Homily for 13Th Sunday B Deacon Frank Olmsted

Homily for 13th Sunday “B” Deacon Frank Olmsted

St. Cletus Parish 10:00 and 12:00 June 28, 2015

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24; II Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-43

In today’s readings we find some of the most powerful material anywhere in the Scriptures. Most of us hear the readings and I presume, on some level, accept them to be true. If we listened and heard the first reading from the Book of Wisdom and then Mark’s gospel and we really believe what he heard, then we have something truly amazing and life-altering. Consider these lines from the Book of Wisdom: “God did not make death . . . for he fashioned all things that they might have being. . . . For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him.” This says that God made us in the image of his own nature and he made us to be eternal. He finds death just as alien and undesirable as we do, and that is not what he intends for us. Doesn’t that make everything else in life completely different?

Karl Marx did not believe in God or an afterlife. He argued that belief in God and the practice of religion was just a drug ofhope for a

better life in eternity to dull the awareness of people to the hard plight

they had on earth. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, said religion was a projection of what we hoped for but which didn’t exist, and thus belief in God was a psychosis, a sickness. Now if what the Book of Wisdom says is true, then why wouldn’t we expect that this belief in a God who makes us in his image and makes us imperishable would be a hope and comfort in the midst of a world made difficult and harsh by the free choices and often bad choices of men and women? As to Freud’s contention, the fact that we hope for a benevolent and loving Father who made us in his image and hope for life after death does not in any way prove that God and eternal life are not real. Maybe, in fact, we long and hope for God and eternal life precisely because God does exist and has placed in us that yearning as a feature of our humanity. Rather than belief in God and eternal life being a carrot on a stick to keep us going in a hostile world as Marx argued or a psychological construction because we fear death and don’t want to die, as Freud claimed, is it not just as plausible, perhaps much more plausible that we have this belief, we have this hope and yearning

precisely because it is innate to our human nature? It is how we were created? If this is so, then life in this world is not rendered less important to Christians as Karl Marx argued, but more important because it is the first leg of a journey that shapes us and takes us to where we were destined to be all along.

Mark continues this discussion in the gospel selection. Jesus restored to life the daughter of Jairus the synagogue official and cured the woman with internal bleeding. These miracles showed the desire of Jesus to help those in physical crisis, but they also point to life that extends beyond today and its problems. Three times a Greek verb is used which is usually translated in other places in the New Testament as “saves”. First Jairus asked Jesus to come lay his hands on his daughter “so that she may get well and live.” More literally this would be “so that she may be saved and live.” The woman with the internal bleeding says, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” This could be rendered, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be saved.” Jesus said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.” When Jesus arrived at the

home of Jairus to find his daughter deceased, he said, “The child is not dead but asleep.” Jesus wasn’t saying that she really wasn’t dead but just in a sleeping state or a coma.” His point is that death is not the end of life but it is like a sleep from which we awaken to the eternal fullness of life. To paraphrase an ancient Stoic philosopher Hecaton of Rhodes, “Death does not put out the light. It blows out the flame of the candle because the candlelight is no longer needed now for thedawn has broken.” Death is also like a great and important book that we read. When we finish it and close the book, the story is not ended. We have taken it into ourselves and made it our own, and so now we can close the book and go on to live in the new light of what we’ve read. This miracle and what it teaches is so important to Mark that he gave us the exact words of Jesus in the Aramaic language, “Talithakoum,” and then translated them into Greek, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” Jairusasked Jesus to place his hands on his daughter that “she may be saved and live.” The woman sick for twelve years said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be saved.” Jesus will say to each of us at our death,

“I say to you, arise.” If in gratitude we say yes to his invitation, we will join the communion of saints.

I believe that Jesus says to us often while the candle of this life is still burning, “I say to you, arise.” Arise to the new life of your baptism. Arise to the calling I have given you to be a responsible Christian witnessing to your faith each day. Arise to the vocation I have given you to be a holy husband or wife, father or mother, priest or religious. Arise to the task of being my light in the world through your words and your deeds, through the little things that you will do today. In one of my favorite books, Reaching Out , Henri Nouwenrecalls a teacher who said, “You know . . . my whole life I’ve been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work (Henri J. Nouwen, Reaching Out, p. 36). The interruptions may be where we are called to witness to the light of Christ. The little things may seem little only because our perspective is not quite that of Jesus. One of my students just before graduation was telling me that he wanted to major or at least minor in theology. He said a key moment

for him was in class when I said, “Theology is not an end we’re trying to reach; it’s merely a roadmap to help us get to an end, and the end is a relationship with Jesus Christ.” I replied that I borrowed that image from C. S. Lewis. He said it wasn’t the analogy that was as important asthe conviction with which I said it. Just a moment and a few words in a class. Not that important, it would seem---or was it?

If we are destined for an imperishable life with God as today’s scriptures say, doesn’t that make every moment here of greater consequence? Isn’t every good deed, every loving moment, every helpful or guiding word spoken another paving stone on that road through this time on earth to the imperishable, eternal life ahead. Are not each of these deeds, moments, and words, many that come as interruptions to what we think is important, and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things though they may seem, actually a response to Jesus when he says each day to everyone of us, “I say to you, arise!” Amen.