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A family tested and love leads the way
SAN ANTONIO — It started with a simple DNA test.
Genealogy is an interest of Pam Branum's. She can trace her roots from Spain to across the West: Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. She even traveled to Spain with her daughter, Annie, in 2012 to follow this history. The two had already taken their own tests through the site 23andMe. With husband John's results, she could complete the family circle.
"That's weird," she thought as she looked at John's page.
She had expected to see Annie's photo, just as she did on her own page. But there was no link between her husband and daughter.
"My stomach dropped," she said. "And I just thought, 'Oh, my goodness.' And knowing what we went through to get her. We had gone to the clinic. So, you know that somewhere along the line, you know there is a possibility for error. You never imagined it could be you."
The clinic was a now-closed fertility lab with the University of Utah, one the Branums used in 1991.
It was 4:15 p.m. on Oct. 25, 2012. John was upstairs taking a nap. Down in the family room, Pam sent an urgent email to 23andMe. Could this be a mistake?
After some back and forth, it was clear the results weren't a mistake. She would have to tell John he wasn't Annie's biological father.
"Your instant reaction is, 'Well, there has been some mistake here,'" John said in May. "And then your conscience haunts you and you say, 'Maybe it wasn't a mistake. Maybe something did happen at the andrology clinic.'"
The Branums' search for the truth would lead to a troubled lab worker, now dead, who had served time after allegedly kidnapping a woman and conducting a "love experiment." It would spur a flurry of national headlines as the Branums unsuccessfully urged the University of Utah to notify other families. It would force Pam Branum's family to talk about things they never imagined.
Some help conceiving
In 1991, the Branums were living in Park City, Utah. John, now a retired Marine, was commanding a recruiting office in Salt Lake City.
Having trouble conceiving, they turned to a University of Utah fertility clinic. John Branum provided sperm. It took multiple tries, but Pam became pregnant. Annie was born in May 1992.
Life moved forward. The family put Utah in the rearview mirror, crisscrossing the country for John's military service with stops in Rhode Island and Hawaii, eventually settling in San Antonio.
Along the way, the little girl with blond pigtails grew into a striking woman studying astrophysics at the University of Texas-San Antonio. She's now 22 and a 5th-year senior.
If John wasn't Annie's biological father, then who was? The answer came in jarring waves.
At the suggestion of CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist in Southern California with a popular blog, Annie was tested on several other genealogy websites. The hope was they could find a relative.
It worked. In late November 2012, ancestry.com linked Annie to Carla Evans in Minnesota. Pam sent an email. After Christmas, the two talked.
"She asked if I had any relatives who were sperm donors," Evans said.
She did. Her cousin, Thomas Lippert, had been a donor in Minnesota and then Utah. He was brilliant, she said. He attended the University of Notre Dame's law school, becoming a law professor at Southwest State College in Minnesota. He died in 1999 due to complications from alcoholism.
But soon, Evans called back.
"After I initially talked to her, I thought, 'She has to know the truth,'" Evans said.
A troubled man
A troubled man
Lippert was a 25-year-old law professor when he abducted an undergraduate student at Purdue University in the mid-1970s and forced her to do "love experiments." There are conflicting descriptions about this.
In some reports, he forced her into a black box and shocked her. In others, it was a dark room without shocks. He hoped she would fall in love with him.
To control her, he allegedly threatened to burn her loved ones, and even took her to a burn unit.
The FBI eventually found the woman in the library at Southwest State College reading art books, according to a story from the time in People. Lippert claimed she had agreed to run off with him and invented the story of abduction.
In the end, he pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy and spent two years in prison where he was required to undergo 90 days of psychiatric treatment.
"I told (Pam), I said, 'You should Google his name,'" Evans said. "While they sensationalize it, pretty much all of it is true."
After Lippert was released from prison, Evans said she thinks he became a sperm donor in Minnesota, where he likely made a connection with Dr. Ronald Urry, a University of Utah faculty member who ran fertility clinics in Minnesota and Utah. But that's just a best guess. Urry died in 1997.
When Evans sent photos of Lippert to Branum, her heart jumped. She recognized him from the clinic. He kept a collage of baby photos on the wall.
"He said, you know, 'These are the babies I have helped couples have,'" Pam said.
She had just told Annie that her biological father wasn't John. Now, she would have to tell her this.
"I said, 'Could you imagine the trouble God had to go through to get you conceived and born,'" she remembers telling her daughter at one point.
God has been a constant throughout this ordeal for Pam and John.
"I don't know how you could deal with it if you didn't have faith in God," Pam said. "That he allowed this for some reason."
Faith gave her comfort even as she grappled with this new reality. She would wake up in the middle of the night, thoughts flooding her mind.
She felt violated. There was no proof the genetic swap was intentional, but given Lippert's past, she believed it was. This belief was supported by those who knew Lippert, including Evans and Lippert's ex-wife.
"I felt so conflicted because on one hand, I was upset about it so much, and yet on the other hand I wouldn't have had her," she said.
She spoke with her older sister every day, and stayed in touch with Moore, the genetic genealogist in California.
Finally, in April of 2013, Pam contacted the University of Utah. She wanted to know more about Lippert: How was he ever employed at the lab? How many times had he been a donor? Could this have happened to others? Could siblings be in relationships?
The family was rebuffed at every turn.
Frustrated, they went public in January, publishing the story on Moore's blog. It caught fire.
"At the end of the day, all three of us agreed that it was worth our privacy to let those other families know," John said. "If the U wasn't going to tell them, we were."
Slow to come around
Slow to come around
The University of Utah has said as many as 1,500 couples across the country used the clinic while Lippert was an employee from 1988 to 1993. But Lippert was also a frequent donor from 1983 to 1993, records show.
In addition to working for the university, he also likely worked at a private lab called Reproductive Medical Technologies Inc. that Urry and other Utah faculty ran out of the same space.
It's unclear if staff at the clinic knew much of Lippert's criminal history.
"They knew he had been disbarred and that he had served time," said Jane Jeremenko, a former office manager with the clinic.
But details of this arrest were a personnel matter, and one assumption was that it was a white-collar crime.
In response to the Branum's concerns, fueled by outstanding reporting from Matthew Piper at The Salt Lake Tribune, the University of Utah Health Sciences Center did an internal review.
That review called for a formal apology to the Branums.
It outlined a shocking lack of controls. There was no background check on Lippert, who had no oversight as a tech. Employees were allowed to be sperm donors. Lab samples were sometimes mislabeled or mishandled.
It also said the university should continue offering free paternity testing for concerned families. A hotline has been established, and about six families have contacted it. None has been matched to Lippert, although one family did verify another genetic mix-up.
But the review argued against contacting families who used the clinic during Lippert's time.
"Frankly, we didn't actually think this was too difficult of a call with respect to the notification of families," said Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, a medical professor with the University of Utah and a member of the panel.
From the university's perspective, it's unclear if Lippert's actions were intentional. Tracking down families after decades through name changes, divorces, deaths and moves would take incredible effort.
The possibility of half siblings becoming romantically involved is statistically unlikely.
As far as health history, yes, Lippert was an alcoholic with a troubled past, but making a genetic connection to alcoholism is controversial. He also had no known genetic red flags, nor any specific mental illness diagnosis.
"If Mr. Lippert had had something that was clearly hereditary and clearly something people could respond to from a genetic perspective that might well change the balance of consideration," Botkin said.
At most, the university would reach a handful of families affected by this. For everyone else, a letter could simply open up all kinds of personal secrets and violate privacy.
"The range of things that can be revealed that were not supposed to be revealed is quite surprising," said R. Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin law professor and bioethics expert, who served as a consultant.
Imagine kids who might not know how they were conceived, she said, or families that don't want to relive the experience.
"There are going to be examples of families where a man does not even realize that his wife used artificial insemination because she didn't want to shame him."
David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said if the University of Utah thinks Lippert may have done this to other families, then ethically it must make its best effort to notify them.
"Yes, it will cause anguish. Yes, it may upset a lot of people," he said. "And yes, that means the university may have to make restitution for the harm and suffering that they are inflicting on these families, but that's what's owed to them."
Magnus was speaking about families like the Branums, and not those who chose Lippert as an anonymous donor.
The Branums have not filed a lawsuit, and have missed the deadline to do so. But Magnus said the University of Utah has an ethical obligation to compensate them. An apology doesn't cut it, he said.
