[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church.
Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast.
So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: My name is Janelle and I am one of the co lead pastors here and am excited today to finish up our series on spiritual practices for resurrection.
And before we get into that, I wanted to just take us back on memory lane of what we've been learning about over these last several weeks. So Jason gave us topics on fasting, which we were all riveting on. Right, fasting and what else did he do? Celebration last week, which you all loved.
And we had Claire talk about the rhythms of the Christian calendar, a little bit of explaining about our Christian calendar and why that might help us in building a practice.
We also heard from myself, we talked about praying the psalms. And then we heard from Larry, who is a member of our congregation, a spiritual director and a retired pastor, who talked about the examen and how to pray through and examine for your day.
And then Mark, who really talked to us as a chaplain in the military about maybe how we have spiritual practice when we're struggling to feel God. And so while it's great that Jason, Claire and I were up here, I want to just say that these two folks did an amazing job as part of our church. So can we.
They're both here.
We are so fortunate at this church to not only have amazing musicians that give of their time, but folks that provide proclamation up here, whether that be through communion or through our sermon that come right here from our seats.
So we are going to be talking in our last bit of spiritual practice about community.
And Joey picked a perfect song for us and storytelling and why community and storytelling and restoration to community is so important in our practice.
And so in the spirit of storytelling, I thought I would give you one of my stories. So I'm going all the way back to seventh grade.
Oh, I know it is. Woo story.
So in seventh grade, I think that's when you have a big difference. And some kids are really ready to be grown up and others not so much. They're still very much in that childhood phase. And that was certainly me, although I was just about as tall then as I am now.
So I was very tall. I was probably 50 pounds thinner and had feet just as big then as I do today, which Are not small.
And it was the early 1980s. And so just want to give you, for those of you who maybe didn't live through the 1980s, a little picture of what the it girl look like when I hit. Yeah, when I hit seventh grade, all the popular girls, this is where they were.
Now, I could not find the picture of me with full headgear, But I just want you to have the picture of yours truly at seventh grade.
Thank you.
Okay, we can take that down.
So I came on the scene in seventh grade and desperately wanted to fit in.
And so I tried to, like, care about makeup and care about my hair. And on the weekends, I would ride my horse and go catching frogs and drinking out of garden hoses. But during school, very stressful. I really tried, and I caught the eye of Eric Schauss.
He was a little more popular than I was. Not super popular, but you know how this goes, the hierarchy.
And he was a bully. I did not like him. But all my friends were like, you have to say yes.
So for fitting in, for the purpose of fitting in, I said, okay, I'll be your girlfriend.
And after a very, very long time of three days of dating Eric, he decided to try to give me a kiss.
And I said, oh, no, thank you.
No, no, thank you. And he said, but we're a boyfriend and girlfriend, and this is what boyfriends and girlfriends do.
And I said, well, then if that's the case, I don't think I want to be your girlfriend.
No, thank you.
So I left school that day and to my horror, came back the next day to find out that Eric had gotten on the phone. You know, we had landlines, but some of us got landlines in our rooms. He had gotten on the phone chain and called everybody at Gage Middle School to tell them that I kissed like a fish and that he had broken up with me.
So I earned a new name, Fish Face.
And for almost two years, Eric's friends would pass by me and go, hey, fish face.
And, you know, I'd try to laugh it off or it's. You know, I was okay, but it wasn't great. It wasn't a great name.
And then.
So this was in the beginning of seventh grade. Towards the end of eighth grade, a new girl came to school. Her name was Jody. And when I picked that picture, I didn't have a picture of Jody. But when I picked that picture, that's exactly. She had, like, the curly hair that was really in. Everybody thought she was beautiful. She had all the right clothes. She looked just like Madonna and everybody wanted to be her friend, have her go to their birthday parties, and everybody thought she was just a beauty. And in math class, we were put in a small group learning group, and it was me and Jodi and one of Eric's friends.
And so he sat down and said, oh, we're in a group with fish face, thinking I think that Jody might think that it would make him super cool. And she looked at him and said, what did you call her?
And he was like, oh, it's a long story. And she said, yeah, I've heard it.
If you say that again to her or I hear anybody say that again to her, I will never speak to you again.
And in just like a couple of sentences, Jody changed my trajectory. I somehow was brought up a little in junior high society and nobody, not one person ever, ever again called me fish face.
That is the power of standing up and community.
And I tell that story because I can imagine that most of you can have a story that you relate to, maybe somebody that stood up for you maybe a time because of something about you or not something about you, just because there are bullies in this world that you felt rejected from whatever group of people you were trying to make friends with or trying to fit in with.
And so I love one of the spiritual practices as a side note that I love to do is when I'm reading a passage from scripture, especially one where Jesus is walking and dealing with others, I like to imagine maybe a little bit of those emotions that I might have if I were in that person's place.
