Faith Lived in Love

Proper 18B-24

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Today’s gospel is an English translation of a Greek text about a man who didn’t write but who spoke and taught in a third language called Aramaic. Our bible records what people remembered, what they could not forget, about Jesus. We have but a few precious untranslated words in Jesus’ native tongue. They’re sprinkled throughout Mark’s gospel like word-icons. There is “Abba,” or ‘daddy,’ Jesus’ name for God. There is, “Talitha cum,” or ‘little girl, get up.’  On the cross, Jesus cried out “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani,” ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

We have another of these Aramaic word-icons in our gospel today, “Ephatha,” ‘be opened.’ The gospel of Jesus unlocks fisted hands, hearts, and minds.  Last Sunday Jesus opened the eyes of the Pharisees to the cancer of religious legalism. Today Jesus opens the ears and speech of a man who could not hear or speak from birth.

Ephatha is the work of the Holy Spirit—as when Jesus’ own heart and mind opened to the radical inclusiveness of the kingdom even for the unnamed Syrophoenician woman. She persistently, faithfully, and annoyingly confronts Jesus. She didn’t care about social conventions or what other people thought. She was fiercely motivated by love for her sick child.

It is shocking, but here, we confront Jesus in his full humanity. In this miraculous story the unnamed woman becomes a preacher to Jesus. He insulted her but she persisted. Ephatha. Her words break the Kingdom of Heaven wide open for Jesus. His consciousness is raised about including the Gentiles—that translates today to people of different faiths and of no faith. No one is outside the embrace of God. Let your heart and mind be opened.

Many of us grew up with a Jesus who was perfect.  He had to be, because the theology we constructed around his deity required it.  “Perfect Jesus” was technically human, but his incarnation fell several steps short of actual humanness. “He never messed up, never fell short, and never had to say he was sorry…The problem with “Perfect Jesus,” of course, is that he doesn’t exist. [Perfect Jesus can’t really help us because he’s not really one of us.] The Jesus who appears in the Gospels is not half-incarnate.  He is as fully human as he is fully God.  Which is to say, he struggles, he snaps, he discovers, he grows, he falters, he learns, he fears, and he overcomes.”   (Debi Thomas, “Be Opened,” Journey with Jesus, 9/02/18).

Personally, I am thankful for Mark’s candor.  Ephatha. Jesus was open to learning and so must we be. As we mature, we learn things, both individually and as a people. Somehow, we apprehend the falsehoods that were always hiding in plain sight. We begin to perceive new opportunities to show up and show out for God. These are what the Church calls Kairos moments. They are opportune moments of decision which come along every now and then in every life, when faith invites action to advance the gospel and the way of love. As Martin Luther said, we are saved by faith alone and not the works of faith that we do, and yet also, faith without works is dead.

In our own time, the Divine lure has opened a Kairos moment for reckoning with racism in America and the complicity of the Christian church in sustaining the unholy belief in White Supremacy reaching all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery in 1493 by which the Church sanctioned the subjugation of people and lands around the world.

Back in the 1970’s stand-up comedian Richard Pryor made white audiences laugh till they cried talking about “driving while Black.” In the ‘80’s and 90’s Gangster Rap, Rodney King, and the L.A. riots exposed the ugly face of racism in America. In Chicago, we’ve had a front-row seat to gun violence and the propagation of intense urban poverty connected to racism.

Last week, Kari, Leah, and I drove past the place where George Floyd was murdered in south Minneapolis. The entire block has become a holy place. Ephatha. Let us be opened to the vision of a new and better future together. Like the Syrophoenician woman, listening to and seeing new truths can be an unwelcome experience. Kairos moments are, by definition, an interruption. New insights lead to new demands that, If we are honest, can lead to defensiveness, denial and disputation rather than constructive, compassionate action. You can try to shut it out and insulate yourself but then, you will have shut yourself off from the gospel. Ephatha is what encounter with the gospel looks and feels like. How shall we respond? We must respond with a new birth of love.

Probably the first Christian creed came from an early baptismal liturgy: “For you are all children of God in the Spirit. There is no Jew or Greek; there is no slave or free; there is no male and female. For you are all one in the Spirit.” Those words, quoted and slightly revised by Paul in his letter to the Galatians, may have even been said at his own baptism.  “And they may well be the oldest words to survive from the ancient Christian movement. That means the very first Christian creed was not about the nature of God or the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus, but it was about us — a creed of human solidarity and the breaking down of ethnic, economic, and gender barriers to create a community where there is neither favoritism nor privilege to those who the empire deems important.” (Diana Butler Bass, Sunday Musings, 9/07/24).

Ephatha. This is a Kairos moment.  Perhaps, it is always a Kairos moment. The divine lure is breaking through cultural norms, old prejudices, and what we thought we knew to bring us again into common cause with each other, and with the all people, and extending beyond that to include all non-human life.

We can feel it. We dread it. It takes shape in countless dystopian dramas, plays and movies of recent years. Modernity has us locked in Pharoah’s Egypt. As in days of old, every day compels us to make more bricks, and to make more today than yesterday. The world is speeding up and going faster and faster often for its own sake and at the expense of our wellbeing—at the expense of all things living—indeed, even life itself. In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, ‘we paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’

Ephatha. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa is among those bringing words and concepts to illumine the path to alternative way of life beyond the suffocating logic of modernity centered on what he calls ‘resonance.’ It is something new rooted in something very old and very real. Perhaps we’ve all had experiences of resonance when where we’re interrupted by beauty; where we feel connected to something, where we feel pulled into a conversation and where it doesn’t feel like time is controlling us and that we’re being kind of overcome by time, but where we feel in it and it feels full. These are experiences where we feel like something resonates with us.

Where can we find places of resonance today in which we may work together to begin to remake the world? Hard boiled scientists like Hartmut Rosa point to the church and to liturgy and to the gospel. Ephatha. This is a Kairos moment. Come let us walk together. Let us listen to poets, artists, theologians, and scientists pointing to human solidarity and oneness with God. Can we really be a living sanctuary of hope and grace?

Just as the Syrophoenician woman taught Jesus about his mission, we trust the voices of the suffering, the lost, and the lonely to guide us. Let our worship, our sacraments, our songs, and prayers be the means and methods of attunement to the healing power of grace which already, always and everywhere resonates in and through all people and all life things now. We awaken to what’s wrong to move closer to what’s right because faith without works is dead, but faith lived in love is life.