Scripture: Mark 5:21-43
One of Lisa and my favorite films is an Italian movie that came out in 2013 called The Great Beauty. Set in Rome, it tells the story of Jep Gambardella, an author and social playboy who has just turned 65 and who is struggling to find meaning in his life. As a young man, Jep wrote a novel that received great critical acclaim, but since then his existence has consisted largely in going from one party to the another. Older now, he yearns for something more.
As the film unfolds, Jep meets a Mother-Theresa-like character who has become internationally famous for her work on behalf of the poor and who has earned the nickname of “the Saint.” The Saint has taken a brief break from her missionary projects in third-world countries to visit Rome, and Jep hopes to interview her for a magazine article. Ancient, frail, and a person of few words, the Saint joins Jep at his elegant apartment for dinner, accompanied by a retinue of distinguished citizens and religious dignitaries.
The Saint does, indeed, exhibit many of the qualities we associate with sainthood. She has devoted her life to caring for the needy. She lives austerely, eating only the roots of plants. She declines all interviews, including Jep’s, because she wants public attention focused on those in poverty and not on her. Toward the end of the evening, she disappears and everyone frantically searches for her. Jep finally discovers her—sleeping soundly on the cold stone floor of his bedroom, just as we might expect a saint to do.
Very early the next morning, Jep comes out onto the balcony of his apartment to find the Saint and her assistant sitting quietly. They shush him, and as he looks around he sees an amazing sight: Overnight, dozens of migrating flamingos have landed on the balcony and are keeping company with the Saint. It’s the rarest of visions. The Saint says softly to Jep: “Do you know that I know the Christian names of all these birds?” She smiles, blows a gentle kiss, and the birds fly away.
I suppose that if you were trying to build the perfect resume for sainthood, those are the things you might do. Serve the poor. Live simply. Walk humbly. Keep everyone focused on those in need. And know the Christian names of all the birds who come to visit you.
Today is All Saints Sunday, during which we celebrate the communion of believers who serve and have served the church. All Saints Sunday helps us remember that the church is not a building or a document or a tax-exempt organization, but a great cloud of witnesses. And it invites us to think about all those who we know who have contributed, each in their own way, to the service of God’s people and the fulfillment of God’s kingdom on this earth.
All Saints Sunday also implicitly calls the question of what we think the word “saint” means and who we think qualifies for the title. As I say, I like the credentials offered in The Great Beauty. But, surely, the prescription offered in that movie doesn’t exhaust the possibilities when it comes to sainthood. Other paths must exist.
Protestants generally, and Congregationalists in particular, tend to take a broad view of the question of who qualifies as a saint. Unlike our Catholic sisters and brothers, we don’t reserve sainthood for those who have gone through some sort of formal and elaborate process of canonization. We think the term “saint” applies to all faithful souls who labor to follow Jesus Christ.
By my reckoning, that definition of sainthood reflects two threads within Protestant thought. First, we tend to be skeptical of claims of individual human holiness. And, second, we tend to be enthusiastic about claims of God’s grace. You might say that the Protestant view is summed up by the song lyric that goes: “Every sinner has a future, and every saint has a past.”
I’ve had the good fortune to know lots of people who I view as saints. I’ll spend some time thinking about them today and I hope you’ll do the same. My list represents a wildly diverse cast of characters, and some of them might not at first glance look terribly saintly. But at important moments these people served as the presence of Christ in my life, and as far as I’m concerned they deserve their own holiday, halo, and little plastic statue.
In thinking about those good people, I’ve realized that they all have something in common. It isn’t going on missions to third-world countries, or eating plant roots, or sleeping on floors, or learning the Christian names of flamingos—although that’s very cool.
It’s something much simpler. It’s something each and every one of us can do. It’s something that I think Jesus very much wants us to do, as often as we can. And it’s reflected in our gospel reading for today.
Let’s look closely at that passage and see what it has to say to us. And let’s start by focusing on something we might not have noticed. Let’s begin with the question of how this passage is structured.
