July 1, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Some preachers always start a sermon with a joke and cause the congregation to laugh. While I have made you chuckle on occasions, Jesus didn’t tell a joke in his famous Sermon on the Mount. Jesus never was noted for sermonic humor. In fact, laughter plays a little role in the Gospels; it’s quite rare. Except in today’s Gospel. Today’s Gospel is the only time that I know of that Jesus made anybody laugh. Mark 5:40, “They laughed at him.”
They Laughed at Him
Before the two stories happened in our passage for today, Jesus had been working on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, out among the Gentiles. When he was with the Gentiles, he wasn’t that effective since they didn’t know him. And since he was Jewish and they were Gentiles, they didn’t understand the Jewish scriptures.
Now Jesus is back home, home among the insiders and the faithful. He’s among his own people, back among fellow believers. But back home, they didn’t understand him either. When the people in the synagogues saw what Jesus was going to do with the dead daughter, they laughed at him.
They didn’t throw rocks at Jesus, didn’t drag him into court, and didn’t outright reject him this time. They didn’t laugh with him, they laughed at him. And if that’s ever happened to you, I bet you will agree that mocking laughter can be the worst sort of rejection there is.
The first story is Jarius, a frantic father comes to Jesus saying, “My little girl is ill! Please come!” Jesus follows him. But on the way, the second story is about a poor, sick woman who has used up all of her life’s savings on one doctor after another and have exceeded her insurance coverage benefits (By the way, this was before the Affordable Health Care Act was ruled to be constitutional.). The woman stretches out her hand among the pressing crowd to touch Jesus’ coat. Jesus stops and she is healed. By the time Jesus gets to the bedside of the little girl, it was all over except for the weeping and wailing.
The gathered mourners say, “Don’t trouble yourself, Jesus. She is dead.” Jesus responds, “She isn’t dead; she’s just sleeping.” And with that, the crowd laughs. The people knew what dead is—they have seen it all of their lives. And besides, Jesus was only a carpenter’s son, not a medical examiner.
Undeterred by their laughter, Jesus bending near the little girl says, “Little girl, arise!” Little girl, get up! And she does that. And Jesus says, “Give her something to eat.”
This was a preview of Easter long before Easter—the resurrection of the Lord happened. In the face of the world’s mocking laughter, the Lord of Life dares to defeat death and leads a little girl back to life.
What About Death
There was a conversation between a university doctor who taught at a medical school and a pastor. The physician was not a Christian but was actually an atheist. The physician was wondering about how Christians thought about death when they believed in everlasting life. He thought that Christians would be consoled by the expectation of another life to come. But he was surprised on what he found by watching professed believers in their last days.
The pastor asked, “And what surprises you about us?”
The doctor smiled and said, “You Christians die fairly much like everybody else, using health resources, clinging to each machine-induced breath, as if physical death is the end of all there is. I would have thought that you people would somehow have a way to face death in a way that we non-believers don’t.”
I fear that this doctor’s smile said more than his words. I fear that he smiled and maybe even laughed at the way Christians are caught in the same boundaries and bondage in which everyone else is caught. We have given Death the last word.
This past week, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act more commonly known as Obamacare. Are we less afraid now that we have the medical safety net to continue to live in this physical world?
When Jesus intrudes into our times of grief, bends over death and dares speak of life, we laugh. It’s a mocking laughter that there is such a power that is stronger than death. We laugh to protect ourselves from a surprising, living God.
Do you know that one way that we handle difficulties in life is a defensive mechanism to find humor in our complex situation? Psychiatrists tell us that laughter helps us creatively to cope. But sometimes, our laughter is evidence of our refusal to cope, our unwillingness to think. The crowd laughed at Jesus because they never thought that God’s power can be more powerful than death. They laughed at Jesus because they wouldn’t believe that a son of a carpenter can do anything more than repair furniture. The people laughed because they just couldn’t believe the truth that Death does not have the last word.
Dying Church
In my service as Vice President of the denomination, I get the opportunity to hear about the health of local churches. In this post-modern era, we see many churches that at one time have been vital and growing that are now unhealthy and dying. One of the tasks that we have is to review the churches that have changed their statuses. Unfortunately, there are many more churches that have been disbanded, dismissed, and dissolved than accepted into the American Baptist Churches. Just like Jarius’ little twelve-year old daughter and the woman who was hemorrhaging, churches can be sick and dying too.
