July 1, 2012

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 5     Mark 5:21-45

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

A former colleague of mine from many years ago is hard to forget. One reason is his name. He is the only person I’ve ever met with the name Blayney. Another is he has a magnificent handlebar moustache that would be the envy of Giuseppe da barber. Blayney and I had an affinity because we were two of the few liberal clergy in a very conservative diocese. I lost touch with him for a while but then I encountered him in his second life on the Internet. After retiring from the ministry he decided to blog.

I look forward to finding his occasional writings in my email inbox. There was one this week. As background, Blayney and his wife spend half of their life in their modest home in rural Vermont where his wife gardens and he writes and chats up the neighbours, but when the snows arrive they have already made their way back to a small apartment they rent in an affluent part of San Diego where he used to work. How affluent? One of his neighbours is Mitt Romney, who has just bought a 3000 square foot fixer-upper mansion on the beach for $12 million dollars and is renovating it, doubling its size. This is the same house in which you may have heard he is installing a car elevator. 

Right now Blayney is in Vermont’s more humble environs writing about the weather. San Diego’s temperatures rarely stray from a high of 22 degrees Celsius under sunny skies. It doesn’t have weather. Vermont may not be affluent, but it has weather to spare. Late last summer, they were hit with the remnants of a hurricane that caused severe damage to the infrastructure due to flooding, isolating many in his valley. Upon their return to Vermont this spring they noticed that many of their hearty neighbours had put “I am Vermont strong” on their front licence plates.

Blayney has a dog, named Cosmos, who is often a subject of his writing. He is “Vermont strong” even though thunderstorms terrify him. Recently he got a snoot full of quills from a porcupine requiring a visit to his vet. Her comment, “Brave little guy. Not so smart, but brave.” His vet is a relatively young woman in respect to Blayney. She has cancer that has invaded her bones, requiring her hip to be pinned together, making her lame. She knows something about brave. She is certainly “Vermont strong.” After extracting the quills, they chatted about the annoyance of age and illness. In the course of the conversation Blayney mentioned that he feared 10 year-old Cosmos had a heart murmur. She listened to his chest and confirmed, “Yep, he does. So what? He looks great.”

After the visit to the vet, Blayney marvels at the many people who are “doggedly cobbling their lives together from the shards of what look from the outside to have been irreparably shattered.”

We meet one of those people today in Mark’s Gospel: the woman who has haemorrhaged for twelve years. She doesn’t have an easy time of it, simply by virtue of being a woman. Ever since the rise of patriarchy, no woman has. A unilateral power system women didn’t create has objectified, abused, exploited, excluded, oppressed, or simply ignored them. And that is on a good day today. Just ask America’s Roman Catholic nuns. In the time of Mark’s story, it was worse, if that is possible.

To make matters more difficult, she was being sapped of energy by her medical condition. Scholars argue as to the nature of her bleeding. My Greek is rusty but apparently if it were menstrual blood, they argue, Mark would have used a particular Greek word to say so. Their point is it could have been a seeping or infected wound. I’m pretty certain it was menstrual blood. First, Greek was not Mark’s native tongue. Greeks cringe at his poor use of their language (although it was still better than mine). But second, he was a man. Even if he knew the correct word he might have had trouble using it. Men have always had trouble talking about it. Euphemisms abound to help us avoid acknowledging its reality. To make my case I offer how Republican state legislators in Michigan banned one of their women colleagues last week from speaking on the floor of the house after referring to her “vagina.” She responded by performing The Vagina Monologues on the Statehouse steps. Gotta love her! She may live in Michigan, but that is “Vermont strong.”

The issue for the patriarchy was not the “unmentionable” place from which she was bleeding, but that she was bleeding. Her blood made her ritually unclean and untouchable. There was a hierarchy of uncleanness at the time. People to be avoided to remain pure were first those who were dead and then those who were bleeding. Lepers were third on the list. For twelve years, no man was to touch her and she was to touch no man (women really didn’t matter, of course). Literally, every day for a dozen years, not just a few days each month, she lived on the margins of society to be despised. She was “the other,” a victim of a discriminatory social construct and a cruel theology.

It would be nice if we could say that no longer happens. Sadly it seems part of the human condition to be pushing those not like ourselves to the margins merely because of their otherness, be it due to gender, sexual orientation, class, colour, ethnic group, or health. 

Susan Sontag, in her book Illness as Metaphor makes the case in painful detail that “ill-ness” is nothing more than a social construct that moves persons from the centre to the margins merely by virtue of a medical condition. It is arbitrary. Having a sniffle won’t do it. Everyone gets those. But having AIDS or cancer can make you a scapegoat, a “Typhoid Mary,” if you will. Even when there is no fear of contagion, we do not welcome being reminded of our mortality and our vulnerability by those who are stricken.

Who knows what motivated our heroine in today’s story to venture into the crowd to seek Jesus. It was a risky and possibly fatal act, should the crowd discover her condition. Perhaps she had heard he had power over demons and the weather. Perhaps she knew she needed some of that power too if she were to claim her full humanity. So she does the unthinkable. She pushes forward to touch the hem of his garment. She could live in Vermont.

What happens next is important. It is how Jesus responds. For how Jesus lives tells us about how God is and we are to be.

After noticing that she has drained power from him, he doesn’t rebuke her. He stops and talks with her. He makes time to relate to her, even though she is considered less than a nobody. He does so even though someone of power and influence has sent him on an urgent mission of life and death.

Jesus doesn’t recognize otherness. He crosses the line regularly, indifferent to whether someone has a car elevator or not. What he does care about is power. He puts his life on the line to confront unilateral power. 

Where unilateral power prevails, the burdens of inequality are borne most heavily by those who are weaker: “The natural and inevitable inequalities among individuals and groups become the means where by the estrangements in life become wider and deeper. The rich become richer, and the poor become poorer. The strong become stronger and the weak become weaker and more dependent.” [i]

There is a price to be paid even for those with great unilateral strength, for their strength lies in impoverishing their own relationships. They must learn not to care about the sufferings of others.

The power the haemorrhaging woman drained from Jesus is relational power.

Faced with inequalities, people with relational power will choose to bear a larger burden so that the weaker have a chance to develop their own relational power. Unlike unilateral power, relational power is not competitive in the sense of being mutually exclusive. Relational power is like love: The more we love each other, the more both of us can grow in love. To achieve this state will require that we take turns carrying the burden of love when one of us is less loving, but, in the long run, your goal is to increase my love, my relational power, and for me to increase yours. [ii]

Jesus demonstrates that people with relational power have more strength than those with unilateral power. They cannot be defeated. They are Vermont strong. Blayney shares a snippet from the movie Sugar. A baseball player from the Dominican Republic goes into a café in the small southern town where he has been assigned to the local AA minor league team. As he takes a seat at the counter the waitress says, I'm sorry, but we don't serve colored people. Without missing a beat he responds, Oh, that's OK, I don't eat colored people.

Many of you have taught me about being Vermont strong. Yep, you have faced many adversities and challenges, but “So what? You look great!” You have made me stronger. I hope I have or will return the favour. May we continue to draw power from one another until we are as whole and fully human as Jesus and a haemorrhaging woman.

[i] Loomer, Bernard. Two Conceptions of Power. www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2359

[ii] Mesle, Robert