“Be Open"
Commemoration of September 11th
| Rev. Pat Bumgardner |
Isaiah 35:4-7 |
| September 10, 2006 |
Mark 7:31-37 |
Will you pray with me? [Prayer...]
After teaching the people that it's what's in us that counts/that the only "traditions" we pass on to each other ought to be about things that unite us, not separate us (last week's sermon) --- Jesus leaves Galilee and crosses the border into Syria, where he reluctantly heals the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman --- a story scholars say parallels the story of the healing of Jairus' daughther (*remember, back in chapter 5 of Mark's Gospel? Rev. Edgard preached on that story not long ago} --- it's important because Jesus is traveling back and forth across the sea (really, a lake in this part of Mark's Gospel) --- back and forth between primarily Jewish and primarily Gentile communities, doing the same things on "both sides of the fence", so to speak:
Healing a Jewish synagogue official's daughter, well-placed among his people, and healing the daughter of a Syrophoenician, gentile, possibly pagan woman, with no place/no social standing as far as Jesus was concerned.
He's crossing back and forth between communities of faith feeding 5000 people with 5 loaves and 12 baskets left over, all decidely Hebrew references --- and then crossing the waves to feed 4000 with 7 loaves, numbers of gentile significance.
And now, on his way back to Galilee, near the Decapolis, people bring a man who cannot hear and who has a speech impediment to him...for healing. They beg Jesus, Mark says, to lay hands on this guy --- to touch him/claim him as a Child of God, as we've said so many times before was the meaning of that gesture. --- And Jesus does touch him --- in fact, he does more than that --- he puts his fngers in the person's ears and spits on his tongue --- they exchange bodily fluids, if you will! {How's that for a Biblical basis for talking about the things that awill save people's lives in parts of the world more comfortable with naming the curative effects of garlic and lemon?!? --- All the newspaper articles about South Africa and AIDS right now, blame an ignorant, though well-educated Health Minister --- but I say WE share the responsibility in a nation where 5.5 million people are positive, with our insistence that fully 2/3 of the financial support we offer be directed at abstinence only programs. No wonder people are singing the praises of beatroot --- they have no real curative/preventative agents to compare it with. --- Jesus exchanges bodily fluids with this man, not only a decidedly inappropriate thing to do in public, even off to the side (I know! I've been spit on, just walking down the street holding Ms. Gibney's hand! In Tel Aviv they thought Gayle was my wife, but that's another sermon!) --- Jesus, using spit to heal --- as almost a ritualistic prelude before looking up to heaven/praying for healing/for openness uses something designated as "unclean" (he might as well have used excrement, that's how strong the prohibition/the revulsion would have been), is negating all the borders and boundaries of separation. Ephphatha! BE OPEN!, he cries out --- it's an imperative. (Jesus often prayed in a commanding way --- the prayer he taught that we regularly repeat --- "Thy common/wealth come!", we say --- is recorded in the imperative. It's a demand that something happen and happen now!) BE OPEN!, he bellows --- and immediately, Mark says, the person hears...and speaks...and Jesus orders the crowds gathered to tell no one --- but they do --- and people begin to say, 'he does all things well', an allusion actually to the fulfilling of prophecies like that in Isaiah's 35th chapter, where the day of salvation/the day of God's coming among us is marked by these same sorts of miracles.
Actually, Isaiah 35 is out of place in the text --- it reads more like Second Isaiah and the poems of retun, where those once exiled reclaim their place in the world.
Daniel Berrigan translates our first reading more like --- wasted places will cry out with LIFE --- ABUNDANT LIFE (New Orleans, the 9th Ward --- all the tsunami-ravaged lands will be filled with abundantly restored life --- it's likea mirage, a miracle). The half-glimpsed glory of God will become pure light and the sorrowful have "hope's first faint inkling" --- and spines bent double
under unremitting loads, like the beasts of burden (like the donkeys Gayle and I saw climbing steep and winding paths in Palestinian settlements) will straighten and leap for joy!
