by Mary E. Johnson
Who is the bravest person you know? The bravest person you know. Sounds like a simple question. But it’s complicated. My guess is that several faces come to mind when I ask who is the bravest person you know.
There are different types of bravery: physical bravery; moral/ethical bravery; interpersonal bravery; political bravery; even spiritual bravery.
What looks like bravery to me might look like something completely different to you.
I’ve known lots of brave people over the course of my life and career: people who faced terrifying odds, few guarantees, financial stress, and many times, a lack of support – like the parents of the newborns in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Neonatology is the medical care of premature infants and their families. As the spiritual care provider for the NICU I worked with young parents of the infants.
My very first patient was a tiny, little newborn we’ll call Angel. Angel was born at 23-weeks gestation. 40 weeks is full term so Angel was just a bit over half-baked. She weighed 14 ounces. She needed help breathing, keeping warm, and taking in enough nutrition to survive. Angel’s parents were not able to hold her and could barely touch her for the first several weeks of her life because of the fragility of her skin. She lived in a temperature-controlled, plexiglass box beside which her mom and dad sat day after day.
One day I was making my rounds early in the morning before Angel’s parents had arrived. I noticed that her dad had placed his wedding band around her arm. The band looked enormous around Angel’s tiny stick of an arm. But that gesture was a sign of hope – a symbol of the bond her parents had already formed with her despite a grim prognosis.
I was there the first day Angel and her parents were allowed to actually be together physically. She was now well enough to come out of her box and “kangaroo” with her mom and dad. Kangeroo is the term used to describe a tiny infant resting on the bare chest of her parent – skin to skin, heart to heart. Kangarooing has been shown to provide real, clinical benefits for both baby and parent.
Angel’s dad was a big, barrel-chested farmer. Watching the nurses place his tiny daughter against his big, hairy chest then wrap them both in a warm blanket was a privilege, a sacred moment. Dad sobbed, surrounded by tearful family members and hospital staff. We tried to pray but most of us were all choked up.
Angel survived. She learned to breathe on her own, keep herself warm, and she weighed almost 4 lbs when she left the NICU. She would be around 40 years old now.
I want to acknowledge the fact that there are those of you here this morning who know this story all too well. You have had the NICU experience. And I consider you among the bravest people I know.
Today’s Gospel offers two healing stories. And these are also two extraordinary examples of bravery. First, we are introduced to Jairus, a leader of the synagogue in Capernaum. After the big storm on the lake, Jairus is among the first to meet Jesus as he disembarks from his boat. Jairus falls before Jesus and begs him to heal his little daughter.
Perhaps it was desperation that compelled Jairus – a powerful, connected, respected man – to fall down and beg the man against whom he, himself may have spoken in the synagogue – this itinerant, trouble-maker. We will do anything for our children.
Then we learn of another person who emerges from the crowd. Like Jairus’ little daughter, this women is also nameless. This woman seeks healing for herself. There is no one there to advocate for her. No friends to carry her on a mat or lower her through a roof to be seen by Jesus.
The “woman with the issue of blood,” as she is described in some translations, has been bleeding for 12 years. This was, likely, a gynecologic issue related to her menstrual cycle. She had tried everything to change her circumstance. She had seen countless doctors but her condition only grew worse. She had no money. She was considered unclean, untouchable, invisible. She was also likely to be barren in a culture where child-bearing determined the value of the woman.
So as Jesus makes his way to Jairus’ home, he feels energy go out of him. The woman with the issue of blood has audaciously touched his cloak (also against cultural mores of the day). She does not approach Jesus with the intention of falling before him or even speaking to him. It seems that all she wants is to touch his cloak and then maybe slip away, unnoticed yet healed. Her plan may have been to ask for healing in a quiet, inconspicuous, small way – likely conditioned by what she had been told to believe about herself. Her plans were changed.
What do you think Jesus means when he says, “Your faith has saved you?” Faith in him? Faith in his divinity? Faith in his ability to heal? Faith in the possibility of healing?
We’re used to listening to these stories as miracle healing stories. And they are.
But Jairus was brave. The woman with the issue of blood was brave. Both were in desperate need of healing but one would expect neither Jairus nor the woman to ask for help given their status: Jairus as a privileged, powerful man; the woman as a penniless, sick, outcast. Both were brave to reach out. Both were brave to consider themselves worthy of hope: hope that his 12-year old daughter would live; hope that her 12-year hemorrhage would stop.
Perhaps another miracle in this story is about being brave enough to be reliant.
Reliance is hard. It’s hard to go against cultural norms which prize independence, self-sufficiency, self-determination. It’s hard to admit that we need help an ask for it. It’s hard to risk the appearance of weakness. It’s hard, sometimes, to believe we are worthy of help.
In her book My Theology: An Evolving God, An Evolving Purpose, An Evolving World, Sister Joan Chitister writes, “God is the mystery nobody wants. What people want from God is not mystery but certainty, the very element in ourselves that binds itself so often to making sure that nothing ever changes, that tomorrow never comes.”
It’s hard to decide to rely on, as Chitister puts it, “the mystery that nobody wants,” to ease our grip on the need for certitude and certainty. The Gospel gives us two stellar examples of reliance on that mystery.
Motivated by love for his daughter, Jairus stepped outside the security of his social and religious position. Motivated by the belief that she was worthy of being healed of a religiously and culturally destructive ailment and that this man could heal her, the women with the issue of blood literally reached out.
In her book, How We Learn To Be Brave, Bishop Mariann Budde writes, “The courage to be brave when it matters most requires a lifetime of small decisions…” Perhaps the courage it takes to be brave enough to be reliant also requires a lifetime of small decisions.
What motivates us to be brave, to step outside of our security, to reach out against convention? – brave enough to believe that we are loved without ceasing? Brave enough to believe that God’s hope for us is wholeness and reconcilliation? Brave enough to believe that we can rely on God?
Earlier I described the bravery of the parents of premature infants in the NICU. I want to conclude by briefly sharing the story of another group of parents as PRIDE month draws to a close.
I want to share an excerpt from the book Coming Out Together by Christina and Geni Cavitt.
The Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbian and Gays, better known as PFLAG from Redwing, Minnesota are a band of regular folks who, with courage and grace, faced down fear, ignorance, prejudice and their own personal demons to advocate acceptance and equality for their LGBTQ children. Most of the members’ children declared their sexual identities in the 1980s and early ‘90s.
Red Wing was a conservative community. Kids didn’t “come out” publicly and their parents certainly didn’t want to tell others. The risk of rejection, ostracization, bullying, violence and altogether abusive reactions from their peers was too great. Sadly, their LGBTQ children did not find welcome and safety in their faith communities and most of these families left their churches. Gradually the parents began to find one another. A whisper here and there – a friend who knew a friend. Finally the Red Wingers decided to form a PFLAG chapter in 1994.
Over the next 30 years Red Wing PFLAG would hold seminars, march at the Capitol and in the PRIDE parade, give out free hugs and words of affirmation, challenge school policies, and continue their tireless advocacy in countless other ways.
What does it mean to parent an LGBTQ child? According to the PFLAG parents it takes teaching, learning, guidance, acceptance, laughter, tears, work, worries, frustration, humility, irrepressible love and the fierce desire to protect their offspring.” And these parents learned that they had to come out too.
This is a group of brave souls.
In closing I want to read a short poem written by one of the PFLAG parents:
“How To Say”
By Karen Herseth Wee
I don’t know how to say this:
you are not
what I expected
Your father and I came together
at a particular moment
in our knowing
and from deep inside me
you already were
made in the image
of the great God
who loves you even
more than I do
(and that’s saying something)
Made in my image too
of course, and your father’s
those young years when you looked like him
the tomboy ones when
you walked like me
And now, a woman
on course
among careless teachings and wrong-
headed ones, you make your way
all the while reaching
a hand back to me
I will keep up, but am
not as young as you, nor as urgent
But I’m coming, dear heart
Don’t get out of sight…
I am coming
and I will bring others.
How brave are you?
Amen.
