The Fourth Church Pulpit

THE POWER OF A NAME

November 26, 1995

John M. Buchanan

Who am I?

Who am I?
They mock me,
these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am,
Thou knowest, O God,

I am thine.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH

A LIGHT IN THE CITY

126 East Chestnut Street Chicago IL 60611-2094
Phone: (312) 787-4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

The Nameless Woman in Luke 8

When I pushed through the crowd,

jostled, bumped, elbowed by the curious

who wanted to see what everyone else

was so excited about,

all I could think of was my pain

and that perhaps if I could touch him,

this man who worked miracles,

cured diseases,

even those as foul as mine,

I might find relief.

I was tired from hurting,

exhausted, revolted by my body,

unfit for any man, and yet not let loose

from desire and need. I wanted to rest,

to sleep without pain or filthiness or torment.
I don’t really know why

I thought he could help me

when all the doctors

with all their knowledge

had left me still drained

and bereft of all that makes

a woman's life worth living.

Well: I’d seen him with some children

and his laughter was quick and merry

and reminded me of when I was young and well,
though he looked tired; and he was as old as I am.
Then there was that leper,

but lepers have been cured before —

No, it wasn’t the leper, or the man cured of palsy,
or any of the other stories of miracles,

or at any rate that was the least of it;

Thad been promised miracles too often.

I saw him ahead of me in the crowd

and there was something in his glance

and in the way his hand rested briefly

on the matted head of a small boy

who was getting in everybody’s way,

and I knew that if only I could get to him,
not to bother him, you understand,

not to interrupt, or to ask him for anything,
not even his attention,

just to get to him and touch him...

I didn’t think he’d mind, and he needn’t even know.
I pushed through the crowd

and it seemed that they were deliberately
trying to keep me from him.

I stumbled and fell and someone stepped
on my hand and I cried out

and nobody heard. I crawled to my feet
and pushed on and at last I was close,

so close I could reach out

and touch with my fingers

the hem of his garment.

Have you ever been near

when lightning struck?

I was, once, when I was very small

and a summer storm came without warning
and lightning split the tree

under which I had been playing

and I was flung right across the courtyard.
That's how it was.

Only this time I was not the child

but the tree

and the lightning filled me.

He asked, “Who touched me?”

and people dragged me away, roughly,

and the men around him were angry at me.

“Who touched me?” he asked.

I said, “I did, Lord,”

So that he might have the lightning back
which I had taken from him when I touched
his garment’s hem.

He looked at me and I knew then

that only he and I knew about the lightning.
He was tired and emptied

but he was not angry.

He looked at me

and the lightning returned to him again,
though not from me, and he smiled at me
and I knew that I was healed.

Then the crowd came between us

and he moved on, taking the lightning with him,
perhaps to strike again.

(L'Engle, Madeline, The Irrational Season, pp. 125-126]

Scripture
Luke 1:57-66
Luke 8:40-56

“He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well.’”
Luke 8:48 (NRSV)

She has no name, this woman who boldly interrupts Jesus while he is on an urgent mission. She is an
interruption to the main story which is about Jairus, a man with a name and a title — leader of the synagogue.
Everyone knows Jairus. He is respected, admired. He also has a very sick 12-year-old daughter. In fact, she is dying
and so jairus does what any parent would do: he has heard about Jesus healing the sick, finds him, falls at his feet,
begs him to come to his sick daughter.

Jesus agrees to go. The crowd which had come out to welcome him is pressing in on him with understandable
concern, anticipation and, of course, curiosity as the entourage heads for Jairus’ house.

And then this urgent mission is interrupted, brought to a halt. A nameless woman somehow manages to squeeze
through the crowd and coming up from behind, not facing him, but behind, discreetly, quietly, secretly reaches out,
touches his garment — just the fringe.

Who was she — this presumptuous woman with no name?

She was, in a sense, an ultimate outsider, a quintessential nobody, She had no name because her culture had
decided that she was a non-person. She had suffered, Luke says, from hemorrhages for twelve years. That delicate,
clinical detail is important because in her culture her physical condition has rendered her unfit for human contact of
any kind. Her condition is described in the Book of Leviticus, the third book of the Law, the 15th chapter, the 25th
verse, as impurity, uncleanness — in her case permanently, for twelve years. There were ritual, social, personal
implications. Everything she touched was unclean. Anyone who touched anything she touched — her bed, her
cloak, the bowl she ate from — was unclean. She was, by reason of her physical condition, an ultimate pariah. A
normal relationship with a man was out of the question. If she had a family, they could have nothing to do with her.
In all probability she lived alone.

This is who interrupts Jesus on his way to deal with an urgent crisis involving the daughter of a prominent citizen
ofthe community. The contrasts could not be more dramatic: a man with name recognition — a woman with no
hame; a man with a title, a position — a woman who is unfit, unclean, untouchable.

