THE FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

September 10, 2006

Isaiah 35:4-7a

James 1:17-27

Mark 7:31-37

Year B/ Proper 18

One of the ways the parish secretary is able to hold me hostage is by threatening to reveal some of the typos I have made and she has caught. On one occasion, after giving her a prayer to be put in the service leaflet, she said “Did you really mean to say ‘everlosing’ God?’” Apparently I am not alone in such word disasters. Once there was an amazing error that appeared in the program for Handel’s Messiah. A line that was supposed to read, “The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth” read instead, “The Lord God Omnipotent resigneth”. One assumes it was a typographical error – as opposed to the possibility that the printer was convinced that God had done exactly that.

Many people to whom Isaiah was writing today believed God had apparently resigned. The northern kingdom of Israel, containing three-fourths of the Hebrew people, had been absorbed into the Assyrian Empire. Isaiah’s own kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom, was on the edge of destruction as well. But Isaiah was a man of hope, so his words flowed into the dry and parched hearts of people tired of waiting and living without hope, like water flowing into dry cracked earth.

Like the children of Israel, we too know how exhausting it can be to wait without hope. The truth is we’ve learned not to expect much from God. And when that happens we become deaf to scripture, deaf to the gospel, and deaf to what God is doing in the here and now.

In today’s gospel Jesus had gone to the mostly gentile region of the Decapolis, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee. Although Mark doesn’t mention it, Luke tells us Jesus had been warned that Herod Antipas was seeking to kill him. This may have been what prompted him to travel completely out of his way in order to avoid the regions directly under Herod’s control. So we have no idea whether the man presented to him today was Jewish or Gentile. We only know his entire life must have felt very hopeless.

Jesus, fearing that his healings were causing a sensation and that people were focusing upon the wrong thing, took the man away in private. However, his words must have been overheard as a sacred pleading sigh groaned between earth and heaven, for the New Testament writers leave the word that Jesus uttered, “Ephphatha”, “Be opened”, in its original Aramaic.

When my mother was 9 years old her 14 year old brother called to her early one morning when he awoke and said, “Whistle something”. He had taught her how to whistle, so she did. He said, “I can’t hear you”. And from that moment on he never heard another sound. Just a few years away from the saving help of antibiotics, osteomyelitis not only robbed him of his hearing it dropped him into a life of pain and suffering. Enduring surgery after surgery he died at the young age of 26 saying to my mother, “I don’t want to leave my sweet sister”.

Every one of us know similar stories, so we are left thinking silently, if not out loud, what good do a few dozen healings and a handful of resuscitations, to which scripture gives Jesus credit, do for us? Every miracle, every healing in scripture, makes us want one of our own. We don’t understand why some people who never seem to pray sometimes get them, while others can stand on their heads fasting and praying from morning til night and the only thing they get is hungry and dizzy.

Some people see Jesus’ miracles as the implausible suspension of the laws of nature. As signs however, which is what the word ‘miracle’ actually means in Greek, they serve the opposite function. For the signs Jesus give us tell us that brokenness, death and decay are the true suspension of God’s laws.

Jesus is the living proof that God’s will for us is not chaos, despair, or brokenness, but wholeness and truth. Every healing, every restoration in the gospel, is a hole poked through the fabric of time and space and into the kingdom of God. Those times of breakthrough are times that are both describable and indescribable. They are both momentary and eternal.

But a sign is not the same thing as a trick. A sign is merely a marker for someone who is looking in the right direction. The opening of eyes, of ears, of hearts, is a sign that what Jesus brings near to us is a new vision of reality; of what reality is supposed to be and can be! We see it in every healing and exorcism that Jesus engages in in the gospel. And today we are supposed to hear it. Hearing God’s voice, in the church and in our lives – and responding to it, is what we are called to be open to.

Today James says a passive hearing of God’s word is no hearing at all. Passivity accomplishes no desirable change in us and no beneficial results to the world. Some things we can change and some we cannot, but we are called to change the things we can. So our readings today stand as a judgment upon all those who refuse to hear. When Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear,” he addresses all of us who week after week hear the Good News but fail to allow it to change our lives.

Seward Hiltner, Professor Emeritus of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, always maintained that salvation always has a “from”, a “to”, and a “by” dimension. The ultimate illustration of that in scripture is the story of the Exodus. I will never forget the first class I ever heard Bishop Ed Salmon teach when he was rector of the Church of St. Michael and St. George (St. Louis, Missouri). When he was asked what exactly were the specific details of how God communicated to the Israelites they should leave Egypt, he said “If you were a slave, stomping in mud and straw all day long, wouldn’t you hear a voice that said ‘Leave!’?”

Part of our problem is that we expect God’s Voice, God’s will for us, to come via Certified mail; some kind of proof we could hold up in court. But God never operates that way. God always allows us the freedom of choice, the freedom of doubt, the freedom to stay where we are. But that does not change the fact that God does call.

As Professor Hiltner says, God always calls away From bondage of any sort, to a new life of grace, by the unconditional love of God in Christ. If we’re waiting for UPS or Fed Ex to deliver that message to us, we too will be people who live without hope. It takes open ears and open hearts to hear God’s Voice, the proof we must leave to God.

My mother told me many things about my uncle as I was growing up. I knew he was a leader in the deaf community in Des Moines, Iowa. I knew he was an honor student at Galladet University for the Deaf. I knew he started a newspaper there called “The Silent Citizen” that won acclaim across the country. She told me how lonely he found it being deaf. But right before my mother died she told me something I had never known before. She told me that every Sunday morning my uncle would go to a place where deaf people met to worship and that in spite of his youth he was the one those people looked to as their pastor. He had apparently opened to a Voice that many hearing people completely ignore.

My uncle’s grave is only a few feet away from my mother’s. The last time I was there weeds had grown over his simple marker. So I sat on the ground and pulled them out one by one. I scraped the dirt away and traced my finger over his name – and I prayed that he had found perfect healing and wholeness; because of the Voice he heard even when his own ears heard nothing.

Jesus apparently never met a disease he could not cure, a demon he could not exorcise, although he did meet skeptics he could not convince and people who refused to change. So the question about selective hearing is always our struggle. But remember this, wherever in our lives we need to hear and be opened, that is where the Gospel is waiting to happen.

Today, in “The Rector’s Class” we started talking about Abraham, remembering that he was not originally the man he became. He was not a religious man. He was a traveler, called by some voice, not entirely clear, that said “go, walk this way, and trust what you will find”.

If Jesus were to take you away in private what do you think he would ask you to be open to? His words are for each of us. They are for the church. “Ephphatha”, “Be opened”, and then, like Abraham, called on that amazing journey, let us trust what we will find.

AMEN

The Rev.Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville, Illinois