And so today we're going to read a story about someone who was deemed unclean, someone who was kept out of society, and someone where Jesus, like Jody, stood up and heard her.
So would you all pray with me before we begin?
God of the brokenhearted, God of the rejected, we thank you for who you are.
Help us to sit in our own stories as we hear this story today.
Be with us in our hearts, in our minds, in our breath.
In Jesus name. Amen.
Okay, so let's get to our passage, Luke 8, 43, 48.
And I'll set the scene a little bit. Jesus is heading on his way to do another healing, HEAL Somebody, a 12 year old who is sick and so on his way. Of course he did what Jesus did, which was attract crowds.
He had a power, he had an energy. And so he would speak, most likely about justice and the Beatitudes as he went. And that's exactly what was happening.
And in a crowd, it says in 43. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood.
You guys have a different version, and that's my fault. Now I'm going to read your version. Now. There was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. And though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her.
She came up behind him, meaning Jesus, and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhaging stopped.
Then Jesus asked, who touched me?
When all denied it, Peter said, master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.
But Jesus said, someone touched me, for I noticed that power had gone out of me.
When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling and falling down before him. She declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him and how she had been immediately healed.
He said to her, daughter, your faith has made you well.
Go in peace.
Beautiful story.
Who is this woman?
She's written about in all three Gospels.
They're basically exactly the same. I know sometimes we see Gospel stories have some differences. This one's pretty close.
Most theologians all agree that this woman was a Hebrew woman under Hebrew law, which we'll get into in a moment.
Her condition is believed to be menstrual in nature.
Some speculate about what cause that could have been. So perhaps she was perimenopausal and in her older years.
And perhaps she, 12 years prior, had started her menses and hormonally struggled with being regular and so therefore had this issue and was closer to maybe the age of 20 or 24.
Perhaps she had some kind of damage to her body during childbirth or. Or through some kind of physical trauma done to her called a fissure. Lots of doctors and theologians wonder if that could have been the case.
We don't know.
All we know is that there is a woman who comes to Jesus and touches his cloak.
We do know a few other things. We know that she was suffering in.
It says here that she did everything she could.
In one of the Gospels, it says she spent all of her money on doctors to try to fix the problem.
So we know it was a physical problem, clearly one that wasn't killing her because she'd had it for 12 years.
We also know that she would have been socially, spiritually and emotionally set aside from the rest of her community.
So for 12 years she was bleeding.
For 12 years she would have been excluded.
And for 12 years she was given the name unclean.
To understand this, we really need to go back to Leviticus 15, which would have been the laws and the rules that she lived under at this time.
And in ancient Jewish law, any woman who was having her period, I'm sure that's the first time we've said that in church, but we talk about foreskin all the time. So any woman who was having her period would have been considered ceremonially unclean.
And if she was discharging blood for longer than a typical menstruation, that entire time, she would be ceremonial unclean. If you're worried about this being only an issue with women, it was believed that life was somehow part of this thing, that she was expelling and therefore kind of expelling death. So this was around death and life and cleanliness practices. And in fact, men who spilled their seed without specifically trying to make children would have also been considered unclean. They were just better at hiding it.
We won't go any further.
In Leviticus 15, 25, 27, we understand that anything she touched became unclean.
Her bed, her seat, anyone she came in contact with and she touched would have to wash themselves immediately and would not be considered clean until the evening.
So again, for 12 years, she wasn't just bleeding, she was untouchable.
She couldn't go to the synagogue.
She likely couldn't be hugged by at least some members of her family.
She lived in profound isolation and shame.
So she tried everything, she spent everything she had, but nothing worked.
Before we say, like, huh, this is why we're progressive Christians and we don't follow the law.
I want to very clearly say, and remind us that Jesus did not come to mark the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. However, you say those words as irrelevant or not important.
And in fact, sometimes the Christian reading of that, like Jesus is warm and fuzzy and the Old Testament is hateful and ugly, is anti Semitic.
So I want to be very careful.
Some people still do follow these rituals. And. And don't we all follow rituals that maybe we understand that there's a different science around it, but it allows us to feel closer to the divine.
So let's be careful that we allow folks that are Jewish and who still practice this, some do, many don't.
That freedom to do so and not indict them.
But I do want to say that Jesus walking in this time, I think, is showing us a bit of a object lesson of what the law came to do, which was to provide justice, love and mercy.
And I like to put myself in the midst of the story.
And I like to imagine Jesus walking in this big crowd.
This woman who shouldn't probably have been in the crowd at all.
Everybody is hemming in.
So she's touching, people are bumping into her. She's bumping into them. She's knowing I'm unclean, I'm making everyone unclean.
And she hears this message of Jesus, this message of acceptance, blessed are the poor, the meek shall inherit the earth.
And she can't help but reach out and somehow sneak a healing.
So I imagine that this is where we can get to this place where we think, did Jesus really not know what happened? If he knew the power was coming out from him, did he not know who did it?