While Lippert's health history is largely unknown, other affected families would be making false health assumptions.
"The common sense thing would be that someone needs to figure out if there are other families that are affected and those families need to be contacted," said Dr. Randal D. Robinson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology with the University of Texas Health Sciences Center.
Controls around fertility labs have dramatically improved since the 1990s, but Robinson said this case was beyond the pale for that time period.
"I am personally not aware of any clinics that allowed staff members to donate sperm," he said.
Pam Branum expressed outrage about the university's response: "Who are they to say? That's the family's decision to make."
Love triumphs
Love triumphs
She worried about losing everything she held true: That this new reality would shatter her family's bond. But it only strengthened and confirmed it. Sometimes Pam has marveled at their love for one another.
"I told Annie when she and I first had a private moment, I told her that I loved her with all my heart, and nothing would ever change that," John said.
Annie declined several interview requests. But in interviews with national media, she spoke with a similar strength and conviction.
"Just because my dad isn't my biological father doesn't mean that he's still not my dad," she told People earlier this year. "He's the one who raised me, and I know he loves me the same through all of this, and I love him the same. Nothing can change that."
The Branums have moved forward. Pam said she's found peace, and thanks God for her beautiful daughter. John said with the help of God he forgives Lippert. But he doesn't forgive the University of Utah.
When the Branums went public, they posted a blog site, lippertschildren.blogspot.com, seeking out other families. "Was your child fathered by Thomas Lippert?" the site asks.
This will stay up. Pam said she expects a half-sibling for Annie to one day emerge.
"The (university's) investigation does close certain things," she said. "And yet, I am always going to be there for any family that comes forward."


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change to another goal.
Major Section: PROOF-CHECKER-COMMANDS
Examples: (change-goal (main . 1)) -- change to the goal (main . 1) change-goal -- change to the next-to-top goalChange to the goal with the name
General Form: (change-goal &optional goal-name end-flg)
goal-name, i.e. make it the
current goal. However, if
goal-name is
nil or is not supplied, then
it defaults to the next-to-top goal, i.e., the second goal in the
stack of goals. If
end-flg is supplied and not
nil, then move the
current goal to the end of the goal stack; else merely swap it with
the next-to-top goal. Also see documentation for

subset: commoncrawl


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After years in the making Tom Burgoon's LAUGH FILLED signature routine is finally released to you in complete detail! COMES COMPLETE WITH: United States performance rights! / Inside info never before in print! / DVD containing detailed performances! / Numbered certificate of authenticity suitable for framing! Complete and detailed manuscript! / Tom's special bonus material! / Autographed 8 x 10 of Tom and Timmy!
Tom Burgoon's Timmy Toilet Paper Routine is packed with laughs and will fit easily into any show. Only a limited number of authorized notebooks will be released. Don't miss this opportunity to own this one-of-a-kind comedy routine!
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Find Your Perfect Home.
Burlington Real Estate
Burlington is located in Wisconsin. Burlington, Wisconsin has a population of 10,650. Burlington is more family-centric than the surrounding county with 29.42% of the households containing married families with children. The county average for households married with children is 29.24%.
The median household income in Burlington, Wisconsin is $50,548. The median household income for the surrounding county is $55,055 compared to the national median of $53,482. The median age of people living in Burlington is 41 years.
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text:
20 sheets of Writing Paper with matching envelopes
$ 65.00
Printed on luxurious 100% cotton paper and presented in a signature Felix Doolittle "book box," the combination of a magical illustration and elegant presentation will transform you into an ardent letter writer - much to the delight of the recipients.
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Mayan Doomsday Frightens Russia, Government Responds
Many believers of the reported Mayan apocalypse may be heading to France for refuge, but in the case of Russia, the country seems to still be figuring out how they will handle the so-called "end of the world" on December 21.
The New York Times is reporting the supposed prophecy has been impacting Russia to the point where government officials had to publicly address the news. Inmates in a women's prison located near the Chinese border are said to have experienced a "collective mass psychosis" so intense that a priest has been called in to calm them. In eastern Moscow, "panicked citizens stripped shelves of matches kerosene, sugar and candles."
In a town called Chelyabinsk, a giant Mayan-style archway is being built out of ice.
"For those not schooled in New Age prophecy, there are rumors the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close," says the newspaper. "Russia, a nation with a penchant for mystical thinking, has taken notice."
In response to the panic spreading throughout Russia, its minister of emergency situation stated Friday that he has access to "methods of monitoring what is occurring in the planet Earth." In addition to reassuring citizens that the world will not end this month, the country is still at risk of "blizzards, ice storms, tornadoes, floods, trouble with transportation and food supply, breakdowns ion heat, electricity and water supply."
Regardless of the public announcement, people are still worried of what may come.
Rev. Tikhon Irshenko, who visited Gornoye's Prison Colony No. 10 in November, told the Data news service wardens informed him that the anxiety had become so severe, inmates had broken out of the facility due to "their disturbing thoughts." Some of the women, he claimed, were sick or suffering from seizures.
In the Buryatiya's capital Ulan-Ude, citizens have allegedly been hoarding food and candles as a means to possibly survive without light.
Last week, lawmakers in Moscow submitted a letter to Russia's three main television stations, asking them to stop airing material about the prophecy, which could potentially encourage con artists to take advantage of the growing situation.
But not everyone is responding to Doomsday with fear.
An entrepreneur from the Siberian city of Tomsk has reportedly "sold several thousand gag emergency kits, a cleverly packaged $29 parcel including sprats, vodka, buckwheat, matches, candles, a string and a piece of soap.
The survival package's motto? "It can't be worse."
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Filed Under (Tips and Review) by admin on 11-11-2010
1. Make sure the ignition timing is correct 2. Adjust the valves as necessary to ensure proper operation 3. Run the engine to warm it up a bit 4. Adjust the float setting. To do this, remove the carburetors (leave the throttle cables attached), remove the bowl and turn the carburetor upside down (fuel will spill). The float should look like this: Adjust as necessary by bending the float support (#37 in Figure 1). Reinstall Installation and idle adjustment 1. First you must adjust the idle. It is acceptable per the manual to adjust the idle by using the idle adjust screws (11). This usually involves screwing them then backing out 1 to 1.5 turns. Or you can adjust looking at the sliders 2. If installing the carburetors: a. Remove the cover (2) b. Reomve the slider (3) c. Place the throttle cable through the guide (18) with the spring (4) on the cable. d. Route the cable through the slide catch (6) e. Insert the slide assembly into the chamber and make sure it easily slides up and down. Direct the needle (8) into the opening of the diffuser (angled side visible). f. Screw assembly together and verify via throttle movement that slide moves freely. Attach fuel delivery lines to (12). 3. Using the idle set screw (11) raise the slider so the lower edge is 1-2 mm. 4. Assemble to engine using the proper gaskets (paper – felt – paper). 5. Using the locknut (26) adjust the free play of the throttle cable (2-3 mm) 6. Adjust the idle mixture screw – turn in completely then out 1 to 1.5 turns. * Starting using the K68′s (cold weather) 1. Verify fuel flow. Apply choke (pull 52 in Fig1). 2. Using the ticklers (13) allow fuel to enter the bowl until fuel drains from (14) 3. With the ignition off, kick 1 or 2 times 4. Turn ignition on, and as soon as engine is warmed up (maybe sooner) push choke mechanisms to open choke Idle Adjustment (engine running and warm) 1. Remove one of the spark plug caps, and with the cap shorted, adjust (11) to decrease RPM's to a point of being minimally steady. 2. Adjust the mixture (15) out until RPM's decrease. Turn in until RPM's increase slightly. Then turn in screws ¼ to 1/3 revoultion. 3. Do the same for the second carburetor with the first spark plug cap shorted. 4. With both cylinders, adjust each idle (11) on each carburetor the same amount each until it's at a steady, minimal RPM. Use small changes. (at this point you can use your airflow tool to check). 5. Sharply increase, then decrease throttle. Then engine must return to low RPMs smoothly. If the engine goes below limits, readjust (11) from step 4. Synchronization of the K68 Note: Rather than using the opposite cylinder shorted to test the pull of the live cylinder carburetor, you can use something like a Twinmax connected to the test ports (27 Fig 1). Or, if you have a model without these ports, use a Synchrometer (Appendix 2) held against the face of the carburetor. These tools merely show airflow passing through each carburetor (which is dependent on the position and wear on the slide). If using these tools, it's not necessary to do the following steps. You wil want to use a throttle guide (Appendix 1), to show airflow at various throttle settings. Using the flow meter of your choice make sure each carburetor is the same at the various throttle settings. 1. Place the motorcycle on the center stand ensuring the rear wheel is suspended 2. Make sure you have large area to work with (safety issues here) 3. Shift into the highest gear with the engine running 4. Short one spark plug cap to the cylinder (using a nail or something in the fins) 5. Increase the speed to 40-50 km/hr 6. Fix the throttle using the throttle (maybe using a throttle stop screw under the throttle housing). 7. Reconnect other cylinder and using the opposite carburetor determine the speed which should be the same as the first. 8. Adjust the position of this slide to achieve the referenced speed using the locknut at the top of the carburetor.
