I'm reading Luke 8, verses 40 through 56. On the other side of the lake, the crowds welcomed Jesus because they had been waiting for him. Then a man named Jealous, a leader of the local synagogue, came and fell at Jesus' feet, pleading with him to come home with him. His only daughter, who was about 12 years old, was dying.
As Jesus went with him, he was surrounded by the crowds. A woman in the crowd had suffered for 12 years with constant bleeding, and she could find no cure. Coming up behind Jesus, she touched the fringe of his robe. Immediately, the bleeding stopped.
Who touched me, Jesus asked? Everyone denied it, and Peter said, Master, this whole crowd is pressing up against you. But Jesus said, Someone deliberately touched me, for I felt healing power go out from me. When the woman realized that she could not stay hidden, she began to tremble and fell to her knees in front of him.
The whole crowd heard her explain why she had touched him and that she had been immediately healed. Daughter, he said to her, Your faith has made you well. Go in peace. While he was still speaking to her, a messenger arrived from the home of Jealous, the leader of the synagogue.
He told him, Your daughter is dead. There's no use troubling the teacher now. But when Jesus heard what had happened, He said to Jealous, Don't be afraid, just have faith and she will be healed. When they arrived at the house, Jesus wouldn't let anyone go in with Him except Peter, John, James, and the little girl's father and mother.
The house was filled with people weeping and wailing, but He said, Stop the weeping. She isn't dead. She's only asleep. But the crowd laughed at Him because they all knew she had died.
Then Jesus took her by the hand and said an aloud voice, My child, get up. And at that moment in her life returned and she immediately stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. Her parents were overwhelmed, but Jesus insisted that they not tell anyone what had happened.
The word is true and can be trusted. Thanks be to God. Thanks, Don. Is anybody else put things off?
Any more? That's the kind of thing. I'm the king of this. I'm the massive, you can ask my wife.
I'm fantastic at this. I don't know where I get it from. I swear it's almost like genetic or hereditary because my dad's the exact same. I think it's the culture I grew up in.
It's like, just put it off until it's a massive huge problem. That's how we roll. In the Brooks household right now, the latest thing I've been putting off is this drip coming from our air conditioner's drainage, the condensation. It's hot as it's been all summer.
We've had this problem. I did some sketchy yesterday involving the air compressor hoping that that would take care of it. It kind of did, but it kind of didn't. I've got to call somebody next week.
But the sad thing is we initially found this problem because we realized the carpet going into our bedroom was wet and both Mary and I, our mind went to the 16-year-old Dachshund. Let's just say after a few spankings, after some scoldings, and after we had a time conversation, we realized that it wasn't the dog having accidents. It was just the air conditioner draining across the hall. We both felt horrible for a while.
I was mainly about the dog. Then we kind of diagnosed the problem and we put a bucket underneath it and I plan on going and getting it fixed. It was a month ago. It was quick fix right now.
The buckets there, we don't have water in the carpet, water's not in the floor. The buckets there, right? It always resolved that the problem isn't fixed. How many times in life do we just kind of find a quick fix and never get to the solution?
Quick fixes, there's a difference between quick fixes and between solutions. I think that a lot of us end up living in quick fix territory for way too long. I think sometimes we can be living in quick fix for so long. We forget what solutions actually look like.
Think about how that begins to affect us. There's ways that we just kind of wib with that for a long time. Unintentionally over the last few weeks, I've been talking a lot about healing and thinking about that. It wasn't anything necessary.
It's just these passages in the gospels that we've been sitting through. We realize that this, all these are passages about healing. A lot of times when we think about healing in church, what it comes up with is like these tent revivals, that sort of thing like sawdust on the floor, like stories of people, standing like a Benjamin Button when he stood up out of the wheelchair. We think about that.
We think about the sort of thing that we read about in our text today. But then a lot of times we just drop that aside and think that doesn't really happen in real life. We know it's out there and the larger thing, but I've never experienced it. So I'm just going to kind of sit it out there on the edges.
