then on the East, linked by a train ride across the continent–I was
priviledged to see the land, not as most tourists do, but up close and
personal, staying in homes of friends and traveling about in the
companionship of a couple of native Aussies.
In such company, I saw, not only many of the places found in travel
brochures, but also the little known, off-the-beaten-path places of the
great Down Under–the way I like to see a country. Not many tour
groups, for example, make their way to the cemetery of St. Anne’s
Anglican Church near Sydney to view a single, non-descript, century old
tombstone on which is carved the fading name of Maria Ann Smith.
Maria Smith was a battling Aussie pioneer woman who, because of an
invalid husband, was forced not only to raise her young family and to be
midwife to hundreds, if not thousands of frontier women, but also to
tirelessly work a small farm and orchard.
One day, after hauling a load of produce to Paddy’s Market in Sydney,
she bought a small barrel of crab apples from which to make apple tarts.
But when she returned home, she discovered that the apples on the
bottom half of the barrel had gone bad. Deciding to keep the barrel for
other uses, she dumped the bad apples on a garbage pile near a creek at
the far edge of her property.
Some months later, she noticed a small tree pushing up through the
rubbish. She studied its leaves and realized that it was an apple tree.
In hopes that it might one day bear apples, she carefully dug it up,
transplanted it nearer the house, and nurtured it. In time, it grew
strong and produced a batch of green apples with a previously unknown
but unique and appetizing flavor.
She eventually marketed the apples, which became popular in her area of
Australia, then all across the continent, and–today–are known and
loved world-wide as “Granny Smith Apples.”
Many of those who were brought into this world by Maria Ann Smith found
it ironic that the woman responsible for their births was remembered
most for playing midwife to an apple.
“Isn’t that just like God,” Granny Smith used to say. “The very stuff
we throw away, he uses to make something totally new.”
It is just like God.
It is just like Jesus.
The whole of the New Testament gospels affirm: “The very stuff we throw
away, he uses to make something totally new!”
What American humorist Mark Twain wrote about the history of Australia
describes just as accurately the gospel record: “It does not read like
history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh, new sort,
no moldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and
incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities, but they are all
true, they all happened.”
Including this one, from Mark’s gospel, chapter five, verses 24-34:
“And a great crowd followed [Jesus] and thronged about him. And there
was a woman who had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had
suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and
was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about
Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For
she said, ‘If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.’ And
immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that
she was healed of her disease. And Jesus, perceiving in himself that
power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and
said, ‘Who touched my garments?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You
see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, “Who touched me?”‘
And he looked around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing
what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down
before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, ‘Daughter,
your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your
disease.'”
Isn’t that just like God?
Isn’t that just like Jesus?
“The very stuff we throw away, he uses to make something totally new!”
Make no mistake about it: society and religion had thrown the woman
away.
By law, she was not allowed to prepare meals for her family or to sit at
the same table and eat with them. She could not touch another person
or be touched by them–unable to hug or kiss her children, unable to
hold or rock her grandchildren, unable to share an embrace with her
husband. In fact, by law, her husband could divorce her, and most
usually did.
By law, she was not allowed to even approach the temple mound–never
able to enter the temple court, even the women’s court; never able to
hear the reading of scripture; never able to bring a sacrifice; never
able to hear a priest pronounce her gift acceptable and her sins
forgiven.
By law, she was distanced from the synagogue, distanced from believers,
distanced from society, distanced from community, distanced from
co-workers, distanced from family, distanced from friends, distanced
from neighbors; and, in most minds, distanced from God.
By law, she was isolated and avoided. She was “unclean”–a word that
doesn’t mean “dirty,” like a three-year-old playing in the mud; rather,
as Brian Stoffregen suggets, it means something more like the phrase
“dirty old man”: someone to be avoided, to stay away from, to not allow
to touch you.
Unclean!
