Sermon rpeached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

From the psalm: ‘Then you hid your face from me and I was utterly dismayed.’

To begin, I quote: ‘Human experience includes those dangerous and difficult times of dislocation and disorientation when the sky does fall and the world does indeed come to an end’

So writes Walter Brueggemann in a book on the psalms.  He develops ideas from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, arguing that the psalms have a very particular psychological function.  Psalms, some individually, and all collectively, articulate the human experience, the psychological movement into disorientation – those moments when the world ends, hope evaporates, when we might echo Auden’s phrase, ‘For nothing now can ever come to any good’; moments when our treasured sense of purpose and meaning, even of faith, may be completely shattered.  If you think this has never happened to you, perhaps you might just remember being a teenager, in love, unrequited.  I’m not sure I have ever recovered.

Out of this collapse of meaning, Ricoeur traces a psychological countermovement of reorientation, where our perception of reality is radically reconfigured – everything perceived in an entirely new and surprising way; hope where hope seemed impossible; meaning where to ascribe meaning would have been positively offensive; wonder where there seemed nothing but loss and sorrow and grief.  Ricoeur describes this as more than just some kind of consolation, or making the best of a bad situation.  This reorientation has the mark of a gift; something new, greater, even miraculous.

The Psalm we heard earlier, psalm 30, recounts something like this movement.  It begins in confidence and faith:

In my prosperity I said, 'I shall never be moved. You, Lord, of your goodness, have made my hill so strong.'

And then the sky falls in:

Then you hid your face from me and I was utterly dismayed.

Then, out of despair, the miracle:

You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.

This is not just a return to the status quo ante; not a waking-up and finding it had all been a bad dream.  History has not changed, the sky has indeed fallen-in, and may well do so again; but out of it has emerged a new way of seeing, of perceiving, of receiving life – where it is, miraculously, possible to dance.

Having spent several years working in a children’s hospice, I would be doing those families a disservice to suggest that this is an easy or inevitable process.  I imagine many of us carry experiences (not just as teenagers) where we are still waiting for our mourning to be turned into dancing – experiences where we have been completely disorientated, and still find the idea of any reorientation unimaginable.  It is not a process that can be forced – no amount of jollying-along will make it happen, and impatience with ourselves or with others is unlikely to be very helpful.  There is simply no telling how long it will take before we are ready to dance.

So, to the gospel.  It had been twelve years since the haemorrhages started.  And as one woman began an illness that would slowly drain her (of money, of social capital or acceptability, of her energy, no doubt drained by chronic anaemia), at the same moment another woman gave birth to a child, a daughter, who would be treasured, not least by her father – that man of faith and a leader in the community of faith. 

For one daughter of Israel (with no doting father at hand), the beginning of 12 years of disorientation and difficulty; for the other, the beginning of a life full of promise, and hope, upheld by a very present father’s love.

Now, twelve years on, the skies have fallen in on that second daughter too – she is at the point of death, and her father throws himself in intercession at the feet of Jesus.

We are tempted at this point to make a comparison – who should Jesus help first, the little girl, or the suffering woman?  Surely the girl is the clear priority; the greater tragedy; surely nothing should detain him.  Yet Jesus turns aside to acknowledge the chronic sufferer, the woman who didn’t want to detain him, who simply, secretly reached out to touch his cloak.  'Daughter (he says), Daughter your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.'

Wonderful, but now Jesus is too late.  The little girl has died; all hope is ended; why trouble the teacher any further?  But death does not deter this Teacher, and he strides on, earning ridicule from those outside the leader’s house.  Then, behind closed doors, he bids this second daughter to rise; for he is the resurrection and the life.  Those present are overwhelmed with amazement.

The interweaving of these two healing miracles creates a richness that confounds any simple interpretation.  The appearance of the number 12, as in 12 years, might refer to the 12 tribes, and the fact that they are both ‘daughters of Israel’ might reinforce a sense that all God’s people are being represented here – the child at the heart of the religious establishment, and equally the woman whose illness put her outside it - the child whose life has barely begun, not yet a woman, and the woman from whom life is being drained away.  The woman and the girl mirror one another in all sorts of interesting ways.

At the very least, perhaps we are supposed to notice that no tragedy is beyond Jesus’ notice - whether an acute horror or a chronic misery.  There is no hierarchy in suffering.

Jesus is shown here as the one who does indeed turn mourning into dancing.  The woman is sent on her way in peace – sent out like an apostle.  The little girl, we are told, walked about her bedroom – is it not at least possible that she skipped?

I used to work in a school for youngsters with profound physical and learning disabilities, and one of the common mantras among those who had speech was ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ 

It was said with a certain amount of gritty determination, and ironic eye-rolling, but I always wanted to say, ‘yes – I stand in witness that it absolutely does make you stronger, and that includes the things that are killing you’  This was nothing to do with physical strength – I never saw anyone get out of their wheelchair (not without a hoist) – but there was a strength which was to do with their human-ness; a depth and quality of their humanity – a miraculous, paradoxical strength that came precisely through the acknowledgement of weakness and dependency; a dignity that danced and shone in them, even in bodies that were weak and failing – a mystery no less than that of the Cross.

The psychological journey through disaster and disorientation to the perception of a reconfigured reality which is more gift, something new and miraculous, we can find this reflected in the psalms; but, of course, in this they point forward to the Paschal mystery; the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The mystery that is endlessly manifested in our human lives if we are minded to see it.  When the sky falls in, we are dying with Christ; when we learn how to live again, to receive our life anew as gift, we are rising with him.  This is the logic of our baptism; the rule by which we live, and live.

But it is possible to deny it; to say that the psalmist, Bruggeman and Ricoeur have all got it wrong (a bit naïve) - and we will always be vulnerable to those who would pour scorn on such a notion, like those who laughed at Jesus – scornful at the hope the gospel offers for reorientation beyond disaster, in this life and beyond it.  It is in the nature of our culture to be sceptical, and I suspect even the most faithful of us feel that at times.

In the end it was the faith of the woman, and of the little girl’s father, that Jesus commended – he did not claim either healing for himselfwi, but gave credit to those who received it in faith.  Power is in him, but we need to keep, as it were, plugged into it, receptive; by reading the psalms; by reaching out for that cloak; by receiving (in the Eucharist) the bread and wine by which we draw on the current (ha ha!) of life and love divine.  Faith can be a powerful practise, even when we can’t necessarily feel it.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus – wrote St Paul, for whom the skies were rarely entirely blue.  When the skies fall in may we receive the faith that can reorientate us towards the gift, the miracle of life that will never be withheld from us – for we are called to live more and more fully within that gift, that miracle, by which there will be dancing, in this world and beyond it.