It ends up becoming like a duct tape situation in our life, like a duct tape solution. We forget that we have any sort of an issue or a problem that might need to help because we just don't let that just live in our world. Or sometimes we think these sort of things are beyond us. We've got something that we know we need to see.
We need to experience. We need to be healed from. We've got an issue. We know is out there.
But we think that's just not going to happen to us because good things just don't happen to us. We're the kind of people where life is always going to be a struggle or it's always going to be a frustration. And we wish it would happen, but we just don't think it's going to happen. It's going to happen.
We don't think that we matter enough for Jesus for him to break into our personal world. We know he broke into the larger world. The big world, we know that. But we don't think he's going to break into our world.
We just don't matter enough. And the story today of Jesus at this village and the gerriest and the woman, all this stuff, it really covers the basis, I think, for many of the things that we have in our head that we have going on about what stops us from experiencing Jesus coming into our own life and to heal us and to take care of those things that stop us the most. Our brokenness in life, it causes our reaction. But the wholeness that we can find in life, what that creates and shows us our solution.
So I want us to kind of jump into this wild story and begin to understand like really what is going on at the root of why we think Jesus is not going to come in and do something unique for us. Luke's Gospel is all about characters. I think so many pattimes in Luke's Gospel, if we want to really start to understand what this story is talking to us about, the first layer of answers just find the characters. Because Luke tells great stories.
His Gospel is all about character. We find who are the characters, what are they doing, what's happening inside of there. Jesus is here. He's doing the Jesus stuff.
He's doing the things we expect him to do. But I love how when we see him, he comes into a new place, he comes into a new town, a new space, and he's just interacting with the crowds that he is looking for opportunities. He's entering into an environment that is in need of things. I love how these stories start off.
Jesus gets out of the boat and people are waiting on him already. I love how Jesus expects things to happen, for these ways for him to do the Jesus stuff to just drop down in front of him. The crowd is here. We've talked about the crowd, talked about them a little bit a couple of weeks back, but the crowd is a character in the gospels.
They do a lot of things. It's this large unnamed group of people throughout the entire Gospel. The way that Luke especially looks at them, and in his story, you see them doing several different things, it's always a story about misunderstanding Jesus, misunderstanding him because of a variety of ways and a variety of reasons. The next character that we find in this story is Jerry's.
He's the leader of the synagogue in this small town, this small village. He's probably the most important man in town. He's the most important person there. He's the synagogue leader, which means he's responsible for the whole organization and rhythm of their religious life.
He makes sure that things are there. They need to be there. He makes sure that things are set up the way they're supposed to be like. What you also see in these towns is the synagogue leader is also generally someone who's pretty wealthy, and they underwrite the needs of the synagogue.
To where the people in the village cannot maintain this space. David Greed said, I'll just cover the costs in the worst case scenario. It's a very, very important person. The last person we meet in this character is this unnamed woman.
And for different reasons, she's had a medical condition for a dozen years that has just completely erased any sense of life that she might have. Religiously, she's considered to be unclean because of this medical issue. That means that she can't touch anyone. That means that she can't eat with anyone.
That means that she can't be with anyone. That means that she can't be inside a house with someone else. You get the point like she has to be by herself. Because anyone or anything she comes in contact with thereby becomes unclean.
She's removed away from religious life. This removal also means that she's removed away from any relationship. Social system or support structure. We find out that at one point in time, apparently she had means, but she has exhausted her financial resources attempting to help doctors to cure this problem.
That's now gone. If you look at all the problems that she has in her life, she's most likely the least important person in this town. We see these characters. We see the full gamut of what this little tiny village is actually life.
We're not going to spend so much time talking about Jerry's today. We spend most of our time talking about this woman because she needs to understand and experience a full level of healing. These are our characters. The place where we live and we can live inside this story, we begin to be able to pull it out when we look at the larger message.
