.  Such intimacy requires trust; we must be willing to lower our defenses -- enough to be open to the possibility of being accepted or rejected by neighbor, and enough to open ourselves to being touched by a power greater than ourselves.

 

If we are to enter the realm of God, we must open ourselves to being close enough to touch the fringe of something holy.  We might both want and fear the touch of God, but sometimes we are left no choice. 

 

The woman with the hemorrhage in this morning’s Gospel lesson is not frightened by such intimacy.  For twelve years, she has been unclean, untouchable, unloved and unlovable; she has been poked and prodded and probed by doctors.  She has known the depths of loneliness, of embarrassment, of fatigue.  Having been shunned and tormented for so many years, she has nothing left to risk.  Desperate for healing, she pushes herself through the crowd and actively seeks intimacy with God, and she reaches up and touches the fringe of Jesus’ garment. 

 

And in the middle of an emergency to save a young girl -- the daughter of a Jairus, a prominent ruler in the synagogue -- Jesus feels her presence amid the jostling of the crowd, and he stops and turns and asks, “Who touched me?”  Although society has rejected her, Jesus is different; he turns not only to those who are in positions of power, but also to the anonymous and rejected, even those who interrupt him.

 

She doesn’t need to tell him that, because of her hemorrhage, she is prohibited by religious rules to touch or be touched.  She doesn’t need to tell him that she is not allowed to worship.  He knows all this.  Still, he listens compassionately, and then he tenderly calls her “daughter,” telling her to “go in peace.”  Go in wholeness, go to live life in its fullness.  Through Jesus, this woman who was an unknown -- identified only by her bleeding and her pain -- is restored to the community, invited back from the outskirts of society into the connectedness of relationship, so that she no longer feels fragmented and alone.  Jesus heals her not only from her disease, but also from her isolation.

 

The purpose of healing in the biblical sense is restoration to wholeness – restoration and peace with oneself, with one’s God, with the community, and with the important relationships in one’s life.

 

Through his healing, Jesus awakens the spirit that lies deep within people, waiting to be touched, waiting to be made whole.  Jesus turns to the woman and he turns also to us and asks, “What is bleeding in your life?  What is draining the life out of you?”  It can be hard for us to even admit that we have some brokenness in our lives, that our lives are not perfect and that we are not whole.  And healing is not necessarily curing.

 

When I was doing my student chaplaincy while at seminary, I learned quickly that patients do not always react positively to the news of their impending discharge from the hospital.  Consider, for example, a woman admitted to the hospital to repair a disability that has isolated her from her community and from activities that once gave her life meaning.  Her surgeon does an excellent job of fixing her problem.  With appropriate post-surgical care, she is soon up and walking. 

 

Contemporary medicine might consider her cured.  But is she healed?  While in the hospital, she has been part of a community; she has enjoyed constant care and attention.  There has always been someone to talk with, and a chaplain readily available.  She might find the thought of going home to the isolation of her lonely apartment agonizing.  Her body is cured, but her spirit is still broken.

 

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus saves the woman from hemorrhaging.  But he saves her from much more.  He saves her from her isolation and her denigration.  She asks for wholeness, and she is wholly restored to life through a healing touch. 

And what about you?  Have you opened yourself up to God’s healing touch?  And has the Christ in you touched someone else with love and understanding?  This church community has a powerful touch.  I see how our ministries reach out and touch people with the love of Christ.  We do it through visits to people in hospitals and nursing homes; we do it through our prayer shawls; we do it at our healing services, and by praying together, by worshipping together as a family of faith, and by sharing communion. 

The miracle of the church is not the leadership of pastors, or the work of the laity, our planning, or our doing, or our giving.  It is not about what WE do to make it happen.  It is the Christ in us. 

 

Jesus told the woman to “go in peace.”  Jesus said it to her as a benediction, and I say it to you now.  Go in the peace of God.  Allow yourself to be touched by Christ; open yourself up enough to reach that level of intimacy with God, and then let the Christ in you go and touch someone else’s life.  Amen.