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With one of the youngest teams in Division I college basketball, there's not much of a history to go on with Coach Steve Lavin's Red Storm squad. So it's understandable while every game this season has been a learning experience.
Just three days after playing one of its worst games of the season, the Red Storm came up with a stalwart effort in a 67-63 victory over No. 20 Notre Dame on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden.
It was hard to believe St. John's was the same team that lost 67-51 to then-No. 19 Georgetown on Saturday on the same court.
"I told you to expect the unexpected," Lavin said of his roster that has only one active scholarship upperclassman. "Buckle up and enjoy the roller coaster ride with this young team, that at times is maddening. But they balance it out with some brilliant play."
Playing man-to-man rather than a zone defense as they have all season, St. John's opened the game strong, unlike the previous contest, and held a 32-31 lead at halftime.
"We came out very intense today," forward Amir Garrett said. "Against Georgetown that definitely wasn't the way we played."
The Red Storm (10-7, 2-3 Big East), which had lost two straight and four of five, had a 12-point lead midway through the second half and despite giving it all up, they managed to score the game's final six points for the win, the third-straight over the Fighting Irish (14-3, 2-2) and fifth-straight over Notre Dame at The Garden.
"We knew they were going to make a run,'' Garrett said of the Irish. ``In the last minutes we had to find a way to sustain the lead."
St. John's did just that, using the Red Storm's mode of choice this season: the blocked shot.
St. John's entered the game leading the nation in blocked shots at 8.56 per game. The Red Storm finished with nine for the contest, the two biggest on two of Notre Dame's last three possessions in the final 20 seconds.
D'Angelo Harrison, a 6-3 guard, blocked a shot by 6-10 Tom Knight and JaKarr Sampson made one of two free throws with 19.7 seconds left. Chris Obekpa, who leads the nation with 5.13 blocks per game, got his second of the game when he blocked Pat Connaughton's drive off his head and out of bounds with 7.6 seconds left.
"Chris got the block after me when he blocked it off his head," said Harrison, who totaled a career-high three rejections. "He said 'I got your back.' I felt like I was a shot blocker today."
Freshman forward Sampson scored 14 of his 17 points in the first half for St. John's while Phil Greene IV had 13, four rebounds and two assists, and Garrett totaled 11 points on 5-of-7 shooting to go along with three boards and three blocks.
"They did a good job of pressuring the ball," Notre Dame's Garrick Sherman said. "We really couldn't get any offensive rhythm in the last two minutes just because of their ball pressure."
Irish head coach Mike Brey agreed.
"They really guarded the heck out of us with their speed and over the course of time it wore on us," he said.
The teams play again March 5 at Notre Dame. Next, however, the Red Storm opens a home-and-home season series at DePaul on Saturday, Jan. 19, at noon on SNY.


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Ozark Gateway Banquet is April 11 at Jones Mallard Lodge
The Ozark Gateway Tourist Council has set its annual banquet for April 11 at the new Stan Jones Mallard Lodge near Hoxie. The 8-county tourism promotion group will celebrate the year's achievements and hear from featured speaker Danny Ford, who is a commissioner with the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism.
Two awards will be presented at the banquet: The Tom Biggs Award for outstanding work in developing tourism and the Media Award for publicity of tourism-related endeavors. Finalists for the Biggs Award are: Mayor Jean Pace of Mammoth Spring, Gloria Gushue of Calico Rock and Mike Cone of Melbourne.
Media Award finalists are: The Times Dispatch of Walnut Ridge, the Newport Independent and W.R.D. Entertainment of Batesville.
The banquet marks the first time for the annual event to be held in Lawrence County, according to Cathy Drew, executive director for Ozark Gateway. "Tourism development is on fire in Lawrence County right now, and that is great for our entire region. It's exciting to have our banquet at a place where so much is happening," Drew said.
The Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce tourism committee and Downtown Walnut Ridge organization recently won a Henry Award from the parks and tourism department for their work developing Beatles Park and Guitar Walk at Cavenaugh Park. Both attractions have opened in the past two years.
Stan Jones Mallard Lodge, which is hosting the Ozark Gateway banquet, also opened in recent months. The expansive lodge is located south of Hoxie, near the Clover Bend community. It will be open for tours before and after the banquet.
The banquet begins at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 11, and tickets are $25. They can be purchased at Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce or The Times Dispatch in Walnut Ridge, Mountain View Chamber of Commerce, Calico Rock Museum & Visitor Center, Newport Chamber of Commerce, Mammoth Spring State Park and Petals & Lace Creekside Loft in Hardy.
Tickets can also be reserved by leaving a message with the Ozark Gateway Region at 800-264-0316.
The Ozark Gateway Tourist Council encompasses Fulton, Jackson, Independence, Izard, Lawrence, Randolph, Sharp and Stone Counties in northeast and north central Arkansas.


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Unless the EU signs up to a Growth Compact soon, we face social, political and economic disaster. Swift action on tax, banking and investment is the way out of the crisis.
Overspending by governments, we have been told, triggered this crisis. Thus the cure lies in immediate austerity, hence the German-led push for a eurozone fiscal compact. But, as demonstrated by the experiences of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy & now the broader EU, this course leads to biting, deep recessions, rising unemployment and worsening public indebtedness. The IMF has acknowledged as much and the latest alarming data on rising unemployment in the EU is a case in point. A focus on growth, not austerity, is the correct answer for Europe's ills.
The case for "growth-friendly austerity" relies on the argument that public cuts are compensated for by consumers and businesses spending more, and with greater efficiency. However, the collapse of confidence wherein everyone expects the economy to worsen before (if) it gets better, along with excessive levels of private indebtedness, means that consumers and firms are busy repaying debt or building rainy-day funds, not spending and investing. In terms of exports, what works for small open economies with flexible exchange rates will not work for the economic giants the EU and the Eurozone are, especially as the troubled economies of the Eurozone have fixed exchange with their largest trading partners.
When EU leaders meet next, they must adopt a binding pledge to increase growth-enhancing public investments in the EU, outlining a firm strategy for funding these - in effect, a growth compact that Re-Define first published in January. This idea is slowly catching on with the European Council, the Parliament, the Commission and even the ECB having expressed support. Importantly Hollande, potentially the next French president and Monti the widely respected Italian Prime Minister are also talking about growth pacts or compacts.
However, to date the political support only amounts to lip-service, not substance. Unless this changes soon, we may be sowing the seeds for the destruction of Europe as economic problems continue to worsen in crisis economies even as the political space available to tackle problems in the Eurozone shrinks. In fact, the Eurozone may already be stuck in a dumbbell shaped trap of economic and political divergence that makes it hard, if not impossible, to tackle the crisis. The immediate dangers of the social fabric tearing at the seam in the worst affected countries are rising fast.
The axe of austerity falls first and foremost on public investment, as it is politically easier to cut than other forms of public expenditure. This undermines current growth by shrinking the level of economic activity, but even more importantly jeopardises the potential for future growth. Every euro of cuts today could result in many euros of lost growth.
Most important, the focus of efforts to reduce public indebtedness should be on raising tax revenue, not cutting spending. Increasing consumption or employment taxes may be counterproductive when consumer spending is depressed and unemployment high, but other taxes have a less negative effect on growth, even in the short term. The taxation of property, land, wealth, carbon emissions and the under-taxed financial sector needs to be increased across the EU. Dividing this revenue between public investment, deficit reduction and cutting income tax for low earners would boost both growth and employment.
