[Propertalk] Proper 18 b

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Just finished this draft .... happy weekending. See you at the Table 8 - 
)

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY                           THE 
FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
PROVERBS 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23                    	    	                                        	 
PROPER 18 B RCL
JAMES 21-17		                                                	               	 
9th SEPTEMBER, 2012
MARK 7:24-37	           					 
PSALM  125

	What is our mission as a congregation? What is our mission as a 
Diocese? What is our mission as the Episcopal Church? What is our 
mission a Christians? What is our mission as co-members of the Abrahamic 
faith?

	We should be able at least to begin an answer to each of these 
questions because we’re members of every group. It doesn’t really matter 
what it is that defines us right now, we belong to a section of the 
human race who’ve taken on the responsibility not only to worship God, 
but to make God known, to open up people for God and for their own 
potential.

	Every so often I meet someone, or read or hear something that really 
excites me so much that I feel as if I should go through life with a 
huge grin on my face.

	Now you’ve probably guessed by now that I’m from around here. I get the 
feeling that a couple of my relatives posed for that famous Grant Wood 
painting, “American Gothic”, you know, the one with a man and a woman 
standing in front of a Carpenter Gothic style of house, the man holding 
a pitch fork in his hand. One of the best titles I’ve seen for that came 
from a cartoon in which the man is saying, “I AM smiling!”

	That’s about where I am most often on the matter of showing my emotions 
in public. So if I say that someone or something really excites me, it 
must be truly memorable.

	That’s what happened when I was listening to a news magazine on the 
radio last week. The interviewer was talking to an author and rabbinic 
scholar. He said that Hebrew Scriptures are so often misinterpreted as 
being little more than the record of an angry God who keeps giving 
commandments and demanding obedience. The scholar said, however, that 
all of Hebrew Scripture can be boiled down to the concept that God who 
created everything wants everyone to have hope.

	Yes, there are standards. That much is plain from the six short verses 
from the Book of Proverbs read this morning. But in the midst of these 
six verses is the core belief that there is always hope, especially for 
those tempted to give up, those shoved aside, those forgotten, those 
stomped on in the stampede to get mine first.

	There is hope even for those whom society, or even religion, has 
marginalized, and drained of any thought that they might be rescued and 
given some degree of respect and help.

	The writer of that book to which I referred suggested that the 
narrative and prophetic works may have been written down while the 
Hebrew people were living under the stress and pain of separation and 
exile. What these sections of the Bible were trying to establish for the 
faithful was that there IS a creator who sees, and hears, and cares, and 
loves; a Creator who has hope that we’ll be able to live in such a way 
that we’ll learn to care for everyone and anyone who is, somehow, cut 
off from the community.

	Into this developing understanding that God wants us to learn to care 
for one another and promote community health and safety; into this 
situation was born Jesus. And it’s obvious from this morning’s Gospel 
passage that He too had to wrestle with how to deal with troubles, and 
pains, and whether or not hope and healing were to be reserved for a 
privileged few or for everyone.

	I put it this way deliberately, that Jesus was born into the stru8ggle 
over the development of understanding God’s relationship with us. The 
contrast between certainty and uncertainty is shown nowhere as clearly 
as the episode in Tyre. It shows that Jesus was fully human, and fully 
immersed in everything going on in His society. He had to wrestle with 
prejudices, not just those of His family and friends, not to mention 
those of the civic and religious leaders. He had to wrestle with His own 
prejudices. He was subject to exactly the same stresses as we are – 
except that He didn’t have a TV, so He had to pick up His overload of 
convention information from the market place. No doubt it was just as 
riddled with partisanship!

	Jesus had to make decisions. Whom should He believe? Should He put His 
support behind one person rather than another, and why? What criteria 
should He use? If someone promised to feed the starving, find jobs for 
the un- and underemployed, make sure that health care was readily 
available for everyone, AND fix their relationship with God, should He 
believe them? For that matter, if Jesus were to demonstrate all of that, 
and talk about it, and say that everyone was welcome to receive these 
benefits; if Jesus said that would you believe HIM?!
	The amazing reminder from the Bible passages this morning is that 
everyone in the stories is awakened to the purpose of God. In the 
Gospel, the woman, the man, their friends, the onlookers, even Jesus 
Himself, had their hopes not only affirmed but broadened. Once again we 
discover that nothing lies beyond the scope of God’s gracious dealings 
with us.