And, so, the world did what the world does with rotten apples: tossed
her with the rest of the garbage on the trash heap at the fringe of
life.
Pick your own word for the woman: tired, weary, exhausted, discouraged,
defeated, devastated, isolated, lonely, needy, hurting, brokenhearted,
frustrated, damaged, afraid, angry–any and all of them nip at the
corners of her psyche. Wendell VanValin says, “This woman was just
plain weatherworn.” The word I prefer is “desperate.”
She had been everywhere, seen everyone, tried everything, and there was
simply no solution to her problem, no answer for her illness. In fact,
after all the specialists had drained her savings, she had only grown
worse. She was at the end of her wits, the end of her rope, the end of
her money, and the end of her options. She was at the end of the road,
and with no hope in sight.
Deperate!
You don’t seriously think, do you, that the woman would give a traveling
faith-healer the time of day if she hadn’t run completely out of
options?
You don’t seriously think, do you, that the woman would resort to
thievery–sneaking up behind her victim, reaching out her hand, stealing
a healing from Jesus, and disappearing into the crowd–if she had any
other alternative?
You don’t seriously think, do you, that the woman would violate taboos,
break rules, scale authoritarian barriers, sacrifice what little pride
she had left, and risk yet another disappointment, if she wasn’t at the
end of the road?
Jesus was this woman’s last resort.
Desperation is sometimes as powerful as faith.
In fact, the two sometimes intermingle.
“If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.”
Call that what you want–silliness, foolishness, superstition, wishful
thinking–but there was an element of great faith there. And it was a
faith that resonated with Jesus. Oh, maybe it wasn’t as sensible, or as
studied, or as mature, or as comprehensive as ours; but, then again,
I’m not sure our deperateness has ever been at the level of hers.
Everybody else was crowding around to see a celebrity. She was reaching
out with desperate faith in a gamble of last-ditch hope to find in
Jesus what she could find nowhere else.
She touched his garments.
That simple act set off a remarkable series of events.
She knew immediately in her body that healing had come to her; Jesus
knew immediately in himself that power had gone from him. Isn’t it
interesting that the woman had an involuntary flow of blood and Jesus
had an involuntary flow of healing power? Two currents–the word
“discharge” is also translated “river”–rushing in opposite directions
and colliding in a miracle of healing and life-change.
It bothers some people that the woman took what she was after without
Jesus’ permission, that the woman was healed almost before Jesus knew
what happened and certainly without him knowing who had grabbed the gift
from him.
Maybe God did the healing directly with Jesus acting merely as a
conduit.
Maybe Jesus was just so . . . “Jesus”–so filled with love, and
compassion, and power, and healing for those in desperate need–that the
cure was dispensed the instant the need touched him. Afer all, Mark
later records, “And wherever [Jesus] came, in villages, cities, or
countryside, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and implored him
that they might touch even the fringe of his garment. And as many as
touched it were made well” (6:26).
Perhaps it was the fulfillment of a Rabbinic promsie that when the
Messiah came, there would be healing in the fringes, the tassels of his
garment. And if that is the case, then the woman exhibits significantly
more faith than we have imagined.
I suspect that all we really need to know, however, is that the simplest
faith extended to touch Jesus finds what it needs.
The woman was healed.
Jesus called her out of the crowd, not to shame or embarrass her, not to
chastise or condemn her, but to love her; to stand her before himself
as a person; to look in her eyes; to reach into her heart; and to assure
here that she was in possession of the healing and wholeness she
sought. “Daughter,” he tenderly said to her, “your faith has made you
well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
“In that instant,” wrote Mark Guy Pierce, “she went from being nobody . .
. to somebody . . . to everybody.”
Mark Twain was right: the account reads “like the most beautiful lies . .
. but they are all true, they all happened.”
And Granny Smith was right, too: It’s just like God–“the very stuff we
throw away, he uses to make something totally new!”
Let me speak now to two groups of people.