Recently, some of you have spoken to me about your concerns about the future vitality of our church. You wonder about whether our church will be around when we see so many of us getting older and maybe even sicker.
There’s a book written by G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul that charges that the market economy with its all-pervasive consumerism has infected the Christian church in America.
MacDonald tells the story of the Community Church of Joy in Glendale, Arizona. In 2002, this church showed all signs of ecclesiastical achievement. Sprawled on a 187-acre campus, it boasted a membership of 12,000 people. Here was a wildly successful mega-church with an efficient parking system, fashionable food court, and bursting numbers in worship.
But behind the scenes, all was not well. The famous senior pastor of the Church of Joy, Walter Kallestad, was having trouble sleeping at night. The leadership of the Church of Joy seemed to Kallestad to be utterly oblivious to the social problems of the Phoenix area—inner city crime, drug and alcohol addiction, unwanted pregnancy, broken homes, and more. Kallestad wondered if the surrounding community would miss his congregation if it happened to disappear.
So Kallestad prayerfully and honestly assessed his congregation and concluded: “They didn’t really want to engage with God. They wanted relief and inspiration.” Basically his congregation was there to have their needs met, their personal hurts healed, without regard to the needs of others. So 20 years into his ministry, Kallestad took the courageous step of going before his congregation and with tears he confessed that The Church of Joy had become a “dispenser of religious goods and services.” This began the process in which Kallestad cleared his church of many of the fashionable features that it had acquired over the years—professional musicians, square dancing classes, dining clubs that visited local restaurants for dinner parties, and evenings that were given to playing bridge.
What happened was that one-third of his members and almost half of his staff left the church in a huff. Six years later the congregation had recovered less than a quarter of its previous membership. However, the congregation had gone a long way to recovering a sense of itself as more than a place of entertainment for spectators and demanding customers. Kallestad told his people, “It’s time you grow up,” and then gave them the opportunity to do just that.
The story of what happened to the Church of Joy teaches us that a vital and faithful church is not about numbers and fashionable benefits. At FCBC, we can thank God that we don’t have a sprawling 187-acre campus or 12,000 members or located in a Thomas Kinkade-like neighborhood where we can’t see the needs of the world. But God in his amazing wisdom and plans for us continues to keep us focus on his mission of sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ in Chinatown and around the world.
When I tell people that we were founded in 1880 and survived two earthquakes and that we are now 132-years old, people generally would say, “That’s old!” It’s particularly old in California. We may be old but we are not dying. In fact, being 132-years old is a reminder that no one today can say that he or she has lived during all those 132 years. 132 years tells us that there have been people before us and there will, God willing, be those who will be here after us. As far as we believe, death does not have the last word at FCBC!
Easter Today
When Jesus entered the room and saw people wailing loudly, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him.
Jesus’ words of life for our lives and for this church are that we are not dead. We believe that these little stories about this little girl and the woman who is bleeding from Mark happen to be true. If we find ourselves laughing that Jesus can heal the sick and raise the dead and can keep this church healthy and growing, then Jesus is telling us to believe in Easter.
Maybe that’s why we come to church on Sunday. Every Sunday is a little Easter. We come to church not to escape to a fantasy world of faith but rather to escape this world that we think is real where death rules and defeat wants to have the last word. We come to church in order to get our heads straight, to rejuvenate our faith in the victory of God in the resurrection.
Jesus transforms anything he touches. He just says the word and there is life, a new world, a future we could not have had on our own. So instead we say in faith, “The same Jesus who said to the little girl, “Arise!” will on the last day of your life say the same thing to you. In the end, Jesus has the last laugh!
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead, help us to worship you as Lord of Life. Enable us to believe in the truth of your resurrection that we might live out victory over sin and death in all we say and do. Defeat our despair, show us your way when we think there is no way, that we may walk in courage and confidence through all the trials and tribulations of this life, ready to meet you at the end of this life, at the beginning of eternity. Amen.