	For me, the surprising thing about this set of verses from Mark is the 
way that Jesus is challenged. Whether or not He was keeping quiet 
because He was among foreigners, and despised, mistrusted foreigners at 
that, and He didn’t want to wreck His chances with the folk back home, 
with all their misguided prejudices; or whether or not Jesus, having 
been steeped in Hebrew tradition from His first days in the synagogue at 
Nazareth, had actually never thought about the possibility of anyone 
from over on the coast, or the eastern part of the country, being of 
interest and use for God’s grand design; whatever the reason for Jesus’ 
approach to the healings this morning, it brings us up short.

	Imagine this as part of the PR package for either presidential 
candidate and you’d hardly be surprised if the handlers would want to 
distance themselves from this as much as possible. After all, no one 
wants to say that the candidate made such a blunder as to imply that one 
segment of the population was unimportant; that one group of people 
could fend for themselves; that the significance of any was in question.

	Yet the compilers of the Gospel didn’t hesitate to include stories 
about the development of Jesus’ understanding of God’s hope for the 
world. It seems that even the One whom we’ve grown to call “Saviour”, 
and “Redeemer” had to grow into His role.

	This is tremendously good news for me, even if it CAN be surprising. It 
talks to me where I may be hurting, where I may be confused, where I may 
feel distanced from someone or something important to me.

There’s a tendency these days to assume that not only can we know 
everything but, if somehow we’re not quite up on what’s going on or what 
we should do, then we’re lacking. This goes on inside these walls as 
much as outside them, but no matter where it happens, it can be 
tremendously destructive physically, emotionally and spiritually. I’ve 
not quite been there, but I’ve heard of congregations – and their 
leaders – who say that if an individual doesn’t have clarity, then she 
or he can’t have been praying enough, or correctly.

Who’s to make that judgement, though? Look at Jesus? Did anyone write 
Him off when He had to wrestle over talking to that Syrophoenician 
woman, then when He tried to wriggle out of doing anything to help her 
and her family? They may have. After all, think of some of the other 
exchanges, and you’ll find one or more of the disciples trying to tell 
someone – tell Jesus Himself – “You don’[t need to bother wish this 
person. You know the rule. Don’t talk to women on the street; don’t go 
near someone who’s got some disease or other; don’t bother with her or 
him.”

Yet, often after a challenge, Jesus recognised the voice of God in that 
woman’s voice.

The good news of the Gospel, of the whole of Scripture, is that everyone 
may have their mind, their whole lives, opened up to receive the 
blessing of God.

	What made me so excited last week when I heard that radio interview is 
that the Jewish scholar seems to have hit the nail right on the head 
when he wrote, “The bottom line is that the Bible introduces hope into 
human political affairs. What it does is it takes the individual, 
empowers the individual and says, ‘Somewhere above you, there is a 
transcendent God who is not controlled by the king or by the priests or 
by the military, a power in the world that is able to hear you, and that 
is going to allow you to develop your understanding of what's right, and 
of the way the world should develop.’ All of human history has proceeded 
from that first spark of hope that appears in the Hebrew scriptures.” 1

No one is excluded – from first to last – in the Bible; not excluded 
from being able to hear what God has to say; not excluded from 
discovering that God is interested in each of us as individuals; not 
excluded from living in that hope that offers me – offers you – the 
promise of wholeness with God.

This means that whatever it is that makes you and me deal with 
uncertainty, or questionable health, or anything that would seem to dull 
my hearing; this means that whatever may seem to close you or me off 
from participating in a full life is NOT the final answer. Every last 
one of us is chosen and is ripe for being opened up to the incredible 
mystery of God’s love.

The wonderful thing is that such news has an incredible way of sneaking 
up on us. Who knows when God will nudge us to remind us of our 
importance and of God’s desire for our wholeness? We may be riding in 
the car, half-heartedly listening to the radio; we may be at a meeting 
with all sorts of voices around us; we may be listening to music, and 
find ourselves moved by a certain phrase; we may happen to glance down 
and see a pair of shod feet, and discover one’s life turned upside down. 
God’s plan for us is to be discover how we can all grow into the 
wholeness planned from the beginning of creation.

The only thing with which we have to deal, really, is whether or not 
we’ll allow ourselves to be open to the Love of God. And, yes, God will 
help us with this too, but not through coercion. It’s up to us to be 
open to God touching us in the most surprising ways – to produce the 
most delectable and beneficial results. So now, and always, it’s up to 
me, it’s up to you. Pray we may be open and be opened to God’s 
possibilities.

Note:

1 	“The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture” by Yoram Hazony Paperback, 379 
September 4, 2012
 
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/04/160388922/an-individualist-approach-to-the-hebrew-bible


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)