Pentecost 14, Proper 18, Year B

Isaiah, 35:4-7a
James, 1:17-27
Mark, 7:31-37

+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last Sunday, during his sermon, Sam rather gently observed some of the imperfections of our hearts, and then before he launched into the good news and the healing of our hearts, he jokingly asked us, “Aren’t you glad you came to church this morning?” I was sitting over at the sedilia, and I thought, “You bet I’m glad I came to church this morning. I had three terrific weeks of vacation, but it feels great to be back here.”

I was in London for three weeks, and I went to beautiful Anglo-Catholic parishes – some traditional, some contemporary. I went to an old-fashioned, Latin, Tridentine mass at a grand Roman church. I went to Holy Trinity Brompton, home of the Alpha Course, an evangelical, even charismatic, church, replete with electric guitars and drums. We sang light rock and read the words off a enormous screen up front, a screen hiding an ornate Gothic high altar. I’m a buttoned-up guy, and the people raising their hands and swinging to the music made me a bit uncomfortable, but I got over myself, and I learned a lot. It was a blessing for me. I also went to services at the popular establishment places: Westminster Abbey and S. Paul’s Cathedral. It was all marvelous.

But it’s great to be home, back among the parish family. Heaven is breaking into the world all over, but it is here where I am most certain of it, it is here where the mission of Jesus is most palpable to me. We experience it vividly in our worship, in our relationships, in the sacraments, even in the loveliness of this building, as well as in a multitude of other ways.

Today’s gospel shows the Kingdom of Heaven breaking into the world. It shows the fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision, which we heard today, that when the Lord came he would make the blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the lame jump for joy. The healing of the deaf man shows us what the end of time looks like, what God’s victory looks like.

In this section of Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been traveling around the borders of Israel. In the scene before this, he was on the Mediterranean coast at Tyre, in what is Southern Lebanon today, north of Israel. Tyre was in the news a lot a month ago, a center of violence during the Hezbollah-Israel war. In today’s gospel, Jesus has gone far inland to Decapolis, to the border country on the other side of Israel, east of Israel, in what is today Jordan.

Jesus is showing that God’s love and mercy and care extends to all peoples. We frequently hear about Jesus reaching out to the overlooked and ignored in Israel. Today, he’s reaching out to foreigners, to the Gentile dogs, to the enemies of his country. If we follow our baser instincts, we fear people who are different than us. Jesus inspires courage and compassion in us. What’s important to Jesus is that someone is in need, and without regard to their worthiness, he responds to need.

Often Jesus heals simply by speaking the word. For the deaf man, however, he touches this unclean man. He puts his fingers in his ears, and then as best we can surmise from Mark, Jesus spits on his own fingers and puts his fingers to the deaf man’s tongue. There’s a real intimacy here between God and the unclean. Jesus looks up to heaven, the source of all healing, and he sighs. S. Paul writes, “The [Holy] Spirit helps us in weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) And then Jesus says, “Ephphatha.” Be opened. Open to the healing of the Holy Spirit.

Mark doesn’t say that these healed people began to follow Jesus, but they all began to tell their stories, how God has healed and transformed their lives, how they’ve experienced heaven.

Of course, as the Church, the body of Christ, we try to continue Jesus’ mission, healing a divided, sick, and often bitter world. That is our purpose in life. That’s what S. James called pure religion and undefiled. We do that here in a lot of ways, but last week two ways really jumped up at me.

First, last Monday, on Labor Day, the Post had a long article about our neighborhood, specifically the architecture of what it called ‘The Mediocre Mile,’ the mile of Massachusetts Avenue from Union Station to up here. In the last few years, developers have quickly built a lot of large residential buildings in this area, and many more are in the works. The Post piece criticized many of the new buildings “with their bland exteriors, and hotel-like interior spaces, their subterranean parking garages and self-contained exercise facilities.” It said that a lot of them were ‘drab,’ reiterating the cliches of the “meaningless facade that looks plucked from a generic office park.” If you like snootiness, the piece was a hoot. 1

It rather depressed me. Indeed, it took me a few days before I could read through the whole piece. But at a meeting last week at S. Paul’s with Fr. Sloane, I mentioned it, and his response was crucial for us. Many of the new buildings here are big and impersonal and drab and thoroughly inspired by profit, but all of that makes this place, this church, so much more important.

Buildings are sacramental. They reveal our values and aspirations, and they strongly influence our behavior, as well as reflect it. Design by profit and strict utility suggest something about our culture’s soul – the way of the world. The parish’s buildings, especially the church, express values of beauty and authenticity and graciousness. The church, even though once among the biggest building in the neighborhood, still has a humane scale. It is now dwarfed by more and more of our neighbors, but more than any other building in the area, it points our eyes upward to heaven, to God. Our church is a sign of eternity, a point where heaven and earth meet: not only the liturgy, but the building itself.

