Click below to download an mp3 version of me sharing the message that this note is from. This particular message is Atom Bomb: Reach Out… However, Pastor Marty is an amazing speaker. You’d do better to click on one of his messages and listen to that.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Connectwithfc
Today, I’m honored, terrified, excited and freaked, to get to deliver the sermon. These are my notes:
Before I begin I want to be clear about some things. The first thing I want to be clear on is that you all are amazing. Fellowship Church small groups rock. There is so much genorisity in this room. I’m not here to guilt you into doing more than you are. Instead, I want to share what I think scripture says about reaching out. I think we’ve gotten as far as we’re going to go, in approaching reaching out with a certain mind set.
I want to challenge that mind set, because I think changing the way we reach out will take us to a new level. I didn’t realize any of this until Christmas Eve.On Christmas eve, I was leaving this retail job that I’ve been working. It was like 7 PM, and if you want to know the truth I was feeling pretty grumpy and sorry for myself as I was walking out of the store. It was dark, lights were off, I was headed home.
On my way out this woman drove up in a mini van. She looked at the darkened sign, the empty, abandoned store behind me. Her lip quivered. And she asked, “Are you closed?”
It was one of those times it seemed like there was no right answer. Anything I could have said would have sounded pretty sarcastic, considering how obvious the answer was. And honestly, I wasn’t feeling very nice at that particular moment.
She filled the silence up. It was one of those laugh-moans that people make when they are on the edge of falling apart. “It’s such a big store.” She said, too quickly. “I thought sure it would be open. I have no place to go.” I noticed she was driving this 2008 version of a minivan. I realized she basically looked like a soccer mom. She seemed like the sort of person who up until very recently would have had somewhere to be on Christmas eve.
I wish I’d called on Jesus for the right words, for the right thing to do. I stood there, realizing I’d been feeling sorry for myself because I had somewhere to go. I stood there, and my whole attitude shifted. But not enough to really help the situation.
“I think the movie theater is opened” I said lamely. There is a hundred things I should have said. A hundred things I could have said. But I didn’t say any of them . I told her about the movie theater.
I wish I had a happy ending to that story. I wish I knew what became of her. I wonder if she ended up at a movie, and if that movie was any good. But I don’t have the answers to any of those questions.
There are some questions I do have some answers to. That event helped me to take a look at myself, and at the church, and at Jesus. One of the things I realized is this: I would have been more ready to reach out if I hadn’t been preoccupied with feeling sorry for myself about working on Christmas Eve. I would have done better if I hadn’t been thinking about my own junk.
I’ve never been a soccer mom with nowhere to go on Christmas eve. But I’ve got my struggles, and they in some ways weren’t so far off from this womens. If I’d done a better job of handling my stuff, I would have been more ready to help her. If I had reached out to somebody else, before that Christmas eve, then I would have been ready when she reached out for help from me to offer more than pointing her to the movie theater. It would be so easy to skip this difficult stuff. There are aspects of reaching out that are much more fun to talk about. Things like the service projects I’ve heard about from our small groups, and the ones that I’ve been personally involved with. I could spend time talking about the less formal ways we’ve supported people. Reaching out to people who are hurt or lost and lonely, inside the groups and out.
It’d be so easy to talk about midnight phone calls and emails that I’ve answered and The blood sweat and tears I’ve put into helping this group or that organization.
But the truth is that this is half– maybe even less– of the picture. The truth is that I have received at least as much as I’ve gotten. The truth is that my back has been up against a wall, and I’ve had no where to turn, but people– you people– have come through for me. It’s no fun to realize this. In fact it’s kind of painful to think about. But it’s the truth.
If I was going to be more even more truthful, I’d have to say that there have been times when I’ve let you all down. Times I should have reached out to you and didn’t. Times that I knew what you needn’t and I just didn’t give it to you because I wanted it for me, or those other times when I just didn’t know what to do, like when I stood there on Christmas Eve.
The nature of reaching out really isn’t that complicated. We can see it even in preschoolers, and in the end, I’m not really so different from them. Sometimes they reach out just to be picked up. Sometimes they reach out with with a cookie in hand, a cookie that’s so good and soft and warm that they just have to share it. they want to put the spit-covered thing right in somebody else’s mouth, and really, who among us doesn’t atleast fake a bite when we’re offered one? Sometimes toddlers, are selfish, and they try and keep the cookie to themselves; sometimes they get older, and they want to be held, but they don’t tell anybody, and so they are stuck, lonely.