The legal and social dimensions of this brief encounter are that Jesus becomes contaminated and unclean when
she touches the fringe of his robe. The law is clear. He is unclean and he must stop what he is doing, bathe in water,
wash his clothes and remove himself from contact with the community until sundown. This is becoming a major
problem: there is a sick little girl waiting; Jesus is now unclean. So she’s trembling and falling down in humility,
now utterly exposed. She tells her story and Jesus, in one of the most revolutionary sentences in the context of that
culture — that time — says: “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

And then, now virtually unclean himself, he resumes his original mission, goes to Jairus’ house in spite of the fact
that the little girl has already died; reassures her parents, takes the girl by the hand, orders her to get up, which she
does, directs her parents to give her something to eat.

There is something very important going on in this story which has implications and ramifications beyond the
scope of the particular characters.

New Testament scholars help us see beneath the surface of this text. Marcus Borg says that Jesus has chosen the
occasion to speak a word which has very real political and social meanings. Jesus, Borg says, when he deals with
this woman, and, essentially ignores her uncleanliness, is engaging in civil disobedience, challenging the very basic
organizing principle of life for his people and their culture. That principle, described in infinitesimal detail in the

11/26/95 -1-

Old Testament, is called the Holiness Code. Holiness is based on purity. It defines all of life, assigns a place for

everything and every person and every experience. It served Israel well for many centuries. Everyone knew that the
purity laws were the reason Israel had survived. ~

What is going on in this story, and consistently in the teaching and ministry of Jesus, is a direct challenge to the

Holiness Code and an intentional substitution of another organizing principle for holiness/purity, namely
compassion. Borg writes:

“In the message and activity of Jesus, we see an alternative social vision: "Whereas purity
divides and excludes, compassion unites and includes.’ Compassion for Jesus was political.”
iMeeting Jesus Again for the First Time, pp. 48, 53, 58)

Walter Brueggemann agrees that there is a political challenge here, but the story is also about deeply personal
conversion. Jesus is inviting the woman to change the way she thinks about herself; to abandon the old “script” and
imagine a new one. That's what religion is for, Brueggemann teaches. The children of Israel in bondage know
themselves to be captives, slave labor, until they hear a word from God that assures them that the script is wrong.
They are not slaves; they are God’s children and therefore free. The woman in the story lives by a script which says
she is unclean, dirty, unfit, guilty, until she hears a redeeming word that says “you are whole,” and her life literally is
saved.

The word for that, says Brueggemann, is “conversion”: the moment when a person abandons the old script, hears
a word from God and says “Yes, this is who I am — a son/daughter of God. Now I have a new name.” [Theology
Today, October 1995]

Names are part of the script. Names are powerful. They define us, how we think about ourselves, and how we
live our lives. When a newborn life is in danger, parents often feel the need to give the baby a name, almost as if
giving a name is giving life.

Madeleine LEngle says somewhere that her name, Madeleine, is her personal possession and she doesn’t like it
when strangers use it before she has consented to that level of intimacy. I’m always taken aback a bit when the
person on the other end of the line, who doesn’t know me, uses my first name:

“Whom may I say is calling?”

“John Buchanan.”

“He'll be with you in a minute, John.”
“Wait a minute; we’ve never even met.”

Or the easy intimacy of telemarketing. The phone rings at 9:50 p.m.: “Hi, John, you can order the Tribune for
three months at half price ...” Or in the mail, “Mr John Buchanan has been selected to be a winner of the Reader's
Digest Sweepstakes ...” One of the saddest duties I ever had to perform was to come home from work and explain the
facts of life to a fifth-grader who had received a notice that he had just won eight million dollars from Reader's Digest
— with his own name on it.

The elderly, when they put themselves in the care of retirement homes, sometimes experience a loss of identity.
And part of it is the easy use of their first names by staff persons a third their age who address them as Mary or Bea or
worse yet, “honey” or “sweetie.”

I love the story William Willimon tells about his mother, a woman in her eighties, who had received a letter from
her church which began “Dear Sarah” and was signed “Tom.” She called Willimon, Chaplain at Duke University,
and told him about this peculiar piece of mail. “I don’t know anyone well enough down there anymore who can call ;
me by my first name. And I don’t know a Tom.” Her son patiently explained that the church hada new computer ~
and was trying to be more personal by using first names, and that Tom was actually The Reverend Thomas D. Smith,
her pastor. “My mother was not amused,” Willimon reported.

11/26/95 -2-

Names are powerful. They are part of the script that defines us. When we have no name, we have no self, ina
sense. Some names we have been called can be demeaning, oppressive. Think of the names we use to hurt: fatty —
dumb — stupid — idiot — kike — nigger — spic.

In his powerful book about the children of the South Bronx, Amazing Grace, Jonathan Kozol describes life in the
poorest neighborhood in the country. It’s not an easy book to read. Kozol’s thesis is that American society generally,
and New York City specifically, conspires to keep its poorest, weakest, sickest isolated in ghettoes where chances for
escape are very slim and where all the reasons people live there in the first place get worse. Ghetto people — simply
because of where they live — get sicker, weaker, poorer, and society becomes more resolved to preserve the isolation.

As a result of this dynamic there is a modern plague running rampant through the ghetto, a catastrophe that has
no real analogy in our nation. 10,000 children in the South Bronx have lost their mothers to AIDS. By the year 2000,
HIV infected mothers will have 32,000 to 38,000 HIV infected children. At this very moment we are seriously
proposing reducing available public funds for public health care, public hospitals, and a whole variety of systems
desperately trying to cope with this complicated plague, and we are looking at a nightmare, worse than anything that
has ever happened in this nation, a kind of ultimate denial that those people even exist.