Isaiah and his people have come through the worst of what the world has to offer and in this poem, some speculate may have been his last before his execution, Isaiah sees his people restored --- it's like a dream come true. They have survived. It's the Gloria Gaynor moment of Holy Writ! Picture this: Ms. Gibney and Carolyn Parker-Davis in a park out on Long Island with 1000s of other middle-aged women, hands high above their heads, waving in the air, paying tribute to that gay anthem: "Did you think I'd crumble? Did you think I'd lay down and die? Oh, no, no, no, not I. I will survive!" --- People, all kinds of people --- the daughters of well-placed synagogue officials and the daughters of outcasts regarded as low-life non-believers are making it --- not only surviving, but claiming their right to life/abundant life in Mark's story.
The right ot live fully is not limited to one form of government, one nation of peoples, Muhamed Khatami, Iran's former President, said in Washington, DC this week.
But not everyone believes that and even wants that. This is a highly symbolic story in Mark's Gospel --- it is in a section, says Ched Myers, that contains "one object lesson after another in the alternative practice of inclusivity and compassion" and people's responses to that. --- Jesus is trying to make Isaiah's prophetic vision of everyone regaining their rightful equality REAL, in this story of quote, "deafness healed." It is no different than Luke's story of Jesus entering the Temple {4:16f.} on a Sabbath and reading from Isaiah 61 --- remember? --- "The Spirit of God is upon me," Jesus reads, "God has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor and liberty to the captives --- and to restore sight to the blind and thereby set the captives free." --- The only difference is that in Luke Jesus will say directly, "Today, this Scripture is being fulfilled in your hearing." --- But people get mad, remember? They say just who do you think you are to claim the power of God is here with these people and with you, for such universal restoration?!? They try to run Jesus over the edge of a cliff!
Sometimes people get angry now when they hear this story we have from Mark's Gospel --- often justifiably so.
Why am I not healed of -------- pick anything off this* long list of prayer for miracles in the bulletin every week. Sometimes we ask why did Phil Reed or Rich Walker or Brad Chilcoat get miracles and MY brother or MY mother --- MY lover, my child...someone I cared about did not?
People get angry because of how degrading they find stories like this one from Mark's 7th chapter. --- I am not a less whole person because I am deaf! I don't need "healing" because I communicate with signs not the spoken word --- I NEED acceptance and recognition of who I am, a complete child of God. I need honor and respect (what I would suggest all the healing stories are ultimately about).
It's a complicated issue we are addressing. Think of it this way: Those of us who hear do not necessarily think of ourselves as "disabled" because we cannot communicate fully with our hands, for example. People born deaf do not necessarily see themselves as disabled because they communicate non-verbally and may therefore not even be the slight bit desirous of things like the miraculous institution of hearing or a Kochlear implant, while people who have lost their hearing may "see" things differently.
We pray for miracles for people who want and need them all the time. We beg/I beg God everyday to save Laraine's life from pancreatic cancer or to help Gene get a meaningful job --- or even for parking spaces (offering a conversion experience to many a non-believer in Manhattan!).
When we were in Jerusalem, at the old city, we went to the site of the pool of Bethesda --- remember that story in John's 5th chapter, where the man who has been sick for 38 years waiting for someone to put him in the water is miraculously cured with simply a word from Jesus' mouth? --- Only say the word and your servant shall be healed, our brother, the Centurian says
in Matthew's 8th chapter. --- I prayed for that word for many people that Wednesday afternoon --- for Randy, for my friend Marvin, for Troy's lover Phillip, for Jim and Justin and so many more.
We as MCCers believe fervently that Jesus was a healer --- that touch is healing. That's why we lay hands on people at Communion. I BELIEVE THAT, AND ... I also believe this: that healing is not only about being cured of something or physically restored. And that that was as true in Jesus's day and age as our own --- if you think about things like that 23-year-old woman in Kolkata, India forces by hospital personnel to do her own abortion, while they tossed supplies at her from a distance because she is HIV+, or that 35-year-old man stoned to death outside an Orissa clinic because he has had AIDS --- don't kid yourselves, people living with AIDS are still regularly discriminated against the world over. --- In first century Palestine, "healing" was just as much about restoration of place/restoration of dignity and value and worth as a human being as it wasa physical alteration of the situation.