Sometimes the structure of a story—the way in which the story gets told—has important information to convey to us. In this regard, many biblical scholars have observed that structure often does a fair amount of work in determining the message that scripture communicates. And a number of those scholars have specifically pointed to the passage from Mark that we heard this morning as an example.
Those scholars have noted that Mark here tells this story—or, more properly, these stories—through a structure called “intercalation.” “Intercalation” is a complicated word that stands for an uncomplicated idea. “Intercalation” just means that one thing has been placed within another thing.
You can see how that idea applies to this text from Mark: the story of the hemorrhaging woman gets placed within the story of Jairus. Mark starts to tell the one story (the story of Jairus and his daughter). Then he shifts to the second story (the story of the woman). And then he returns to the first story.
The gospels don’t usually tell us stories this way. They tell us one story, beginning to end. Then they tell us the next story, beginning to end. And so on and so on. Biblical scholars think Mark must have used the structure of intercalation for a reason. They think he wanted us to read these two stories together and to see the connections between them.
Some of those connections are actually contrasts—including the contrasts between the two characters who come to Jesus. Think about it: Jairus is a person of substantial social importance; the woman is obscure—we don’t even know her name. Jairus approaches Jesus directly; the woman doesn’t want Jesus to notice her at all. Jairus engages Jesus in a dialogue; the woman just wants to touch the hem of his garment. It’s hard to imagine two people who are more differently situated and whose interaction with Jesus begins more differently.
But, by intertwining the stories, Mark invites us also to see the similarities between them. Both Jairus and the woman start in places of deep despair, quite literally in places of blood and tears. Both have sought him out, filled with hope and faith. And Jesus does not choose between them; he blesses both of them.
You’ll notice how that outcome moves us away from our modern frameworks of winners and losers, of achievers and failures, of scarcity and zero-sum games. By intertwining these stories Mark conveys a message of abundance, a message that all who come to Christ will be met by him in their need. All people; everyone; from the privileged to the impoverished; no exceptions, period, full stop.
I think the structure of these stories conveys an additional message as well. To get at this point, we need to look not only at the structure of these specific verses, but at the structure of the fifth chapter of Mark more generally. When we do so, we notice that both of these stories come to us as detours from the principal narrative. In other words, both stories come to us as interruptions in the arc of the tale that is otherwise unfolding.
Remember where we are: Jesus has just crossed again to the other side of the sea. A crowd has gathered around him. We can imagine Jesus rolling up his sleeves and preparing to address the assembled. We can envision people settling in to hear what he has to say. We can almost hear him clearing his throat and starting to speak.
But then something unexpected happens: Jairus approaches Jesus to plead for his daughter. And, when Jesus tries to work his way through the crowd to go with him, a woman touches the hem of his garment. The narrative therefore gives us not one interruption but two—first, the interruption by Jairus and, second, the interruption by the woman. Twice—twice—the story we’re following gets stopped in its tracks and set on a different course.
And here is what I’d invite you to notice, and I think it’s just critical: Jesus doesn’t treat either of these interruptions as interruptions. He doesn’t tell Jairus to come back later. He doesn’t tell the woman that he’s busy helping Jairus. In both cases, Jesus stops everything he’s doing, he listens attentively, and he meets the person seeking help in the exact place of their greatest need. He is fully present for them. And that presence makes all the difference in their world.
I think that, through this structure, Mark tells us that—when it comes to the needs of our fellow human beings—there are no interruptions. There are only opportunities to be the hands, arms, and legs of the living God. There are only invitations into a complete and holy presence in the service of Love.
We live such scheduled lives, thick with our own plans, our own agendas, and our own expectations about what needs to come next. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” After all, as the stories of Jairus and the woman tell us, God’s interruptions are not really interruptions at all. The presence they require of us is not a distraction. Our presence is precisely the point.
