Sermon from January 14, 2001
About 18 years ago, I had knee surgery, and the nurse that escorted me to the OR was a piece of work. She got me out of the waiting area, and as she wheeled me down to the operating room, she called out in her best Master Sergeant voice, "Hey, guys, clean up your act! We're bringing a Rev. down!"

I actually enjoyed her gruff demeanor, but being throught of as a moral policeman is not my idea of what my life is all about. However, it seems to go with the turf, and I just keep my mouth shut until I have a chance to reveal evidence to the contrary. I dislike being caricatured like that, becuase it sends the wrong message about Jesus Christ. Think about that for a minute. Think about Him for a minute. It is one of the hidden beauties of the Gospels that the most moral Man who ever lived seldom if ever comes across as a moral policeman.

We have come almost seven chapters into the Gospel of Mark. Can you think of any occasion thus far when Jesus urged people to keep religious rules? Come to think of it, can you think of any occasion when He urged people to keep the Ten Commandments? I think you will search a long time before you find anything like that. It would not be true to say that Jesus had no interest in people's behavior, but the absence of moral exhortation is one of the distinctive features of Mark's Gospel.

There are people in this world who don't feel good if they don't feel guilty. What are they going to do with the Gospel of Mark? What are they going to do with Jesus, who seems determined not to make them feel guilty? For most of us with a religious background it is just the opposite. We get tired of being told to be good. We already know we don't measure up. Why does the preacher just keep rubbing it in?

On the other hand, if Jesus' job was not making people feel bad by pointing out how far short they fall, what was His job with people? If He is not on our case about our failures, what is He after? Now, that is a question worth asking. What was He after then? What is He after now – with us?

What if we became a church like that? What if word got around that BVBC is a church that does not get on your case about your moral failures? It would represent a huge change in how people think about churches. What if the publicans and sinners of the Brandywine Valley started showing up here to see what a church was like that was not always on their case about their moral failures?

Now, that really is a question worth asking. Becoming a church like that will require us to dig deeper than ever into the Gospel of Mark. What were Jesus' aims? In what ways did He go about what He did? What can we learn from Him? To put it another way, becoming a church like that will require us to listen with a new intensity to what we are reading in Mark. Our text for today explains why that is not easy.

To get the most out of this section, let's put it in its larger context. Mark 1-4 focused on Jesus' authority. Chapter one presented a demonstration of His authority, chapter two a challenge to His authority, chapter three a rejection of His authority, and chapter four an exercise of His authority in judgment. If those four chapters have to do with Jesus' authority, chapters 5-8 have to do with His identity.

I am sure you remember the disciples' question in the terrible calm after a terrible storm, when they asked of Jesus, "Who is this?" We can now give a provisional answer to that question. Jesus was a prophet, like the great prophets of Israel.

He did the works of a prophet: He calmed the storm, cleansed a demoniac, healed a woman by His touch, and raised a child from death. He also thought of Himself as a prophet. At His hometown of Nazareth He called Himself a prophet. The murder of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas reminds readers that being a prophet could be hazardous to your health.

Then, chapter six records the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus' walking on the water. The miraculous feeding points to Jesus as an inexhaustible source of satisfaction for humanity's insatiable hunger for God and meaning and a hope that does not disappoint us. Jesus may have been a prophet, but He was more than any other prophet ever claimed to be. In chapter seven Jesus spoke like a prophet. In fact, to show His solidarity with the great Jewish prophets He quoted Isaiah. Then, like Jewish prophets of old, He went outside Israel and ministered to gentiles.

The miracle story we read today begins a remarkable circle of stories that take us toward the climax of Mark's revelation of Jesus' identity in chapters 5-8. Let's follow verses 31-32, which describe the setting for this miracle.

Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. The Decapolis refers to a municipality of ten towns south of the Sea of Galilee and east of the Jordan River. Their inhabitants were Gentiles, many of whom had found Jesus very appealing. We should read what follows as an incident involving another Gentile. Verse 32 continues, There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged him to place his hand on the man.

The miracle Mark is about to describe and the healing of the blind man in chapter eight are unique in the Gospels. They are unique in methodology, and they are unique in the purpose they serve in the story Mark has told about Jesus. So, I want us to pay close attention to the unique methods used to do this miracle, and then I want us to ask what purpose Mark had in mind when he included it here. Verses 33-37 record the miracle.

After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, "Ephphatha!" (which means "Be opened!"). At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly. Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. Did He really hope to keep that private? Repeated efforts did not succeed, and the message on the grapevine had nothing but good things to say about Jesus. People were overwhelmed with amazement. "He has done everything well," they said. "He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak."

Look at two unique features of how Jesus did this miracle. First, before He healed the man, Jesus took him aside, away from the crowd. Nothing we have read up till now has given us any reason to think Jesus was shy about doing miracles in a crowd. Think of the crowds at Simon's front door in chapter one. Think of the time Jesus turned around in a crowd and singled out an embarrassed but very happy woman whom He had healed. Except for His mentoring the disciples, He tended to be very public about everything He did. So, it gets attention, when He deliberately avoids a crowd to do a miracle.

Here is a second observation about this miracle. The miracle worked, but it was not easy. We know it worked, because verse 35 says that the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly. It worked, but look at the rigmarole Jesus went through to make it work. Verses 33-34: Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said o him, "Ephphatha!" (which means, "Be opened!").