EU states also need to redouble efforts to crack down on tax evasion and avoidance. Greece and Italy (which have large "black" economies) as well as France, Germany and the UK have enacted recent measures to increase compliance. The results are mixed, since domestic measures that have squeezed the tax avoidance balloon at one end have inflated it at the other. London, a haven for the rich rascals, is now adding southern Europeans to its mob, but Greek and Italian money is also flooding into Germany.
Sharing and implementing the most effective anti-tax avoidance/evasion strategies across all EU countries and an agreement to help other members enforce their domestic measures would multiply the revenue from such crackdowns. Urgently renegotiating the EU savings tax directive, that at present captures less than 1% in annual tax revenue on untaxed wealth transferred to other EU members, would also provide a big boost to revenues to fund public investments. EU member states must use the EU's status as the largest economic area in the world to aggressively negotiate under the banner of the EU and strike much better deals with tax havens so tax losses can be minimised and past, unpaid taxes clawed back.
The UK-Liechtenstein and German-Swiss bilateral deals, on the fate of untaxed UK and German money in these tax havens, have been rightly criticised as being very weak. The US has used its weight as the largest economy in the world to negotiate a much better deal for its tax collectors. This is what the EU must do. Also, the US, under its foreign account tax compliance act, obliges EU banks to share data on accounts held by US citizens. The EU must immediately push for reciprocal arrangements.
Doubling the capacity of the European Investment Bank, which has a good record of providing credit to the employment-intensive smaller business sector, would need limited amount of up-front cash, and generate investments of several times that amount. Some or all of the €250 billion of unused guarantees of the EFSF, the temporary crisis management fund should be allocated to the EIB as callable capital, significantly increasing what it can do in terms of infrastructure investment and supporting businesses. Every Euro of EIB investment typically crowds-in five Euro of private investment and this would be a good way of unlocking some of the record levels of cash that EU corporates are sitting on.
The European banking system remains very fragile and deleveraging is reducing credit to the real economy and weighing economic confidence down. The dangerous sovereign-bank dance of death wherein weak sovereigns and banks keep pulling each other down must be halted. For this, the European Crisis Management Fund, the ESM, must be allowed to inject equity directly into weak banks, for example those in Spain facing large real estate losses. A pan-European funding guarantee scheme should also be implemented together with a banking compact that binds banks on sovereign, EU-fund or ECB support to abide by a set of rules to retain profits and bonuses and support the real economy better.
Unless the funding costs for Spain and Italy fall soon, the sovereigns would need to be supported. In truth any lowering of ECB interest rate would not really help the real economy in these countries nor the sovereigns as the transmission channels for monetary policy are broken. Sovereign yields, which remain far too high, provide a floor on borrowing costs for most entities in the real economy so are a legitimate target for the ECB in its narrow pursuit of effective monetary policy for the Eurozone. So a preannounced ceiling on sovereigns yields accompanied by a credible secondary market purchase program would do the trick allow these countries.
Finally, the structural reforms in crisis countries must continue and the liberalisation of services in the single market must be accelerated. These policies will help boost future growth but work best in a growing, not shrinking, economy. Freeing up the licensing process for taxis in Athens does little in terms of inducing competition and lowering costs as long as everyone expects that the demand for taxis will be shrinking in the foreseeable future. That is why the transition path is so critical and demand cannot be allowed to fall precipitously because of an excessive pace of austerity.
Without a growth compact, the social and employment crises in Europe will only get worse. With it, we have a fighting chance to emerge stronger.
This blog is an updated version of A Growth Compact for the EUOriginally published by Sony Kapoor together with Peter Bofinger, Member Council of German Economic Experts in January 2012 which also appeared as an Op-Ed in several European Newspapersincluding the Guardian.


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This Halloween Craft is a great Preschool Craft. It's simple, fun and inexpensive to create. It's great for decorating your house around halloween too! I love to decorate with kids art work. They get such a kick out of seeing their work displayed around the house!
Halloween is such a fun time for kids! They love to get dressed up and pretend they are someone or something else! Great for the imagination! Plus all those costumes are great for the dress up box, after halloween is over!


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Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen and Bryan Voltaggio of Volt are lending their support to a Wednesday night benefit for Up From Under, a project for building homes in Haiti.
The Up From Under benefit dinner and silent action, which is being held at Washington, D.C.'s Long View Gallery on Wednesday, will help raise awareness and funding to build homes for the homeless and those devastated by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The Volt staff is preparing is preparing food for the benefit, alongside Gjerde, R.J. Copper of Rogue 24, Matt Hill of Charlie Palmer Steakhouse and Mike Isabella of Graffiato. The food sounds good, and so does the music -- the event's disc jockeys are Thievery Corporation's Eric Hilton and US Royalty's John Thomley. Sounds like the place to be in D.C. on Wednesday. Tickets are $125 and can be purchased here.


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Never send a bereaved widow with no children a giant sympathy basket stuffed with gourmet olives, chocolate, popcorn, and mustard. Fifty-pound potted plants are also really bad ideas, since the intended recipient will be in no shape to lug heavy objects. If you take nothing else from A Widow's Story, National Book Award-winning writer Joyce Carol Oates's memoir of the months after her husband, editor Raymond Smith, died suddenly from a "secondary infection" acquired at a hospital, remember this.
"Of all deliveries I have come to most dread those from Harry & David those ubiquitous entrepreneurs of fateful occasions – Sympathy Gift Boxes adorned with Sympathy Ribbons hurtled in all directions across the continent. Why are people sending me these things? Do they imagine that grief will be assuaged by chocolate-covered truffles, pâté de foie gras, pepperoni sausages?" she writes of trying to deal with the mounds of trash and party food generated by the well-meaning.
But there are genuine kindnesses, as well. Another friend, knowing Oates won't be able to eat, gives her a dozen Odwalla blended juices, so she has something in the house she can get down. Others bring over homemade meals or cook for her at their own homes, and another drives her on errands.
The Smiths had been married for 48 years, rarely apart for more than one night, before Smith went to the hospital. "From the first evening we'd met – Sunday, October 23, 1960 ... we'd seen each other every day," Oates writes. They walked holding hands decades after getting married, and neither wanted to inflict bad news on the other. Smith, a PhD and the editor of the Ontario Review literary journal they cofounded, as far as Oates knows, never read her fiction.
Even though the outcome is known from the title, the first section is suspenseful and emotionally draining to read, let alone to write. The hospital staff do not come off well: There's the chirpy nurse who is outraged that the Smiths don't want her to watch her talk shows while they try to spend time together, and the desk clerk who suggests, as Oates clutches Smith's belongings the night he died, she look in the Yellow Pages for a funeral home to come and pick "it" up in the morning. ("It" being the body of her beloved husband, who has died as a result of his hospital stay.)
In the days following his death, Oates is exhausted, dazed, and furious – at the hospital, at herself for insisting he go, and for stopping for a red light the night he died, and with Smith for dying. "I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely – perhaps never – furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives."
In "A Widow's Story," she describes what she calls her "posthumous life." She avoids entire rooms in their house in New Jersey, takes refuge under her mom's quilt, and is convinced the cats blame her for Smith's absence. She learns to recognize a certain smile from well-wishers as one certain to mean pain for her. "I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed:
As Mrs. Smith, she tries to be quiet and no trouble to others and to supply all the right answers. "The Widow has entered the stage of primitive thinking in which she imagines that some small, trivial gesture of hers might have meaning in relationship to her husband's death. As if being 'good' – 'responsible' – she might undo her personal catastrophe," she writes in one of the narrative paragraphs that end many of the chapters. She also offers practical hints: "Advice to the widow: MAKE DUPLICATE COPIES OF THE DEATH CERTIFICATE. MANY!"
Her professional self she dubs "JCO," a construct whom she is determined to impersonate "as flawlessly" as a replicant from "Blade Runner." Despite her grief and insomnia, "JCO" will carry on with her tasks as a writer and professor at Princeton University without her students and readers seeing her pain. In her memoir, she lets herself howl. As for the novels everyone still expects her to whip out every three months like clockwork, she writes she could no more start a new one than she could hike across Antarctica.
