A Tearful Moment: Jesus and the Sleeping Child

Fifty years ago, Steinbach Mennonite Church began our relationship with the Manigotagan Community. We hope to spend some time remembering and celebrating those 50 years at some point in the future, when we can eat and sit together more freely than we are able to now. For this present time, I want to reflect on that relationship in light of the Scriptures we read this morning and use them to think about how we move into our ongoing relationship with Manigotagan.

Psalm 30

The Psalm we read has a long title: “Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness. A Song at the dedication of the temple. Of David.” I’m not sure what all of that means, but we can picture David singing to God in the Temple, following his recovery from a bad illness. We read this psalm as a typical scene, rather than focussing on a description of one particular trouble that David experienced. We can use it for those times in our lives when we feel that a particular danger or problem oppresses us.

The Psalm goes back and forth between two contrasting emotions. Verses 1 to 3 picture the psalmist as saved from his enemies – whether the enemy is an illness or a human opponent, God has delivered the psalmist. Verses 4 and 5 build on the theme of having been saved: weeping lasts for a moment, but God’s favour lasts forever. So far, the psalm is a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. Then the mood changes.

Verses 6 and 7 picture the moment when trouble came: The psalmist had become prosperous and anticipated more good things in life, when tragedy struck. “You hid your face, Lord; I was dismayed.” This is the night of weeping that the psalmist had referred to as brief, but when we are in the grief experience it feels endless. In the middle of the grief experience, loss and pain are overwhelming (verses 8 to 10). The psalmist feels as though the pain and trouble of life actually falsify the whole idea of God. “What good does it do if I die? Who will praise you if I die?”

One can hear the total self-absorption that deep grief brings to us. Nothing else matters but that I am in pain. I need it to end! In verses 11 and 12, the pain does end. Joy returns. Grief becomes a celebration of God’s goodness and grace.

Mark 5

In Mark 5, we have a concrete lived out example of the Psalmist’s experience. Jairus was a synagogue leader. If we use our congregation as an illustration, he would have been something like a member of the church board or one of the trustees – someone with a good reputation in Steinbach and well respected by the rest of the congregation. He had a daughter, apparently quite young: “My little daughter”, he calls her. She became ill and soon lay at the point of death. In desperation, Jairus seeks out Jesus to heal her. Between his plea and Jesus’ response, we have the story of the woman with an issue of blood – also desperate and seeking out Jesus for help. She receives help, and so does Jairus.

During this interruption, Jairus’ daughter dies; but Jesus says essentially, “Keep up your hope; she is only asleep.” Then he goes to her, takes her by the hand, and tells her to get up. And she did! Her life is restored, and she is alive and well.

The whole account serves to emphasize the wonders that Jesus performed as part of his ministry. We could focus more on that miracle-working aspect within Jesus’ own life, as well as within the early church. Peter, James, and John performed miracles in the opening chapters of Acts, while Paul did the same in the latter chapters. There is material enough in the New Testament to pursue this theme, but I want to turn instead to a deeper principle underlying both this chapter and the whole of life.

The Basic Principle: Every Gain Comes from Loss

This is the principle that any gain in life, any new life, grows out of a loss, out of some kind of death. Jesus says the same thing: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” This applies most fully, of course, to our spiritual life in Christ. We “die to self” and “live to Christ.” We are baptized into the death of Christ so that we can rise with him, and so on. But it applies also more generally to the whole of life.

Parenthesis: Be sure not to turn this around and say that every loss leads to gain; every death leads to new life. A positive truth – every gain comes from loss – becomes triumphalistic and makes us unable to grieve our losses properly when turned around – every loss leads to a gain.

I remember when our sons first went off to school. We took Vaughn out to the bus near our house, and he rode away to begin a new phase of life; a new set of authorities had come into his life. One phase came to an end, and a new phase began. A similar process was acted out as our sons finished high school and began university. The “empty nest”, as we call it was also a time of ending, as well as a new beginning. Then came the day that they told us of the new person in their lives. They were already on their own, but a phase of life was coming to an end. The beginning of married life was also the end of their lives alone.

This pattern is basic to all of life. When I moved to Providence, I lost the relationships I had in our congregation in Indiana. When I ended my work life as a full-time professor at Providence, I found a new role at Steinbach Mennonite. Endings can be hard, but endings are also new beginnings. This principle applies also to our relationship with the community at Manigotagan.

Manigotagan

Fifty years ago, Steinbach Mennonite Church began a relationship with the Metis community of Manigotagan, two hours northeast of us in Manitoba. We have heard this morning something of those beginnings. I know little about them and have been learning along with you. I do know that it grew into a valuable part of our church’s life, in which both of our sons spent a week in August for several years at Manigotagan working with our youth there.

This relationship has been valuable to us, as I have said. It has also been good for the community in Manigotagan, but I do not think we can claim great credit for that. All mission ventures (and our annual DVBS was a mission or outreach venture) take place within a social and cultural context. In Canada, this context included an assumption that Anglo Canada is better than First Nations and that we have something to give them.

People like Neill and Edith von Gunten, who were so important to the Manigotagan community, overcame this assumption by living with the people and integrating into their lives. We heard from Edith Hiebert during the children’s story, and Dave and Edith have also identified with the people in the community over a long period of time. But some of us, I suspect, have assumed that the DVBS was a gift we could give and that Manigotagan needed.