To those who have come to the end of the road–whatever your
circumstances are or however you interpret them, and however final, even
fatal your road seems–I assure you that Jesus is there and he will not
pull away from you. You can touch him and you will receive from him
that which you truly need but have been unable to find anywhere else.
And he will stand you before him as a person, and look in your eyes, and
reach into your heart, and tell you, in a way you have never before
been told, “I love you.”
In his tough but tender book, “Messy Spirituality,” the late Mike
Yaconelli related a true story told by New Zealand author Mike Riddell:
“Vincent had met and fallen in love with a young girl named Marilyn.
Neither one of them is seeking a relationship, but a relationship is
seeking them. Swept up by their emotions, the two become deeply
involved. Marilyn, a prostitute, is not prepared to fall in love and is
certainly not prepared for the honesty love requires. She must tell
Vincent who she is, knowing full well that her painful disclosure will
probably mean the end of their relationship.
‘Vincent?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘There’s ah . . . there’s something we need to talk about.’
‘Only if you want to. I’m happy just to sit here and look at you.
Sorry, this looks like something serious.’ Looks a lot like the intro
to the Dear John speech, truth be told.
‘It’s about me and what I do.’
‘Yeah, I wondered when you were going to pluck up the courage to talk
about it. Don’t tell me, you work for the CIA, right? Sorry, sorry.
I’ll shut up.’
She is totally absorbed in the remains of her salad, scrutinizing it
for something. Anything to avoid his eyes.
‘There’s no easy way of saying this. I’m a prostitute. I sleep with
men for my living. It’s a business. I’m very professional.’
Time and silence have this thing they do together. They make a chasm
that has no bottom to it. And there you are, standing right on the edge
of it. Aware that at any moment you may be falling and falling, with
no hope of recovery. At the moment they are at either side of it, each
consumed by their private terror. She looks up at last from her salad.
Vincent is crying. The tears are streaming down his cheeks, and he is
biting his lips to stop himself sobbing. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to
deceive you. I’m sorry, Vincent, I’m sorry.’
He can’t speak. He wants to, but nothing is working. He is looking at
her, at her beautiful face, at her eyes, at the slight hardness around
her mouth. And weeping and weeping. She reaches a hand across to hold
his. She is beyond tears, empty and bleak and barren. Vincent is
mumbling something, but incoherent through the pain. And then he begins
to repeat it again and again. ‘I love you. I love you. I love you. I
love you . . . .’
This is the worst thing she has ever heard in her life. She wants to
scream, to break something, to tip over the table in rage. Instead some
continental shelf rips loose within her. She begins gulping and
moaning, a terrible agonizing cry from another place. And the tears are
flowing. They grip each other’s hands, and lean their foreheads
together. The tears are flowing into the abyss, and there is no end to
them.”
Yaconelli commented on that story: “Marilyn expected Vincent to reject
her, to pull away from her, to have nothing to do with her. In a
strange and touching way, Vincent did what Jesus would do: he looked
beneath her behavior, saw her longings, and all he could do was weep.
She expected criticism; what she received was understanding. Instead of
hearing words of condemnation, Marilyn heard over and over again, ‘I
love you’.”
Perhaps it could be said of her also, “In that moment, she went from
being nobody . . . to somebody . . . to everybody.”
“To everybody”–because that’s me . . . and that’s you.
All the wrong turns, all the detours, all the dead-ends; all the paths
that have taken us where we never intended to be, or wanted to be, or
even thought we would be; all the roads that have taken us to
only-God-knows-where, but far from him–they do not mean that we have
arrived too late to be saved, or that we are too hopelessly lost to get
home, or that we are too far gone to find grace, or that we have
traveled beyond the reach of hope.
The truly marvelous thing about Jesus is that he refuses to play by the
rules of cartographers, choosing rather to extend lines and roads beyond
where all maps and all logic and all conventional wisdom say that they
stop.
I have often wondered: can that be what it means–at least part of what
it means–for Jesus to be “The Way”?
