IN A FEW MINUTES, Fr. Sam is going to baptize Norah, and of course the baptismal covenant is part of the rite – the question and answer section we all participate in stating the fundamentals, the first principles, of our faith.  I recently came upon a portion of an interview, a Q & A, that we might call the worldly success covenant.

Q. What are some things you do to manage your time effectively?

A. I get up at 4:30 every morning.  I like the quiet time.  It’s a time I can recharge my batteries a bit.  I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world.  I read papers.  I look at e-mail.  I surf the Web.  I watch a little TV, all at the same time.  I call it my quiet time but I’m already multitasking.  I love listening to music, so I’ll do that in the morning, too, when I’m exercising and watching the news.¹

I’m not making that up.  When I read it, I wondered, “So quiet time is working out, dealing with emails, surfing the web, watching TV, listening to music – all at the same time?  If that’s quiet time for someone, how could you connect with a person like that?  With a pace of life like that, can there be a center?  Can there be a ‘there’ there?”

Then I read that the interviewee is Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney.  It all made sense.  I was struck by his remarkable integrity.  He is what he does.  Disney’s mission statement declares that it exists to make people happy, and the way it aims to make happiness is by producing unparalleled entertainment experiences.²  Disney makes films, shows, media, consumer products, theme parks and resorts – lots and lots and lots of external stimulus, to keep you hooked in and turned on, no need ever to take a moment to be alone.  Disney offers constant distraction - what it considers happiness.

Christianity offers a different approach to hook in and turn on, a different approach to meaning and connection and happiness.  Ronald Rolheiser writes,

The Christian life ... is nothing other than this, an attempt to strip aside the veils and mirrors, riddles and walls, barriers and shadows, fears and fantasies, facades and mists, and selfishness and unreality that separate us from God and each other.  The Christian life is an attempt to pierce the mist of unreality and encounter God and others face to face.  To the extent that this happens in our lives, we enter the kingdom of God and community of life, which will wipe away all our tears and take our loneliness fully away.³

Rolheiser refers to a 1976 Ingmar Bergman film, Face to Face.  Jenny is a psychologist.  She is high-functioning, loved, accomplished, esteemed – someone who seems to have it all together, but Jenny tries to kill herself.  In her reality, she feels like she’s living in a fog, cut off from other people, separated by locked doors, the doors which lead to life and contact with others.

 After a friend rushes her to the hospital, Jenny has an exchange with a doctor who’s trying to help her recover.  She asks, “What do you want from life?  What would have to happen to make it meaningful?”  The doctor replies,

Just once I would like to reach through to someone and see someone and touch someone, and know that that other person is just as real as I am.  Just once I would like to cut through all the veils and barriers, mirrors and fantasies, shadows and unrealities which separate us from each other and feel something as real as I am.  Just once I would like to see face to face.  Then life would be meaningful.⁴

The doctor desires total health, complete healing, wholeness.  In today’s gospel, the doctor’s desire happens, and there is the fullness of healing. 

Last Sunday, Jesus was crossing the Sea of Galilee to Syria, to pagan territory.  Our lectionary skips over the marvelous healing he does there.  Jesus exorcizes a  man possessed by demons, a wild man, who was living alone, cast out, in a graveyard.  Jesus sent the unclean spirits from the man into an enormous herd of swine, and then the swine rushed down a steep bank into the sea.  The herd committed suicide –like lemmings.   

Jesus’ healing of the man with the demons unsettled the natives, possibly because it threatened their livelihood.  Their choice: pigs or Jesus?  They asked Jesus to leave.  Jesus got back in his boat and crossed back to the Jewish side of the Sea of Galilee.  Another great crowd meets Jesus at the shore.  Among the crowd is Jairus, one of the poo-bahs of the community, a leader of the local synagogue.  His daughter was very ill.  Jairus fell at Jesus’ feet and begged his help.  This important, influential man, in turning to a sketchy, itinerant healer, risks humiliation and scorn, but the situation was urgent.  Jesus responded to Jairus’ distress by joining him and walking with him.

As they head for Jairus’ house, the crowd follows them.  Pressing her way through the crowd, a woman with a hemorrhage comes up behind Jesus.  She merely touches Jesus’ cloak, and immediately the hemorrhage ceases.  But that is not the fullness of her healing.  Hardly.

Who is this woman?  For twelve years, she has been suffering.  She’s spent all her money on physicians and received nothing.  Her condition made her ritually unclean, infected, contaminated, unable to touch anyone or anything.  People probably treated her as they treated lepers or as we treat radioactive waste.  She was cut off, beyond the pale, alone and lonely, abandoned.  She risks her life to enter the crowd around Jesus.  Her situation is horrendous, but she has hope and she acts.

Jesus is walking with Jairus and becomes aware that “power has gone out of him.”  Jairus and Jesus are in a rush.  Jairus’ daughter is at the point of death, but Jesus stops, turns around, sees the woman, and speaks to her.  He takes time for her, directing his attention away from the need of the respectable, important Jairus to this down and out woman.  He’s breaking all kinds of barriers and conventions – religious, economic, social, gender, class.  Jesus is saying that this unclean, sick, forlorn, lonely outsider is just as important and beloved by God.  Jesus reaches through to her, sees her face to face, and he listens to her story. 

When Jesus responds and calls her ‘daughter,’ he’s restoring her to the family, to the community, to the Jewish people.  She’s no longer an outcast.  She belongs.  Every human being deeply needs a place to belong.  The healing is far more than physical, and it comes from more than simply touching Jesus.  It comes from trusting him and taking the risk to engage with him.  “Daughter, your faith, your trust,  has made you well, whole.”

Her trust in Jesus, her faith, her boldness, her willingness to risk, to take action, to do something, means that she becomes an agent in her healing, that she’s not helpless, that she has assumed some responsibility for her healing.  Like Mary saying ‘yes’ to Gabriel, she is saying ‘yes’ to God.  She is participating in, and contributing to, her salvation.

As Jesus stops and engages with this woman, I’d bet that Jairus is becoming quite anxious, eager to get to his daughter, but watching all of this had to strengthen his trust in Jesus, that Jesus could address his need.  Then word arrives that the girl has died.  Jesus tells Jairus, “Do not fear, only trust.”

When they arrive at Jairus’ house, there is a tumult, people carrying on and mourning, madness and commotion.  It’s the madness and distraction of our world, the mania of Disney.  But Jairus remains focused on Jesus and chooses to trust him.  Jesus tells Jairus, “She’s only sleeping.”  The people laughed at Jesus, mocked him, but still Jairus, facing scorn and derision, trusts Jesus.  Like the woman with the hemorrhage, he won’t allow anything or anyone to shake his trust.

Jesus takes the hand of Jairus’ daughter and speaks to her.  The doctor in the Bergman movie said, “I would like to reach through to someone and see someone and touch someone.”  That would make life meaningful to him.  Jairus’ daughter immediately responds to Jesus’ voice and touch.  Jesus’ presence with her renews her life.  What fills us with life and meaning is not happy experiences.  It’s not staying busy and tuned in.  It’s not a belief in ideas and principles and customs.  Rather it’s the presence, the voice and touch, of someone who believes in us, who has faith in us.   Jesus is always there to be that person for us, there to renew our lives.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

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¹ Quoted by Andy Borowitz, “Shouts & Murmurs: My Quiet Time,” The New Yorker, June 1, 2009, p. 45.

² http://corporate.disney.go.com/corporate/overview.html

³ Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart, Doubleday (2004), p. 106.

⁴ Rolheiser, pp. 108.