EPHPHATHA! BE OPENED
Text: Isaiah 49:1-6; Mark 7:31-37

George Buttrick, my beloved teacher, used to say that when a text causes you to stand at attention, it is a command to preach. I was reading along and suddenly I was standing at attention. “All ears” - - which is what to stand at attention means.

I

Jesus has crossed the borders into Gentile territory. Just before, in the passage preached last week by Sheila, Jesus healed the daughter of a feisty Syro-Phoenician woman who challenged a fatigued Jesus on the narrowness of his mission vision. Now Jesus runs into a man who is deaf and who speaks with labored difficulty.

The man was brought to him by friends, who asked Jesus to lay hands on him and heal him. Often we do not get to our healing just on our own. Others help get us there.

Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd. Sometimes Jesus needs to get us alone, away from the crowd, in order to get our attention.

Jesus employs the language of signs. The man could not hear. Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spat on his hand and using the spittle, touched the man’s tongue.

Jesus gets that close. He touches the inside of our ears, our tongue. There is an exchange of body fluids. This is the risk of incarnation, word made that flesh.

Jesus then looked to the heavens and “groaned.” It is the groaning of compassion, of intercession, a cry for healing. Sometimes I groan with my cello. Sometimes in sermons. When, how, do you groan?

Then he issued a healing command in Aramaic: Ephphatha! Be opened! He was speaking to the man’s ears. And his ears were opened. Then the second miracle following on the first: He could speak plainly without encumbrance. His tongue was set free.

This twin miracle is a miracle we need. We need it everyday. We need Jesus to lead us away from the crowd - - and the world’s crowding noise - - and say Ephphatha! Poet e.e. cummings wrote:

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened.)1

Israel is Israel when it hears. Its central command: Shema Y’Israel. Hear, O Israel. The church is the church, the people of God in Christ, when we hear the word of God, the word of Christ.

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?

II

Jesus no doubt had read and heard Isaiah. It was chapter 49 I read this week and stood at attention.

The nation was fallen, holy city destroyed, holy temple razed to the ground, its people taken into captivity. A 9/11 of 9/11s.

As the people languished in exile and despair God sent another prophet, another Isaiah, a second-Isaiah whose words begin in Isaiah 40: “Comfort, comfort ye my people.” In chapter 49 this new prophet says:

Listen, coastlands and people from afar!
Yahweh called me from the womb;
from the body of my mother
God called my name.

Did he in his mother’s womb hear her sing God’s praise, hear her call his name, a name as given her by God? Sometimes spiritual formation begins in the amniotic waters of the womb, in the prayers and songs of parents.

Then the prophet says:

Yahweh made my mouth a sharpened sword,
Made me a polished arrow.
In his quiver God hid me away.
Hid him until just the right time. Then God drew him back as in a bow and flung him toward the target. Bulls-eye. Most days I’m happy to stay in the quiver.

Then God says to him these astonishing words:

You are my servant, Israel,
in whom I will be glorified
You, there with your opened ears, you are Israel. Scholars debate: Who is the “servant” of God in these chapters?
Is it the whole nation?
Is it a faithful remnant within the nation?
Is it a single person willing to bear God’s word?
Centuries later, was Jesus now the servant?

Sometimes it is a nation who hears, sometimes a faithful community within the nation. Sometimes it is a nation of one, one faithful woman or man. “You are my servant, Israel.”

God calls nations to be God’s servants, to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. When nations fail to hear, God calls communities. When communities falter, God calls persons.
Like Martin Luther King, Jr., God’s polished arrow, an arrow straight and true, burnished by suffering, his own and his people’s.

Martin Luther King often felt like the servant of Isaiah 49. When God said, “You are my servant in whom I will be glorified,” the prophet said:

I have labored in vain.
I have spent my strength for nothing.

For all of King’s towering, heroic faith, there were moments, as Taylor Branch reports, wracked with worry, weighed down with depression, great anxiety taking its toll on his body’s health.
But God reassured the prophet and added words that broke theological molds and transcended ancient Near East religion:

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel.
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.

God’s faithfulness to Israel was strong and sure to bring them back into their land from Babylon. And to restore them back to their land once again in 1948 after centuries of exile and the horror of the Shoah, the Holocaust we must never forget.