And I’ve come to realize, that I’m not much different, and you, I don’t think you’re much different either. Sometimes we reach out to be held. Sometimes we reach out with a cookie. Sometimes we want to reach out– for either reason– but we don’t. There is that part of us that tells us that we are supposed to be self sufficient. That voice that tells us we’re supposed to be independent. We’re not supposed to need anybody else. We don’t want to ask to be held.
I think we’re alot like my friend, Mr. Potato head here. The normal way of being either a person or a Mr. Potato head is to have two arms. (Hold up Mr. Potato head.)
Arms on a person– or a potato — are the things we need if we’re going to reach out. We need them to reach out to offer others a cookie. We need them to reach out to be held.
Every time we leave our broken places broken, every time we leave our wounds unhealed, we are like a Mr. Potato head who ditched his arms. (Pluck off the arms) We tried only to be independent, we never wanted to be selfish… but when it comes time to use our arms for reaching out to help somebody else… They are gone. We can’t offer that cookie to anyone, if we don’t have arms to hold it with.
The truth is we’re all a mess. The truth is that we all have those broken places. The truth is that none of us enjoy asking each other for help.
Have you ever thought about it? It would be silly if it weren’t so sad. I can stand up here and announce that we’re a mess. And you can sit out there and maybe nod your head and agree with me. But this service will end. And then we all go about our lives and live this unspoken agreement to pretend that we’re not a mess. We all participate in this giant lie together, living in denial of our brokenness and need for each other.
Every time we live this lie, Every time we refuse to let others help us, every time we refuse to reach out to others, we’re taking off our arms. When we want them, to reach out to somebody else, to offer someone that symbolic cookie, they won’t be there.
Of course we want to fix ourselves, by ourselves. But That’s the whole problem. It was on our own we got to the places we’re at, wherever that is. What’re the odds that we’re going to get ourselves out on our own?
I don’t think it’s going to happen. If we could do it by ourselves, I think we would’ve. Our deepest problems aren’t usually new. These things might not be getting any worse, but when we try to handle them ourselves, they aren’t getting much better.
We’ve all got something. Maybe it’s something that part of you knows that you haven’t admitted to the rest of you. Maybe it’s something you’re fighting about all the time, with the people you love the most. Maybe it sneaks up on you when you wake up in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s something that happened a long time ago, that seems like it should be in the past but it keeps rearing it’s ugly head and effecting you in your present.
And we all know somebody: somebody who’s hurting. Maybe we’re doing a little bit for them. Maybe we’re doing a lot. We’re probably wondering, are we supposed to be doing more? How could we doing more? Maybe we’re doing things for them, but it doesn’t make us feel as good as we want to. I think we can fake it and force it for a while. We can try an opposite extreme. We can do our devotionals and we can pray, we can get ourselves all fired up and we end up making ourselves into the opposite of this little freaky thing here.(Put him back) So we decide to reach out more. We write these plans into our palm pilots or scheduling book… or maybe you’re like me, and you don’t have a palm pilot or a scheduling book. I claim that I don’t do lists… But really, we all do lists. Every one of us knows the things we plan to do. Some of you organized people right it down. Some of us less organized people try to keep it all in our heads. But we’ve all got a list. And maybe, our list of things to do begins like this: (to be projected)
1. Grocery shopping.
2 Oil change.
3 Watch the game at the bar.
As a result of our new understanding, we add #4. (To be projected)
4. Reach out somehow.
(Put an arm in the top of his head.)