We place ourselves inside of it by thinking about maybe some of the assumptions that might be brought into this situation by these characters, by this woman, and to look at the solution that Jesus offers. What we're going to do this morning is just look at the re-assumptions that we can find in this story and that you might be having one of those right now or you might have had it previously in your life and we look and see how does this story bring us past these assumptions and into a solution. But the first assumption we find is this, that we aren't important enough. We're not important enough.
We think that we don't matter enough. Not to Jesus, not to anyone else. And the biggest part of this story that really speaks to me here is the fact that Jesus sees us, regardless of who we are, he sees us. You see Jesus respond to Jerry, it's the most important person in this story.
We also see Jesus respond to this woman, the least important person that's in this story. In this woman, that whole touching thing, it really speaks just that. When Jesus knows what's going on, everything, single thing around him, he immediately asks who is touching me. He knows that something is happening in this moment, whereas Jesus is completely surrounded by people in the way that this story is told.
I think of the time where you've been in crowds, I get uncomfortable in crowds. I try to avoid crowds like crazy. But I think about the time where you've been in a crowd, maybe in a big line trying to go somewhere or get into something or get out of something and the crowd just seems to have a mind of its own. You're not even walking, you're just moving with it.
That's the way this story reads out. It's surrounded by people. Jesus recognized and sees this woman. We all have the case for us where this happens to us individually.
The healing power of Jesus is going on between him and this woman. It changes the definition of what knowing means. In this moment, this woman is completely and fully known by Jesus at every single level. It's a deep personal interaction.
Jesus refers to her as daughter. It's a term where he identifies who she is, identifies her need, where he places her under his responsibility, where he acknowledges his care for her. This full level of things. A random strange man referring to a random strange woman as a daughter would be extremely socially inappropriate because it suggests a level of intimacy that suggests a massive level of protection.
It's the middle of everyone. Jesus calls her daughter. He knows her. He sees her.
She knows instantly that she is important to him. If we have the Insumption in our life that we're not important enough, the solution that Jesus gives us is how he draws us in and does that with distinction. He recognizes us and inside of that place we learn how our value changes our life regardless of where we are in life, regardless of where we are in the Christian journey. If we were very new to Jesus or we've been walking with Jesus for a very, very long time until we find our primary value set in our life in Jesus, we're going to be walking around bleeding on everybody else, dealing with our own dysfunction, trying to find our weight, our grounding of our importance in other people.
I said, this can be done in a completely good way. Put your spouse, your family, your kids, your best friends can never give you the identity that Jesus gives you and we will never be able to walk for immaturity and holiness until we begin understanding of that identity that Jesus wants us to understand should be primary in our life. The second thing that we might assume is that we've just done too much. We've had way too much go on in my life for him to care about me.
I've done way too much. He can't forgive me for this. I've done way. I'm just over at it.
I'm going to tell you right now there's nothing that we can come up with that he hasn't seen before. This woman's experience in the last 12 years of her life is a whole lot of things. We're about to talk about that whole lot. But what really boils down to too is she's experienced completely restricted access.
It's so bad there's no earthly way anyone can dig me out of that. If anybody ever hears ever had a chronic health condition, we realize that these things seem like they are never going to stop. I was reading the story this weekend. I was trying to understand where this woman was and I realized my sister-in-law is an OB.
Let me call her and she follows Jesus. I know she knows this story. Let me call her the OB and see what does she say medically about what this woman is dealt with in life. Out of all the things that are going on that are troublesome for her.
Let's just talk about the medical issue and where this might take her to be. This is what my sister-in-law Lauren said. She said I suspect that she had what we call min- I can't pronounce this. No mirror rosia meaning that she bled heavily along with a normal cycle and more frequently more than just a one once a month.
This is one of the most common reasons we perform hysterectomies today. I asked her how physically debilitating with the ability to speak. This is what she said extremely. She was likely anemic to the point of needing a blood transfusion.