Can it be that Jesus is not simply the road, but that he actually meets
us at the end of the road–just as he did the unnamed woman in Mark’s
gospel–and shows us yet more road, yet a new way we never knew existed,
a path that lies beyond what seems so obviously to end?
Can it be that with Jesus no road is final?
Can that be what it all means–that the road will not stop, the road
will not dead-end, the road will not suddenly quit on us because Jesus
won’t; that no road is final; that no life is hopeless; that the end of
the road is where hope begins because that is where Jesus is?
Can it be that with Jesus the end of the road is not the end afterall?
I think so.
Like Marilyn, who came to the end of the road only to find Vincent’s
love there for her; like Mark’s unnamed woman who came to the end of the
road only to find Jesus–his healing and love–there for her; we, too,
may have come to the end of the road. And, if so, then we need to know
that Jesus is there for us.
Even to this day, dead-ends are the places Jesus most loves to frequent,
the places he most likes to surprise us with his healing and love.
No roads end where Jesus is present; instead, they always pick up again,
leading us on to health and wholeness, to life and newness, to hope and
a future.
It is that healing the woman found. It is that healing that we can
find. For “healing,” wrote John Pitch, “is the restoration of meaning
to people’s lives no matter what their physical condtion might be.”
Wherever Jesus is present, the end of the road is where restoration, and
healing, and forgiveness, and hope and life begin.
In the words of Eugene Peterson, “When we sin and mess up our lives, we
find that God doesn’t go off and leave us–he enters into our troubles
and saves us.”
If you are at the end of the road, take heart. Because of Jesus, the
end of the road is where hope begins.
Let me now speak to the church.
Do you remember your life before you found Jesus, perhaps at the end of
your road? Do you remember the wounds that you carried in your heart
and the grace that healed them? If so, can you relate to Macrina
Wiederkehr’s touching poem (“Seasons of Your Heart”)?:
“Once there was a wound.
It was no ordinary wound.
It was my wound.
We had lived together long.
I yearned to be free of this wound.
I wanted the bleeding to stop.
Yet if the truth be known,
I felt a strange kind of gratitude
for this wound.
It made me
tremendously open to grace,
vulnerable to God’s mercy.
A beautiful believing in me
that I have named Faith
kept growing, daring me
to reach for what I could not see.
This wound made me open.
I was ready for grace.
And so one day, I reached.
There I was thick in the crowd,
bleeding and believing,
and I reached.
At first I reached
for what I could see–
the fringe of a garment.
But my reaching didn’t stop there
for someone reached back into me.
A grace I couldn’t see
flowed through me.
A power I didn’t understand
began to fill the depths of me.
Trembling, I was called forth
to claim my wholeness.
The bleeding had left me.
The blessing remained.
And, strange as this may sound,
I have never lost my gratitude
for the wound
that made me so open
to grace.”
Do you remember?
Have you ever stopped thanking God for his grace that in Jesus reached
out to you and into you and healed you and saved you?
It is just like God.
It is just like Jesus.
“The very stuff we throw away, he uses to make something totally new!”
The question was never and is never, “Are people at the end of the road
beyond Jesus’ concern?” For, nothing in all creation can separate us
from the love of God in Jesus (Romans 8:39). The only question is, “Are
people at the end of the road beyond our concern?”
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was seeking hard after Jesus, trying to
discern his dream for Bethel. On the way from my house to the office
one morning, I drove south onto Moreland Road, then turned west onto
Route 140, passing by some of our community’s biggest churches and
largest facilities, ideally located along high traffic areas. I
remember a time–before I became pastor here–when Bethel had dreams of
building on Moreland Road. I was part of a group of pastors who went
out to that vacant land, prayed over it, and prayed for you, asking God
to build the church he wanted.
That dream never came to fruition . . . but God’s dream for Bethel has
never died.
