Dear Spencer,

Congratulations on your baptism, which we celebrated just a few minutes ago.  

It represents the beginning of your life as a Christian, and it’s a special day for the adults who love you best. 

Your birthday is special in its own way, of course. 

It’s a day to celebrate the simple wonder of your arrival.  

By contrast, your baptism is a day to name and honor what we hope your life will mean.  

Don’t worry when we say that – most of what your life will mean will be yours to discover and develop.  

With so many gifted musicians in your life, you don’t need to worry about people keeping track of one another, and reminding anyone who might need reminding that you have to find your own voice in this world…to make your own song.  

Baptism doesn’t just mean that we hope you will come to find God in your life.  

It represents our hope that you’ll find yourself in God’s life—that who you understand yourself to be will be grounded in the ongoing presence of God in the world.  

Our hope is that you’ll see your own story as part of that even greater story enfolding all of us and all Creation, and that you’ll find the meaning of who you are and what you do within that greater story.  

If you learn to hold yourself accountable to the ways you add to it, and also accountable the ways you might be taking away from it, you are sure to be a force for good, not only in the lives of those who are nearest and dearest to you, but well beyond. 

As for us, having you reminds us to make sure we do that, too. 

Now that you’re here, we have a much greater stake in the future—in where this story goes from here. 

Your impact has already begun.  

Now, if you were listening carefully, you might have heard a story that didn’t sound all that cheery for a joyous occasion.  

The outcome is happy: two healings take place. 

But they come on the far side of tremendous worry. 

Let’s set this up for a moment. 

First, there’s the healing of the woman in the middle of the crowd pressing in all around Jesus who reaches out to touch his cloak. 

Then there’s the healing of the little girl whose father, Jairus, is the president of their local synagogue. 

You’ve heard how the gospel writer Mark artfully weaves them together.  

We start with Jairus asking for help, and Jesus starts to follow, but then everything stops as Jesus encounters the woman, and then after that, he goes to Jairus’ house and heals his daughter.  

Mark doesn’t usually get a lot of points for being an artful writer—for example, he writes in Greek, but I’ve been told that he doesn’t do it all that well—so it’s nice to lift up a story of his that shows a little more literary technique than usual.  

He also tucks in a strange coincidence, of sorts…a random detail…that I’m guessing most people probably zoom right past. 

In fact, I’ll tell you what: let’s make it a quiz. 

Raise your hand if you caught the detail of how long Mark says that the woman in the crowd has been sick.  

How long? 

O.k…so there’s a part two to this test.  Double Jeopardy, where the scores can really change.    

Let’s jump to the part of the story where Jesus heals Jairus’ daughter, telling her, “talitha cum,” which is Aramaic for “Little girl, get up.” 

How old does Mark say she is?

It’s a wonderful detail that Mark does not particularly embellish or explain. 

He just sort of parks it there.  

But I think it’s another way that he’s weaving these two stories together.  

Think about what the last twelve years have been like for Jairus and his wife.  

The birth of a child. Her first steps.  

I remember when Grace first switched from milk in mommy’s lap to eating glop in her high chair, and we called everyone we knew to share the exciting news that she’d tried strained peas and liked them.  

Jairus was a prominent man, and the family would have been a public sort of family, but like any family, so much of their life would have been anchored by those milestones of a child getting older, learning to do things on her own, moving from playing to helping as she swiftly approached young womanhood. 

That’s what these twelve years have mostly been. 

But then one day, the bottom falls out.  

Overnight, his daughter gets sick.  Right away, it’s bad.   

Everything changes.  

Of course, for the woman who’s been bleeding, the last twelve years have been very different.  

It’s been a slower, yet unrelenting process of trying to get better, without success.  

Many doctors will admit that medicine can be an art as much as it is a science – that bodies decide for themselves which medicines and treatments will work, and how much of anything is too much or too little. 

We know this, too.  

Even with access to the best medicine in the history of the world, most of here know how challenging it can be to get it and keep it just right.  

For this woman, the milestones of her last twelve years are a medicine cabinet full of those little orange bottles, and a dining room table covered in bills, and a bevy of doctors shaking their heads and saying sorry but there’s nothing more they can do.  

By this point, the people in her life seem to have left her to fend or fall all by herself.

So for Jairus, it’s been twelve good years suddenly swept away by a crisis that’s almost certainly far worse than any possible sickness of his own, or even the thought of losing his own life. 

For the woman, it’s been twelve years of collapsing in slow motion, watching the life she knew gradually peel away.   

However they’ve gotten here, whatever the road has been, here they both are, looking at Jesus as their one last hope.  

And I think part of what Mark wants us to see is simply how vulnerability is a great equalizer.  

Whoever they thought themselves to be in the world, whatever role they decided they were going to play (or found themselves playing) in front of whatever audience, that’s all gone.  

They’ve come to a moment when it’s just them and God.    

Whatever their stories were before, those stories have come to an end.  

But God’s story hasn’t come to an end.  

And as these two people come before Jesus, they soon come to understand that they are being invited into God’s story. 

It’s striking to me that their desperation is so public, and yet their healing is so private.  

I think that’s because the people around them don’t have the compassion to acknowledge that desperation. 

Because they don’t, they don’t receive the gift of seeing God’s healing at work.  

God’s story offers us a better way to live. 

In the moments when our luck runs out and the well runs dry, we see so clearly what has always been right before us: the love and presence of God, with arms wide open, eager to fold us in. 

Spencer, in baptizing you today, we lift you into that same love and presence.  

We hope to teach you to live with open arms and open eyes.  

And may we all learn to live with compassion, to see with gratitude, and to sing our song with gusto. 

Amen.