16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18B

16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 18B September 9, 2018 This is a difficult gospel passage for us today. Our lectionary gives us two seemingly unconnected healing stories in Mark’s gospel. First, we have Jesus’s encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman. Jesus is fresh off a challenging encounter with the Pharisees (which we saw in last week’s gospel reading). They are challenging him because his disciples do not follow the Jewish dietary laws. And Jesus counters with the fact that the Pharisees are a bunch of hypocrites who put more emphasis on following human traditions than having their hearts be aligned with God’s teaching. At this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus is exhausted, and he goes on retreat to the remote area-the region of Tyre. But his rest and retreat do not last long as word gets out he is there. Mark tells us that the Syro-Phoeneciann woman bursts into the house where Jesus is staying. She is Greek which means that she is both a foreigner and a Gentile. And she has burst uninvited into this houses to confront Jesus and demand healing for her demon-possessed daughter. Commentators on this gospel interpret what happens next in the story in two different ways. Jesus is a real jerk to the woman, calling her a dog and refusing to heal her sick child. One way commentators interpret this is to say that Jesus knew how the woman would react, and so he provokes her with the harsh language and the challenge to her request—pushing her to demonstrate her faith. The other way of interpreting this encounter is that Jesus is tired. He’s digging in and sticking to his guns about what he believes is his mission—to minister to the “lost sheep of Israel.” And he rests in the cultural norms and religious expectations of his day—that he didn’t need to help this woman or her child because they are not Jews. This second interpretation is actually the more challenging (and because of that, I think, the more interesting interpretation) because Jesus seems to be doing to the woman exactly what he criticizes the Pharisees for in the verses just before this encounter. And yet, the woman persists, and Jesus changes his mind and heals her daughter. Just like God changes God’s mind when faced with compelling arguments from Abraham and Moses against God’s chosen course of action against God’s wayward people, Jesus changes his mind, expands or opens his understanding of his mission when faced with the arguments of the foreign, Gentile woman But that’s not all! Our lectionary gives us a second story this week-the story of the deaf man with the speech impediment who is brought to Jesus for healing. Jesus takes the man apart from the others, and he heals the man by touching him, using Jesus’s own saliva, and commanding the man: “Ephaphthah” which means “Be opened” in Aramaic. This story is important to read with the first story because we see Jesus acknowledging how his own faith, his own sense of his mission has changed as a result of his encounter with the woman. Jesus, himself, has been opened. And that’s really the nature of faith, isn’t it? Being opened. None of us, not even Jesus, ever arrives at the fullness of our faith in this life. Our whole life-long, faith journey is the process of being opened by God and to God, through encounters with the sacraments, with God’s grace given through the Holy Spirit, and through encounters with each other. There’s an individualistic component to this. We can ask ourselves this week: “Are there any areas in your life, or in your faith, where you need to allow Jesus to come and open, perhaps areas that you shut long ago?”i But there’s also a corporate (church-wide) component to this being opened as well. I sometimes listen to a lectionary-based preaching podcast called “Pulpit Fiction.” One of the two hosts is a United Methodist minister, and in this week’s episode, he talked about the long-standing Methodist ad campaign: “Open hearts; Open minds; Open doors.” He said that some people in the Methodist church critique this slogan because they say that the church isn’t truly open to all people. And the minister said that he sees Jesus’s words “Open up” or “Be opened” in conjunction with this saying-not so much as adjectives but as verbs—as a prescription of what we are supposed to be doing—working to actively be open. He then shared a prayer for illumination that his church uses prior to the reading of scripture every week: “Holy Spirit, open our hearts to the story of your love. Open our minds to new ways of knowing you. Open our doors to whom all you would welcome. Amen.”ii Now, lest we start thinking too highly of ourselves as Episcopalians in this, let me share with you a couple of details. The first comes from an article that the bishop sent all the clergy of the diocese this week. The article is by Dan Hotchkiss and is titled Five Lies We Like to Tell About Church Growth. The very first “lie” is that friendly churches grow. Here is what Hotchkiss writes about this: “Declining churches often marvel at how many visitors show up once and don’t return. ‘But we’re so friendly!’ Like most lies we tell ourselves, this one has a grain of truth in it: a visitor who gets a friendly greeting is more likely to return. But most church consultants know that the more vehemently leaders say their church is friendly, the more likely it will feel quite cold to visitors. When people say, ‘Our church is friendly,’ generally they mean ‘My friends are here.’ Visitors to ‘friendly’ churches see the backs of people’s heads—heads gathered into tight, impenetrable groups of friends. Churches that excel at hospitality are more apt to give themselves a B+ or C– in the friendliness department—and appreciate that hospitality takes effort.” I’ve heard this described as the difference between being a friendly church and a church of friends. A church of friends is the phenomenon that Hotchkiss writes about, when visitors only see the backs of peoples’ heads. This is something that we need to be attentive to, asking ourselves often if we are truly a friendly church or if we are being, instead, a church of friends. The second detail is a reminder of the Welcome survey I preached about a few months ago. We left copies in the narthex and church office and asked people to fill it out and turn it in, and we gave you a little over a month to do this. We had 13 of those surveys turned in, which tells me either a. we don’t like to fill out surveys or b. we aren’t very interested in assessing how welcoming we are. So how do we as a church live more deeply into this call of Jesus? To “Be opened.” At this beginning of a new program year, what are ways that we as a church can be opened—expanding our understanding of our mission and ministry, growing deeper in our faith together to opening to those who are different than us—different faiths, different socio-economic classes, different skin colors, different political parties? Let us pray. “Holy Spirit, open our hearts to the story of your love. Open our minds to new ways of knowing you. Open our doors to whom all you would welcome. Amen.”iii i. From Pray as you go podcast for September 9, 2018 ii. From Pulpit Fiction episode for September 9, 2018 iii.From Pulpit Fiction episode for September 9, 2018