We can represent this decision to reach by giving our friend a new arm. It’ll help him reach out more. Perhaps we go work in a soup kitchen Maybe that one day a week that we serve the hungry doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe we discover some other cause that seems just as worthy. Maybe somebody in our small group asks us to engage in a service project. And we keep going, realizing that reaching out to help others shouldn’t just be on our list. We ought to move it to the top. Reaching out to help others becomes our top priority.So now, our list looks like this: (on the screen)
1. Reach out by going to work in a soup kitchen this week.
2 Oil change.
3 Watch the game at the bar.
4. Grocery shopping.(More arms.)
Already the ways we try to juggle our schedule becomes complicated. Because grocery shopping is at the bottom of the list it takes us longer to get to. And maybe we end up eating out some night, because there’s nothing left in the cubbards. We end up spending extra money on food for the family that week. We feel guilty when we realize we can’t give as much financially to some organizations, charity, or church… In our attempt to reach out one way we hurt our reaching out in another.But more than this, it still isn’t enough. Reaching out is still a fraction of our lives. We cut things out, and we give away, and we’re still not living up to Jesus’ example. (Take pretty much everything out of MR. Potato Head: nothing but arms in their places.)Our list for the next week looks like this:
1. Reach out by going to work in a soup kitchen.
2 Get the kids to baseball.
3. Reach out financially by supporting __________, and make up for the amount we skimped last week.4 Watch the game at the bar.
5. Reach out by participating in small group’s service project.
6. Grocery shopping.
One of the problem with these lists is that they tend to neglect the fact that there are two reasons to reach out. Maybe we even work this way so that we can forget. It’s easy to make reaching out with that cookie a priority. But we don’t generally plan to reach out to be held. And maybe, somewhere deep inside, this is our plan. If we spend all our energy saving the world, we can begin to forget how deeply and thoroughly we need to be saved, too.When all is said and done, we’re nothing but arms, nothing but reaching out. We can’t see what we’re doing, we can’t talk about it because we have no mouths. We’ve stopped doing everything else. And you know what? We’re still miserable. We think about the abundant life Jesus promised, we think about all the good things we’re doing, and we wonder why we’re still empty. Sometimes we redouble our efforts.We keep going like this, and our lists get bigger, and we hope something changes on the inside for us, but we keep doing things on the outside the same way. Other times we give up completely.
Because the good news, for Mr. Potato Heads, is that it’s easy to go back to how we were before. And the bad news, for Mr. Potato Heads, is that it’s easy to go back to how we were before. These arms come out as easily as they go in.
(Take arms out, put him back to normal.)We return to our lives as originally scheduled. The more things change, the more they stay the same. (Original list, back on screen) Our to do list looks pretty familiar, at this point:
1. Grocery shopping.
2 Oil change.
3 Watch the game at the bar.
We pull back into our shells. We were hurting while we helped people. We we’re hurting still, and now maybe we’re burned out and confused on top of it.There’s a pretty interesting study I’d like to share with you. It’s quoted in Malcom ___’s great book, the tipping point. In this study, they went to this seminary, And the scientists stood there, at one end of this campus. And they told the students that they wanted to hear these students preach a message. They asked the students to speak on the parable of the good samitaritian.If you don’t know this story, basically, a guy gets robbed, beaten, and left for dead. All the people we’d expect to help him: Priests and priests helpers walk on by. Jesus praises the ordinary person from a hated group who does rescue this man.So the researches plant this seed, in the students head. And then they planted an actor,who pretended to be in need of help, in the path of the students. Would the students be like the Pharisees or the Samiritans?
These scientists figured out who would help the man in need. It wasn’t the people I would have expected.But I want to put that thought on hold for a moment and switch gears a little. Because there is insight more important than the sort we get from psychologists and studies.
God new that it wouldn’t be easy to work this stuff out. The good news is that God left us some stories and some instructions that walk us through this stuff.
I’d like you to turn with me to Mathew 10:7-11 Jesus is giving instructions to his disciples. It’s one of the first times we see them all together: and Jesus is dispersing them, sending them out into the world to reach out to the lost, lonely, and broken.7As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’ 8Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy,[b]drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. 9Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; 10take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep. 11“Whatever town or village you enter, search for some worthy person there and stay at his house until you leave.”
Jesus was of course so brilliant in how he did this. He sent his disciples out with nothing so that they’d have to reach out in both senses of the word. The disciples probably planned on reaching out to help the world around them. The way Jesus sent them out, though, required them to reach out for support, to reach out for help, as well. Jesus said “. Freely you have received, freely give.” Reaching out to help others and reaching out to be helped by others, it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s inhaling and exhaling. We can’t do one for long without the other.If we all sat here, and only exhaled for a while, it’d be a pretty wild service. We’d passing out in the aisles and hyperventilating in our seats. Though it might look like one of those churches that they call spirit-filled, in fact, all it would be is a church full or people that are oxygen deprived.