Here, in this little meeting house, we know more than a little about how this works on the ground. Just last week, Pastor Robin stood in this very pulpit and described all the ways in which so many people showed up—in one way or another—to help out our beloved Dave and Conway in a time of need. Every single person involved had other plans—not least of whom Robin, Jesse, and, for that matter, Dave and Conway themselves. But every single person involved also understood the critical importance of their presence and assistance in that urgent moment.
In this current series of sermons, we’re exploring the issues of dementia and memory loss and the challenges that those conditions can pose to the patient and their friends and family. As someone whose mother passed away from Alzheimer’s disease, I have personal experience with those challenges. I understand the feelings of loss and helplessness that can set in when dementia overtakes someone who you love. It is as if you lose that person not once but many times, over and over. It is unspeakably hard.
Multiple studies strongly suggest what common sense might tell us: that our presence matters to these patients, that it can help reduce their anxiety and their sense of isolation, and that it can foster feelings of comfort and even joy. My mother knew the great blessing of spending her last years in a residential facility not far from the home of my oldest sister, Sandy, and her husband, Larry, whose consistent and nurturing presence for her bordered on the heroic. Our mom was not always easy to be around. But Sandy and Larry were there for her, day after day.
This—this—is the quality I see in all of those people who I count as the saints in my life. They never treat a human need as an interruption. They understand the healing that comes from and through presence. One hundred percent of the time, they will pause to listen to the person who comes to them like Jairus came to Christ. One hundred percent of the time, they will sense an unspoken need and turn around to see who is grasping at the hem of their garment.
They have another thing in common, too. To a person, they will all tell you that the act of presence benefits them as much as it benefits the object of their care and compassion. They need to be there, just as they are needed.
It reminds me of another of my favorite movies, the 1962 film version of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. You may know it and you may recall how it ends. But here’s a quick refresher for those of you who don’t.
Atticus Finch is a lawyer in the South who has represented a Black man named Tom Robinson against a sexual assault charge brought by a white woman. We have lots of good reasons to think she has falsified the charge. Her racist father, Bob Ewell, is angry at Atticus for representing Tom. So one night Bob Ewell attacks Atticus’s young daughter, Scout, on her way home from a school event.
Scout is saved by the intervention of their mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley, and her brother, Jem. Jem is injured in the attack, but not too seriously, and he is brought home to recover. Atticus takes his place in the chair beside the bed. And the last line of the film is: “He would be in Jem’s room all night, and he would be there when Jem woke up in the morning.”
Of course he would. Where else would Atticus be? Where else would Atticus want to be?
I’m still waiting for a really good movie to be made out of one of my favorite novels, Graham Green’s magnificent book The Power and the Glory. That book follows the wanderings of a priest who is fleeing from authorities in Mexico during a period when Catholics, and especially Catholic clergy, were hounded, persecuted, and killed. This priest is no angel—he has a past, he drinks too much, he makes more than his fair share of mistakes, and he struggles with his faith along the way. At last, he comes to a place of remarkable clarity. Greene writes: “He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted: to be a saint.”
I recall many years ago reading that sentence for the first time, and then re-reading it and re-reading it. It’s an amazingly powerful idea, I think—that in all the complexity that life brings to us, only one thing counts: “to be a saint.” All Saints Sunday seems like a good day to ponder what that might mean for us in our own lives.
Maybe it means all those things we find in the Saint in The Great Beauty. Maybe that’s what it means for you. Maybe you will serve the poor. Maybe you will eat roots and sleep on stone floors. Maybe you will learn the Christian names of flamingos. If you do, I hope you’ll teach them to me.
But maybe for you it means the simple act of presence. The act of never treating a need as an interruption. The act of never seeing suffering as a detour.
The act of sitting beside someone’s bed.
The act of being there when they wake up in the morning.
The gospels tell us that these things, too, are the work of God. These things, too, are sacred. These things, too, are the very stuff of which a sainted soul is made.
Amen. And amen.