In his book, Adversity Quotient @ Work, Paul Stoltz says that the average person faces 23 adversities or stressful incidents each day, up from 7 per day ten years ago. “These may be small frustrations occurring at home or the office, or stressful incidents commuting between the two. But coming at the rate of more than one per waking hour, cumulatively they add to the general stress levels.”

Stoltz is a financial advisor who knows that many of these stresses are about money, and believes his philosophy of investing can improve our capacity to weather life’s stresses.

I’m interested in this mostly for the odd idea that you should count your adversities. Christians believe in counting your blessings, many of which are the result of Christ’s helping us through adversity. Let’s don’t make a bigger deal out of hardship than of victory!

Consider this week’s Old Testament reading, Deuteronomy 8:11–20. As God speaks to his people through Moses, the adversities includes slavery,thirst in the desert, snakes and scorpions, and hunger in the desert.

Nevertheless, God brought them out of Egyptian slavery, led them through the great and terrifying wilderness, provided water and food, and has now given them good houses, exploding flocks, and prosperity in silver and gold. Their blessing-quotient is so far off the scale that he has to warn them against saying, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth” (v 17).

This reading is suitable to the theme for our Sunday worship service, “The Church’s Confidence in Christ,” which continues our post-Pentecost emphasis on the church as a believing and worshipping community.

All the same, it’s true that life is stressful for us, and we don’t need an adversity meter to prove it.

Code Blue and Chronic Care.

The New Testament reading, Mark 5:21–43, has adversities of its own. In it a father with a code blue emergency involving his daughter has to stand by while a chronic care sufferer takes up Jesus’ time. The two events happened one inside the other, and Mark’s account of them nests the second story (vs24b–34) inside the first (vs 21–24a, 35–43).

The father is a synagogue official named Jairus, and his 12-year-old daughter is dying; he tries to bring Jesus back to his house to heal her. The chronically ill is a woman has suffered for 12 years from a flow of blood, probably one that began when she was about 12; under Jewish law, she is “unclean,” and should not even be in a public place (see Leviticus 15:25–30). Her condition has continued without let-up, and Jesus heals her.

The maddening thing is that Jesus stops to help her, while the little girl fades into death. Only later does Jesus reach the family’s home, where he restores the little girl to life. His words to her in the Aramaic language have been preserved in the gospel: “Talitha cum” (v 41). Mark tells us this means “little girl, get up,” but in fact the Aramaic talitha means “lamb,” a word used for any young person, male or female, and especially a young girl (Think of “lambkin.”) These words would have been understood by any Palestinian, and have been remembered in their original form.

We’ll take up this embedded pair of stories in order to think about our confidence in Christ as we ourselves face adversity.

Chronic Care = Life.

Chronic Care speaks to us of Christ’s ability to sustain us in all the besetting circumstances that shame us and keep us from activity for him in our world. This includes our vulnerability to temptation, the frailty of our very humanity, and those besetting weaknesses that cause us grief and failure. As he detected the woman in her anonymity and healed her publicly, he can master our shame by his power, and return us to our groups as a public witness.

In your hearts enthrone him, let him there subdue
All that is not holy, all that is not true.
Take him as your captain, in temptation’s hour
Let his will enfold you in its light and power (Caroline Noel).

Code Blue = Death.

I believe that Code Blue speaks to us of the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. The daughter’s raising is a figure of Christ’s (and our) passage through death into the new existence God creates. The reason for thinking this is the language used in the story. Two examples. • Jesus said that the child was sleeping, frequently used of death in the Bible, and especially in 1 Corinthians 15:20 where Paul says, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” • The bystanders “laughed at” Jesus (v 40), as did the Athenians when Paul preached the resurrection (Acts 17:32).

Incidentally, the personal name Jairus appears to me to be based on the Hebrew verb ya`ir, which means “he stirs up, he wakes (someone) up.” For example, the prophet Zechariah says, “The angel who talked with me came again and woke me, like a man who is awakened out of his sleep” (4:1). A name embodying that verb is very suitable to the Code Blue story, and is consistent with my interpretation of it as pointing to the resurrection.

The Embedded Stories.

To embed Chronic Care within Code Blue • tells us that even in life we are surrounded by death. It may come suddenly and and to someone too young, or it may delay. Even the woman who was healed will eventually die; and however long death is in coming, it surely arrives. President Reagan finally died. At some Jewish weddings, amid all the joy, there is the breaking of a glass goblet. In the midst of life, we are in death.

• It tells us that in our daily adversities, be they three or 23, we are surrounded with the hope of God’s final power over death. We draw strength to live Christ’s life within earthly stress from knowledge of God’s power and long plan. • It also tells us that the ultimate healing of our besetting humanity lies beyond earthly life and time, in the resurrection of the body to new and greater usefulness in God’s good other world.

(I have drawn information on Paul Stolz from an article by Jonathan Chevreau in the Financial Post May 22, 2004, p IN5.)

This Sunday’s Service.

In our opening hymn, we sing a rhymed version of Psalm 95, using the well-known tune “Darwall”—a rousing beginning of sung praise. The acclamations of praise emphasize Christ as the one who delivers us—“He touched me” and “Now I belong to Jesus.” The pulpit hymn is, “Heal us, Immanuel, hear our prayer”—words by John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace,” with the tune “Beatitudo.” We’ll close with the familiar Irish tune, “Danny Boy,” and the uplifting words of William Fullerton, “I cannot tell why he whom angels worship should come in flesh as prophets long foretold.”

Our Workcamp gang will be leaving for Harrodsburg, KY, in a week, and we’ll send them off this Sunday with a short liturgy of commissioning following the sermon.