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September 10, 2006
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Proverbs
22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23, James 2:14-17, Mark 7:24-37
“All-ee, All-ee,
All in Free! At Home to the Whole World!”
The question of the day may well be, how in the world does this bulletin cover
relate to these texts -- or to anything else about this Homecoming Sunday?!
Contrary to first impression, it’s not “chickens with their heads cut off.” Nor
even, on the eve of 9/11, “chickens come home to roost.” Nor is it “birds of a
feather flock together.” It refers to the “Responsive Benediction,” “Thousand
Red Birds” by Phil Porter. Appropriate both to beginning this new year –
Welcome home!
Welcome back -- to church, to work, to school, to whatever else we’ve been
putting off! It’s appropriate to observing tomorrow’s anniversary. This prayer
asks that we not go through our life together clutching at tiny bits of hidden
faith -- fearfully, suspiciously, defensively and protectively. Not to put our
own stingy scarcity in place of God’s awesome abundance. Rather, we are, by
faith, to find heart and courage “to grow, to shimmer, to pulse, to explode into
the air – like a thousand red birds!” We’ve got ‘em for you in the Social Hall
– not!
Julie and I adopted Jeffery and Jane. Then the birth of Jacob sneaked up on us.
Well-meaning friends would say, “We’re so glad you finally got one of your
own!” As if the first two didn’t count. Or at least wouldn’t cost so much to
love or raise! Like most congregations, I suspect, we do pretty well at
“taking care of our own” – those whom we think of us “like us,” in whom we can
see ourselves easily. Yet we have to say this morning of Homecoming 2006, we
cannot keep tough things from happening to our own – no matter how close and
caring we are!
We are feeling besieged with aching and breaking, agitation and deterioration of
our body – physically, emotionally, relationally, programmatically. As a
congregation and as a people together, we are many ways “challenged” today.
Yet we offer up signs and gestures of life and of hope – in each bulletin a
“Sharing of Gifts and Graces” form – Please fill it in as you tour the Social
Hall, or as soon as you are able – and in the Social Hall a new “Handbook for
Congregational Care” – a listing of members and friends – with the invitation to
reach out in care for others, sisters and brothers in Christ we may not yet
know. There are imperfections and omissions to each of these – please bear
with us.
Our challenge this Homecoming Sunday is to hear
and believe the good news we proclaim at the end of each game of “Hide and Go
Seek” – “All-ee, all-ee, all in free! Time to come home! Come out, come out,
wherever, whoever, you are! We are all free be seen and heard just as we are!
Nothing has been held against us! The forgiveness of God goes before us!” Peace
author/educator Colman McCarthy says we could have responded to 9/11 that way.
It’s hard to think we would have been any the worse off by now. We could have
regarded differently what happened in that ideological attack. I never felt
personally, or nationally, or religiously attacked – much as I felt the intense
violation and gross devastation. But I see it as the ideological, the political
attack of a very few highly dedicated and disciplined individuals -- on the
homes of world trade and world militarism.
We could have regarded it differently -- as an
unnatural kind of “natural disaster” – not unlike the tsunami or Katrina – not
even unlike the cancers and other diseases that feel like such invasions and
occupations of our own bodies! We could have sought immediate remedy and relief
through established or even emerging procedures for international criminal
justice. We’ve got to acknowledge such systems some day – why not now? We
could have taken the occasion for some serious work of what the church calls
“confession” – self-reflection, self-examination, self-evaluation – leading more
to repentance and renewal, than to revenge and retribution. We could have said,
in various ways, as horrible as this crime is, we forgive you. Now forgive us
as well. That together we dare find a way past the ways we always have done
things to each other. Is it too late?
Is it too late? Can we, in Eliot’s phrase, come
home again as if for the first time? Home “where cross the crowded ways of life”
we may find respite, reception, safe space, hospitality – the chance to be seen
and heard as we are – the chance to be welcomed as our worship begins this
morning in words of Thomas John Carlisle: “Listen / only / listen. / Do not
pursue me / as though you were God. / The gift I need / is your hearing / and
your heart.” Your hearing, and your heart. Is that not the “Christian
caregiving” we seek to learn to practice, to give and receive, in this
Homecoming Season? Through a “caregiving way” of doing our lives and our life
together? Collegially, collaboratively, congregationally in our lives?
Economically, ecologically, and ecumenically in our larger life together?
The command Jesus gives this one who is both
deaf and dumb – because if we cannot hear when God has given us two ears, we
certainly cannot speak when God, wisely, has given us only one mouth! – the
command Jesus gives is “Ephphatha! Be opened!” And that is a word to us if we
would be caregiving toward others: We first must be opened ourselves. We must
learn what it’s like to be “others” of every category. Beginning with what it’s
like to be “others” in this all-too-shrinking world of ours – other faiths,
other cultures, other nations, other tongues – and among ourselves, other ages,
other genders, other sexualities, other classes, circumstances, conditions. What
is it like to be one who does not hear, does not speak, is not able to express
oneself in ways that others may recognize and respond to? Caregiving with those
not “like us” will mean learning whole new languages, so to speak, whole new
ways of communicating!
Who and what are we deaf to? Who and what are
we dumb to? Whom do we need to see who is not visible to us now? Whom do we
need to hear who is not audible to us now? Whom do we need to touch who is not
tangible to us now? Whom do we need to encounter, embrace, engage, endure who
is not even imaginable to us now? And have we ourselves never felt unseen?