We've talked about this before, but I think it bears repeating, in our quest to really unearth the promise of this story for ALL God's people. People in Jesus' society who were ill or differely abled from the accepted norm in any sense of the term were regarded as "unclean". Lepers {translate:
people who today would simply make an appointment with a good dermatologist} had to walk around crying out, "Unclean! Unclean!", lest anyone come closer to them than 15 feet. They were often banished from the camp or town, because their outcast STATE (whether this was physically
true or not) --- their STATE as outcasts could be passed on --- IT was contagious. That's why Jesus so often tells people not to say anything after he heals (touches) them, because he, too, could now be banished --- and in fact, in chapter 1 of Mark's Gospel, he is. He, too, joins the ranks of people without place in their society. It's why people get so upset when he crosses back
and forth between camps he jeopardizes all the boundaries and distinctions between people.
In Jerusalem, there are Palestinians who live there, who have for a long time. They are not immigrants in any sense of the word/not new-comers but they are accorded only nominal citizenship in the city, NOT the nation and simultaneously they are not allowed to be citizens of Jordan or Palestine. They literally have no place in society; people without a county, they are people without passport, and so they cannot go anywhere outside their own circles, not for work, not for health care, not for education, not for pleasure --- not for anything. In a real sense, they have lost their place in this world as equal human beings, and that is not lost on them. THAT is part of the simmering anger and disdain you can see and feel as you ride through the villages and look out the windows. It's why a child would pick up a rock and throw it at a person with a machine gun.
It should not be lost on us --- as Don't Ask Don't Tell eliminates 244 medical personnel. Maybe you think, 'I don't want to be in the army.' or "I don't believe in the war.' Neither do I --- and --- societies have always understood, says Aaron Belkin (the scholar and founder of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military) that being able to render service or get married ---
pass freely from one place in life to another --- were the markers that constitute full and equal citizenship.
There are many, many things going on in this passage. Jesus does restore this guy to his rightful place in society. AND, someting we haven't talked about before is that it is part of a larger campaign in Mark'ks Gospel to shift strategies from focusing on what he or we are missing or opposing or want to dismantle --- to --- what we want to build and establish (in a sense, heal).
NOT fighting terrorism, but building community, establishing peace, laying a foundation for global justice --- that should be our agenda, Mark is saying. That is why I, for one, decided to go to Jerusalem --- not simply to repudiate the nasty, violence-prone religious fugure heads spewing forth venom and putting $4500 bounties on our heads, but to demonstrate the concrete meaning
of the those words "love without borders", by myself crossing back and forth between cultural and racial and religious borders and talking about the things --- all the things: our beliefs, our ways of life, our ethnicities and gender identities (California just passed a bill to make services for older people more Trans-inclusive!) --- talking --- somehow touching one another's lives is the first step
toward building the kind of world most of us really want to live in.
That's what Jesus was doing in this story. --- He's like us: he's done with repudiation, done with defending his right to exist, done with trying to explicate all the Scriptures used against him. He's moved on here, to building something new.
You know, the newspapers --- the television --- the media are all full of story after story about September 11th, as we approach this 5-year anniversary. The President has already given several speeches, in some sense commemorating it --- will probably give more --- some people say to keep our focus on fear, on loss, on all the "what ifs" that could happen if --- we don't add another $500 billion to our war efforts in Iraq {only $75 million has even been appropriated, not spent,
for the 70% of workers at the site who are now ill} --- what will happen if we don't pass a bill to expand the government's ability to eavesdrop and further limit our civil liberties.
But none of that is the real issue, as we mark this 5th anniversary. The real issue is not what will keep us tied to our past and all the people, all the sense (ultimately true or not, but sense) of security lost that day. The real issue is not what will keep us separated into camps --- Americans killing Iraquis and Iraquis killing Americans and Iraquis killing other Iraquis --- the real issue is
what will make us move forward --- what will rebuild not only towering buildings but lives --- our lives/our nation's life, maybe even the life of the world.
And the answer is not cutting one another off. Why should it matter is a dietician working for Jenny Craig wears a hejab or a hat to work? What does it mean to look "American"? Why should we have to? Who looked American among the 2749 victims at the towers that day? People from 80 different nationalities perished and for what? So that Dena Al-Astani in a suburb of Chicago could get death threats on her telephone because sh is a practicing Muslim and looks like it?