It’s easy to see that We can’t exhale for long without inhaling. IT’s not as easy to see that We can’t reach out to help others for very long when we’re in desperate need of help ourselves.
Maybe reaching out shouldn’t be just a neat little category of things to do, between getting our teeth cleaned and doing the grocery shopping. Maybe it’s wrong headed to put it on our to-do list at all. I wonder how Jesus feels about the fact that we have these nice and neat little boxes not only for our lives but also for the church.: Fellowship on this date. Evangelize on that one. Go on a missions trip over here, or over there during the vacation.All those things are awesome things to do.
I’m not saying that we should stop them. But I’m not always convinced we’re doing them the way that Jesus did.When you look at Jesus, you can’t tell where the fellowship ends, and the evangelizing begins. You can’t tell the difference between his plans for a missions trip and his plans for a church plant.
In that passage we just read, in todays terms, how we would we categorize what he sent his disciples out to do? Really, we couldn’t. It’s a missions trip, it’s a church plant, it’s evangelizing, it’s fellowship… and it’s really more simple than all these things, too. He just reaches out. In so many different ways. When he reached out, all these things that we categorize seperately end up melting together.
And he doesn’t just blend the ways we reach out to help others. He blends our serving and our need. He makes us interdependent. He wants us to offer what we have even as we take what we need. We reach out to help others with our left hand as we reach out to be helped by others with our right.Now, let’s get back to the’ study that I mentioned before: There’s a lot of things that I wish I could tell you determined whether or not people would stop to help the person in need. But it’s actually something that doesn’t look all that important The thing that most often determined whether or not people would stop was whether or not the they felt rushed.
You see, sometimes the folks giving the test told the students that they only had a few minutes to get across campus to deliver the sermons because they were running late. Other times they did not. Whenever the students new they were running late, they were highly unlikely to stop.I’d like to suggest that maybe there’s a wider issue than just being rushed. My experience tells me that whenever my world is cluttered, I tend to have trouble doing what I ought to be doing.One kind of clutter that can invade our world is busyness. They did that in this test. They simply made the people busy, and this was enough to cause them to forget the whole point of the parable that we know was on their minds.
When we’re busy, we forget to slow down. But I think there’s other ways we get distracted, that our lives get cluttered. When we’re hurting, we have trouble climbing out of our hurt. When we live in denial of our own junk, it’s hard to see other people’s. When we’re occupied with not reaching out to get help, it’s tough to reach out to help anybody else. In a way, this study is going on for all of us, all the time. Jesus is watching us. He knows we’re in a rush. And he’s wondering if we’re going to stop anyway.This is what our first list looked like:
1. Oil change.
2. Watch the game at the bar.
3. Grocery shopping.
And this is what our last list looked like:
1. Reach out by going to work in a soup kitchen this week.
2 Get the kids to baseball.
3. Reach out financially by supporting __________, and make up for the amount we skimped last week.4 Watch the game at the bar.
5. Reach out by participating in small group’s service project.
6. Grocery shopping.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t plan to reach out. But I neeed to ask a question:Are we more likely to notice and help those around us if we’ve got 3 things on our mind, or 6?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make lists. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t oirganize service projects. Organization and time management are incredibly important if we’re going to be powerful in the ways we reach out.The deal is that I think we can simplify our lists and simplify our lives.
Recently my wife and I were at a restaurant with a bar. We were wondering about those people sitting there, maybe they came with somebody and maybe they didn’t; but they certainly weren’t really with each other. They were sitting there, alone together with these empty expressions. They were watching the weather on the bar TV and drinking.
My wife and I started wondering why they were there and what they were doing. I have to wonder if these people had this on their lists, all week: come to a noisy room full of strangers, spend money on overpriced drinks, and watch the weather.
Because it seems like if they didn’t want to be there, they would have left.
I am not saying that they shouldn’t be drinking, probably though, at least some of them should be drinking less. I’m not saying that bars or alchohol are evil.I am wondering if this was worth there time. My guess is that for most of these people, it wasn’t that this was actively destructive. But spending time doing that, it stood in the way of better things to do.