Unheard? Unspoken to? Untouched? Unimagined? Ignored? Irrelevant? Have we
not met others so sure they have nothing to learn from us? I mean, not just
learn about us – as in a “National Geographic” kind of way – but really learn of
us? Learn from us, directly? Deeply? Urgently? As we really are?
It looks like we are beginning to live in what
Jacque Ellul called long ago “the technological concentration camp!” Kay Greene
and President Bush alluded to same phenomena this week – and by the way, I would
support Kay Greene for president! Kay emailed us all about some new data base
that knows everything about us! More about us than we know about, or would care
to know about ourselves! Meanwhile President Bush was openly commending what
some courts -- even military ones -- have found to be illegal eavesdropping,
wiretapping, detention, imprisonment, seizure, and torture.
I always say of us, if we would be friends and
followers of Jesus – Jesus who was spied on his whole life! Informed on and
betrayed, seized and searched, tried and convicted, tortured and executed!
Jesus who promises us the vision and voice, the advocacy, of the Holy Spirit –
our legal Counselor in resistance to violence and injustice -- because Jesus
expects that we will be busted and hauled into court and will need to know what
to say! I always say of us, I just hope we are doing something subversive
enough to warrant all this suspicion!
As Christian or any faith-based caregivers, as those who offer hearing and
heart, healing and wholeness, we open ourselves to all that is “other” to us.
We open both to what is outside of us and, more painfully, as Jesus told us last
week, what is inside of us as well. Jesus says nothing outside of us – no
so-called pagan, or unbeliever, or immigrant, or alien, or addict, or homeless
person, or communist, or terrorist, or even fascist of whatever kind – nothing
outside of us can corrupt us or even hurt us! But only what lies in our
own hearts, and minds, and bodies, and souls. We are our own worst
“enemy!” Once we open ourselves, only then we may look for the “opening”
in the other.
But as James says in the epistle, it’s never
just a matter of saying a few good words over them. Actions are always more
healing than words. Jesus’ word here is preceded by a lot of hard work! First
Jesus has to deal with the begging of those who bring the deaf man to him. Then
he has to resist the temptation to use the man for his own purposes; to show off
his own healing powers; to exploit or show the man off in any way; especially to
make any money or any fame off any such common circumstance or condition of our
lives. Jesus will not divide and conquer our shared humanity, even as some
“reality” shows – not to mention any number of other so-called “entertainments”
– seem to be doing to us.
So first Jesus takes the man aside in private,
away from the crowd. Then Jesus gets down and dirty: He puts his fingers into
the man’s ears – Yuck! And he spits! Where? On whom? For what? And he even
touches the man’s tongue! Without putting on rubber gloves!! Only then does
Jesus speak a healing and whole-making word to the man. Only then has Jesus
earned trust enough for the man to open himself completely to Jesus. And even
then Jesus tells his followers – with all their “church growth” anxiety -- not
to go telling the world what he has done – even though he knows, the more he
says that, the more we will do the other! Jesus knows the more he heals, the
more trouble he gets into.
Jesus is trying to keep the same low profile
when he crosses the border – illegally? – into the regions of Tyre and Sidon –
in the news lately because of the bombing of south Lebanon. But Jesus just can
never escape the notice of those who need him and want him the most! Jesus
tries to get away with using words on woman who begs for her daughter. He wants
to make her somehow invisible, inaudible, intangible, unimaginable -- and thus
unworthy and dismissable to him! But she will not leave him alone.
She’s desperate enough to identify even with dogs eating crumbs from the table
in order to get Jesus to act on her plight!
She literally puts him to shame. As Sharon
Ringe says bluntly, Jesus is “caught with his compassion down.” Jesus is
understandably human! He is “like us” in every way. Even as we are “like him”
– in more ways than we care to admit. As caregivers in Jesus’ name today, just
think what difference this woman made for us. Consider her legacy to us. She
wins for her child, and for all children in Jesus’ sight, a healing where there
was no healing! A way home where there was no way – so everyone – everyone! –
is invited, welcomed, seated, and fed.
Garrison Keillor writes this week, in a way
reminding us of this fierce mother -- and in a clearly alternative view to
“Survivor,” – “We really are one people at heart . . . . The issue is whether we
care about people who don’t get on television. “Last week I sat and listened to
a roomful of parents talk about their battles with public schools in behalf of
their children who suffer from dyslexia, or apraxia, or attention deficit
disorder, or some other disability – sagas of ferocious parental love versus
stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic needful things – and how some of
them had uprooted their families and moved to Minnesota so their children could
attend better schools. You couldn’t tell if those parents were Republicans or
Democrats. They simply were prepared to move mountains so their kids could have
a chance. So are we all.
“And that,” concludes Garrison Keillor, “is the
mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we had.” And that is
true of everyone everywhere in this world. Sisters and brothers, even those who
flew the planes into the buildings five years ago, not to mention all those who
were killed on that day – every one of them – every bomber, every soldier, every
defense contractor, every victim – every one of them was a child to someone
somewhere – who birthed them and raised them and cared for them and nurtured
them and tried to give them as good a chance as they could. Every one of them.
Every one of us.
Amen.
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