She also fights a fascination with suicide, which she describes as a basilisk "with beady dead gem-like eyes."
Oates includes her own e-mails and excerpts from the letters sent her at this time, and details the many kindnesses from her friends. (These include writers such as Richard Ford; Edmund White; and Gail Godwin, another widow who advised her, "Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.") And she includes glimpses of her and Smith's life together in Wisconsin, Michigan, and, briefly, Texas. ("At least we're not in Beaumont," was the family catchphrase for decades after one school year there.)
Eventually, she brings herself to plant flowers in Smith's garden, choosing perennials "guaranteed to survive," and to read Smith's unfinished novel, "Black Mass." In it, she learned the reason for her husband's schism from his father and the Roman Catholic church, which he had kept from her their entire life together.
"A Widow's Story" ends on a hopeful note. While cleaning up the trash bins raccoons have strewn across her driveway, Oates finds a pair of missing earrings. "If I have lost the meaning of my life, and the love of my life, I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash."
And her last chapter, "The Widow's Handbook," hints that she may have slain her basilisk. "Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive."
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews books for the Monitor.


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Turn with me in your Bible to the 9th chapter of Matthew. Matthew, chapter 9. We are returning to our study of Matthew. I have long awaited this return, because I love so much the gospel narrative. We stopped over a month ago at verse 17 and we begin again today at verse 18. And verses 18 through 26 are really a unit; and in order for you to understand the story and have it in mind, let me read verses 18 to 26. And we'll spend at least a couple of sessions together going through this tremendous record. Beginning at verse 18, Matthew writes:
"While He spoke these things unto them, behold, there came a certain ruler, and worshiped Him, saying, 'My daughter is even now dead: but come and lay Thy hand upon her, and she shall live.' And Jesus arose, and followed him, and so did His disciples. Behold, a woman, who had been diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind Him, and touched the hem of His garment: For she said within herself, 'If I may but touch His garment, I shall be well.' But Jesus turned about, and when He saw her, He said, 'Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee well.' And the woman was made well from that hour. And when Jesus came into the ruler's house, and saw the musicians and the people making a noise, He said unto them, 'Give place, for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth.' And they laughed Him to scorn. But when the people were put forth, He went in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose. And the fame of this went abroad into all the land."
I'd like to title this passage very simply, "Jesus' Power over Death." That's what it's all about, the raising of one from the dead; and on the way, the healing of a woman with an issue of blood. And if you read the other gospels, you know that the reason for the healing interlude is to delay Jesus until the little girl is dead, and the funeral has already begun. For the other writers tell us that when he first approached, the man said to Jesus, "My daughter is dying," and by the time He got there, she was already dead and the funeral was in session. So the Lord places this very lovely interlude of the woman with an issue of blood as part of the delay to bring about the resurrection. So we see Jesus' power over death. I think this to be an essential message dealing with a critical theme. We're living in a dying world where all of us face the inevitability of death. We are deteriorating humans in a deteriorating world. Our world is marked by tragedy. Our world is marked by sorrow. Our world is marked by sadness. Our world is marked by death and dying. Since the Fall of man is recorded in Genesis, chapter 3, there has been a curse on the earth. And that curse has sent the earth and all of its inhabitants careening and spiraling into tears and disasters and pain and sickness and death. In fact, we face these things incessantly.
Just this month alone, in the past, say four or five weeks, I know of one dear friend who died of cancer, many other friends who are being consumed by cancer's painful deadly process. I know of a young man who, in his car, killed another little boy of eight years old. I know of a Christian man who was driving a semitruck on the freeway when another man darted in front of him and was embedded in the front end of the semi. I've looked into several caskets in the past month: the cold, stark face of a father and the same of a mother. I've heard the weeping and the sorrow. I know of a young lady with two small children: That young lady is dying from a lung tumor. I've watched a young man emerge from surgery to feel the pain as the anesthetic wore off. I've walked the halls of several hospitals. I've heard the moans and the groans of those filled with pain and disease. I've seen children with leukemia. I talked to a pastor friend on the phone who told me, "Would you please pray, John, for my sixteen-year-old daughter? She's had two open-heart surgeries, and now she's having heart failure, and we almost lost her." I have this month remembered that a year ago a dear wife and mother in our own church died being burned to death. Last Sunday, I met a man slowly going blind and a lady slowly going deaf. I talked to a nine-year-old in the last month who lost his mother to cancer, and last Sunday I prayed with and for a man who is so diseased with a brain tumor that he's in constant pain. That's just a part of it, but that's how it is in this life. That's what sin has done to this world. That's the curse in action.
Is it any wonder that Jesus reacted the way He did when He came to the grave of Lazarus? And the Bible says in the 11th chapter of John, "When Jesus saw her weeping [that is Mary, the sister of Lazarus] and the Jews also weeping, [and came upon, a funeral scene is what He came upon, it says that] He groaned in His Spirit and was troubled." There was a deep pain. There was a hurting, and it wasn't so much because of what had happened to Lazarus, but in the infinity of His mind He could stretch His thinking throughout all the eons of time to gather up all of the consequences of sin and feel the pain that all of it would bring to man. And as a sympathizer beyond anything we can conceive, it hurt Him deeply. It says He wept, and the Jews said, "'Behold, how He loved him!' And some of them said, 'Could not this Man, who opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that this man should not have died?' Jesus therefore groaned again in Himself." It was a deep hurting in Christ, because He could see the power and the pain of sin. God doesn't want it so. That wasn't the plan. All things in the world were created for the good of man and the blessing of man, but man sinned. And so the Old Testament prophets say sin will run its course, and then God will reverse the curse. God will turn it all around.
And we come to the end of Revelation in the next to the last chapter, and we read this: "Behold, God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. There shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying. Neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away." And John has this incredible vision of the day when the curse is over. Who can do that? Who can reverse the curse? Who can destroy disease and pain and sorrow, tears of death? The prophets said there would come a Messiah, there would come a Prince, there would come a King, and He would do it. He would have the power to bring back wholeness to life. Thus, when Jesus came into the world, He demonstrated that power. Though the fulfillment of those prophecies is yet in the future, the One who will fulfill them has sufficiently demonstrated His ability to do so, so that when Jesus came into the world, for all intents and purposes, as you've seen, He banished disease from Palestine. He raised the dead. He forgave sin. All of those things that will be true of the great and glorious coming kingdom, He demonstrated there in His first coming.
The miracles of Jesus were the verification of His power to reverse the curse; the verification of His power to establish the kingdom, for He had said in John, chapter 5, you remember, that He would someday raise from the dead all that were in the graves. And if He's going to do that, He's going to have to demonstrate that He has the power to do that. So miracle upon miracle did He do to verify His power. If you were to follow just the thinking of Matthew, you would see what a tremendously important thing this is for Matthew to indicate. Going back, for example; you don't need to turn to it, if you'll just listen, I think you'll get the flow. Going back to chapter 4, Matthew writes:
"And Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people. And His fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto Him all the sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments: Those who were possessed with demons, those who were epileptic, those who had paralysis, and He healed them."
You follow Matthew a little further, you come to the 8th chapter; and some of you will remember, in the 8th chapter in verse 16 it says, "When the evening was come, they brought unto Him many that were possessed with demons, and He cast out the spirits with His word, and He healed all that were sick, in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet." Now, listen, He did not heal them for their own sake only, but that He might demonstrate His power. And He did not heal all of them because they all had faith; not by any stretch of the imagination. He did not heal all of them because they were all worthy. He healed all of them in order that He might show that He could heal all disease, that there was no limit to His capacity. Chapter 9, verse 35: "Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in the synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people." In chapter 11, verse 5: "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them." And so it was that He demonstrated that He was God, the Messiah, the King.
Now, if you've been with us in our study of Matthew, you know that this is Matthew's focus. This is what Matthew wants us to understand—that He's the King. So Matthew has told us about His ancestry. He has the lineage of a king. He has told us about His arrival. He had the birth of a king, a virgin-born son. He told us about His adoration. Other kings bowed to Him. He told us about His anticipation; the Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in His birth. He told us about His royal herald, His announcer, John the Baptist. He told us about His affirmation, where the Father spoke at His baptism. He told us about His advantage when He conquered Satan in temptation. He told us about His activity of healing and preaching. He told us about His authority in His sermon in chapters 5 through 7; and now he tells us about His authentication, His miracle power. And through chapter 8 and 9, we see the miracles of Jesus; and Matthew gives us three groups of three miracles. In chapter 8, we see the first group of miracles dealt with disease. From chapter 8, verse 23 to chapter 9, verse 17, the second group deal with disorder, both in the physical and spiritual and moral world. And now the third group, and the one we're going to be looking at in days ahead, deals with death. Disease, disorder, and death. This is the climax. Jesus can raise the dead.
