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More Light" Mark 5.21-43 (the last Sunday in June, 1997) In the Barber Institute of Fine Arts down on the Birmingham University campus there is a 3-panel medieval painting. In its left-hand panel it depicts Adam and Eve lamenting the death of Abel. In the middle panel, it shows Mary the mother of Jesus lamenting as they lift her dead son down from the cross. In the right hand panel Jacob is holding the many-coloured coat of the presumed dead Joseph. The three panels give us three scenes of parents grieving for children who have died that speak to the heart of what it means to be human, to love, to bring life into the world and to live in hope of this life. The grief of a parent whose child has died is the greatest grief of all , they say. When we lived in Wales I had a colleague whose wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident right outside the church on a Sunday morning. His grief was immeasurable, and when he came back to work after some months on leave, it was still an ever-present, gnawing pain. But people came to encourage him to get on with life, to put it behind him. They didn't know. The pain of losing a child lingers on, and wells up at unexpected moments. Photographs stand on mantels like shrines, And prayers are filled with memories of stunted hopes. We meet such grief in our gospel lesson this morning, in the grief of Jairus the leader of the synagogue for his daughter. Imagine how the sharpness of his pain is heightened by contrast with the ritual grief of the women here, the weeping and wailing that can so easily turn to laughter, and heightened by the casual attitude of those who say, "Your daughter is dead. We don't need the rabbi any more." As if everything were OK now. Imagine the genuinely horrific shock when Jairus hears those word: "Your daughter is dead." In a crude sort of way the three panels in the medieval painting seem to be saying death is not real, in so far as the last panel depicts a lament for Joseph, who, we know, is not dead at all, but lives and in fact will be the salvation of his family. Whether or not the artist meant to imply that life just goes on and that death is merely a rumour, these paintings on the three medieval panels nevertheless touch that central mystery of our Christian faith, which at the end of the day and according to what Scripture really says, is not so much about what happens to us after we die as much as it is the power of spiritual transformation in this life, in the sense that our spiritual rebirth is resurrection; in the sense that those who say that they have been "born again" have experienced resurrection. Paul again and again speaks of our baptism, of our conversion as resurrection, as our dying and rising with Christ as sharing in his cross and resurrection. Such profound experiences of transformation lift up witnesses to resurrection in a manner not all that different from the way people recovering from a stroke become witnesses to resurrection. Life is going to be different. Paul doesn't say that life just goes on. He says we shall be changed, in the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed. This story in our gospel lesson may not be about what happens to people when they die anyway, unless we want to abuse the text by taking it in a crassly literal fashion. It is more about what happens to twelve year old girls. I can testify. My youngest daughter just finished her twelfth year a couple days ago. When she was younger, I used to say to her, "Rachel, are you enjoying your childhood?" And she would always answer, "Yes!" and answer with glee. Can you imagine asking an adolescent suffering from chronic hormone poisoning this question? Are you enjoying your adolescence? Moan, moan, moan! So I would ask the question again and again, maybe once a week when she was six, seven, eight years old, sot hat she would be able to remember that at one point she had been able to say an unqualified "Yes! To life. Because I knew what was coming. I knew that was coming and I grieved for the loss of my child. But under no circumstances would I want her to go back to being a child. I would not wish to keep her as a child or to block her from growing in any way, because I have seen too many families that have done just that, and so cripple their children to a stunted emotional development. The Church can be like this, too, with its deeply ingrained fear of sexuality. We cripple one another with an assumption that our faith must remain childlike, unquestioning, caged and cloistered away from the world and never changing from what our grandmothers believed. It is a mistake to read this story about Jairus' daughter naively. Jairus, like all fathers, fears that his child has died. But no, Jesus says, your fears are mistaken, Look, your daughter lives, a young woman. Notice how this story about the young girl forms a "frame" around another story, the story of an older woman who has suffered from chronic menstrual bleeding for years on end. Shunned, unclean, a religious pariah, she reaches out her hand to the rabbi not simply to be healed but to be acknowledged, to be known at least of not cherished for who she is. "Who touched me?" Jesus says. For this is a forbidden act. Now, according to the faith of that day, Jesus himself was unclean, stained and stigmatised by her uninvited touch. But instead of railing against her for violating this taboo, Jesus says she is healed. Unless we are to abuse this story by reading it as just one more healing miracle. Here the healing is primarily the healing of relationships. At the woman's initiative, a gulf of distance is bridged, an estrangement is overcome. Her hunger to be accepted breaks through centuries of barriers. So this is no mere personal healing but a healing with immense social, cultural and religious consequences. We are stepping into a new world here, into a future that will not look like the past. And yet there are those, I am sure, who will mourn for the world of taboo and fear of women's sexuality that has been left behind. Change is never easy. Change that liberates those who have been shunned is particularly difficult. Such breakthroughs into new dimensions of religious understanding have to happen again and again and again. We define our faith from the small perspectives of our human understanding. But God breaks through with unexpected new life. This is indeed the promise of resurrection, that there will be resurrection after resurrection after resurrection, beginnings without end. We will leave home, we will grow up, be born again, abandon the security of what has become so familiar that it imprisons us in the past and cripples our capacity to