I don’t go sit in bars and watch the weather. But I do other things just to fill my time up. And even if I don’t write it down, there is a to-do list in my head and these actvities gets a high priority. I think we all do some things just to take our brains out of my heads. I’m resisting the urge to offer up my own opinions of things that aren’t worthy of our time.
I think you know what these things are. They are the things that offer nobody– including you– any real benefits. The things that you might not be able to explain why you do them. Things you spend an absurd amount of time at, and feel kind-of silly afterwards: what did you really get out of them, when all is said and done.As we think about the things we do, as we think about how busy we get, as we think about our lists there are some important questions I’d like to challenge us with.
Would you engage in these activites that are not worthy of you, if you were more healed, more whole? If you weren’t a mess would you do whatever it is you do?There are all kinds of ways we try to escape our brokenness. If we spent this time dealing with our brokenness by reaching out to be healed, I think we would begin to find our lists simplifying themselves.It’s awesome to be able to do things just for ourselves, sometimes. But a lot of the things we claim are just for us, they don’t really help. Those people could spend the rest of their lives watching the weather in bars. Whatever things that are motivating them to do this, these things won’t go away. So here’s our first step toward more powerfully reaching out: cross everything off our list that isn’t worthy of our time. But the truth is that even if we take things off that list that aren’t worthy of our time, we still end up with pretty big, intimidating lists. I think Jesus wants more than just this for us.And it’s easy to think that Jesus just didn’t get it. It easy to say that Life at his time isn’t like life in our time. I’m going to leave aside the fact that he knows everything for the moment, and just take a look at what it was like in his day and age. I’d like to look for Jesus wisdom about reaching out. As we do that, lets follow him around for a day. We’ll try to use some of the space up here to get a sense about where he came from and where he was going. What I want to do now is take a little trip, back to Mark, chapter 5.
This day starts for Jesus and his followers after a broken night’s sleep: the disciples had woken Jesus up to calm a storm they were afraid was going to sink them.
After the storm was calmed, morning came, they came up on shore, Let’s say it was Over here (stage left, bottom of the stairs) They came up and discovered that there was a possessed man who they used to chain up, over here (climbing stairs, stage left)The man broke the chains, shed his clothes, and lived in the tombs, over here. (stage center, back.)Jesus caught up with him, had a confrontation with the demons that were possessing the man.
He casts them into pigs, over here (left back) Pigs apparently don’t like being possessed. They jumped off a cliff and killed themselves back here, in the water, where Jesus started his day.If my day started with a boat ride, lead to a fight with a demon, which lead into a mass pork suicide, I’m about ready to call it a day. But Jesus is just getting started.So the villagers, afraid, came maybe from over here (left front) up to Jesus and his followers.
They asked Jesus and his followers to go away.And they did.I imagine they had to climb over pig corpses as they made their way back to the boat. They took another trip, and ended up back where people new Jesus.(Below stairs, walk to stage left)
Jesus and the disciples end up here, come out of their boat, and are rushed by a crowd excited to see him.And in the middle of the festivities, up comes a synagogue ruler, probably from back there somewhere. The synagogue ruler interupts the festivities. His daughter is dying. He needs Jesus. Now.Me? At this point, I’m pretty much done. I’m exhausted, it’s been a long day, I just want to hang out and feel good about the guy I freed. But Jesus?
(Toward center stage) he heads to the home of the synagogue ruler, and he’s mobbed again. And a woman sneaks a touch of his cloak. And she is healed. Jesus uses it as a teaching moment for the disciples, which we’ll get to in a moment.
(Toward stage left)After this, Jesus keeps going. Now, finally, he nears the home of the synogoe ruler. People come out, and tell them that the daughter is dead. That sounds like a pretty good reason to give up on the whole healing plan to me. Jesus? Jesus keeps going. After all, if you tallied up the day, you’d see that on the plus side you’ve got a man free of possession, a woman freed of bleeding, and probably an enomorus pork barbecue somewhere.
They didn’t quite get there in time for the girl, but hey, they tried, right? Not Jesus. Jesus keeps going.He ends up here, and capped that day off by bringing somebody back from the dead.
And so, there’s some things that are worth noticing out of all this: The first is that Jesus never let himself get rushed. He doesn’t ignore the opportunities to reach out that are in front of him. My agenda, so often, is a list of places to go and of things to get done. Jesus agenda was people.