We have not seen anything like that in Mark so far, have we? He takes Jairus' little girl's hand, almost as an act of courtesy, and says, "Little girl, I say to you, 'Get up,'" and she woke from death and ate. The woman with chronic bleeding clutched His garment and found herself instantly whole for the first time in twelve years. Jesus said to the leper, "I will. Be clean," and immediately, the leprosy left him. What is all this poking and spitting and touching and sighing and looking up to heaven?

Some scholars have said that Jesus encountered difficulty in making this miracle work. The process certainly was more complicated than anything we have seen previously in the Gospel. What's the point of telling us this? That brings us to the unique purpose of this miracle.

First, remember that in the New Testament miracles in the Bible are never ends in themselves. They always point beyond themselves to tell us something about Jesus' authority or His identity. The model is back in chapter two, where Jesus healed the paralytic whose sins He had forgiven with this explanation: "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins," – he said to the paralytic, "I say to you, 'Rise, take up your mat and go home!'" and he did it. The miracle offered powerful material evidence of Jesus' less obvious authority to forgive sins. So, what does this miracle tell us about Jesus' identity?

Obviously, this is a miracle of hearing. In the Gospel of Mark hearing and understanding the true meaning of Jesus is a big deal. Twice in chapter four Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," (Mk. 4:9, 23). Likewise in chapter four Jesus said, "Everything is in parables so that 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding," (Mk. 4:11-12).

Even closer to home in chapter four, when His disciples did not understand the parable He had told, Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?" (Mk. 4:13). And do you remember Herod's curious attitude toward John the Baptist? When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he like to listen to him, (Mk. 6:20). But of course he did nothing about what he heard. In Jesus' words he did not consider carefully what he heard (Mk. 4:24). Finally, back in Mark 7:18, after the disciples had failed to grasp what Jesus was driving at, He said to them, "Are you so dull?"

Among disciples and detractors alike, you can make a case that Jesus' words and actions were falling on deaf ears. They did not understand. Their hearts were hard. We have all had that experience. We have said, "I talked myself blue in the face, but that guy just didn't get it." Haven't you even said it about yourself? "What was wrong with me? I heard the message over and over. Why did it take so long for me to get it?"

I would say that Mark included this miracle here as an illustration in the flesh of the miracle needed in the human spirit in order for people to hear and understand Jesus' true identity. The difficulty of the miracle illustrates how hard it can be for the message of Christ to get through to us. Taking the man aside, away from the crowd, might suggest the need for people to get away from their usual haunts and habits in order to hear the message of Christ in the center of their being.

Let's take this interpretation as a working hypothesis and see if it helps us to make more sense of the events that chapter eight is about to unfold over the next few weeks. By the time we reach the culminating event of chapter eight, we will know if it has merit.

We already know that the idea of hearing but not understanding has merit, and that brings me back to the ideas with which I started this sermon. What if the publicans and sinners of the Brandywine Valley started showing up here to see what a church was like that was not always on their case about their moral failures? Becoming a church like that will require us to listen with a new intensity to what Mark tells us about Jesus, because Mark presents us with the story of how Jesus, the most moral Man who ever lived, seldom if ever came across as a moral policeman. Can our church be like Him? Let me show you what is at stake in that.

I know in my bones that many people in the Brandywine Valley would welcome what we embody in this church. However, they find it difficult to step through the door of this or any other church for fear of being judged. We need to face the fact that a lot of people see churches as courtrooms, and if you can't walk in there sure of your innocence, you don't want to go there. Can you blame them? Who wants to spend precious discretionary time among people who accuse you of being a moral failure? The really sad thing is that their unasked questions remained unasked. They go elsewhere, or they go nowhere with their fledgling aspirations for God.

Let me ask you a question: Do you live your life day in and day out watching for other people to slip up morally so that you can find fault with them? I hope not. Why should our BVBC community do that? Why should people who need a hospital find themselves in a courtroom? Why should people ask for bread and be given a stone? We should fight even the perception that we are like that.

Can this place, these few thousand square feet, become know even by our enemies as a place of mercy: a place where people find merciful answers to important questions; merciful forgiveness for terrible deeds; merciful patience for intractable problems? Is it not true that to be a place like that is to be a church that is more like Jesus Christ in His merciful treatment of people?

How do you in this church family perceive Bill Heider, Karl Nockengost and me? We are the ordained pastors of this church. Are we men of mercy, or do we come across to you as accusers? We want to be men of mercy, embodiments of grace. We know we need mercy and grace. We are terribly flawed men, liable any day to collapse like a hourse of cards right before your very eyes. We also know the cultural baggage we picked up the day we became pastors in the Church of Jesus Christ. We will always be "the Rev.," coming down the hall with invisible signs stuck all over us which say, "Clean up your act." We know we are more than that, but is that all we are to you?

To be men of mercy, to be a people of mercy will take us beyond ourselves. To go there means hearing with understanding ears the story of Jesus Christ that has come down to us in the gospel of Mark. I know we have heard these stories before. I wonder if we are deaf to what they say.

And so I imagine the Lord of the Church laboring over our deaf and mericless selves: sticking divine fingers into our plugged ears, touching divine spittle to our speechless mouths, sighing deeply in His great and grieving soul and saying to us in our profound deafness, "Ephphatha!" which means, "Be opened!"