hope. Resurrection does not close a world by preserving it in aspic, but opens us to God's ever surprising future. We shall be changed, Paul says, in the twinkling of an eye. There was a time in this country when belonging to a free church like this was basically illegal. In the early seventeenth century, with nonconformists feeling the full brunt of ecclesiastical repression under Archbishop Laud, a group of dissenters made the difficult decision to abandon the world they had called home and set our for the wilderness of what eventually became the land of my birth. This was the group of men and women we called the Pilgrim Fathers, whose option for freedom became a foundational story for us. Against the retrenching and repressive conservatism of the established Church, the dissenters took the position that God was calling them to be faithful by breaking free, in the trust that what God had in mind for the future was not defined by the past. John Robinson encouraged them on the eve of their departure in 1620 with the assurance that God had more light and truth yet to be disclosed from his holy Word. In a typical Congregationalist spirit, he said they should not be confined by the narrow thinking of their time in history or by the pronouncements of the official church or by the sense of creeds written centuries before, but by requirements of the of faith, hope and love as we are led into God's future. Here are the words he said. . . . We limit not the truth of God to
This was indeed a powerfully encouraging statement, but here, too, I am sure that there was grief as an old life died so that, with Christ, a new life could live. Life in the wilderness would not be easy. Many would look back to England with nostalgia, just as the people of the Exodus did to the land of their captivity so many years before. There are, of course, two kinds of grief: one that is destructive and another that is creative. Our grief is destructive when it defines our inability to let go of the past. We can mourn a dying world, for instance, in the sense that we cling to it, never allowing the past to be past. We can be so overwhelmed by the confusion of change around us and by loss that we do not allow what is new to even touch us. Insulating ourselves against change, we make a religion out of living among the dead skeletons of what used to be vital. But mourning can also be creative. New horizons, new worlds are never possible unless we do take the time to mourn, marking death and change by touching it, naming it and recognising it. Our world may be disrupted by unavoidable sorrows, by wrenching changes creating immense disorientation, and our temptation may be to close our minds to that pain. But it is only by acknowledging the death of the old that we are ever able to greet the birth of the new. The old fashioned funeral practises were better at this, and studies have shown that women who cared for their husbands at home during their final illness lived longer and healthier lives following the death of their spouse than those who did not. Grieving is good for you when it is an acknowledgement of that is happening rather than a denial of what is happening. A faith that does not allow this to happen is descructive, spiritually crippling. Grief needs to be practised in ways that contribute to new, unexpected futures. The United Reformed Church is struggling through momentous changes right now, changes some wish would never happen, changes others hunger for. At our General Assembly, meeting in a fortnight's time, we will be voting on three resolutions having to do with human sexuality and specifically the ordination of those in same-sex relationships. The first resolution is that the United Reformed church maintain its unity throughout its engagement with this issue. The second resolution is to launch a new, extensive, church-wide study and debate of the issues involved. The third resolution proposes what I think is the only just option for the interim period: to respect the current structure of ordination based in the call of a local church confirmed by the district council. If therefore a local church wishes to call a person who is homosexual and in a faithful, long-term same-sex relationship, that will be accepted if the district council concurs. At the same time, if a local church does not wish to consider such a person, that too is acceptable. If a district council does not concur with a local church's decision to extend a call, then the matter is arbitrated at the synod level. Note carefully what this last resolution asks us to consider. It does not ask us if we are willing to accept a candidate in a same sex relationship. It asks us if we are willing to live in a denomination with churches who will. It asks if we are willing to affirm the diversity that already exists in the United Reformed Church, during this period of church-wide study, even if we may not be ready to actually celebrate that diversity. Like the woman who reached out to touch Jesus in her hunger to be accepted, so there are faithful people already in our midst with rich spiritual gifts who wish to serve their church now in an open, public way. It will not be easy for the church to decide whether its ministry will be opened to such gifts or shut. Which ever way the vote goes, there will be grief, I am sure. There will be grief if the Mission Council's proposal passes. There will be grief if it is defeated. There is no way to avoid the pain of engaging one another on this difficult issue. My prayer is that we will be able to mourn together, to face the pain, to touch the disorientation of change and move together in the light of the resurrection with the confidence that our God has more light and truth yet to break forth from the Word that gathers us here this morning in worship, and will continue to gather generations yet unborn. Note: At the July 1998 Generasl Assembly of the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom, all three resolutions discussed above were passed with large majorities. In February 1998 our local Church (Weoley Hill URC, Birmingham) concluded a two-year study of this question with a poll of the congregation. Several questions were asked. 91% of the congregation responded that they would welcome Christians who were homosexual and celibate as members, 81% responded that they would welcome those who were in same-sex relationships. 70% of church members responded that they would welcome a celibate homosexual person as their minister, and 60% responded that they would welcome a minister in a same-sex relationship (a further 10% responded that they would "tolerate" such a minister). Rev Dr Tom Arthur
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