Fr Sloane pointed out that previous generations had built lovely, magnificent churches in the east end of London. The east end used to be very poor and rough and tumble; it mostly had dilapidated, unattractive buildings. But its churches were great centers of life and civility. Susan Hawfield, who was at that meeting, pointed out that’s what’s happening today in New Orleans. The churches are the heart of the community – focal points for unity, caring, renewal, and healing.

That’s what our church is: a spiritual home for people, a place to connect with others, to build a community, to serve one another. We want to draw people out of their buildings and personalize our world.

All summer and especially while I was away, our master plan committee did a lot of work to choose an architect for us so that we can update and renew the property. In the coming year, we are going to be thinking a lot about what God is calling us to do with this space, how we can use it for mission and ministry, for building community, for healing souls.

How we use and design the building is critical to assisting a second way we are healing our world. At the heart of being a faithful church is building relationships, both with people inside the church and with those outside. Fundamental to building relationships is accepting and respecting and admiring other people, especially people different than us, especially people who have little to do with the Church. Jesus healed beyond the borders of Israel. We heal beyond the church to all of the community.

Philip Yancey tells a story about a class he was teaching.2 It was discussing how to make non-Christians feel comfortable in churches. The discussion became highly critical of fundamentalist churches. It’s always easier to criticize others rather than taking a hard, honest look at ourselves. Yancey himself even joined in making fun of the Moody Bible Institute. During the ‘70s, the Moody Bible Institute had banned its males students from having beards, mustaches, and hair below their ears. Yancey joked that the school had a prominent painting of hirsute man breaking all three rules. It was a portrait of Dwight L. Moody.

That is funny, and it amused most of his class, except for one fiery student who finally stammered,

"I feel like walking out of this place,” [he told the class], and all of a sudden the room hushed. “You criticize others for being Pharisees. I’ll tell you who the real Pharisees are. They’re you [he pointed at Yancey] and the rest of you people in this class. You think you’re so high and mighty and mature. I became a Christian because of Moody Church. You find a group to look down on, to feel more spiritual than, and you talk about them behind their backs. That’s what a Pharisee does.”

Yancey realized that he had no response. He had been caught out, full of spiritual arrogance, looking down at others. He says, “The silence grew louder. I felt embarrassed and trapped.” Then a second student spoke and told the angry student, “I’m glad that you didn’t walk out. We need you here. I’m glad you’re here . . . .” The second student then began to tell his story:

I was addicted to drugs, and in a million years it wouldn’t have occurred to me to approach a church for help. Every Tuesday, though, this church lets an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter meet here. . . I started attending that group, and after a while I decided that a church that welcomes an AA group – cigarette butts, coffee spills, all – can’t be too bad, so I made a point to visit the service.
I’ve got to tell you that the people [there] were threatening to me at first. They seemed like they had it all together while I was barely hanging on. . . People didn’t shun me. They reached out to me. It’s here that I met Jesus.

That’s a great story of healing, and why it’s vital here is that telling it helped heal that class. It drew the angry student back in; it relieved the embarrassed; and, it united everyone.

Everyone of us here also has a story, possibly not as dramatic as that drug addict’s, possibly more open-ended, but our stories are more powerful, more interesting, more dramatic than we think. If we think about our stories – how we came to know Jesus, how we’re coming to know Jesus, and then share them, as well as listen to the stories of others, we’ll recognize that they’re more similar than we think. There’s a common theme: “I once was lost, and now I am found.” Amazing Grace is the most popular hymn for a reason.

It’s a good thing to pray about: God show me how you’re healing me, how your Spirit is working in me. Our stories themselves are healing, for ourselves and for others. Being aware of them makes us more grateful, and being more grateful makes us more joyful. Our stories unite us, and they personalize life in what is often a very hard, cold, depersonalized world. It’s heaven coming into the world.

God calls every one of us to share in his mission. That’s our purpose in life. That’s pure, undefiled religion. There are so very many ways we can be working to heal. Sometimes it’s dramatic – a deaf man suddenly hearing, a drug addict getting it together. Mostly, it’s just ordinary things – making a friend at church or gazing up at the church tower and praising God in the quiet of our hearts. Mostly, it’s just ordinary things.

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. Philip Kennicott, ‘The Mediocre Mile,’ The Washington Post, 4 September 2006, p. C01.

2. Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, Zondervan (1995), pp. 147-49.