Now, in this section, you have three miracles then. The first one actually has a miracle in a miracle, but there are three separate miracles. The first, raising the dead; second, giving sight to the blind; the third, speech to the dumb. Now, the last two may seem less marvelous than resurrection, and you may ask the question as to why Matthew would include giving sight and giving speech in a section that speaks of His power over death. And I'm not sure I can be dogmatic about the answer to that, except it seems to me a wonderful illustration of Jesus' resurrection power. First, He raises the whole person from the dead, and then He shows how it is that He can raise the whole by showing you how He can give life to the dead parts. He who can give sight to dead eyes and give speech to a dead tongue can also raise the dead, for that's only the sum of the parts. So He has power over that which is dead.
Can Jesus overcome death? What a message that is. G. B. Hardy, the Canadian scientist, one time said, "When I looked at religion, I said I have two questions. Question No. 1: Has anybody ever conquered death? Question No. 2: If they did, did they make a way for me to conquer, too?" He said, "I checked the tomb of Buddha, and it was occupied; and I checked the tomb of Confucius, and it was occupied; and I checked the tomb of Mohammed, and it was occupied; and I came to the tomb of Jesus, and it was [What?] empty. And I said, 'There is One who conquered death.' And I asked the second question, 'Did He make a way for me to do it?' And I opened the Bible, and He said, 'Because I live [What?], ye shall live also.'" That's the question: "Jesus, can You conquer death? Are You the One who can reverse the curse? Do You, as it says in Revelation 1, hold in Your hand the keys of death and hell? If You are that One, show us, demonstrate it." The same Jesus who stood at the grave of Lazarus and groaned, who wept with Mary, was the same Jesus who said to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?" Yes, Jesus has power over death, and nowhere more clearly will you see it than Him raising this dead girl in this situation.
Now, let's just get a few basic notes out of the way as we approach the text. It has a miracle within a miracle, but the miracle inside the miracle of resurrection, that is, the one dealing with the issue of blood, is really part of the resurrection miracle, for it provides the delay that is necessary for the death to occur and to make the resurrection as dramatic as possible. So you really have a miracle within a miracle; and if I may sort of trade on that thought, I'd like to give you a sermon within a sermon, and I'd like you to understand the miracle and the power of Christ. But at the same time, I want you to see, as we flow through these two marvelous things that happen here, I want you to see, not only the story of what happened, but a sermon within a sermon. I want you to see how Jesus dealt with people, because nowhere is it more wonderfully seen than here. All of His tenderness, all of His sensitivity, all of His gentleness, all of His openness, all that He is in loving-kindness is here, and all of His power is here, and all of His dynamic is here, and all of the wonder of His majesty is here. And you really get a marvelous glimpse of how he dealt with people and it becomes a pattern for us in dealing with them, too. So mark that as we flow through.
Now, I'm going to use the outline based upon how Jesus dealt with people to lead us through this tremendous account. As I look at this in the very beginning, I see, first of all, that in dealing with people, Jesus was accessible. He was accessible. Verse 18, "While He spoke these things unto them, behold, there came a certain ruler." Now, stop there. "While He spoke these things." What things? "Unto them." Unto whom? We have to ask those questions, don't we? Who's He talking to about what? You remember what was going on here? He had cast the demons out of the maniac of Gadara and sent them into a herd of swine. He had calmed the sea and the wind, and you can believe that that word spread rather rapidly. In fact, when He came back to Capernaum, that little village on the very northernmost point of the Sea of Galilee where Peter lived—when He came back to that village after these incredible incidents in Gadara, He was staying in Peter's house—and the disciples of John the Baptist came and said, "Why aren't you fasting? Why are all of you disciples and the Lord eating like this? Why aren't you fasting? Why don't you fulfill the prescribed fasts?"
And with that in mind, we come to verse 18. "While He was speaking these things, [in answer to the scribes and Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist] there came a certain ruler." If I may stretch your thinking a little bit, this speaks to me of Jesus' accessibility. People could get to Him. I mean, He was there. There was no ivory tower. He's not a religious guru who was eighteen feet up with lilies all around Him. He's not at arm's length. He doesn't live in a monastery. There's no hierarchy. You don't go to the third vice president and have him pass it up the line. He moved among the people. He was God in the world of men. And, you see, that is the essence of the incarnation: "That God," John 1 says, "pitched His tent with men." He was in the streets. He was in the villages. He walked the dusty roads. He was in the synagogues. He was in the homes, because it was all He had, to stay in a home. He didn't have His own. He bumped into people in the temple ground. He was accessible.
One day, a lot of parents came—in Matthew 19—and they brought a lot of little children, and they kind of pushed their little children up, because they wanted Jesus to touch them. The disciples said, "Send those kids away." Jesus said, "No, permit the little children to come unto Me, for such is the kingdom." He gathered the little ones. He was accessible to adults, to little children. I mean everywhere He moved, He moved in a crowd. On one occasion, He said, He said, "I have compassion on the multitude, for they have been with me three days." Can you imagine? Do you think they asked Him questions when they got next to Him? Would you? Do you think they brought Him all their problems? Would you? I mean, if you knew there was One who had all the answers. He was counseling. He was healing. He was teaching. He was in the midst of people—Can you imagine?—for three solid days; and He said, "I have compassion on them."
Imagine the conversations, the endless needs, the endless questions. He even, on occasion, had to retreat to the Mount of Olives to have some solitude to talk with the Father; and there were times when He was even caused to say to someone, "Don't tell people about this miracle," because of the pressure that would come as a result. And there He was, the Master of the world, the Creator of the universe, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords, and there He is walking the rolling hills of Galilee, little children running in and around, and people stopping Him, and talking. There He is in the villages, and by the sand, and the shore, and in a boat on the water, and in the crowded streets of Jerusalem, and always, always surrounded by people. He was accessible. You know what that tells me? That tells me that God is accessible. Isn't that good? Because this is God displaying Himself; He was accessible to the crowds.
And on the occasion of this particular time, two people are in the crowd. One is a ruler; the other, a sick lady. One is kind of up and in. The other is definitely down and out. One was wealthy and one was poor. Can you imagine the assortment there would've been in a crowd like that? The Pharisees were trying to trip Him and trick Him, condemn Him; and the people who were just trying to analyze Him, and then all the hurting people, all the people who were sick, all the people who had anxieties, all the people who were beggars, who were poor, who were outcasts, who were slaves, who were captives. All of the hurting people were there, as well, trying to have all their needs met. It thrills me that He's accessible to the crowds; that you can get to Him. But let me take it a second step. Jesus was not only accessible—and if I can kind of just change the word a little—He was also available; and, by that, I'm not so concerned with the crowd as the individual. He was not only accessible in that you could get to Him, He was available in that He would come to you. That's a marvelous reality; that Jesus was sensitive to who was in that crowd, and He would move to that person with real availability. I'm not thinking so much of the crowd, as I said. I'm just thinking of the individual.
Well, let's look back at verse 18 and see what happens. "While He spoke these things, behold, there came a certain ruler." "Behold," he says. I mean, that means look at that. I mean, this is a startling, shocking, amazing thing, very remarkable. What's so remarkable? Well, this man was a ruler. Mark adds, "He was one of the rulers of the synagogue." And Luke says, "He was rosh ha keneseth," which means he was the chief elder of the synagogue; and his name was Jairus. You know what this man was? He was number one representative of the religious establishment in Capernaum. He's the chief elder, not in the temple of Jerusalem, but in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Now, synagogues were ruled by elders. They were the spiritual leaders. They had the administration of the place. They were to coordinate and make sure everything was conducted properly, all the public worship. They were men of great influence; and out of their group, they would have a lot of elders. They would elect someone to be the head man, who would preside, who would supervise, who would appoint the, the preacher and the one who prayed and the one who read out of the law; and they were responsible to administrate the whole synagogue. And here's the number one guy. This is the epitome of the religious establishment: and for all intents and purposes, if you know anything about the gospels, you know that the religious establishment was dead set against Christ. They fought Him tooth and nail, all the way through His life. And this guy was looked at as the epitome of that, and he may even have been a Pharisee. We don't know, but he had a lot of peer pressure to be a faithful Jewish traditional religionist, and he comes to Jesus. Now, you might expect him to come and say, "Now, sir, I am the chief elder of the synagogue. I'd like to speak to You. Could we please have a private conversation?" That's not what he did. He didn't protect himself at all. It's amazing. Look at verse 18. "He came, and he worshiped Him." Now that word in the Greek, to worship, means to prostrate oneself before someone and either kiss his feet, kiss the hem of his garment, or kiss the ground in front of him. Now this is a heretical person, this Jesus; and the Pharisees are after Him; and the religious establishment is after Him; and this guy does what you only did in that culture to a deity, someone who was divine, someone who was holy in an unhuman way...or some king who had stated that he was, indeed, divine. You didn't do this to human beings unless they were in some sense supernatural.
I think it's wonderful that Matthew loves to use the word worship. He uses it thirteen times, because it fits a king, doesn't it? The man worshiped. But whatever made this guy do that? How could you ever get somebody to do that? Like him? Tell you. Very easy. Verse 18. You know what he said to Him? "My daughter's dead. My daughter is dead." Now, Matthew's account is brief. Luke's is larger, and Mark's is larger; and the other gospel writers tell us that the first time the man spoke to Jesus, he said, "My daughter is dying." And later on, he was informed that she was dead and he told Jesus she was dead. Matthew just condenses it all, leaving out some of the preliminaries; and, at this point, Matthew just says, "Now she's dead. My daughter's dead." And the other writers tell us that the little girl was twelve years old; and twelve years and one day in the Jewish culture meant that you were a woman. For a man it was thirteen years and one day, and that's why you have bar mitzvah. We've known all along that women were ahead of us, haven't we? Twelve years and one day. She'd just reached the flowering of womanhood. She had just bloomed. Twelve years of sunshine had turned to the shadow of death. You know why he came? He didn't care about social pressure. He didn't care about prestige. He didn't care about religious establishment. His daughter was dead, and there were no resources within his system to deal with that; and I believe that God had already been working on his heart; because his faith is incredible. He says, "Come and lay Your hand on her, and she will live." There's not a taint of doubt in that, is there? He swallowed his pride. He turned his back on social pressure. He said goodbye to the religious establishment, and he came to Jesus, and he fell flat on his face and probably kissed His feet. Said, "My daughter's dead."
Now let me tell you two things about this man. Number one: He had a deep need; and that's why people come to Christ. You don't have a need, you're not going to come. Recently, I had a man say to me, "I have no need of Christ." Well, if you don't have any need of Christ, you're not going to come; and we should pray that you should have need of Him. We should pray that you would be in a deep need, that you would know pain, that you would know desperation, that you would know the loss of all your resources that would drive you to Christ. It's apparent to me that the man in his mind probably already believed in the power of Christ. He probably was overawed by Christ; but maybe up until this point, he had been somewhat hesitant; but now, when his daughter was dying and now dead, he came in desperation. His motive wasn't totally pure. He didn't come just because of the wonder of Jesus Christ. He didn't come just because he had some great love for Christ. He came because he was hurting, and he was hurting deeply, and he knew a pain that he'd never experienced in his life. There was a hurting that was like— not like anything else, and there was no alleviation. This was so final. His heart was literally crushed. It's the people with need that come, and that's why the gospel is preached with reception to the poor and the sick and the weak and the ignoble and the captives and the prisoners. So he came and—even though his faith was inadequate, his motive was a little bit selfish— Jesus was available.
I talked about His need. Let me talk about his faith for a minute. That's the second thing that made him come. He really did believe that Jesus had the power to do this; and that is a marvelous faith. Do you know that if you go back to chapter 8, for example, there was a centurion who said his servant was home sick of the paralysis. You remember that? And the servant said, "If You speak a Word, my servant will be healed," and Jesus said, "I have not seen so great faith anywhere in Israel." This man had the great enough faith to believe that Jesus could heal his servant with a word. If that's the greatest faith he'd seen in Israel, what kind of faith is it to believe that Jesus could put a hand on a dead person and raise him from the dead when it had never been done? This is surpassing that. The man has marvelous faith. It's even better than Martha's faith. Martha said to Jesus, "Oh, if You'd only been here when he was sick, You could have done something; and now he's dead, and it's too late." She didn't even believe in resurrection power. I believe this man had the faith to be redeemed. And I believe before the day was out, he entered the kingdom of God.
And the Lord even throws in another little miracle that's really kind of marvelous. Jesus is in the big crowd, and another miracle happens, and Jesus isn't even involved in the miracle. It's involuntary. He says, "I felt power go out of Me." And then He looks around and says, "Who is that?" God did that to delay the whole move down to the house, to make sure the girl was dead. How did Jesus respond to his need and his faith? Verse 19. I love this. The Greek says Jesus up and followed him. Up and followed him. He didn't say, "Well, you know, I've got this very important meeting here with all this multitude and certainly don't know how I'm going to slip away. I mean, there's lots of sick folks." He up and followed him.
Sometimes the Lord does want us to meet the individual need. Philip was holding those great meetings, and there were mobs of people coming, you know. Great revival, people being saved, and Philip was preaching everywhere. Now, I don't know whether the Lord just picked him up against his will or not, but the, but the Bible says in Acts, "The Lord took Philip," wshhhhh-pbbbt, and dropped him in Gaza. Said, "I've got a person I want you to meet," and here comes a eunuch riding in his chariot, and he leads him to Christ. And then when it was all over, the Lord picked him right back up and flew him via the Holy Spirit right back to where he was before he came. There are times when there is a tremendous need in an individual's life. Jesus: ever sensitive to that. What does it say in John 6:37? "Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise [What?] cast out." He's accessible to the crowd. He's available to the individual. Can I indulge your thinking one more point, this morning anyway, and say that Jesus was also touchable? Not only accessible and available, but we're getting closer now.
Look at verse 20: Jesus went now with Jairus. And so did the disciples: verse 19. And Mark and Luke tell us so did the multitudes. So this mass of humanity now starts moving toward Jairus' house, and there's a big crush and a big crowd pressing around Him, and the questions are going on, and the, the whole thing that always went on. "And behold, [again, again, startling, shocking, amazing] a woman who had been diseased with an issue of blood for twelve years came behind Him and [You won't believe this.] she touched Him." You say, "Is that bad?"
Well, women basically didn't go around touching men; and the word touch doesn't mean to just touch. It means to grab. It is the same word used in John 20, you remember, where Mary wanted to reach out. It says that she touched Jesus, and He said, "Don't touch Me. I've not yet ascended to My Father." What she did was hold onto Him; and He said, "You can't hang onto Me. I've got to go back to Heaven and send the Holy Spirit. You can't keep me here." And this woman reached out and grabbed on and clutched.
You say, "Well, was that wrong?" Well, she had a problem, you see. She had been "diseased with an issue of blood for twelve years." Twelve-year-old girl and a woman with an issue of blood for twelve years. Jairus had a little girl. Gave him twelve years of sunshine. This lady had known twelve years of shadow. Twelve years of laughter. Twelve years of tears. An interruption that becomes an opportunity. Now what is it to have an issue of blood? Well, basically, for twelve years, this woman could not stop bleeding, perhaps due to a fibroid tumor in the womb, something that would be readily treated today by surgery. But she was perpetually unclean, unable to deal with this. Luke says, "She could not be cured." Incurable. Mark says, "She spent all her money on doctors and was worse." Luke wouldn't say that because he was a doctor. From the Jewish point of view, you couldn't imagine anything worse than being a woman with an issue of blood. It was humiliating, beyond anything, perhaps, except leprosy. For example, very commonly in Palestine, this issue of blood existed; and the Talmud, the Jewish codification of law, gave eleven different cures for it that you were to try. Some of them were like tonics and herbal things and astringents and, I don't know whether they were effective or not; but you'd go through all of those; and then a whole lot of them were superstitious. For example, I'll give you just a couple illustrations of the many. One was that you had to carry the ashes of an ostrich egg in a linen bag in the summer and transfer them to a cotton bag in the winter. Another, which is far worse, was that you had to carry around on your person a barleycorn that had been found in the dung of a white she-ass. Now, that's really strange. Now, these were the kind of superstitious things that were done to try to deal with this kind of a problem. But the horror of the disease was because of what was stated in Leviticus 15:25. Listen as I read it. This is the law of God given to Israel:
"If a woman have an issue of blood many days out of the time of her separation, or if it run beyond the time of her separation, all the days of the issue of her uncleanness shall be as the days of her separation; she shall be unclean. Every bed whereon she lieth all the days of her issue shall be unto her as a bed of her separation; and whatsoever she sitteth upon shall be unclean, as the uncleanness of her separation. And whosoever toucheth these things shall be unclean, and shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until evening."
