AUGUST 6th, 2023 PASTOR DON PIEPER
ONE AT A TIME PS 139:1-10 / Luke 8:40-56
“ZOOM IN & FOCUS”
Before I get started, I have a confession to make. I'm often not at my best. I know, shocking, right? There are times when I'm absolutely in my element like walking on the beach with Claudia or bicycling on Larry Scott Trail, or eating maple bars.... Those are moments when I'm in my element.
But there are other times...., when not so much, when circumstances really get to me. I'd have to admit, such times stress me out and they're admittedly far too frequent for my liking. Is it just me or can any of you relate? Yeah? What's something that gets to you?
The list of stressers can get pretty long some times, can't it? For me, the worst of such times is when I can't seem to escape it. That sore throat that came with being sick with Covid is a case in point. Every swallow I took felt like there was a sharpened knife in my throat. That was bad.
Another one is when I've distrupted a hive of wasps mowing our yard. Its happened twice now. Being a bit alergic to their sting, I quickly paniced! A ran around like a chicken with his head cut off. To say that I was not at my best that day is a vast understatement. I screamed like a baby...!
But the one that gets to me the most frequently – that causes me to break out into a cold sweat, gasping for air and desperately searching for the nearest exit, are crowds. It's true. I experienced it repeatedly during our recent stay in Paris. The worst was probably the day we went to an art museum and found ourselves inundated with crowds of people. The rooms where the paintings of world famous artists, Monet and Van Gogh, could be viewed were absolutely packed.
Monet is Claudia and Nicola's favorite artists so they were in their element, but no matter how beautiful the paintings in front of us were, Melanie & I soon found ourselves looking to escape. We finally found the way out of that sardine can literally gasping for air. It's true, crowds get to me!
Not a great quality for a pastor, I'd have to admit. That's what drew me to this story from Luke. When I was in seminary, one of my preaching professors taught us that one way to discern an author's clue to a theme a text was addressing was by paying attention to what words are repeated in any given text or story. In the sixteen verses we read from Luke 8, the Greek word for crowd, 'oxlos', appears some seven times, far more than any other word, save the name of Jesus himself.
Luke begins: “On the far side of the lake the crowds welcomed Jesus because they had been waiting for him.” (Luke 8:40) Okay, so that's not at all stressful. He was not only surrounded by crowds once again, but they were waiting for him, wanting something from him, closing in on him.
My hands are getting all sweaty and clammy just thinking about it! Luke continues: “Then a synogogue leader named Jairus came and fell at Jesus' feet, pleading with him to come to his home and heal his twelve-year old daughter who was dying.” (Luke 8:41) The poor guy was worried sick about his daughter. I can relate. Just before Melanie was to fly home from Germany she got sick. We were worried sick ourselves, putting her on that plane alone for what was an awful flight. Not only was she feeling ill and wiped out from not sleeping but the woman beside her used her as a footrest...!
And where were the crowds when this pleading father made his case? Luke makes sure we're well aware. “As Jesus went with him, the crowds nearly crushed him!” (Luke 8:42)
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Oh boy! I think I'm going to hyperventiliate! Can I get some air up here? How does Jesus do it? How can he breathe, much less go with the guy? But Luke's not finished: “A woman in the crowd who'd suffered for twelve years with an incurable bleeding disorder, came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his robe and immediately the bleeding stopped. 'Who touched me?' he asked.
Everyone denied it, and Peter said, 'Master, the crowd is all pressing up against you!'”
(Luke 8:42-44)
In other words, with such a massive crowd, how can you possibly focus in on just one person..? In his book, One At A Time, from whom I'm borrowing in this new series we begin today, Pastor Kyle Idleman notes that Jesus is not focused on numbers, for only one number matters – the number one!
Question: Does anyone else like to take photos with your phone? Ever use the portrait mode? To do so you spot the person you want to highlight, and then zoom in and let the camera focus. In that moment everything else fades to blur as the person in question becomes the focus, in focus.
When Jesus was surrounded by the crowds, he had a way of zooming in and focusing on the one - it was Jesus' secret way of making a difference and his core disciples...took note. And to be sure, they weren't the only ones: “When the woman realized that she couldn't stay hidden, she began to tremble and fell to her knees in front of him. The whole crowd heard her explain why she'd touched him.”
(Luke 8:47)
She knew Jesus' focus was on her and her alone. Her response was one of worship & gratitude – that is, her heart was transformed. As Chris noted last week, that's what Jesus is all about, and as a result, so are we. As Jesus' followers, no one should go unnoticed. It forces the question: what kind of person are you, or are we, prone to overlook? As Kyle makes clear, Jesus loves everyone in the crowd, but the way he loves them is one at a time. It's a theme revisited throughout the gospels.
Jesus goes into Jericho and people pack the streets to get a glimpse of him like a Claude Monet art exhibit, but Jesus focuses on just one person: Zacchaeus. (Luke 19:1-10) Jesus comes down from a mountain and “large crowds followed him”, but a leper shows up, Jesus zooms in, and everyone else is cropped out of the picture. (Matthew 8:1-4) Jesus goes to a place where “a great number of disabled people used to lie...”, that is, there were crowds of hurting people, but we're told of “one who was there”, who gains Jesus' focused attention and is the only recipient of a miraculous healing.
