12-step Eucharist July 3, 2024. Interruptions, Mark 5:21-43, Healing Jarius’ Daughter and the Hemorrhaging Woman
Here, we are gathered in community on the eve of our country’s birthday to discern if Jesus has a last-minute message for us and our country before we celebrate this nation’s founding with family and friends./
Jesus has just crossed the Sea of Galilee from the region of the Gerasenes, outside the bounds of Galilee, where he immediately met and healed a man possessed with demons. Tonight’s story takes place now on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee, which isn’t really a sea but a large freshwater lake some thirteen miles long and eight miles across, surrounded by high mountains and roughly in the shape of a heart, which fits well into this story. Now back home, Jesus is immediately met on the shoreline by a great crowd, including Jarius, a leader of the synagogue whose 12-year-old daughter is dying. On his way to Jarius’ house, a woman who has endured a GYN illness for 12 years touches his garment and is healed. Immediately, Jesus senses power has left him, stops, and asks, “Who touched me?”/
Are you getting any sense of a pattern here in Jesus’ life described by Mark?///
“While visiting the University of Notre Dame, Henri Nouwen met with an older professor, and while they strolled, the professor said with a certain melancholy, ‘You know, my whole life, I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.’” 2
Jesus’ life in Mark often seems to be a series of interruptions. Jesus stops and meets people exactly where they are in the present moment. This is how and where he heals.
I don’t know about you, but I have an agenda. But I am slowly, often painfully, learning that God continually meets me in the interruptions in my life that are not on my schedule. There is a call from a friend or family member when I think I am too busy to talk. This is a sure sign that I am in trouble, losing priority of what life is about if I cannot stop and chat. Interruptions are like a stop or yield sign to go off script and listen for a grace note. Interruptions remind us of how powerless we are. If we think we are in charge, the interruptions remind us that this is a myth. There is a power greater than ourselves, who constantly tries to lead us. Jesus daily teaches us this. He responds to what God presents to him in the present moment throughout his day.
To everyone here, especially those in recovery, “How do you think we got here?” Somehow, we received a message to interrupt what was going on in our life in addiction and reach out for something better. In recovery, it is called “a moment of clarity,” but it is truly a “God call,” interrupting what we have planned for the day./
My personal experience is that it is so easy to become EXPONENTIALLY ISOLATED, sealing ourselves off and refusing to respond to anything but what has become “our agenda, our lifestyle.” Our world, our God, becomes too small. We become the center of the universe, fossilized, like the Pharisees. As a result, we also develop a high hubris titer. A fallacy lurks in our ears that we will lose our thoughts or creativity if we stop and meet the interruption. But, when I return after an interruption, I almost always have fresh and new ideas about the next path, leading to becoming the person God created me to be.//
Consider the interruptions in our lives. Always remember that, most probably, our lives and the lives of our friends here in recovery were saved by a God-Call that was an interruption.
1 Frederick Buechner in Secrets in the Dark (HarperOne, 2006).
2 Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Image Books, 1975), p. 52.
Joanna Seibert joannaseibert.com