It is a grim topic in a very grim book and when it becomes too much for him, Kozol says he tries to find a reason to
visit the elementary school where the children he is studying and interviewing attend. He writes:

“When I look through my notes after a day like this, I'm often fascinated by the names of
many of the young black children I have met ... Some are African names, as well as poetically
invented names that have an African sound, Shaneeka, Jowanda, Kadeesha. Increasingly,
biblical names have become popular.”

The names symbolize a wish to mark a new departure from the bitterness or sorrow of the past. Kozol recalls
African-American children named Charity, Prudence, Felicity and Easter — whose mother said, “She was born in
spring and I was prayin’ for a better life,”

In one of the poorest homes he found a child named Precious. When he asked how the name was chosen, her
mother said: “When I was pregnant, I said to God, ‘I want a pretty little girl who has long hair, and I don’t want no
dummy.’ He gave me exactly what I ordered ... You got to be specific. One time I asked God for a handsome man
and that’s exactly what I got — handsome and nothin’ else. No brains, no money, no religion. So said next time I
got to be specific.” Precious.

Another little one is called Blessing. “I have the highest hopes for her,” her grandmother said. [p. 193-203]
The power of a name.

One day a nameless woman made her way through a crowd and got close enough to Jesus to reach out and touch
him. What do you suppose made her do that? Don’t you suppose that she had run out of other options, that the
position her culture and religion put her in gave her no choices other than disguising herself in the anonymity ofa
crowd, hoping against hope that a chance encounter, just a touch of his robe, might somehow make a difference and
break through the socially and religiously mandated barrier that condemned her to live in a hell of isolation and
shame?

One thing was certain: she couldn’t face him, couldn’t approach him face to face as other people were doing,
couldn’t simply walk up and say, “Rabbi, I have a problem and I hope you will help me,” as Jairus did. Religious law
and social custom would not allow her to get that close. Religion and tradition already condemned her.

And so it was a powerful moment when, from out of the crowding, pressing throng of people, her hand brushed

his garment, and the power that went out of him was none other than the power of God, the power of creation that
hovers over formless chaos and creates a world out of nothing, the power that converges with human love and

11/26/95 -3-

passion to create new life: the power that here breaks through a cruel social and religious barrier and creates a new
person. The woman was healed, and did you notice, she receives a name — a name as powerful as “Precious” or
“Blessing”? Jesus said: “Daughter, Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

There are a lot of people like her, I think, maybe even you: following Jesus from a distance, looking on wistfully as
he does apparently wonderful things for other people. And what keeps many people away is what kept her away: a
name, a conclusion reinforced over the years that you are not good enough for religion, that you are not acceptable,
that you have never lived up to the expectations others had for you and you adopted therefore as your own, and so
you have made a very bad bargain with life to live ina lonely isolation, never getting close to anyone, never walking
up to Jesus or anyone else for that matter, and asking for help, because you know you are not good enough.

Maybe, like her, organized religion has turned you off and turned you away. Maybe it was the church that told
you you don’t measure up, you are not welcome or acceptable. Maybe, like her, your isolation is a result of observing
religious people construct barriers around the good news of God's grace until it seems, at least, that they have
concluded that they own it and have the right to distribute it to whomever they decide is acceptable.

There are reasons to believe that this isolated woman is no stranger in our world. Malcolm Boyd wrote a
collection of prayers a number of years ago which became a means of grace for many of us, Are You Running With
Me, Jesus? “I wasn’t going to get lonely any more, and so I kept very busy, telling myself I was serving you. But it’s
getting dark again, and I’m alone: honestly Lord, I'm lonely as hell. Take hold of me, Jesus.” Ip. 14]

For centuries, Christian people have been engaged in a theological conversation about grace, about how it is we
finally encounter the reality of God’s love in Jesus Christ. Is it our initiative or is it God’s? Is our search, our longing,
our reaching out stimulated by God's spirit? Is our search actually God's search for us? That important conversation
has been going on for centuries and many of us could add a chapter or two out of our own experience. But, do notice
that this woman has to, in some way, get herself to a place where she can touch Jesus — which for her is a moment of _
shattering power. She has to reach out and in the reaching make herself accessible to God’s powerful, redeeming,
re-creating love. She has to reach out in order for grace to touch her.

And that is what I invite you to do this morning.

It may mean deciding to do something unlikely — like joining this Church.

It may mean deciding simply to come back to try it again next Sunday.

It may mean going home and stepping forward and joining a Christian church wherever you are.

It may mean simply going home to those who love you and care about you and whose grace you need to be whole.

It may mean deciding to tutor a child, or spend an evening in jail, or cook a meal, or write a check.

It may mean starting all over again.

l invite you, in whatever way is appropriate, to reach out your hand across whatever barrier keeps you away from
the help, the love, the grace you need.

When you do, you will hear your name — Daughter — Son — Child of God.

Amen,

11/26/95 _4-