Well Touched
Genesis 12:1-9; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

June 5, 2005

Everyone knows the old maxim about the necessity of teaching and learning history: if we don’t know learn from our history we are condemned to repeat it. Most of us recognize, however, that no matter how many history books we read and history classes we take, we usually end up repeating our flaws and suffering or inflicting similar consequences. We tend not to repeat our successes so easily.

The desire to “make history” on the part of ambitious people who believe they are visionaries is a short-sighted venture. Now that we all finally know who “Deep Throat” is, it is helpful to remember that the real downfall of Nixon came from the so-called “White House Tapes” which included an 18-1/2 minute gap at a crucial point in one meeting (see, history has this habit of imitating itself). Most people back in the early 1970’s were surprised to hear that there was a hidden tape recorder going all the time in the Oval Office. Nixon instructed that they be put in place in order to properly record the transactions of his Presidency and to ensure a place in history for him. Nixon was a reputed history buff. He was absolutely right, the tapes secured a place in Presidential history for him.

The case of individuals and groups who become history are not so calculating. Historical figures never attempt to mold history, but they cannot avoid history’s grasp. History for all of us begins with an unsuspecting man in an unremarkable place, that is, Abram. The three major religions of the Western world – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – are often called “Abrahamic religions.” Not Noah or Adam or Abel, but Abram. Another accident of history is that he becomes Abraham, but in the beginning he is simply Abram.

Who is Abram? We know his lineage, but the Bible is at its drabbest. Nothing distinguishes him. No accomplishments, not even royalty. When the real story, real history starts, he is living not in the ancestral city of Ur of the Chaldees on the Persian Gulf, but way up north in Mesopotamia in Haran. Abram and his family were foreigners, outsiders, they weren’t locals, and that was a burden just as today.

What was different was that the Lord God spoke to Abram and told him to go where God would show him. No comment from Abram, he just went down to Canaan, the Promised Land, but there were Canaanites living there. That should have been a surprise. Abram did not plan or plot this out. He made an instinctive decision that changed his life, set in slow motion for the moment the birth of a nation and of an idea.

Abram lived, students of the Bible now figure, sometime around 2000 B. C. Yet in some ways he was a modern person. Here was a human being who knew God, talked with and listened to God when very few other people acted as if God existed. Oh, there were the pietisms about knowing that there was a higher power, perhaps three or four or more higher powers. But they had no real clue how to think of this God in a way that made a difference in the way they lived. More and more, that seems to be our situation in our high-powered busy societies of today. It is possible to live as if there were no God, and a lot of people in 2000 B. C. were good at it, and with our technology we are even better.

Abram was a person who thought differently. God was at the centre of the way he thought and lived. He did not plan to do and go where he did, but looking back someone was putting the pieces together.

The best things happen without planning or foreknowledge. Jesus had just recruited Matthew as a disciple, when a leader of the synagogue anxiously comes to interrupt Jesus’ conversations. A rather amazing situation enfolds. The leader’s daughter had just died, but he believed that Jesus had enough of the spirit of God in him to come to her side, lay his hands upon her and resurrect her.

The synagogue was generally hostile to Jesus, so this leader seeking Jesus out was a radical and risky move on his part. It also showed the confidence Jesus could inspire in others. Mind you, Jesus had not performed any resurrections yet, new territory here for him, and resurrections by anyone are a rather presumptuous request.

This was not a scheduled event for Jesus, but there is no dialogue and off he goes following the rabbi. A funny thing happened on the way to the rabbi’s house. He was touched. A woman suddenly came up behind him. She had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years, and she thought to herself, “If only I touch his cloak, I will be made well.” So she touched, and Jesus could feel it and turned around, knowing exactly what she desired. “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” Immediately, she was healed.

Which part of the story was an afterthought? Jesus resumed his trip to the rabbi’s house and seeing the mourners already in high voice, he read out the riot act and cleared the area. “The girl is sleeping, not dead,” he declared. And they laughed at him. Jesus thinks differently too. He took the girl by the hand and she got up.

There was no advance planning with these events, no strategies connived. Jesus in both instances responded to the heart-felt need of hurting people. They were not in his Daytimer. Neither the rabbi nor the woman had thought ahead about this, yet they shared similar feelings of trust in the God-given power of Jesus and took a risk. The rabbi asked Jesus to resurrect his daughter. The woman touched Jesus’ clothes in order to heal what 12 years of doctoring had not.

From that moment on, their lives became something quite different, physically and even more spiritually. We do not, cannot plan God. Some of us think we can or even have planned our lives, but that is our delusion, and even our arrogance. Certainly, you plan to go to university or study a particular subject or learn a special trade, but do you really think that plans your life, that absolves you of having to make any more decisions?

The Gospel and Biblical story are not a spiritual purpose-driven manual that ensures our spiritual, physical, career, and financial success. The Gospel is about how you respond in the moment to someone else hurting. Remember the Levite and the priest who passed by the robbed and beaten man, only to have a Samaritan, scum of the earth as far as the Jews were concerned, stop and give the man everything he had? Suddenly, immediately, do you know how to love, do you know how to care, can you discern that it is God calling you to go where no person has gone before? If you are asked to resurrect someone’s life, do you try to bring back life? If you are touched to heal someone no one else has been able to help, do you help anyway?

There are no novels and great stories about strategists who plan out a proper successful life. All of our stories are about the chance moment when overwhelmed by love, caught by the spirit, you do something different, think differently, talk differently, and by God’s grace, the Promised Land is lying before you and the world changes.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan