Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Michael Kenneth Williams became a famous actor in the early 2000s playing Omar in the HBO series The Wire.

He died of a drug overdose on September 6, 2021 in Brooklyn, NY at 54 years old.

He did not know that the heroin he purchased had been laced with a lethal amount of fentanyl.

He struggled with drug addiction for most of his adult life.

He was molested at 12 or 13 years old, and thought of himself as damaged goods.

In a 2016 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Williams described his relationship with Reverend Ronald Christian, and his experience at Christian Love Baptist Church in New Jersey.

He met Rev. Christian during the second season of The Wire.

He was on a downward spiral abusing drugs.

He was, in his own words, in jeopardy of destroying everything he had worked for.

He said this about Rev. Christian, “I’m not saying that he accepted me in my disfuctionalism, but he loved me in it.”

Then he said, “That was the first time I actually walked in a church and felt Ok.

I didn’t feel dirty.

I would never go into a church.

It made me question myself on every level.

Those events happening so early on in my life.

And I would go to church with this secret, this weight.

Like, I’m dirty.

I’m dirty.

God is never going to want me.

I’m dirty.

I had a very low self-esteem coming up and I just never felt like God loves me because I was dirty.

I was damaged goods…And I wore that badge very early on in my life.

And I didn’t let that go until I walked into Christian Love Baptist Church.

I saw other men who said, “Me too,” out loud.

And it doesn’t make you less of a man.

It doesn’t make you dirty.

Learning how to forgive myself and forgive other people.

I got all of that at Christian Love.”

There’s a lot we could say about what Michael Williams shared, but here’s part of why I’m telling you this story.

Whether or not you are able to relate to his experience, none of us get through this life trauma free.

None of us, no matter how wealthy or successful by society’s standards, or how displaced we are from the pathway to prosperity, gets to live a life that does not need continual healing - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual healing.

Pain and trauma are pervasive in the human experience.

We suffer pain, we cause pain.

We are traumatized, we traumatize others.

Where is hope found for this seemingly permanent problem?

In this Easter season our messages are honing in on living in light of the resurrection.

We’ve talked about peace.

We’ve talked about Joy.

And today we’re going to talk about healing.

Jesus’s resurrection is God’s guarantee to us that he is making all things new, and this includes our healing.

There are three things I want to share with you from this passage in Mark’s gospel.

Jesus Has Time for You.

Jesus Has Time for Your Healing.

Jesus Has Time for Your Faith.

Jesus Has Time for You

In this passage we encounter two people who are in need of healing, and two people who are desperate for Jesus to help them.

Mark tells us this account in a sandwich format.

He does this several times in his gospel.

He’ll start a story.

Then before finishing, he interrupts the first story with another one.

And then he goes back a wraps up the first story.

It’s not that Mark has trouble focusing on one thing.

No, the stories are connected and instrumental to the point he’s trying to make.

In many respects, the theme verse for Mark’s gospel is found in Mark1.14-15

By the time we get to our passage it has become clear that Jesus is a healer.

He is demonstrating that the kingdom of God is at hand not only by what he’s saying, but by what he’s doing - casting out demons, healing diseases.

In fact, in the passage right before ours, Jesus is in a Gentile region, that is a non-Jewish region, the country of the Gerasenes.

And he heals a demon possessed man.

Now, Mark says in v. 21 that he crossed over again in the boat to the other side of the sea.

He’s back in Jewish territory.

And because word about Jesus has been spreading far and wide, a great crowd gathered around him.

When Mark says at the end of v. 21 that he was beside the sea, we get the sense that Jesus was about to begin teaching the crowd.

But then a man named Jairus, a ruler of one of the synagogues came and fell at Jesus’s feet.

As a synagogue ruler, here’s what we know about Jairus.

He was a religious man.

In fact, more than religious, as a synagogue ruler he would been consider pious.

He was well respected.

He was a man who carried a degree of authority in his community.

He was a well resourced man.

And with all of that going for him, power, wealth, respect, access to resources, his daughter lay next to death (likely with some incurable disease) and there was nothing he could do about it.

Let me point out two things.

First, when he says, “My little daughter,” you need to hear a depth of love and affection being expressed.

You need to hear him saying in a voice of desperation, “This is my baby girl.”

“This is my sweet girl.”

Parents, aunties, uncles, god-parents, what term of endearment do you use to describe the young ones you love?

Put that term in this text.

This is as deeply affectionate as it gets.

Which makes the second point that much more desperate.

My precious daughter is at the point of death.

She is at death’s door.

Can you feel the grief?

Can you feel the hopelessness and helplessness?

We haven’t gotten to the woman with the discharge of blood yet, who spent all she had in search of healing.

But you can imagine that Jairus brought whatever resources to bear that he could trying to help his daughter.

And nothing.

What does Jesus do in response to Jairus’s prostrated plea?

Mark simply says, “Jesus went with him.”

We are meant to respond with a sense of hope for healing just like the great crowd that followed and thronged about Jesus.

They are anticipating that healing is coming!

But then this massive procession of people on their way to Jairus’s house is interrupted when Mark takes us from the top of the social order to the bottom of the social order.

The synagogue ruler has a name, Jairus.

The title for the second desperate person in our text is only given to us as, “the woman who had a discharge of blood for twelve years.”

Thirteen years before encountering Jesus she may not have been poor.

But then she contracted this physical ailment that caused her body to go from discharging blood monthly to the blood flowing continually.

So, even before she exhausted all of her resources going to doctors, she became an outcast.

Her flow of blood made her ceremonially unclean.

She was now excluded from her community because of her disease.

Look at how Mark describes the last twelve years of her life.

She suffered much under many physicians and spent all that she had.