His agenda was about reaching out from somewhere deep inside. Jesus life was not cluttered in any sense of the word. He noticed the people around him, even when he had somewhere to go.
And what about those people?There were people that saw one of their own freed of a demon, and somehow they were afraid of Jesus. Never mind that the best they could do on their own was chains for the afflicted. Never mind that Jesus sets him free. The bible tells us that they were afraid and asked Jesus to leave. There is no record of Jesus being either angry or surprised that some people are afraid when we reach out, that some people seem to fear the possibility of being set free.
And I can only imagine this bigwig synagogue ruler. This guy is one of the trendsetters, one of the cool kids. He sees a big crowd of the ordinary people like you and me. They are all celebrating with Jesus, so happy to have him back among them.But the synagogue ruler, he doesn’t play it cool. He doesn’t try to take it casual. He doesn’t wait for Jesus to come to him. He doesn’t try to pull Jesus aside. He doesn’t worry about the fact that he’s going to bum them all out and crash the party, nor about his social status. He drops to his knees right there. He begs Jesus for help. He probably knows Jesus has just gotten out of the boat. He knows Jesus will have to some traveling to get to his home. But he knows what he needs and he reaches out.Eventually there are people in the story who tell that man not to bother Jesus because his girl is dead. Notice that we aren’t told that they’re worried about the father. They aren’t offering condolences. They only come with a lack of faith and a strange belief that the man was bothering Jesus. They seem to be saying “Maybe he could have helped you once, but not now.”
I find it interesting that it appears that these are the very same people who later laugh at Jesus when he says the girl is sleeping. Early on they seem so interested in helping Jesus maintain a schedule. Now, they laugh at him? I wonder just what their motivation was. There daughter is healed, there reaching out rewarded. The man knew what he reached out and asked for it.
And in the middle of all this is the bleeding woman. She, too, approaches Jesus in the middle of a crowd. one of the things that surprises me is Jesus reaction to her. She’s sneaking in. It seems like she’s taking advantage of this needy, crushing crowd. She comes up from behind, and as much as admits that she was trying to sneak some healing from Jesus, as if he had on some sort-of Harry Potter magic cloak.
The society they lived in gave her every reason not to want to reach out; not to consider herself worthy of Jesus time and energies. She was a woman living in a sexist society. Her bleeding would have caused her to be viewed as unclean. She was poor from the money she’d lost trying to fix her problems. But she reached out, anyway. And if we take a look at the text, we can see that she had it right. The folks that followed Jesus… not so much.
Scripture tells us: When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. 30At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” 31“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” 32But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
Even if we forget the cultural stuff, the disciples confusion is understandable. Picture the most annoying crowd you can imagine. Target on Christmas Eve, a crowd finding their seats right before the concert starts.People are up in your space, all around. They’re pressing in from all sides. If you looked at me and said “Who touched me?” I’d probably say “Everybody, you idiot.”And this is what happens. Jesus is in the middle of the crowd. All kinds of people are pushing up against him. And he says “Who touched me” and the disciples… They basically said “Everybody, touched you, you idiot Rabbi.”But who’s really the idiot? Not likely Jesus. Jesus of course knew that he was in a crowd. But he wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that there is touching, and then there is reaching out in longing, reaching out in pain. And this is a whole different deal. We might expect that Jesus would confront her on sneaking around. We might expect that there’d be issues with her thinking that the healing was in Jesus’ clothes. We might think he’d yell at her saying “how dare you slow me down? There’s a dying little girl and you think your problems are important!?!?”But he didn’t. He said a thing that he says a lot to people we wouldn’t expect. He says “Your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”Unlike our lists, Jesus probably only had one or two things on his at any given time. And somehow, he got so much more done. Partially, I think this is because Jesus life wasn’t cluttered. His mind wasn’t on an overwhelming list of things he felt like he was supposed to do.
Jesus lived his life reaching out. Reaching out wasn’t something he added to his list: reaching out was something that ran through every item on his list.Jesus allowed people to serve him. In the bible, we hear about people who anointed his head and who washed his feet. Jesus praised those who came and asked him for help, as we saw with the women who was bleeding in the synagogue ruler. We should reach out, to Jesus, too. When we do, we will become so much more powerful when we reach out to help others.