She was also probably significantly deficient in iron other nutrients since it lasted so long and just given that time period, nutrients were already lacking in food and iron and she had iron deficiency anemia. If that's severe enough, it can cause extreme fatigue and malnutrition affecting her weight, her skin, her hair, her nails, her teeth, et cetera, in addition to her heart health. In the beginning, her body goes into overdrive to compensate for excess bleeding. Her bone marrow works harder to make more blood and uses up all of its iron storage.
When the problem isn't fixed and no extra nutrients are found, the body becomes fatigued. The organs that are working overdrive are damaged especially from the heart. Many of our patients who have this just for a month or two will need an iron infusion prior to surgery. She's been dealing with this for 12 months or 12 years.
Can you imagine just the stress from the health side of this? You take out every other single part of what's going on, the social stigma, the religious stigma, the disconnection, all of those sorts of things. Just imagine where she is just off of the health issue. Just her touching Jesus, it wasn't just about her healing.
But for her to touch him out of this level of faith, she also had to make the decision that she would risk making Jesus unclean. When you see her reaction in the story, when Jesus sees what's going on and starts talking about that, she says she is in fear and that she is trembling. She was worried about what might happen if this doesn't work. The moment Jesus showed up in this village, he was even more important than Jerry.
Every single feature in this town was on him. He risked an even larger amount of just stigma that was attached to her. There's a theme of fear with this woman, the way we see her working. But here's the thing.
And Jerry's was fearful. Like, fear is just kind of running throughout this whole passage. But fear is interesting. Sometimes we have to come to Jesus out of the depths of our fear.
And if we're traversing these internal fears, these strong fears, these fears where we think he can't do anything for us or he won't do anything for us or we don't matter enough for him to try to do something or we've done too much for him to do these things, just by us beginning to move into this space of eliminating this fear, we're going to come to the point of just massive personal awareness about who we are. That our level of openness to Jesus is going to be our level of access to Jesus. This woman got into the point where she said, I will risk everything now. I will risk losing the last tiny bit of what I have in my life in the hopes that this man is who everybody says he is and he can do what everybody says he can do.
Now, how many times have we in life hid our greatest needs because we've been conditioned to stay quiet and to not bother or burden someone else. She's willing to risk every single thing. And what this and what goes on is Jesus then begin, he gives this woman completely total unrestricted access to who he is. They're by not just healing her physically but healing her spiritually, healing her socially, all these things.
That's the solution. The last assumption that we have that we have to deal with this is that sometimes we might assume Jesus picks and chooses. In other words, if Jesus is in his story, he says, who touched me? Peter responds, Peter's almost laughing at him and said, why are you even going to be asking that question?
I could touch you. Everyone is touching everyone else right now. And now you ask this and Jesus says, I felt the healing power go out from me. We find this woman trembling, scared.
We've talked about all of that. But in the moment that she touches Jesus, she's healed. It's not waiting for this verbal exchange between her and Jesus. So as she's terrified explaining herself to Jesus, she's also in her mind thinking about, wow, every single thing has stopped.
The story makes us think about healing. If it was just the touching, if it was just the physical touch of Jesus, then everyone around Jesus would begin being healed of all the things. Everyone is touching everyone else in this scenario. When I was thinking about this this week, I go back to a scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows where they go into the vault at Green Gots and the Bellatrix, which was strange as they're younger people.
I'm like, oh, yeah, you're talking about Chad. They're like, I've grown man, watch this enough to know this. No, strange things happen. Every time I get sick, I get a fever.
I watch Harry Potter and it makes it really wild. But the whole scene is they go into this vault and somebody plays a doubling charm on it and they're trying to find like a cup. There's all sorts of treasure in there. The only problem is with this doubling charm does is every time you touch something, it replicates itself.
So they're trying to find the one thing that touching anything else and they end up drowning in treasure and trying to crawl their way out. I think all it was was physical touch with Jesus. Everybody around like, wow, my ingrown toenail is now fixed. Like, no, it's not about the physical touch.
Jesus tells a woman, your faith is what made you well. I said it earlier. Our experience with Jesus is only limited by our openness to Jesus. This woman had made herself completely and totally open before she goes to him.
