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For many of us there's a sense that we need to "make things right with God" before we can approach Him. We feel that we have to be made holy first, that we have to be worthy.
John Newton, beloved author of the hymn "Amazing Grace", was one of those people. Newton was a sailor and was involved with the slave trade. Then one day, after just getting freed from his own enslavement, found himself in a storm. Newton was at his wits end, and cried out for help, in desperation, to God. Newton survived, and saw this moment as the beginning of his conversion.
Newton gave up his vices and turned to studying Scripture. However, in spite of his own enslavement, he couldn't quite give up his ties to the slave trade.
Newton claimed he went through many conversions, because he hadn't quite been made whole. And yet, God still called out to Him. God still made the move to get closer to Newton. Though it took years for him to distance himself from slavery and tell the horrors that slave traders were doing to these people, God still reached out, to the point of calling Newton to become a priest.
God didn't wait for John Newton to be ready. Newton didn't have to become holy first. God reached out to him and then Newton went through the slow transition of being made whole.
In our Gospel this morning, we hear the story of a woman suffering from a hemorrhage, for 12 years we're told. Under the Jewish law, she would have been considered unclean. She would have been unable to take part in religious life.
Along comes Jesus, the great healer, and she thinks if she can just touch His clothes, not Him, but His clothes, she'll be made whole.
Our expectation might be that God would smite her down for this. We might expect that she might burst into flame our combust spontaneously. After all, nothing unclean can touch God.
The opposite happens. The woman is made whole. Her hemorrhage which had afflicted her for over a decade, which was often made worse by the doctors trying to help her, just went away.
God doesn't expect us to be clean before we approach Him. He wants us to come to Him just as we are, both physically and spiritually. After all, who else can heal us than Him.
We worry so much about being in the right state, about being ritually clean, in order to approach God. This woman was not, by Jewish customs, ritual clean, and yet she approached God, and God in turn approaches her and marvels at her faith. She makes the first step towards Him, and Jesus takes her first steps to come into relationship with her.
The lesson here is that we don't have to be perfect or clean to approach God because nothing unclean can dirty God and so all things unclean that come to Him are made clean once again.
Don't fret over where you are in your life. God wants you to come, just as you are. After all, He took in Peter who denied Him and Paul who was killing the members of Christ's Body, the church. In Lewis' Dawn Treader, which we've been discussing here in church for the past month, Eustice doesn't have to be perfect before Aslan comes to him. In fact, he is at his lowest when Aslan comes to him. We don't have to be perfect before we approach God because He will do the work to make us so.
That doesn't mean we just accept things as they are. Newton didn't, not in himself and not in the world. We are meant to strive to be better. We just don't have to hold off greeting God until we do so.
What we are called to do is to rejoice in the healing that Jesus Christ provides in our souls. We are called to sing about how Amazing His Grace is, right along with John Newton and all our fellow sinners in this world. We are called to let God into our imperfect lives so that He can heal us and make us whole once again.