Text: Mark 5:21-43

Speaker: Carolyn May

When Joel asked me if I’d be willing to offer the reflection for today, he told me that CMC has been
working through a series focused on “Courageous Peace Witness” and that there was a thought that
perhaps the retreat would be a good weekend to reflect on embodiment and peacemaking. In a lot
of ways I still feel surprised that bodies have become such an integral part of my life and work. I
think I spent much of my early years feeling very disembodied. And feeling, somehow, like that was
a virtue. Like being a good Christian meant learning to rise above all of this messy physical stuff.
There are still remnants of that deep within me, I think. And so it felt a bit surprising for Joel to
suggest that I might be a good person to reflect on embodiment.

But, it makes sense. After an intense year of schooling and training, I recently became a licensed
massage therapist. Truly not a path I could have or would have ever anticipated for my life. It
certainly wasn’t the path I imagined when I went to seminary. Though, to be fair, I don’t think I
actually had any clear path imagined when I made that move.

But as I’ve been reflecting, I think I’ve been recognizing that embodiment has been a really
important part of my theological life for a long time. Because of course. It has always been part of
everything, regardless of how much I have tried to remain separate from my body, or how much I
have absorbed that old Christian tendency to think of flesh and body as somehow lesser, while
spirit and mind are where the real spiritual work happens. I am still a body. I think maybe, for a
while, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that part of the spiritual work might be learning to be
more fully here.

During seminary I became interested in dance and dance worship, and in what it means for our
bodies to participate in prayer rather than treating worship as something that happens primarily in
our heads. I found myself thinking about embodiment in ways I hadn’t really considered before, and
wondering what our bodies might have to teach us about the divine.

And then I graduated from seminary and started a chaplaincy residency.I began that work in August
of 2020. I had chosen chaplaincy before COVID, but by the time I actually started, the world was
very different from the one I had imagined when I made that decision. And less than a month after I
started, my dad became sick. About a week and a half later, he died.

So I found myself spending my days accompanying people through illness, dying, and grief while I
was also trying to figure out how to live with my own grief. I was suddenly spending a lot of time
around bodies. Bodies that were sick. Bodies that were healing. Bodies connected to machines.
Bodies that were dying. Bodies that had died. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I began to
understand embodiment a little differently.

Shortly after my dad died, a friend connected me with a massage therapist who became an
important part of how I made my way through that grief. My friend actually paid for me to have
several massage sessions, and those sessions became one of the things that helped sustain me.
I think part of what made massage so important was that grief is not always something we can talk
our way through. There are things we can say about grief, of course. We can tell stories. We can name what we miss. We can cry. We can pray. But sometimes the grief is bigger than language. Massage gave my body somewhere to put some of what I was carrying.

It didn’t make the grief go away. It didn’t solve anything. But there were moments when I could feel
my body beginning to let go of something it had been holding. I could breathe differently. I could
experience a little more space. It was as though my body could participate in the grieving process in
a way that words alone could not.

I continued in chaplaincy, and over the years experienced the deaths of other people I loved.
Chaplaincy was heart-wrenching work, but it was also beautiful work, and I’m deeply grateful for
what it taught me. But eventually I found myself wanting to move toward a different kind of grief
work, one that still allowed me to accompany people through difficult things but might also give me
more opportunities to witness growth, healing, and the ways people find their way toward greater
ease. And so….massage therapy.

The story from Mark that we just heard is actually two stories woven together. There is Jairus, a
religious leader whose daughter is dying, and there is a woman who has been hemorrhaging for
twelve years. Both of them are desperate. Both of them come to Jesus because they have run out of
other options.

The woman has spent years suffering. Mark tells us that she has seen many physicians and spent
everything she has, and instead of getting better, she has gotten worse. She enters the crowd and
reaches out to touch Jesus’ clothing, believing that even that might be enough.

And it is. It’s always interesting to me that Jesus doesn’t just let that healing happen. He stops. He
asks who touched him. Which kind of seems like an odd thing to do. There is literally a crowd
pressing in around him. People are touching him everywhere. His disciples even point out how
strange the question is. But Jesus wants to know who it was.

And eventually the woman comes forward and tells him the whole story. This woman is not simply
a passive recipient of Jesus’ healing power. She takes a risk. She moves through the crowd. She
reaches out. She acts on her own behalf. And then, when Jesus asks, she tells the truth about what
has happened to her. An act of courage.

There is also something interesting in the word Mark uses to describe her illness. The Greek word is
mastix. It can mean a disease or affliction, but it also literally refers to a whip or scourge, the kind of
instrument used in Roman punishment. Matthew and Luke use different language in their versions
of this story.

We can’t know exactly what Mark intended by choosing this particular word. There is a real debate
among scholars about how much this story should be read through the lens of Roman occupation
and how much through Jewish purity practices surrounding menstruation and bodily fluids. I don’t
think we need to settle that question to notice that Mark has chosen a word with a broader meaning
than simply “disease.”

