Sermon by Lucy Forster-Smith | February 26, 2023

First Sunday in Lent
February 26, 2023 | 10:00 a.m.

I Believe
A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
Mark 5:21–43

Today I have the privilege of launching a new sermon series. Over this season of Lent and Eastertide (that is, through the spring), Shannon Kershner and the rest of Fourth Church clergy will be focused on texts that lift up portions of the Apostles’ Creed.

Why are we doing this? There may be times you wonder why we often say the Apostles’ Creed as our Affirmation of Faith, as we will do a little later in our worship service. And you may find yourself wondering if you can affirm you do believe, as the very first words of the creed states. You may pause when you say the creed and wonder if you really do believe every bit of it; you also may fear that if you don’t believe it all you are faking it here or aren’t really Christian. Well, that is exactly what we hope you bring into this exploratory series! And we trust you will stay with it through this long walk through Lent and post-Easter. (You can be glad that we are doing the Apostles’ Creed and not the Nicene Creed! That would be a very long walk—actually a marathon.)

What we know about the Apostles’ Creed is it is not a Bible passage, not a prayer, but a foundational, compact set of beliefs for the church. It was likely a baptismal statement, when those who were stepping into faith would be instructed in and at their baptism affirm faith in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit as key elements.

So given that the entire Apostles’ Creed leads out from the words “I believe,” our Gospel story for today is an excellent lens through which we can glimpse the troubling, tender, and tremendous power of belief. Though the story of two healings in Mark’s Gospel is very long, the power of the narrative and the way the story is told is arresting. Infused with belief, with fear, with tradition, with faith, with insiders and outsiders we arrive at the scene breathless.

As a writer, which I sometimes am a wannabe, I marvel at the movement of this passage, the panic of the scene, where Jesus is coming from across the sea, having been teaching and only a short time before has encountered the nightmare of a man so possessed by demons that he could not be contained. I cannot fathom how much of Jesus it took to send the legion of demons into swine that drown in the sea. Jesus crosses over and just arrives on the far shore, and the crowds are waiting for him.

We can imagine him taking a breath to begin teaching, when someone from the crowd alerts Jesus that a very, very important leader, likely the president of the synagogue, needs a word with Jesus. From the crowd the man comes up and falls down before Jesus and respectfully tells him that his beautiful daughter, his twelve-year-old child, is on the verge of dying. “Please come. Please lay your hands on her. I am beside myself. I believe you, my Lord, can heal her and she will live.”

Jesus goes off with him. But they are not alone. A great crowd throngs about him. Again, the action draws us in. We realize quickly that we are not only hearing the story; we are part of it—the panic of a child sick until death; the roar of the crowds; the urgency: move it along, Jesus!

And then the whole scene stops. “Who touched me?” Jesus turns around, searching the crowd. “Who touched me?” The jostling, pushing, roaring crowd was all around. And of course, the disciples do the reality check on their leader: “You see the crowd pressing around you and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’”

Power had gone out from him. He knew it. Crowds were in the way, but someone had touched him with need; with persistence. Who, who, who. Then from the crowd a terrified woman falls before him, with fear and trembling. We learn that the woman has suffered for twelve long years. She’d tried every remedy, every physician, spent all of her resources. Oh, it was a bloody mess she was in. She could not go out in public; she could not be touched or touch. and it was getting worse.

So she chanced it, believing that even a brush with the fringes of his garment would do the magic. She likely avoided eye-contact with anyone and with no fanfare reached for him. Her very life depended on it. In an instant the bleeding stopped. “I’ll slip away. Oh, my God, I will just be on my way!”

It didn’t end there, but with the mounting pressure for Jesus to speed to the bedside of that child, his word is “Who touched me?” Who believed so fervently in the power of healing, of possibility, of awakened hope, that they dared to do what was taboo, touching in her unclean state a rabbi? And with all of that, she was immediately healed by an act that was culturally, religiously forbidden! And this followed by the daring desire of Jesus for face-to-face intimacy with one who dared to touch him. “Who touched me?” He knows our need. She does what is forbidden, and he understands that for many belief begins with desperation and trust.

“I believe,” says the creed. Do we believe? Do you believe in the power of the living Christ that lives in our midst? But there is more to come in this story. Yes, we think the air may go out of the room, that the power from Jesus is all used up in this healing. But here comes the punch! “She’s dead,” a messenger whispers in Jairus’s ear. “It’s over. No need to bother the teacher any further.” But Jesus likely turns again, this time facing the grieved man, ignoring the message. And with such steady and unwavering assurance he says to the man, “Do not fear, only believe.”

