"Be Opened!"

(Scriptures:  Isaiah 35:4-7a;  James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37)

 

Many of you know that my mother and sister live in the Reading area.  As I drive north from Philadelphia to Reading on route 422, there’s a building with a sign that always catches my attention – “Mary Merritt’s Museum of Childhood.” That sign always makes me ponder, because the words “Childhood” and “Museum” seem to point in different directions.  A museum, of course, is where we go to see artifacts from our past, to remember where we’ve been.  On the other hand, when we are children, we have our whole lives ahead of us, with little memory of the past.  What would a “Museum of Childhood” look like.  I’ve never actually pulled over to see what’s inside - I think it might be a doll museum or some such – but as you can tell, that sign always starts my mind going.

Our “Blessing of the Backpacks” is a small way for our church to recognize and lift up those who have returned to classes this week.  We’re also reminded that our forebears in the faith valued education.  The book of Proverbs tells us “Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding.”  And so we are happy for those students, young and not-so-young, who seek to further their education, to open their minds to new wisdom and new understanding.

The writer of our brief reading from Isaiah spoke words of encouragement to a people who were under threat of conquest by the Assyrians.  Isaiah points past the present danger to speak of better days to come, a time when “the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, when the lame will leap and the speechless sing for joy.”  We see these verses come to life in Jesus’ healing of the deaf and mute man who was brought to Jesus for healing.  Jesus speaks the Aramaic word “Ephphatha” – in English, “be opened” – and we’re told his ears were opened, his tongue released, and he spoke plainly.  Those who witnessed the healing said, “He has done all things well, he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

“Ephphatha - Be opened!”  These words are likewise our prayer for those students, young and not so young, returning to class.  “Be opened” – opened to new learning, to new insights, to new ways of seeing the world, new ways of hearing what our neighbors have to tell us – and new ways to proclaim this new knowledge in word and deed.

“Ephphatha - Be opened!”  I believe these are also Jesus’ prayer for us in the church.  On one hand, for our children attending public or private school, we want them to have the most modern facilities, the most up-to-date textbooks, and shiny new sports equipment.  If at school, our children were taught geography from an old, threadbare textbook that said that America had 48 states, and showed the countries of Africa with the names they carried when they were colonies of Great Britain and France and such, parents would be outraged. . On the other hand, in many churches, “newness” of any kind – new hymns, new insights from Scripture, new ways of worshipping – are sometimes greeted with ambivalence.  I’m grateful that at Emanuel, while we definitely treasure our history, those holy moments where God has met us in the past, you’ve also been willing to try some new things.  For God does not call on us to be curators, but explorers.  We may remember that the name of God given to Moses – which in English we may say as “Jehovah” – is usually translated in our Bibles as “I am who I am”, it also means “I will be who I will be.” 

God offers us continuity with the past along with newness in the future – not one or the other, but both.  On one hand, did not Jesus say, “Let the little children come unto me and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven”, and in another place, “those who will not receive the reign of God as a child will never enter it.”  And the writer of I Peter asked his readers to crave pure spiritual milk, like newborn babies.   On the other hand, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  And the writer of Hebrews implored his readers to move beyond the stage of needing nourishment from spiritual milk, and to move on to spiritual meat.  And Jesus himself called on his hearers, not to try to fit the new wine of his teachings into the old wineskins of longstanding tradition, but to use new wineskins to contain the new wine.  God is gracious to meet us wherever we are – be it ever so humble – but God will not leave us there.  This is not to say that we should go along with every new spiritual fad to come down the pike.  We need to use discernment.  As I John 4 says, “Dear friends, do not receive every spirit, but test the spirits, to see if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”  So on one hand, we as Christians can’t live with our eyes closed and our hands over our ears to block out all new information; on the other hand, we need to engage in discernment over new teachings, to see if they’re consistent with our basic understanding of God, or, perhaps, the new insights are so compelling that they call into question our theological framework.   Sort of like Paul, who before his conversion had his faith all figured out – until God knocked him off his horse with a vision of the risen Christ.

We in the church are called to be lifelong learners.  We here at Emanuel experience some of that through our Bible study which we hold after church.  On the other hand, often our most memorable learning experiences come, not through texts and lectures, but through the people we meet – new visitors, former members returning to active participation.  And, in fact, today’s Gospel reading carries a story in which it seemed even Jesus seems to have experienced a learning moment in his encounter with a Syro-Phoenecian woman – a Gentile, we’re told, an outsider to Jesus’ community.   Mark’s Gospel gives us a very human portrait of Jesus, and this encounter is a very human moment.  We’re told that Jesus tried to keep his presence a secret – it sounds like perhaps he was tired and needed some "down time" – but a woman outside his community knocks on the door and begs for healing for her daughter.  Like we may do sometimes when we’re tired and don’t want to be disturbed, Jesus apparently tries to brush her off with a really insensitive comment about keeping bread for the children and not throwing it to the dogs – basically saying that his primary focus is on bringing good news to the Jews, not to every Gentile who happens to knock on the door.  And yet the woman pushes right back, saying that the dogs eat the crumbs that the children drop, basically saying she’s willing to be content with table scraps, so long as her daughter is cured.  And Jesus recognizes that in her desperation the woman has shown great faith, and cures the woman’s daughter – and in so doing perhaps gained a larger picture of what God was calling on him to do, that the grace he was bringing was not just for his own community, but for all.  It’s interesting that Mark set the story of Jesus becoming open to the plea of the Syro-Phoenecian woman next to the story in which he used the words “Be opened” to restore a man’s hearing and speech.

Our reading from the book of James reminds us in very stark terms that, in the church, we are likewise called to show hospitality to all, also, in its own way, calls on us to “be opened.”  A few years ago, the national offices of the United Church of Christ put together an ad campaign to highlight the importance of welcoming and including of all sorts of people.  It began with a picture of an imposing, tall steeple church with a velvet rope and a couple of bouncers outside, such as you’d find at an exclusive nightclub.  There was a line, and the bouncers were choosing who could enter, and more importantly, who could not.  A white, middle-class couple with children got right in, no questions.  Others – someone of middle-eastern descent, a gay couple, possibly a girl on crutches – it’s been a few years and I can’t totally remember the ad – but anyway, the more motley of the folks in the line were refused entrance.  Of course, the point of the ads is that churches are not like an exclusive nightclub, and we’re supposed to be welcoming to all. 

While the scenario in the ads may seem a little outlandish, the ads were really just elaborations of the scenario set up by James in our scripture reading today:  a rich person with all the bling walks into worship, and the ushers fall all over themselves catering to that person, while a poor person walks in and is all but ignored, certainly not made to feel welcome.  James reminds us that God does not see as we do, that the poor person in his story is rich in faith before God, and that our gatherings must be open to all who come our way.

Jesus said to the man in search of healing, “Ephphatha – Be opened.”  May God open our eyes to the vision of the reign of God to which we are called, open our ears to the cries of need in our community.  And may God loose our tongues so we can praise God’s name and proclaim good news to all who come our way.  Amen.