ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
The Thirteenth Sunday of Trinity, 6 September 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass
Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7a; James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37
Mark 7:37. He even makes the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak
Christians cross boundaries. Jesus crosses boundaries. Today Jesus behaves like a pagan magician, like a village medicine man, touching ears and tongue to make whole a man who is deaf and dumb. Jesus is like this all the time, entering Gentile houses, casting demons out of little girls, and what we are being told, in these stories which are vehicles for God's grace in our lives, is that the strangeness doesn't matter. That's what we say to a child, when the child falls over, crosses a boundary, gets a bit dirty; it doesn't matter. External forms do not matter. Jesus is all things to all people. The boundaries we set on how to behave and on what is possible, are not going to prevent the free flow of God's healing power into human lives. I can cross a boundary right now. Let's cross that boundary together. On one side there's me wondering whether saliva can really cure a person with a speech impediment, deciding probably not, but suppressing that thought because it makes nonsense of the Gospel as I think it is, so sort of going along with a half-truth. Or, one step across the boundary, in the kingdom which our Messiah proclaims, I find that I can hear again and I can speak again, in a new language which understands all and is understood by all, the language of the love of God.
He even makes the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak. The crowd say that. I don't like crowds much. You're all right, you're a nice crowd. But the crowd that followed Jesus around had a mind of their own, so Jesus is always dodging them, and the crowd don't actually get to see the miracles. But this time the crowd is like a sort of opera chorus commenting on what's happening on stage, so we hear from them a quotation from Isaiah, which, thanks to the energy of the compilers of our readings, we heard in today's first lesson. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing. What looks like a rather messy miracle becomes the fulfilment of a prophecy, our glorious future come at last, when water breaks out in the desert. The message is to those of a fearful heart, and who more fearful than we, that 'He will come and save you'.
Christians listening to that story in the early days of the Church would have got the connection with Isaiah just like that. We have unlimited information on our little screens, but we are an almost deaf and dumb generation, so we have to work at the words. But the message is the same today as it always was. Jesus is the one who makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak. That is the measure of the liberation of the Christian Gospel. Our faith does not tie us down with rules, it liberates us from them. We hear again. We hear the truth abour ourselves, that we are forgiven, that we are empowered by the Spirit to help create God's world. We learn to speak in a new way, without impediment, not with ourselves at the centre of every utterance, but in a more natural form of communication, we are put back in touch with each other. We learn to speak plainly to others and to God. Ephphatha, Be opened. No more secrets, no more lies. What a relief. Then the demons leave, as they do in the presence of Truth, as they left that little girl lying on a bed in the city of Tyre. When we learn how to hear and to speak again, and how Jesus can hear, and speak, and heal through us, those earthy stories of St Mark don't seem so way out after all.
Faith without works is dead, says St James today, controversially. Jesus wanted to cure a man who was deaf and dumb, and he did so. It was instinctive, God working through him. It should be instinctive for us, as Christians, to reach across to those turned in on themselves, the deaf and dumb in spirit in our generation, because we can trust the God within us to heal and to raise from the dead. After all he's done it to us. There are streams in our desert. When we were selfish and proud, and unhappy as a result, or at a dead end in our lives, there was hope because of what someone said, some indication that God did mind about our unhappiness, and stretched out his hand and touched us. Everyone is an outcast, struck dumb, at some point in their lives. Perhaps it is one of the things that unites us all in this world, a solidarity in suffering. It's not a bad place to start. Shared weakness binds us closer than shared strength. Brokenness is real. Our weakness helps us to be compassionate, because we have learnt to see connections, to identify with others, and to trust in the power of a loving God to heal us. Christ's gift to us today is the freedom to cross our boundaries, and to heal and forgive. In some ways it is the answer to almost all the problems we come up against in our lives, learning to be as compassionate as Jesus was that day beside the Sea of Galilee.