She has been suffering under a kind of scourging. And then Jesus says to her, “Daughter, your faith
has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.” “Go in peace.” This woman has
spent twelve years living with pain, uncertainty, economic loss, social vulnerability, and, very
possibly, exclusion. Jesus doesn’t just tell her that her symptoms are gone. He restores her to a life
she can inhabit.

And then the story immediately turns back to Jairus and his daughter. His daughter has died while
Jesus has been talking with the woman. But Jesus goes to her anyway. He takes her by the hand and
says, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up.” Again, Jesus meets people through their
bodies. He does not heal from a distance. He touches. He is touched. He listens to a woman tell the
truth about her suffering. He takes a dead child by the hand.

What can this teach us about courageous peace witness? It’s easy to talk about peace as though it is
something that exists outside of us: peace between nations, peace in our communities, peace in our
families. And obviously those things matter. But violence and peace are also experienced in bodies.
A casualty number is a body. A refugee statistic is a body. Hunger is experienced in a body. Racism
is experienced in a body. War is experienced in a body. Grief is experienced in a body. Trauma is
experienced in a body.

It is very easy to become abstracted from those realities. We can talk about thousands or millions of
people without ever allowing ourselves to imagine the actual human beings contained within those
numbers. Mark’s story keeps bringing us back to bodies.

Here is a woman who has suffered for twelve years. Here is a father whose daughter is dying. Here
is a girl lying on a bed. And here is Jesus, paying attention to them.

Perhaps peace begins, at least in part, with becoming people who are willing to pay attention to
what is actually in front of us. Not just ideas about people. Not just categories. Not just statistics.
Bodies. Particular people with particular stories. And I think this includes our own body as well.
One of the things I am learning through massage therapy is that the body often knows something
before we have words for it. People come in because something hurts, but the story is rarely only
about the painful muscle. Bodies carry history. They carry habits and injuries and stress. They
adapt. They compensate. They hold tension. And this doesn’t mean that every sensation in our
bodies contains some hidden spiritual truth necessarily. Bodies can be confusing. Bodies get sick.
Bodies experience trauma. Sometimes paying attention to our bodies is difficult because the body
itself has become a place of fear or pain.

So embodied peace must mean something more than simply feeling relaxed. Sometimes our bodies
should be disturbed by what is happening around us. Sometimes anger is an appropriate bodily
response to injustice. Sometimes fear is telling us that something needs our attention.
And so the work is not to become disembodied people who don’t feel those things. But rather to
become people who can stay present enough to notice what is happening in us, without
immediately letting that reaction determine what we do next.

This is part of what I find so meaningful about the practice of massage. It is not really about fixing
someone else’s body. At least I hope it isn’t. It is about paying attention. It is about consent and trust
and listening. It is about creating enough safety for someone to become a little more aware of what
they are carrying. Journalist Liuan Huska writes, “Being fully human is to inhabit the wild mysteries
of our bodies and trust that, because Christ was a body, and still is a body, we don’t need to fear this
place. We can say, it is good, because Christ meets us here.”
Christ meets us here.

In the tired body. In the grieving body. In the body that has survived something. In the body that is
afraid. In the body that is beginning to feel safe again. And if Christ meets us here, then maybe
courageous peace witness also begins here. Maybe it begins with the willingness to inhabit our own
bodies honestly enough to know when we are tired, when we are afraid, when we are carrying grief,
when we are becoming hardened. Maybe it begins with learning to recognize the bodies around us,
especially the people whose suffering has become so familiar that we barely see them anymore.
And sometimes, it might mean having the courage of the woman in Mark’s story: to reach out, to tell
the truth, to advocate for ourselves, to refuse to disappear into the crowd. Sometimes it might mean
being more like Jairus, using whatever position or privilege we have to advocate for someone who
cannot advocate for themselves. And sometimes it means being like Jesus, willing to stop in the
middle of everything else because a person in front of us needs to be heard.

Jesus says to the woman: “Go in peace.” Maybe peace is something we learn to carry in our bodies,
not as a permanent state of calm, but as a way of being present in the world without becoming
disconnected from ourselves or from one another.

Dr. Celeste Snowber, a professor, dancer, poet (and someone I encountered through my dabbling in
dancing during seminary) writes: “May you call your body back to listen to the tenderness and
wildness and everything else in between. May you have the courage to live in such a way that you
are at home in your own skin.”

She reminds us that this is not something that happens once but is a life practice.

So as we think about courageous peace witness. May we keep coming back to our bodies. May we
listen to what they are telling us. May we notice the bodies around us. May we resist the temptation
to turn suffering into abstraction. May we have the courage to reach out when we need help, and
the courage to stop and listen when someone else reaches out to us. And may we become, slowly
and imperfectly, more at home in our own skin, so that we can be more fully present to the people
and the world around us. Because this is the body God chose to inhabit. And these are the bodies
through which we encounter one another, carry our grief, tell the truth, receive care, and practice
peace. Amen.