When I, when I was younger, I. I imagine because, you know, I was an awkward 12 year old going through my own hormonal changes, that Jesus was like, who touched me.
But now that I understand the power of storytelling and trauma and that things aren't always just physical, I wonder if Jesus knew exactly who touched him and decided to call her out to tell her story and stand with her in her quote unquote uncleanliness.
Was anyone going to call him unclean?
I also wonder Jesus is God becoming man, if you are so inclined to think so.
I know we come from many different thoughts on that here.
So he got. He's in a man's body.
I wonder if when she touched his garment that he not only felt the power of healing come from him, but he also maybe got a bit of a window of what it was like to be in a woman's body.
For those of you who are men here and not experienced menses or childbirth, I wonder if through a sister, a friend or a wife, you have grown a little more appreciation for what a woman's body does starting at the age of 12, the cramps, the tears, the feeling of being unclean, having a baby, those men who have been able to be part of that or witness that, if maybe you have had a new appreciation for what that might be like, or for a woman who really desires to have a baby but can't because her hormones aren't working the way that she thought they would.
I wonder if Jesus also, in that moment of understanding the entire human experience, was able to experience that.
We don't know this is my musings of this, but I sure do like that story.
I wonder if he was able to imagine that every morning for 12 years she woke up and went to the bathroom and said, I'm unclean again today.
I won't be able to hug my brother again today.
I think Jesus, in calling her out, in calling her to tell her story to the crowd perhaps understood that there would be additional trauma, that a healing physically doesn't mean that there's healing emotionally.
Shelly Rambo, who is a amazing theologian and does specific work around trauma and Christianity, says that trauma is not located in the past, but it is the residue that remains in the present.
I think Jesus knows that healing isn't complete without being seen, being heard, and being given a restorative name.
Daughter not formally unclean, not healed Woman daughter, I'm in relationship with you.
I am family, you are home.
This unclean woman wasn't the only things that were called unclean in the Bible.
Lepers had to call out unclean, unclean everywhere they went.
People with epilepsy were thought to have demon possession.
The poor were judged as being cursed.
And we know that women were often shamed.
There are other things, and I think, like we could say again, thank God we don't live at that time, but I think we're all seeing right now that there are lots of things that are being judged, called unclean, pointed at in our society.
Mental health issues, whether you have to take medication for depression, maybe addiction, poverty, homelessness, queer trans identities, disabilities, neurodivergence, immigration status, just a couple.
These are all labels that give us or society maybe the opportunity to write off.
There are many more.
And as progressive Christians, we can again pat ourselves on the back and say, yes, this is why we come to church, to stand for justice with Christ and say that these things are worth fighting for. These things are what Jesus talked about as those that needed to be uplifted. And that is absolutely true.
But as I was preparing this message, I thought, well, if I just really think I've made it because I have all the right answers. I've got a problem because Jesus came for all humanity.
And so I wondered maybe what, as progressive Christians, we might judge.
Maybe we judge people of faith that seems more charismatic, more mystical than ours.
Maybe we judge Christians that aren't deconstructing in exactly the same way that we do or read a specific verse in a different way than we do.
Perhaps we really kind of on the side judge people who are a little too wealthy and, you know, even though they are giving to justice causes, we still kind of don't trust them.
Maybe we judge them by their education because we consider ourselves a pretty educated group.
I think this is a big one. Do we measure someone's spirituality based on their activism, based on their Instagram posts?
Here's the reminder. Jesus stops.
Jesus sees.
Jesus restores in a crowd on his way to someone else's daughter's house. Jesus stops.
He didn't have to.
The woman was already healed.
But he knew that healing wasn't complete until she was seen, until she was heard, and until she was named.
Jesus makes room for her, not just for her sake, I would argue, but for the sake of the crowd.
The crowd had to see her story.
The crowd had the opportunity to look at their own judgments and confront them.
The crowd had the opportunity to themselves be healed.
This was a communal healing.
So perhaps today you need to hear something like, daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.
Maybe even though you're here in this community, you desire to grab the hem of Christ's garment and have someone in your community hear your story, stick up for you, and have you be part of the community.
I hope and pray that every person here is safe to do so with.
Perhaps you're feeling really strong and you need to be like Jody was for me, like Jesus was for this woman, and stand up and align yourself with somebody that needs you to align them with them today.
This is the spiritual practice of community, of all coming together, of listening to each other's stories and reaching out for the divine.
So I'm going to call the band back up to play music, and you are welcome to sit in your seat and sing. And as we finish, I also want to invite you for me coming up and lighting a candle is a kind of a physical representation of a prayer. So if you are reaching for God today, feel free to come up and light a candle. And then if you need someone to hear your story, by all means, you can reach out to us as staff, but also reach out to someone in your church and say, hey, can we get coffee?
I have something I'd like to get off my chest.
Sound good?
All right.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching. No matter when or where you're tuning in, to learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
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