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September 10, 2006, Pentecost 14, All
Souls’ Episcopal Church
Be opened
In the Gospel reading
appointed for today, our Lord Jesus and his disciples
pass through a region known as Decapolis – the ten
cities. A man is brought to Jesus so that the Lord may
lay hands upon him and heal him. The man is deaf and has
an impediment in his speech. Often, these two conditions
go together, good hearing being important to speaking
clearly. We are told that our Lord takes the man aside
from the multitude. He gives him special attention. Our
Lord puts his fingers into the man’s ears, spits,
touches the man’s tongue, looks up to Heaven, and sighs
as he says, “Be opened.” We are told that the man’s
hearing was restored and that he also was able to speak
plainly. Our Lord then tells the people to say nothing
of the miracle. And yet, the more he told them, the more
the people spread word of how he had healed their
friend.
People often ask why our
Lord instructed the crowd to remain silent about the
miracle. Some have suggested to me that Jesus was using
reverse psychology, and that he told them one thing
knowing that they would do the opposite. There are
problems with this view. First of all, we should not
assume that Jesus would have us spreading the Gospel
through disobedience. Secondly, reverse psychology does
not appear to have been our Lord’s usual modus operandi.
It’s not like he tells us to be evil and treat each
other horribly in hopes that we will be good.
St. John called our Lord’s
miracles “signs.” The miracles are a manifestation – an
outward and visible sign of God’s inward and invisible
grace. The miracles are meant to illustrate our Lord’s
teachings and are to be understood in the broader
context of those teachings and of his life, death,
resurrection, and ascension. It is possible that Jesus
did not wish to have the people focusing only upon the
miracles themselves, seeking him out only for outward
blessings.
Whatever our Lord’s reasons
for instructing the people to remain silent, I cannot
help but feel for the man who was healed. He had been
unable to hear and unable to speak. His deafness had
excluded him from conversation. Finally, he can hear and
speak, and Jesus tells him not to talk about it. But –
and I know I’m being fanciful here – perhaps our Lord
had something like this in mind. The deaf man had been
cut off from conversation. His deafness had left him
feeling isolated and even excluded from the community.
Perhaps our Lord was telling him that that his first
topic of conversation should not be about himself.
Perhaps he was being told to focus on others and hear
their story – listen first, and then speak. Perhaps!
I am always struck by the
way in which our Lord used outward and visible signs to
demonstrate to the deaf man what he was doing for him.
He communicated at a level the man could understand.
This indeed is in keeping with how our Lord does things.
In fact, we believe that our Lord is “the word made
flesh.” We believe that he is the Word of God incarnate
– in the flesh. As such, his entire life is an outward
and visible expression of who he is. His life is
sacramental in that sense. Moreover, he gives his church
– his body, sacramental signs not only to accompany his
word, but to be an outward and visible sign of that
word. In fact, his church, his body, is to be an outward
and visible manifestation of his word.
It would be a poor football
coach who spent all season drawing plays on a chalk
board but never let his players on to the field to
practice those moves. My favorite musical is The Music
Man. In it, a so-called professor teaches students music
with what he calls “the think theory.” He insists that
if the students just think about a piece of music, they
should be able to play it without ever practicing with
musical instruments. As crazy as this seems, some people
seem to apply this same theory to their Christian lives,
believing that as long as we have the right ideas and
the right teachings and understand the Christian
principles, it doesn’t really matter whether we apply
them to our lives and live them. One of the earliest
heresies which the early church struggled against was
Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that Christianity was
all about having esoteric knowledge about God and that
the life we live in the flesh didn’t really matter. What
mattered weren’t morals but right knowledge. We still
see this heresy today when people act as if as long as
they express all the right opinions their private life
doesn’t matter. As long as they hold all the right
opinions about integration and race relations, they feel
they can be racist in their private lives, or as long as
they subscribe to equal opportunities and rights for
women, they can behave in private like sexist pigs and
that’s somehow okay.
St. James attacks this view
in the Epistle Lesson. He says that faith without works
is like a man looking at his face in a mirror and then
immediately forgetting what he looks like the minute he
walks away. Such a man has no real self-impression.
There is no real spiritual substance with such a man.
All he has are notions. St. James makes plain that
Christianity is both to be believed and lived. We are to
have faith in Christ and follow him. We are to believe
in Jesus and become like him. In each Christian and in
the Body of Christ, the Word of God must become flesh in
the lives we live.
The man who was healed had
been deaf and therefore could not hear others. Many of
us on the other hand who are not deaf nevertheless fail
to hear the voices of others because we are not
listening. We suffer from a self-imposed deafness. Or
else, we are selectively deaf, hearing only what we want
to hear. We apply that selective deafness all too often
to our colleagues, our friends, and even to our
families. We get so caught up in our own little world
and with our own concerns and preoccupations we have
little time and no interest in hearing the voices of
others. And, we sometimes are selectively deaf because
we are comfortable hearing only what we want to hear. We
are too wrapped up in our own social, political,
religious ideologies which come with responses prepared
before any questions are asked, as we wear our religion
like a Do Not Disturb sign hung on the closed door of
our mind.
Sometimes, though, events
occur which open our ears and bring us out of our
self-imposed hard shells. Fives years ago tomorrow, on
September 11, 2001, our nation was attacked by suicidal
mass murderers. Thousands of loved ones died on that sad
and tragic day. We continue to mourn with those who
mourn and weep with those who weep. On a day which
changed our nation, great buildings crumbled, innocents
were lost, and innocence was lost. In a land founded by
the people and of the people whose liberties were
secured by citizen soldiers, the first to fight back on
that day were a group of common citizens who responded
with uncommon valor over the skies of Pennsylvania and
saved countless lives in sacrificing their own. And
then, we began to see another response as our nation
came together in a remarkable way with an enduring
spirit as people began volunteering, putting the needs
of others ahead of their own. People began listening to
one another and helping one another. People from all
walks of life stepped out of their ideological ghettos
long enough to recognize a common purpose. People were
opened on that day. On that day and in the days that
followed we acted as “one nation under God.”
As Christians, let us be
opened. Let us first be open to the Word of God. It is
only when we hear God’s Word and listen to that Word can
be speak about God and about ourselves in an unimpeded
manner. As Christians, let us be open to the voices of
others, hearing them, listening to them and being
attentive to their needs so that the spirit which so
graciously moved this nation five years ago may not
merely be the exception but become the norm. As
Christians, let us “be swift to hear, slow to speak, and
slow to wrath.” Let us be doers of the Word – incarnate
expressions of God’s Word, knowing that therein is “the
perfect law of liberty.”
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