And she came to Jesus unlike anybody else came to Jesus that day. She was radically open to him. The crowd in this story, it always consistently shows a failure to believe. We see the crowd is laughing at Jesus when he tells them that this girl is not dead.
The crowd doesn't believe. They can't experience Jesus. They can't experience His fullness. They can't experience His healing.
No, they want to. They want to see it and have it in theory, but they can't physically because they just don't believe. No, faith many times doesn't look like what we expect. And the folks in the home of Jarrison, they're already gone.
Jesus, like, she can't. You can't fix this problem. He's like, yeah, yeah, we can. When we place the limits on our expectations of what Jesus can do, we build up walls that stop us from experiencing and seeing Him.
Now, Jesus doesn't pick and choose. It's our lack of responsiveness to Jesus that picks and chooses. So how we take on the confidence of this woman? And we simply come to Jesus.
Last year, my dad invited us to go to the Holy Land with his church. We were there right in the beginning so people were whispering about COVID-19. And on the third day, we found out they had found COVID in Bethlehem and the nation of Israel completely shut down the entire Western bank. And so we're sitting there with a couple of open days in our schedule trying to have to find things to do.
And my dad's been there 10 times. He's usually a guy they've used for 30 years. And they're like, what can we do? And this guy said, oh, there's this kind of newer thing I don't think you've ever been to.
Let's go there. Y'all might like it. So we're all, to be completely honest, we passed by a pizza hut on the way there. And all we were thinking about was pizza hut.
We'd had so much hummus and falafel. We're trying to bribe the, of course, me, foreign country, gas station pizza. We're trying to make this happen. But we pull up and we find out that what we're there is the ancient village of Magdala, where Mary Magdala then comes from.
And it's actually, since it's a new discovery, it looks like what you think that sort of thing looks like. You know, for the past 2000 years, everybody finds anything in the hallway. I'm like, oh, let's put a church on top of it. That's kind of a hard thing to see the stuff.
And the church on top of where the stuff was. And so we go there and we look around and it's really cool. We get there and we find out that that's the town where people say that this story happened. Okay, cool.
So Jerry, it's one with the issue of blood. We've heard these stories. That's kind of cool. And so Mary's and I are walking around, trying to find out what's going on.
And then we end up going into, okay. So we end up going into, we're trying to find the bathroom is what's going on. And so Mary and I are at the basement of this retreat center walking around, like trying to find the bathroom. And we turn a corner and we come into this room and we stumble into this painting right here.
We have on the screen. So you're trying to find the bathroom. This is what you find instead. And this picture, as big as this is, does not explain to you how big this painting is.
Like this literally is probably the size of this entire back wall. And it kind of puts it into perspective. Like you hear the story, you want to try to think, what's about the tassels of Jesus' and we're trying to find some like fun Bible reason why he probably tried to do this. I really think it's like, how can I get into this guy and touch this guy without anybody seeing me do it?
Crawling on my hands and my feet with the hope that I can experience what I have heard about. You know, we come to Jesus in spite of our hopes, in spite of our fears, in spite of all of these things. And sometimes we have to do it in a hidden way. Sometimes we have to do it in a way that requires, you know, all that stuff I read in my sister and all said, you know, this woman might not have had the strength to walk.
But we come to Jesus with the complete level of openness that we have with the assuredness that he is going to have the ability to fix what we have going on. In the middle of our chaos, when we think that he might not want us or that we're doing something else that can stop us or our experience with Jesus is only limited by our openness to him. You know, how many times we just stuck a bucket underneath a leak, physically. But how many times we had a spiritual leak and we just stick a bucket underneath it?
Like, let me just do something that will allow this to not get out of control and not just deal with the bucket of water. And the story from the life of Jesus, it challenges us to stop with these quick personal fixes, with the excuses that we have in life, and to come to Jesus, we know that he fully can't offer us the solution to what we need. And we have no excuses to not deal with our brokenness. And it's having the faith of this woman is what gives us the solutions.