He doesn’t repeat it, but I will: Do not fear, only believe.” “I believe,” says the creed, and maybe, just maybe, the subtext of those first words is “I won’t fear … because Jesus is here. I don’t fear my own extinction from the planet, my own dying or the dying of my beloved child, I won’t fear, because Jesus has his eye on me. I believe.” And then Jesus leaves the maddening crowd with Jairus, James, John, and Peter.

They enter another scene. The paid mourners and many others have gathered by the prominent family home. Jesus and the three disciples may have been holding the dad up at this moment, and Jesus addresses the mourners: “Why do you make tumult and weep? The child is not dead, she sleeps.” To our twenty-first-century ear we may think that there was a misdiagnosis: she was in a coma, not dead. It is quite clear that Jesus means she is dead but that is not the last word here. The mourners roll their eyes. This is a good laugh for them. Jesus kicks them out.

Now it is quiet—too quiet. And in the intimacy of a dad, a mom, and a child dead on a bed, wrapped up ready for the tomb, along with the disciples, Jesus touches a dead body—yes, another forbidden act—reaching for her hand and saying, “Talitha cumi,” “Little girl, arise.” to the astonishment of the onlookers the child arises, and she walks. This twelve-year-old got up, and Jesus then said to give her something to eat.

“They were overcome with amazement.” He told them to tell not one. Really?

“I believe,” says the creed. “Do not fear, only believe,” says Jesus. And we may ask, Is belief contingent on good outcomes, as seen here? What about when our faith wavers, does that mean we don’t believe? And what about the next word in the creed—I believe in. Does belief have an object or is it an untethered set of thoughts? Is belief in the Christian form of it attached to a bunch of dry doctrines or erudite theological concepts?

I love what the late Frederick Buechner says about believing. He makes a really interesting and very insightful distinction between believing in something and what the Greek word of believing implies, which is more like believing into something or someone. Think about it: if you are into something like a particular book you are reading that you don’t want to end, you may read a chapter a week to preserve the joy. But if you are in something you could be selling books at a bookshop or online. So also with faith. Buechner says, “Believing in God is an intellectual position. It need have no more effect on your life than believing Freud’s method of interpreting dreams or” some random theory about election data. “Believing God [or Jesus I’d say] is something else again. it is less a position than a journey, less a realization than a relationship. … We believe in God when for one reason or another we choose to do so. We believe God when somehow we run into God in a way that by and large leave us no choice to do otherwise” (Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 20–21).

When have you believed? Where has Jesus found you in your desperate need and you deeply trusted your belief into Christ? And, of course, the challenge is when have you been confounded in your belief, in your faith, by the reality that healing like those in this story has not or will not happen? Does our faith in Jesus come unraveled when the ending is not a happy one? In other words is belief stunted by our if-then assumptions? This is where we have to trust, fully trust, the words of Jesus: “Do not fear, believe!”

The woman’s desperation takes her to hope; the woman’s whiff of trust leads her to coming forward with “fear and trembling” and telling the whole truth. The whole truth for her was “I was desperate, and I believed you’d be able to help me; I defied social and religious boundaries, knowing that even the brush with the fringe of your garment would bring me back to life; and when you brought me face-to -face, O Jesus, you called me into an intimate, deeply whole relationship with you. I admit I did tremble with fear for what might come, and out of a simple brush with fringe, you honored my reaching with turning to me, sweeping up fear with joy; awakening generous new life.” And the same with Jairus. Fear in the face of his dead daughter meets faith, believing Jesus.

There are so many things in life right now that rail against belief. We are saturated by family and friends in trouble; we feel so pained in our grief for those we have lost, that the planet has lost; we grieve for peace of mind, that we once held with confidence; we awaken many days with the sick sense that nothing will ever be like it used to be … pre-COVID, pre-surgery, pre-diagnosis, pre-war. And like the lady with the flow of blood for twelve years, we may figure it is what it is. Get over it or just eat it.

But this is where real faith begins. Not when all is calm, nothing seems bright; when the dark days, the persistent desperation quickens into hope beyond belief. Yes, hope that won’t stop with a mere belief in but a quickening hope that believes into the day, the hour, and meets Jesus on the way. That is when he turns to each of us individually and all of those who reach in this frightful world and says, “Who touched me?” And we all look up and see the hand of Jesus trading our deathlike grip with the hand of abundant life. And you hear him say, “Talitha cumi, little girl, little boy, little one, my child. Get up. There is not just food, but there is the feast of abundant life. And I am here to share it with you, believe it or not!” I believe … yes!

Thanks be to God.