(John 5:2-9)
Why doesn't Jesus heal all of them? Not sure, but I do know that one is the way of Jesus. When someone stood in front of Jesus, time stopped. Everything else in his life – his concerns, his plans, his destination – blurred and disappeared in the moment. He was zeroed in and zoomed in...!
Anyone ever see the 'Spot the Gorilla' video on Facebook or Youtube? Six people stand in a circle, three in white shirts, three in black. The viewer is asked to keep track of how many times the basketball is passed by the people in white shirts. The action starts, the ball is being passed back and forth, when a gorilla walks into the crowd, thumps his chest, and quickly exits.
Would you notice the gorilla? Of course! Who wouldn't? Actually, when this experiment was conducted at Harvard University over half of the viewers never noticed the gorilla. How so? Simple. It wasn't what they were looking for. They were preoccuped with the crowd of ball players.
So what do you see.....when you're at work, walking on the beach, shopping at QFC, or driving? How's your peripheral vision? Can you see the one in the midst of the many?
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I love how David reminds us of God's extraordinary vision: “You see me when I travel and when I rest at home.... You even saw me before I was born.... Every moment matters to you...”
(Psalm 139:3, 16)
Forty times in the Gospels we read, “Jesus saw”. Matthew seems to summarize all those stories when he writes: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because like sheep without a shepherd, they were harassed and helpless.” Jesus saw is the launch pad of most of the most amazing stories of transformed lives. If we want to participate in similar amazing stories we need to learn from Jesus, behave as his students, and do what he did, see as he saw. I need to be discipled by Jesus not just in my relationship with God, but in my relationships with other people.
(Matthew 9:36)
One of those harassed and helpless people Matthew had in mind was this bleeding woman. In a society where emen didn't talk to women they didn't know, where husbands didn't talk to their wives in public, Jesus spoke to her with a title of affection, revealing the secret to how he saw her: Daughter!
Picture what that moment was like for her. She'd spent all her money on cures that didn't help, on doctors who didn't care. The religious laws of the time stated that her bleeding made her unclean. That meant, in addition to deealing with a debilitating illness, she wasn't allowed to worship at the temple. She was ostracized from her community, those who'd begun telling her that her sickness was punishment from God for her sins and that her bloodstained clothes was evidence of her lacking faith.
Worse, if she was married or had kids, she couldn't touch them or be touched by them or touch anything they touched. She'd likely been forced out of her home and family. Her last twelve years had been a living nightmare. No one would touch her or claim her, until now. “Daughter...!” Jesus saw beyond what those in the crowd saw. He truly saw her and claimed her as his own. (Luke 8:48)
There's a danger these twin stories reveal to us as well. There's not only the danger of failing to see the one among the many, there's the danger of succumbing to that of crowd mentality. When Jesus finally makes his way through the crowd to arrive at Jairus' home, he takes his core disciples, Peter, James and John in with him to observe. There's another crowd there waiting, and they're wailing as custom would have it. Jesus promptly announces Jairus' daugher is merely napping.
Then comes this chilling verse: “But the crowd laughed at him because they all knew she had died.” (Luke 8:53) Who among us, surrounded by others so laughing, wouldn't have done the same? They all thought they knew better. It's crowd mentality in true form. How often do we act likewise? How smug, even we believers can become. I think of the crowds storming the capital, many of whom carried fixtures of the Christian faith as they did so. I think of how confident we become of the purity of our cause when we have similar minded folks around us, with our focus on what the crowd is doing, convinced that we know what we know. But Jesus is not distracted by what everyone else is doing. He
again, focuses in on the one, claims her as his own, and brings about transformation:'My child, get up!'
(Luke 8:54)
Perhaps you've seen the post that's been circulating on Facebook lately featuring a red bench. The caption reads as follows: “Walking through my son's schoolyard, I notice a bench painted bright red. I asked my son, 'Is that the only place to sit around here?' He said, 'No, that's the buddy bench. When someone feels lonely or they have nobody to play with, they sit there and kids ask them to play.”
'Wow!' I thought. 'That's amazing!' I then told him how wonderful that was and asked him if he ever used it. He said, “Yeah. When I was new I sat there and someone came and asked me to play. I was so happy - and now, when I see other kids on it, I ask them to play with me. We all do!”
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So it is to be a student on the playground of Jesus' discipleship school. The trick is to train one's eyes to recognize the red benches in our community, in our neighborhoods, places of work, grocery stores, class rooms and places where people gather in small or large numbers, even here at worship.
I think it begins by learning to pray a selfless prayer in sync with what we heard last week, that the church exists primarily for those outside of it. Would you join me in praying such a prayer? Jesus,
give me your eyes for the one. Help me to see people the way you see them. Help me to see those who sit alone, isolated, harrassed and helpless on the red benches of life, and to love on them as you do...
“When the woman realized she could not stay hidden, she began to tremble and fell to her knees in front of him!” (Luke 8:47)