But God’s dreams are ever bigger. Bigger than Israel or America. God’s got the whole world in her hands. Syria too and Iran and Iraq and China and the Koreas and Liberia and France (yes, France, too), and Brazil and Indonesia. To the ends of the earth.

Salvation that stops at national boundaries is too small a salvation. Salvation bound by religious creed or color of skin is too small a salvation. God’s dream is the healing of all the nations and the shalom of the world. This salvation is tried and tested at the hardest places not the easiest ones. What is the Christian position on war? Most Christians I’ve known are against all wars except the war we are in.

III

Today is the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, an event that has tested and is testing our nation’s soul. It has caused us to reflect on our nation’s identity and mission in a dangerous world.
President Reagan used to love to quote Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who en route to America wrote:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

The image comes from Jesus’ Sermon the Mount and draws upon Isaiah’s image of Israel as a light to the nations.

But these biblical metaphors have deep spiritual conditions placed upon them, conditions there in the scripture which give them birth. God has blessed us that we might be a blessing to the world, but this can only be if we continue to hear and follow God. We want the glory without the responsibility. To be the light without being light.

Gov. Winthrop believed this. The only way to “provide for our posterity,” he wrote, was to follow “the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” Only then could we be a city on a hill. And if we failed? This is the rest of Winthrop’s words:

...if we deal falsely with our God...we shall be made a story and a by- word through the world: We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God.... We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us....2

It is a familiar Old Testament image: God calling the nations of the world to be the jury over Israel and judge her according to her actions.

Martin Luther King called our nation to live up to the ideals of its creed. “I have a dream,” he said at Lincoln’s Memorial, ...that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident - - that all men are created equal.”

There were great advances in freedom and equality during the Civil Rights Movement as God raised up prophets and communities to overcome racial discrimination. But King’s ear heard more. He went on to champion economic justice for all Americans and to protest the war in Vietnam.
“You’ve heard enough, said enough, done enough,” said friend and foe alike. “No need to go further.” But he had to go further. He championed the Poor People’s March. He took the cause of economic justice to Chicago, and he took his protest of the Vietnam war to Riverside Church in New York City - - against the advice of friends and advisors.

Shortly after the Riverside sermon he preached at Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. Our guest, Taylor Branch, quotes King’s words:

They applauded us on the freedom rides when we accepted blows without retaliation...they praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma.... There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say be non-violent toward Jim Clark [the sheriff of Selma who used violence against the marchers], but will curse you and damn you when you say be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children! There is something wrong about
that!3

An assassin’s bullet soon ended King’s life but not his voice, for God had opened his ears and set his tongue free, and his was a bell that can never be unrung.

I do not know what repentance should look like for a pluralistic nation like ours, a nation of many faiths and of people with no religious faith. But it should include what Micah said: To do justice, and love mercy and walk humbly.

It should say, the price of oil is not worth the price of a person’s soul, the availability of gas worth Arab children’s lives.

It should say that the word “equal” has no qualifiers.

It should say every life is precious and life itself is sacred.

It must say: Sincerity does not equate to morality. As Harvard’s Susan Nieman writes: “What counts is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.”4

It must say that the growing economic inequity in our nation, the growing gap between rich and poor, dims the light of our democracy.

And if we are in the sub-group in America trying to follow Jesus we hear the faint Galilean voice: “You’ve heard it was said, Love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say to you, Love your enemy.”

And if the nation cannot hear, God will call a community. And if a community fails to hear, God will call a person. Maybe you.

I wonder what God is trying to say to you today? How is Jesus groaning over you? What private victories do you need to win in order for there to be public victories down the road? God is speaking peace and wholeness and healing to you. Sometimes it is easier to talk about what America needs to be healed, or Charlotte needs, than what you need to be healed. In God’s eyes every person is as precious as a nation, and every nation as precious as a person.

So Jesus takes us to the side, away from all the other voices. He places his fingers into our ears. He spits on his hand and with the spittle touches our tongue. He is speaking something to our ears. We cannot yet hear. He touches our tongue which has so often embarrassed us.

Ephphatha!
Ephphatha!
Ephphatha!

We think we hear something like “Be opened.” We hear bird song. We hear something like our name. We stumbling, rise.

1 "i thank You God,”, 100 Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 114.
2 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry, ed. Perry Miller (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 83.
3 Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 604.
4 Susan Nieman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2002), p. 275.