You know, the real miracle of September 11th was that no one seemed to care that day or in the immediate aftermath who was gay and who was straight, who was of African descent and who was of Asian ancestry, what you wore, what faith {if any} you practices. It didn't matter --- no one told Renee Barrett, one of our Members here who died after she made it out of the North Tower to a waiting ambulance and recited her l over's name and phone number as her next of kin to contact, "Sorry, we're on our way to passing an amendment here that doesn't recognize your relationship." 40,000 people came from near and far just to help one another, and all that mattered that day was the universal human sorrow we shared.
When we were in Kuala Lumpur, Boon said he came out because he couldn't forget our people in Malaysia and he had to share in their suffering.
True enought, AND when we enter deeply into one another's lives --- when we cross borders and boundaries to work for restoration, as Jesus did/as we all did that day 5 years ago --- we move beyond shared suffering to common humanity. An openness to common humanity is what the world really needs now. BE OPEN --- that's the call and what will move us forward. --- That's also the real legacy of September 11th --- not closing our borders, but opening them, both personally and as a nation.
Physical survival is not always in our hands, says Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of NYC's Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, but spiritual survival is.
We have to stay open to what is in our hands and not make the kinds of decisions and choices as individuals or nations that can take even that much away from us.
It's a spiritual decision to close our borders to peole seeking refuge. One of the artifacts that will stand at the entrance to the September 11th Memorial Museum is a Statue of Liberty found in the rubble. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" is not a political mantra to be carted out and chanted at the polls --- it's a spiritual posture that has nothing to do with being Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Sihk or Hindu or Buddhist or secular humanist --- it's a universal spiritual posture --- openness is a spiritual posture that can save us all and build the kind of world that would truly honor the one thing every single person who died that day and who had a chance to leave a final message or make a final phone call mentioned. Nobody said start a war in my name or even get
the guys who did this. To a one, they all talked about love --- in the face of losing everything, they talked about love --- not hatred, not animosity, not revenge or getting even, but love. (The number one cyber game in the world today is "World of Warfare", and it will gross $1 billion this year.)
You know, there' a lot of scholarly debate about whether the disciples really left everything to follow Jesus. And some would say, even if they did, it would have been by choice, not someone else taking everything away. But either way, there's a spiritual openness necessary to be a follower of Christ --- to be a person who practices what Jesus preached.
You can't be holding on to old grudges, even legitimately founded ones/closed down tightly on a desire for revenge, and be forgiving 70 times 7.
We have to be able to give more of an accounting than they hit us first in the face of the words, "As often as you did it to the least of these you did it to me."
The choice is always, says Rabbi Kleinbaum, "will adversity and enemies define us" --- or --- will the love of God for all the people of God? BE OPEN to that truth. PRAY to be OPEN. PRACTICE it on the streets/at work/with people you know and people you don't know.
Everywhere I travelled in August, there were people who were incredibly rude and mocked me --- and people who were incredibly kind and generous and helpful. Rudeness knew no borders --- and neither did kindness. Closing down because of the nastiness won't change anything. Being open to the kindness just might. It changed everything for the guy in our story. And truthfully, it brought some peace and comfort --- even some hope and healing to our city 5 years ago --- and I believe holds that same promise for our world now.
The truth is, as Pema Chodron says --- we can try all we want to guarantee safety and security --- what a lot of peole say we lost that day and are fighting for now --- but those are things we never really had to begin with, because safety and security rest on certainty and knowing what's gonna happen next. And, only God knows that. You can't get back what you never had to begin with. --- The only question before us is will we live and die in fear, in mistrust, with hostilities and difference separating us, or with openness and love, like the saints of September 11th. Will we be open to the kind of kindness and care, acceptance and compassion that can carry us all through times of uncertainty? It's the latter. Being open to kindness and care/receiving and giving it --- that constitute the best memorial to September 11th and the Gospel of Jesus the Christ, and so I'm praying that will be our choice.
Amen.
ALL are welcome in MCC. MCCNY is one of hundreds of MCC churches worldwide