5A Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 Interruptions, June 11, 2023
It is five o’clock Friday afternoon at Children’s Hospital. A young child with vague symptoms presents to the radiology department, just as I am almost out the door to go home after a long week. A routine ultrasound shows a large abdominal mass that most assuredly is cancer, the bad kind. I try to tell the mom we need more tests, walk them to the Emergency Department to her pediatric resident and staff, and suggest next steps./ The patient who presents at five o’clock on Friday routinely has a serious illness. Their mother has just gotten off work and notices something wrong when she hugs her. My day at the hospital is extended. I soon learn in my medical practice to pay attention to these interruptions. Another physician who calls or comes to see me usually has something more important than the issue I am working on. I hope I was as available to medical students, but probably not always.
I identify with one of Henri Nouwen’s stories.
While visiting the University of Notre Dame, he meets with an older professor./ As they stroll the campus, the professor tells him with a certain melancholy, “You know, my whole life, I have been complaining that my work is constantly interrupted/ until I finally discovered that my interruptions were my work.”1
Living a life of interruptions is not easy. I always have a to-do list, like most of you. I rarely get through it. There was a time in my practice, as I became more successful, when my thoughts began to be filled with hubris. “I am a very important doctor. I need someone to screen these interruptions. I will call them back at my convenience.” I soon learn I miss opportunities to help or heal or learn more crucial information about a child I am evaluating if I don’t stop to listen.///
Jesus’ life is one of constant interruptions. I don’t know how he does it.
Today we hear one more story of the constant daily intrusions into his life./ Our story starts out with Jesus interrupting Matthew as he sits at his tax booth.
The Pharisees then ungraciously interrupt their dinner by critically asking the disciples why Jesus eats with sinners and tax collectors. Note they make triangles/ and do not ask Jesus directly. But Jesus hears them and interrupts their triangulation, suggesting their clock is wound up backward. He quotes words from the prophet Hosea that we just heard (6:6). Jesus’ mission is to heal wounds, show mercy, and forgive sins, not minister to those who think they are well.
While Jesus tries to finish the best meal he has had all week, he is suddenly interrupted again by a synagogue leader. He kneels before him, pleading that his daughter has died. “Come and lay hands on her, and she will live.” Jesus instantly leaves the table to go with him. Then suddenly, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years interrupts their abortive journey by touching the fringe of his cloak. Jesus turns around and heals her. “Take heart, daughter. Your faith has healed you.” Jesus then interrupts the customary paid mourners around the dead child’s home and interrupts the young girl’s “sleep” as he takes her by the hand/ and brings her back to the living./
Jesus meets people where they are, living or dead, not where he is. He operates in the present moment. No call waiting or call back later or make an appointment.
Again, how does he do it? He gets help. He has at least twelve followers. But after their three-year residency, they don’t seem ready to take their specialty boards./
We never hear about Jesus’ weekend vacations to recharge. We do hear about his attempts to sleep on boat rides, but he is again interrupted. But he does like to eat, always at other people’s homes. He reinforces how meals build relationships. Food nourishes and changes our bodies, but also nourishes relationships in some way that is not the same as simply sitting together around a table and talking./ Today, we also hear that Jesus eats with sinners like ourselves./
How does Jesus heal in these constant interruptions?
Miracle stories always produce more questions than answers.
Jesus touches, especially outcasts. His interaction is personal. His presence may be something like what I have experienced with a handful of people in my lifetime. When you talk with them, you feel like you are the only person in the room. You have their total attention. You begin to live in the present moment with them.
How does Jesus have the energy to do all this without a break in these constant interruptions?
Look more closely at the healing stories. Does Jesus say, “I have healed you?” Today it is “your faith has made you well.”
What about raising the child from death? Was it the faith of her father that brought about the miracle? Jesus never mentions for people to let others know that he, the great Physician, performs the miracle.
Jesus models that he is so connected to God, the Father, that he has become a channel of God’s power to love and heal each person he meets, whatever he is doing.//
We are now aware that this resurrected Christ is also within us. This is huge. That power of love and healing is now within us.
How does Jesus stay connected to this love and healing power? We know how this happens. There are almost thirty verses in the New Testament where Jesus goes off to a quiet place and prays./ When I tire of the interruptions in my life, I know this is a true sign that I am not connected to God’s love, particularly in my prayer life. I must stop and reboot my rule of life.
My experience is that I have an agenda, but I am slowly, often painfully, learning that God continually meets me in the interruptions in my life that are not on my schedule. When I ignore a call from a friend or family member when I think I am too busy to talk, this is a sure sign that I am in trouble, losing priority of what life is all about. Interruptions are like stop or yield signs to go off script and listen for a grace note. Nouwen calls them opportunities for hospitality and novel experiences. When I return to a project after an interruption, I usually have fresh ideas. But that false notion keeps speaking in my ear that if I stop, I will lose my creativity or train of thought./
Interruptions remind us of how powerless we are. If we think we are in charge, interruptions remind us this is a myth. When I seal myself off and refuse to respond to anything but what is on my schedule, I become exponentially isolated. My world, my God, becomes too small. I become the center of the universe and fossilized. That is when I develop that high hubris titer./
When we are open to the interruptions in our lives, we begin to see miracles happening all around us, in medicine, in recovery groups,/ healing, which interrupts lives when all seems hopeless. Those desperately caught in an addiction go into recovery. A child or adult survives an infectious disease like tuberculosis, diphtheria,/ or cancer that would have killed them fifty, ten, or five years ago. The child I first meet on a Friday at five,/today has a chance.
Interruptions always bring us back to live in the present moment, where God likes to abide. We become aware of what is happening directly around us in our life,/ instead of living into what is going on in our heads in the past or future.
One last story reminds us about the power of God’s love, the resurrected Christ within us that we now share when we live into the interruptions presented to us in our surroundings,/ living like Jesus in the present moment where miracles happen./ The resurrected Christ within us/ in each present moment/ reaffirms the incarnation,/ the Word made flesh./ We now connect to the presence of the Divine Risen One in our body.
Richard Selzer, distinguished Yale surgeon, wrote in his book Mortal Lessons about operating on a young woman with a cancerous growth on her cheek. Unfortunately, he must cut the nerve controlling the muscles of her mouth.
Looking at her misshapen mouth in the mirror, she asks him, “Will this always be this way?” He replies, “Yes.” /She then nods and lies there quietly.
But her young husband quickly bends over her,/ smiles/ and says, /“I like it.”
Then he shapes his mouth to hers/ and kisses her to show that their kiss still works./ Selzer writes that in that brief moment, he is looking through an open window into the healing presence of the living God.
And, of course, he is. Because the work of the Great Physician comes to us in the twisted shapes and interruptions in our lives/ to shape his love/ to fit us/ and to pour/ his love into us.// May this healing power be yours.2
1 Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Image Books, 1975), p. 52.
2Samuel T. Lloyd III in “The Miracle of Healing,” a sermon at The National Cathedral, February 8, 2009.
Joanna Seibert https://www.joannaseibert.com/