What Leviticus said was, "This is an unclean woman with an issue of blood. Every bed she touches is unclean. Everything she sits on is unclean. Everything she wears is unclean, and every person who touches her is unclean." Therefore, she was excommunicated from the synagogue. She was divorced by her husband. She was ostracized from all human relationships. For twelve years this dear woman lived in utter isolation, to say nothing of the medical things complicated by this problem. Never able to go to the temple. Never able to go to the synagogue. No longer able to meet with her husband or her family. Sad lady, and she touched Jesus. Why? Same two reasons: She had a deep need, and she believed. She had a deep need. I mean she lost all the sense of propriety. There was a desperation there. People say, "You know, I'd like to come to Christ, but I'm certainly not going to go down there and go in that room." That's fine. You just aren't desperate enough. When you get to the desperate point, if the door's not open, you'll knock it down. There's a certain desperation. This woman was there; and it says she touched the hem of His garment.
Now, in the Old Testament, in Numbers 15:37-41, and Deuteronomy 22:12, the Jews were told that they were to mark their garments with a zizith. It's the Hebrew word. Basically, it's translated in the Old Testament fringe. Kraspedon is the Greek word, and it really means a tassel. And they did this: they wove blue thread through their garment; and they had four tassels of kind of a blue color, a bright blue color on their garment; and those tassels were woven in a certain configuration with certain kinds of thread, seven times around and eight times, and there were, there was the significance of various numbers. But the sum total, without going into detail, was that the threads were put together to represent the word of God, faithfulness, loyalty to the word of God, and holiness unto the Lord. So that every time a Jew went anywhere, the world knew that he belonged to God. And every time he took his clothes off or put his clothes on, he saw those things and it was a reminder to him. We have some of that today. Some people have a little cross, maybe, that they wear, or sign of a fish; and every time you put that on or you look at it, maybe you're reminded who you belong to. That's what that was for them.
Of course, it was the sign then of being holy unto the Lord; and in Matthew 23:5, it says, "The Pharisees made theirs very big." See, the bigger your tassel, the more holy you were, they thought. And you might be interested to know that in times in Europe when the Jews have been persecuted, they have still worn them, but they've worn them on their undergarments; and in contemporary times today, you'll find them still on the prayer shawl of an orthodox Jew; little blue tassels.
In the back of the Lord, they probably kind of swung a little bit as He moved through the crowd; and this lady, it says, and this is really interesting, verse 21. Look at it. It says, "She kept on [in the Greek, she kept on] saying in herself, 'If I may but touch His garment, I shall be well.'" She kept saying it over and over as she struggled through and finally grabbed that tassel. You know what happened when she grabbed it? Instantly, she was healed. And it says, "The Lord felt power pass from Him." It was involuntary, because everything He did, He did according to the will and power of the Father, right? He wasn't even involved in it. And then He said, "Who touched Me?" Before He knew in His humanness who, she was healed.
If you put the whole account together, the healing came first, instantly as she grabbed on; and you know what happened? This crowd and this moving to Jairus' house, and all of a sudden, when that woman grabs that tassel, the frame freezes and everything gets out of focus; and you see just two people: that woman and Jesus. And the other gospels tell us He said, "Who touched Me?" And the disciples said, "Are you kidding? Who touched You? People are clawing at You all over the place. Look at them all over the..." "No," He said, "there was a special one. I felt power go out of Me. Who was that?"
She had faith, didn't she? She said, "If I can just touch that thing." You say, "Well, it's not exactly a perfected mature thing." No, it's almost like superstition, isn't it? It's almost kind of magical. Say, "Well, the Lord certainly isn't going to respond to that." Listen, faith as the grain of a mustard seed would move a mountain. The Lord will take, the Lord will take an inadequate faith like the man's that is somewhat selfish, and He'll take an inadequate faith like the lady's that is somewhat superstitious, and He'll move it from there to the saving faith. He couldn't let that lady go or the, or all she would've remembered maybe was the superstition. He had to pull her into the fullness of a relationship. I don't really believe she was healed by her faith. I think she was healed by the sovereignty of God. God chose to heal her. Jesus just said He'd felt power go out of Him. Jesus healed multitudes of people that had no faith. You say, "Well, it says here her faith made her well." Oh, that's different. Say, "What do you mean, different?" You ready for this? Says, "Her faith made her well," and it doesn't use the word for healing, iaomai, the normal word for healing. You know what it used? Sodzo: The word means to be saved. Her faith has what? Saved her.
Jesus did miracles everywhere, healed everybody of everything, but saved only those who had faith. He healed those without faith. Certainly, the servant of the centurion didn't have any faith, we saw earlier. No, what I see here is the use of a unique word; and by the way, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all use that word sodzo, which means to be saved. I think there's a redemptive element in her faith. Oh, she wanted to just grab on; and it was kind of a, kind of a superstitious thing, in a way. Jesus wouldn't leave it at that. He drew her out, and He saved her. The ruler had an inadequate motive; it was selfish. And she had an inadequate faith; it was superstition. And yet, Jesus redeemed them both. It's kind of like the man who said, "Lord, I believe. Help thou my [What? my] unbelief." Take me where I am with my little faith and move me to saving faith. See, Jesus always knew the difference between the jostling of the fickle mob and the grasping of the faithful soul. He knew the difference; and He sensed it when she touched Him. Jesus is accessible. Isn't that great? He is available. He's touchable. Been saying this morning:
All your anxiety, all your care,
Bring to the mercy seat—leave it there;
Never a burden He cannot bear.
Isn't that right? Takes you where you are. There's a lot more to this story. I didn't hardly get started. But I can't think of a better place to stop for today than to remind you that Jesus is accessible and available and touchable. But there are two things, listen carefully, that'll bring you to Him: One is a deep need, a sense of desperation over your condition; and the second is great faith. Do you believe? Have you looked at your life, and you see that it's less than what it ought to be, and you want to reach out? See somebody transform it. Listen to these words:
Like her, dear Lord, I, too, would come,
Sick, sin-stained, amid the crowd alone.
I dare not tell to all their ears
The longings which are to Thee known.
Help, help, gracious Lord, no eye but Thine
Can graze the hills of bygone years.
All human aid is vain, but Thou
Canst heal my wounds and dry my tears.
Oh, God, if only I may touch
Thy saving virtue soul to soul,
Then come what may, let all men know
That Jesus Christ has made me whole.
You could touch Him. He's available. He's accessible. He's God moving in this world, alive, to touch your life. Let's bow in prayer.
Oh, our Father, how thankful we are: that You came into this world; that you pitched your tent with men; that you aren't the god of the deists that wound it up and went away, and it's all disintegrating; that someday the curse will be reversed. Someday there'll be no more pain and sorrow and disease and tears and death. And, Lord, thank You for demonstrating that. Thank You for Your power to raise us, and thank You for what we've learned about how You work with people. That You're a God that we can come to, a God who comes to us, a God who can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities; who cares, who's sensitive, who loves, has compassion. Those of us who have sensed our deep need have come to You with faith and been redeemed; and we pray for those gathered here in this place who have those needs unmet, who sense the pain, the hurt, that haven't yet moved toward You. May there be such a sense of desperation that there's no other way to turn. May You take their simple faith and bring it to the bloom of saving faith. Lord, make us thankful. As we heard earlier in the song, we know You died, and we know You rose. May we tell others, who need to know, that You're available to them, to give to them life, abundant and eternal. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.
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