Becoming Together through Hope (MPLS)

Mark 5:25-34

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’”

He looked all round to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Dear beloved of God, grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus who is the Christ. Amen.

When the strings begin you know it’s something special. By the time the timpani rolls you can start to feel it in your chest. Then he starts singing, and every time it takes my breath away.

This is what hope sounds like. It’s what hope feels like.

Listen to “A Change Is Gonna Come,” by Sam Cooke.

Sam Cooke wrote this song in the early 60s, at the height of segregation and in the midst of the Civil Rights movement. It’s reported that Mr. Cooke had heard Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind” and “was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that . . . he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself.”

But Sam Cooke’s song captures the immediacy and the intimacy of the struggle in a way that Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind” can’t. The pain and frustration is palpable as Sam Cooke sings his song. He knows, he knows first-hand all that is wrong with the world. You can hear the indignities in voice. And yet there is a conviction in his voice, that things will be different. A certainty that change is gonna come. He has hope. He knows how it is in the world and yet he has hope.

This kind of hope is consistent with the character of biblical hope. The prophets proclaimed this kind of hope. They spoke to the people in exile. They spoke to people in despair and said a change is gonna come. Mary had this kind of hope. Pregnant. A teenager, not yet married. She sang a song of kingdoms and rulers being upended. She sang of finding God’s favor even as she rode a donkey to have her baby in her extended relatives guest room.

This unnamed woman in today’s reading had this kind of hope. She’d been bleeding for years. Hemorrhaging. She’d spent everything she had to get well. Spent all she owned on healthcare. None of it worked. She was bankrupt. Alone. Forced to live on the edges of society because her condition made her unfit to be among the regular folks. She didn’t belong. She needed to quarantine, to remove herself from the center of society, she wasn’t welcome among “normal people.” She was one of those people. She didn’t belong in the crowd. If she touched anyone or anyone touched her she could have risked passing onto others the condition that required her to stay apart.

Yet she heard about Jesus. She heard what he’d done. Who he’d healed. So she thought maybe. Just maybe. If I can get close enough. If I can touch even the hem of his garment maybe I too can get some of that. Maybe I can be healed and made whole. Maybe I can have a life among the people again. Maybe I can be seen, like truly seen.

So she follows. She gets close. She reaches out in hope, expectant hope, thinking and believing that by simply getting close to Jesus, simply touching Jesus her life will be changed.

It’s been a long time coming: 12 years of bleeding, 12 years of isolation, 12 years of hoping.

This past week I had the good fortune of joining some folks from the leadership team for the capital campaign on a call with Pastor Ingrid Rasmussen, who is the senior pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in the Longfellow neighborhood. So many of you gave of your time and resources to help at Holy Trinity when that congregation and Pastor Ingrid found themselves at the epicenter of things during the uprising and racial reckoning in the summer of 2020. In the days, weeks and months since, Pastor Ingrid and Holy Trinity have played a critical role in giving birth to Longfellow Rising. Longfellow Rising community organization that is working hard to help rebuild the Lake Street corridor in a just and sustainable fashion.

As you might remember our capital campaign, Building a Future with Hope, allocated $150,000.00 of our $2 million dollar goal toward something called neighborhood restoration. At the time we didn’t know what it would look like, or exactly where that money would go. Almost a year later we are continuing to listen and are having clarifying conversations with people like Pastor Ingrid that are helping us to imagine how to leverage those dollars most effectively and most faithfully.

Over the past 18 months, Longfellow Rising has been listening to its neighbors and cultivating an imagination for what’s next. If you didn’t see the Star Tribune article about their work in last week’s paper. It’s exciting to hear and see some of their hope inspired plans.

One of the things that struck me in our conversation with Pastor Ingrid was that she said the horizon on this work is incredibly long. It reminded me of something similar that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of quoting, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

Or like Sam Cooke said, “It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come.”

Beloved of God, hope isn’t naïveté. Those who dare to hope are acutely aware of the painful realities that surround them, and yet they long for, invest in, work for, give themselves for a different future that is coming.

It might be 12 years like the woman in our story today. It might be 18 months like folks committed to help Longfellow Rise from the ashes. It might be decades and centuries like those have scratched and clawed their way toward equality. But hope propelled them forward.

This is our story as resurrection people. Hope is our foundation. We live with the sting of death all around us, each and every day, but we live convicted that the tomb is empty. We live as though life and not death has won, that Jesus is alive. We’ve been chasing that horizon for more than 2,000 years, but we do so having been touched by Jesus, having been made whole by Jesus. Like this unnamed woman we have been looked at, we’ve been seen by Jesus and called daughters and sons, we’ve been named and claimed as children of God.

Look, I know there are kinds of places and people that want a piece of you. And it can feel overwhelming. But God doesn’t just want a piece of you. God doesn’t just want some of us. Jesus is God’s great salvation project. In Jesus God is after all of us, the whole world. Jesus wants the fullness of what and who each of us are to be a part of God’s life now and forever. The church, you and me, we get to be stewards of that hope, stewards of that work to heal this world. It’s hard and long work. But God’s change is gonna come. Amen.