If you think Bethel’s road ended at a strip of propery slightly north
and east of here, then you don’t understand grace.
As I turned down South Prairie that day and approached our buildings and
property, I said–partly to myself and partly to God–“If it is true,
as many church growth experts say, that a key element in building a
church is ‘location, location, location,’ then we have a really lousy
location. Unless a person is headed to the nursing home, or the last
row of apartments, or the storage facilties; or unless they are
attending a soccer match or watching the airport fireworks, the only
reason they end up down here is because they made a wrong turn.”
And, then, I am confident that God spoke to my heart. You may think it
an undigested bagel with low-fat cream cheese, but I believe it was God.
He spoke to my heart and asked, “Pat, just what is wrong with Bethel’s
location?”
I was somewhat miffed that he didn’t understand church growth principles
like most experts do, so I explained: “It’s at the end of the road, at
the end of town. The thing just dies. It dead-ends at airport
property. It’s at the end of the road.”
The short silence that followed was broken when he once more spoke to my
heart. “Look around you. Do you see who lives in your own back yard?
Many of them are people at the end of the road. Do you know who
inhabits your neighborhood, as well as who is scattered about Bethalto
and this whole area? Many of them are people who are at the end of the
road–people who need hope, who need Jesus.”
And, then, he said–I heard it plainly in my heart–“Think about it . . .
Bethel: at the end of the road . . . where hope begins.”
Anybody looking for a dream?
Verna Dozier, in her book “The Dream of God,” wrote, “The important
question to ask is not, ‘What do you believe?’ but ‘What difference does
it make that you believe?’ Does the world come nearer to the dream of
God because of what you believe?”
Does it make any difference to those around us, people at the end of the
road, that Bethel–hear it in its Old Testament Hebrew translation:
“House of God”–sits among them . . . fittingly enough, at the end of
the road?
Someone may ask, “Do you know what kind of people we will attract with a
dream like that?” I do–a whole lot of people like the unnamed woman
in Mark’s gospel, bleeding in a lot of different places and a lot of
different ways, and who just happen to live where we worship: at the end
of the road.
There is location and then there is location. A person can live in the
finest house in Bethalto or Moro or Wood River or Roxana, and still be
at the end of the road . . . and still need Jesus . . . and still find
healing and hope.
Jesus–through his church–still looks for hurting and broken people to
touch and heal, or to touch him and be healed. He still looks for
people who have been hurt and disappointed so many times–even by the
church–that they refuse to trust anyone anymore. He still looks for
people at the end of the road.
Jesus is still “just like Jesus.” “The very stuff we throw away, he
uses to make something totally new!”
In his book, “Love, Acceptance and Forgiveness,” Jerry Cook tells of
what happened to his church when they began to reach out to what I call
end-of-the-road people. It changed the looks of the church, and its
heart. One day, a friend of his, a fellow pastor, called him on the
phone and read him the proverbial riot act for what he had done to his
church by reaching out to such people. “You know what you are out
there?” he asked. “You’re nothing but a bunch of garbage collectors!”
Jerry Cook thought about it afterwards and realized that his friend was
right. That’s exactly what they were: garbage collectors. That’s
exactly what the church is meant to be: garbage collectors.
Do you remember?
Do you remember what we were before Jesus found us?
Do you remember what we were before Jesus touched us?
We were garbage . . . that Jesus, by his grace, gloriously recycled.
Cook wrote: “I’ve seen human garbage become beautiful . . . . I’ve seen
the stench of sin turned into the fragrance of heaven. That’s our
business. We can’t worry about what the critics think or say. Where is
God going to send the ‘garbage’ for recycling if he can’t put it on our
doorstep? He’ll find a place. If we’re not open for business, someone
else will be. But we want to be used of God.”
We want to be used of God.
We want to be used of God.
Yes, we do–even Bethel; even little, lousy location Bethel, which–as
God would have it–sits at the end of the road . . . where hope begins.
