By Father Casey

In the gospel this weekend we’ll hear a great story sandwiched between another great story. The bookends feature Jesus raising a young girl from the dead. Many months before the more famous raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus first demonstrated his remarkable power with this unnamed daughter of a Jewish leader named Jairus.

In the middle of that story, Mark includes another story revealing Jesus’ power. It’s about another unnamed woman, who “had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.” Having spent all her money on doctors, she suffered destitution in addition to the constant bleeding. Further compounding her suffering was the religious ostracization she had to endure: her condition made her perpetually unclean, which meant she couldn’t enter the temple or take part in any religious rituals, and neither could her family and friends touch her or even sit in a chair where she had sat.

The sequence of events in the story is important. Jesus ultimately heals both of them, but the woman whom society dismissed and despised – whose presence in the crowd that day, if discovered, would have almost certainly caused outrage and backlash – is the first to receive Jesus’ miraculous power. The whole story is a manifestation of the themes of Jesus’ ministry: his grace and mercy abound for all, but his priority is upon those who are typically overlooked and neglected, the “poor in spirit.” She who has always been last and least is healed first.

One of the great calls of the Christian faith and life is to see the world like Jesus, and allow our priorities to be reshaped in emulation of his priorities. In my experience, the ability to see the world in this way is dramatically hard, even when we make up our mind that we want such sight. The desire to see all the unnamed women in our midst – the ones our society overlooks and neglects, who have suffered under oppressive laws and cruel social customs – is much easier than the work it takes to actually see them and respond to their plights. Jesus is remarkable because he not only notices, but he also responds. He not only feels sorry for the suffering he sees; he acts to heal it.

Over the next few weeks, we will bid farewell to two people from our staff who have showed us how to emulate Christ’s compassion. Deacon Ginny and Dana Jean have been holy examples to us of what it looks like to not only feel bad for the suffering of the world, but to dedicate your life to responding to it. They have been constantly on the lookout for the unnamed women in our midst, the ones who are too often overlooked or despised, and done all they could to answer those needs and invite the rest of us to help, too. They both possess a faith much like the unnamed woman in the story: brave and eager, ready to go straight to the Lord and touch the hem of his robe in full confidence that he has power to save.

It is fitting that Deacon Ginny will be our preacher this weekend, and her final weekend with us will be July 3 and 4. In July, she will begin serving and inspiring a new community just down the road, St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church. Then in two weeks (July 10 and 11), we will say farewell to Dana Jean, as she leaves to begin an exciting new chapter of life at Virginia Theological Seminary in preparation, we hope, to one day be ordained. I give thanks for the time we’ve had these servant leaders among us, and all the ways they’ve helped our church see and be more like Jesus. I hope you’ll help us send them off with our love and gratitude. If you’ve been blessed by their leadership, consider writing a note of thanks, or donating to the purses we’re collecting for each of them. And remember to pray, that following the example of Ginny and Dana, we may have grace to see as Jesus sees, and the will to love as Jesus loves.