Please understand me here. I am not being critical; I am trying to be honest. I am the son and grandson of missionaries in Zimbabwe. I have myself been part of the colonial project as a missionary myself. I do not point fingers at anyone else. Rather, I am reflecting on the way that we are always part of our own context.

God’s grace is such that we do great good even when we participate in our own cultural weakness. The youth groups going back and forth to Manigotagan have done real good – both for the community there and for our own church community. We celebrate God’s grace and goodness working in them and in us. You can tell that our DVBS has been good and worth celebrating, because when it ended, the church there asked us if we couldn’t continue doing it. Then they arranged for someone else to come and put it on. This would not have happened unless what we had was good. But however good it was, it is time for something new, a relationship that fits better with who we are now and with the value of something truly mutual.

In this context, the community has invited us to come to their annual family camp. From Friday evening to Sunday lunch on the weekend after Labour Day, the community meets at their campground. People bring tents and RVs and whatever they need to spend time together. There is little formal planning; this is a time for relationship-building. Saturday evening is time for a campfire, with singing around the campfire. They may also have a program that grows organically out of their history and interests. On Sunday morning, the community holds a church service in a tent set up at the campground, and then they finish with a potluck meal for lunch.

You can see that the primary point of a family camp, then, is to nurture relationships. By inviting us to come to the family camp, they are providing an opportunity to enter into a relationship between equals – two groups of adults meeting as equals around the campfire. (I say “they”, but the invitation has come through Norman.) In such a setting, we do not think of what we can do for them or of what they should do for us. Rather, the relationship grows organically, and over time we discover how we can help and support each other.

I don’t know what this will lead to. That’s part of the point. We have the opportunity to move beyond a program that has been fruitful and beneficial to both parties into a relationship in which we can grow even closer together.

A Parallel Case

I want to illustrate this basic life process – the way up is down – from the life of a missionary couple I know in Zimbabwe. I went to Zimbabwe as a missionary in 1972, returning to the USA in December 1974. The Liberation War, which led to the end of the old country, Rhodesia, and the birth of the new country, Zimbabwe, was just beginning as I left the country. My friends had gone out to Zimbabwe 20 years before, but the war interrupted their service. Their mission withdrew, and they were not able to return to Zimbabwe. Finally, after several years, the church in Zimbabwe invited them to return.

The old missionary relationship was gone, and they had to learn how to relate to the national church in a new situation. In the years that followed, they did whatever the church asked. The privileges that had been part of the old relationship were gone, but in their place a new and deeper relationship grew – one in which they are fully integrated into the Zimbabwean church in a richer fuller way than would have been possible before.

I talked with them while they were exiled from the country. The husband especially was grieving the loss of their place in Rhodesia of old and the relationships they had there. Today, something new has grown in the place of all that they had lost, something they could not have had without the death of the old relationship. That is the way life is: The way into our future is through the death of what we had in the past.

Conclusion

Jairus sought out Jesus as his daughter lay near death. Jesus healed her and gave her back her life. We can follow the example Jairus has set us. As something has come to an end in our congregational life, we can celebrate what has been. That is part of what we have been doing this morning – remembering the way that our connection with Manigotagan began. Then, like Jairus, we bring our connection to Jesus and ask him to restore it to life, a new beginning. The way that Jesus responded was with an undramatic and common place act. He took the girl by her hand and said, “Little girl, get up.” She did so. Then he told the people to get her something to eat.

We bring our relationship with Manigotagan to Jesus and wait for him to lead us into the next stage. The invitation to join their community in the family camp may well be that stage. Our response is as commonplace as getting up and getting something to eat. Those of us who are able can go and sit with our sisters and brothers in their community and learn to know them better. Where will it go from here? We don’t know. It may go nowhere. It may turn into something big. We don’t know, and we don’t need to know. All that we need to do is take the ordinary commonplace step that Jesus puts in front of us and discover the new life that Jesus gives. Then we can say with the Psalmist, “You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever.”

 16 August 2020

Steinbach Mennonite Church

Texts:

Psalm 30

Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness

A Psalm. A Song at the dedication of the temple. Of David.

¹ I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me. ² O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. ³ O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.

⁴ Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name. ⁵ For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

⁶ As for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never be moved.” ⁷ By your favor, O Lord, you had established me as a strong mountain; you hid your face; I was dismayed.

⁸ To you, O Lord, I cried, and to the Lord I made supplication: ⁹ “What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? ¹⁰ Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!”

¹¹ You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, ¹² so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

Mark 5: 21-24, 35-43

A Girl Restored to Life

²¹ When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. ²² Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet ²³ and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” ²⁴ So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. …

³⁵ While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” ³⁶ But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” ³⁷ He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. ³⁸ When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹ When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” ⁴⁰ And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹ He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” ⁴² And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. ⁴³ He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Focus statement: Life is full of endings and beginnings. Every ending leads to something new. Our task is to remember the old and embrace the new.

Thought provoking question: How do you deal with loss? Do you avoid grief or embrace it? What can we do when we confront the crossroad of pain and loss?