Our lists will begin to simplify themselves as the useless things, the spinning of our wheels, the stuff we do to take our brains out of heads, as this all falls away.
we can not go to Jesus in the same way that the synagogue ruler or the woman who was bleeding went to him. But we can go to him. We can go to him directly in prayer, and we should go to him in prayer. But there are other options open to us. Things that we should do, too. Things that are hard, things that we try to avoid. Scripture describes the church as Jesus body.
If we take Jesus seriously we have to take seriously what he told us: We are his body. And we are told that what he did will be nothing compared to what we do. Do we take Jesus at his words when he says these things?
When we reach out to heal others, it’s with Jesus hand that we’re doing it. But it’s even stranger and more amazing than that: Because Jesus is already in the hurting. He tells us he is with us when we are suffering. He says that when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, we are feeding, clothing, and visiting him.
When we reach out for healing of ourselves, we are also reaching out for the healing of him.Some of you know that I’m a teacher. That means that I’m licensed by the state of Massachusetts to issue homework. I’m going to ignore all the stuff about a separation of church and state and give you some homework now.
If you don’t do it, I think I’ll have to issue you a detention or something.
Take a step toward reaching out to be healed this week. Close your eyes right now, and think about something that not many people know about you. Who would want to know this thing? Who can you trust with this?
If you’re in a small group, I’d like to challenge you to share it with somebody in your group. If somebody dragged you here today, maybe you can share something with them over lunch. Maybe it’s something that’s been bugging you. Maybe it’s time to tell somebody where you’re at spiritually. Maybe it’s something deeper. Maybe it’s something that won’t seem so deep at all.If you can’t think of anybody, one possibility is that maybe you’re thinking too big. I’m not saying go to the deepest depths of the closet and drag your most rotten skeleton out of it.
I am saying that there is some small way that you can be like the synagogue ruler. I am saying that Jesus praised the woman who reached out and touched his cloak.
Reach out to somebody. Trust them with a little something. As you sit here, take a moment, in the silence, and make a plan: Who are you going to reach out to trust? What are you going to trust them with?And please remember. I’ll be checking in next week. And issuing detentions.
The challenge for you, and the challenge for me, is not to see how many times we can add reaching out on to our to-do list. It’s to see how many ways we can reach out in the middle of our every day reaching out.When we’re less distracted with our own brokenness, when our time is less filled up with things that don’t help, we will be more open to the opportunities that are right in front of us. Jesus didn’t rush to the synagogue rulers house so that he would have enough time afterwards to do something else. He saw needs along the way and took care of them.
If we don’t rush through our grocery shopping, in order to get to the next thing we feel like we have to do, maybe we’ll see somebody who needs a smile. Maybe we’ll notice one of those carts that they leave our for donations to the local food pantry. Maybe we’ll drop something in there.If we spend a night hanging out with friends instead of watching a TV screen, maybe we’ll talk about things that are important to us. Maybe they’ll spend a night talking about things that are important to them.
Maybe after we do these things we feel refreshed. I think at the end of all this that we’re going to have more time and energy to go out and take on those projects. We’re freed up to be excited about going to that soup kitchen that we had tacked on to our list out of guilt.
And so many of you are reaching out. I don’t need to tell you that’s important. But I’d like to close today with a suggestion around maybe why it’s important. One of those reasons is that this is practice, this is a dress rehearsal. At the foundation of the Christian faith is the belief that God has given us all sorts of things that we could never earn. They are undeserved, gratitious, and over the top.When we serve others, when we give to someone more than they deserve we are working with God in showing others His love. We are not only fixing the problem: we are not only showing that we care: we are helping them to believe that there is someone so much greater than us, who cares too.
And when we receive kindness: When we reach out so that others might know our needs, we are practicing at receiving some of the deepest and greatest undeserved gifts of all. There can be something almost horrifying about taking that which we need yet don’t deserve. But the fact that it’s horrifying doesn’t make it unnecessary. And if start with the little things, it makes it easier to accept the big things.
My dream and hope and prayer is that Fellowship Church could be a community that reaches out… in both senses of the word. I hope that someday Jesus will be in someone who reaches out to you, to heal you. And I pray that Jesus will work through your hands, too, in the healing of somebody else. And through your reaching out, whether it’s for you or for somebody else, somewhere deep inside, you’ll hear those amazing words: “Your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.