Did you ever have one of those uncomfortable conversations?
The kind where you need to ask for help from someone?
From someone you’re not sure will give that help, even when you ask as nicely as you can?
We might have more of them than usual at the beginning of a school year, or the start of a new project or program.
When you need help, but you’re just not sure if this person you’re talking to is the right one to ask.
Or you’re trying to get help for someone else, but the person you have to ask is the class bully or the biggest suck-up, or a teacher or a boss who seems to not like you, or even a stranger.
That’s kind of what’s happening in the stories Mark tells us about Jesus this week.
Both of the stories are about people coming to Jesus, and asking him to help someone else.
And in the first story, the story of the woman whose little child is sick, there is every reason for her to expect that Jesus won’t want to help her.
She’s from a different sort of clan – one that doesn’t get along very well with Jesus’ people, with the people of Israel in the first century.
They are having this conversation in a part of the country where her kinfolk are probably the richer, more privileged folks, and Jesus’ kinfolk are probably the poorer folks, and there’s probably some resentment between the two groups.
Jesus’ folks might be angry about it if they hear he helped out one of those landlord types who everyone assumes just take what they can get all the time.
And to top it off, she wants divine help, a miracle, when the two of them have different religions.
But she comes to Jesus anyway, and she asks very carefully. “Bowing down” to show she doesn’t think she’s better than him.
Please, please help my baby. She is so sick from this evil demon, and I know you are the best person to heal her. I really need your help.
And Jesus says exactly what she might have expected him to say. What anyone else might have expected him to say.
I can’t waste God’s power on this. You don’t belong. It’s not fair to take what my people need, and give it to your people.
That’s pretty uncomfortable for you and me to hear, maybe, after we’ve had generations of teaching that we can trust Jesus to help anybody.
But from a popular opinion perspective at the time, that’s exactly what he would be supposed to say.
But this woman – this momma who knew she was going to have a very uncomfortable conversation when she had to ask for help – this woman tells Jesus that in spite of what everyone else would expect, she trusts that he really will help everybody.
Everybody.
There is enough to go around, she tells him.
I don’t want to take away what your people need. But there is enough, more than enough of God’s mercy, for your people to have what they need, and for my baby to be healed.
And Jesus says, “You’re right.”
And her daughter is healed by a miracle so powerful that it happens right that instant, without even seeing or touching the child.
And Mark tells us that story so that now, thousands of years later, we know too that there is always enough of God’s mercy for everyone to have enough.
Even if we have to get into a very uncomfortable conversation about it.
Mark tells us this story
– and the story after it, where a bunch of people come to Jesus, and tell him about another person who needs healing, and Jesus takes the time to carefully and specially heal that person, too, with God’s power –
Mark tells us this story so that we can “make our boast of God’s mercy,” just like we prayed in our collect, our prayer of the day at the beginning of the service.
You can look in your program, at how we prayed to be able to be like that woman, that momma, in the Jesus story:
Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts;
for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength,
so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy;…
If that woman in our story was from the richer, more powerful social group that many bible scholars think she was, it would have been easy for her to “confide in her own strength” – to assume that the resources she had at hand, in her own community, were better than whatever this roving teacher from the other side of the tracks had to offer.
But instead, she “made her boast of God’s mercy”. She went right to the man of God – went right to God – and said “God’s mercy is enough. More than enough. It’s all I need, and it’s exactly what my baby needs. I know, I trust, you will heal her.”
And God did not forsake her. God didn’t leave her on her own; God helped her.
Just like we prayed today.
Prayed – and keep praying – that we can trust God that much ourselves.
Because we need that kind of trust.
We need to know God will help us when we have to ask for help.
We need to believe – in our guts, not just our heads – that God loves us bigger and stronger and more abundantly than we ever need. That God loves us more than anyone else can dislike us, and more than anyone can ever say no to us.
We need to know that, to trust that, because there will always be things we need help with. Problems too big for us to solve – violence and prejudice and whether everyone has a good job, and a good school, and good medical care and enough to eat – but that we can help solve because God helps us.
There will always be uncomfortable conversations – times when we need help and know it might be hard to get. Or times when someone we don’t much like needs help from us.
And if we can trust in God’s mercy, all of those conversations will be a little easier, because we will know that God has enough love and help and kindness and healing for everyone.
We can have those conversations trusting in God, instead of in ourselves.
There are lots of things we can do out of our own strength and skill – things that are easy for us right away, sure, and also new things that are hard when we start but are skills we can learn, whether it’s trigonometry or essay writing or programming or dribbling a ball or managing a team or a database or a new language.
And there will always – always – at work and at school and at home – be things that we can’t do, or won’t do, without help. Keeping our friends and families safe and healthy. Making the world a friendly place, where everyone wants to help others.
And there are things that God will always – always – help us do, even if we don’t know how to ask.
To be brave. To be generous. To help one another. To love – love other people, love ourselves, love God.
That’s why we pray, today, and often, that God will help us always to trust God.
So that we can do more than we think we can.
And so that God can do everything we - and everybody - need.
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