by CCW | 7 September 2014 14:41
In the days of the closing down of summer, to use Alistair MacLeod’s compelling phrase and image, the title of his most reflective short story, we make a turn to new beginnings, to the renewal of patterns and programmes in our various lives. On the Sunday after Labour Day, in the Maritimes, at any rate, the cottages have begun to be closed down for the winter, schools and colleges have resumed, vacations are over and done, and even summer seems already a distant and nostalgic memory. We are back, it might seem, to our usual lives.
But are we? Is it really about merely returning to the drudgery and the boring sameness of week after week, day after day, even Sunday after Sunday? It needn’t be, it seems to me. Not only are there the beginning hints of changes in the air but there are the deeper challenges of the Scripture readings. This Sunday marks the notional mid-way point of the Trinity Season and it signals important things to us. We are being challenged to be open – “Ephphatha”, Jesus says, in one of those rare but precious moments where Aramaic appears in the Scripture and is immediately translated by the Evangelist, in this case Mark, into Greek. For us, of course, there is the further translation into English, yet the Aramaic word remains in our text, a quiet witness to another aspect of the reality of the Incarnate Christ. His spoken words were in all likelihood Aramaic, a variant of Hebrew, but we only know his words through the Greek and subsequent translations. His saving word for all humanity is revealed through a particular culture and language; the universal in and through the particular.
“He has done all things well”, Mark concludes, having detailed a healing miracle. What is that all about? In a way, we are being opened to the very thing that St. Paul is saying in the Epistle reading from 2nd Corinthians. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”.
We are no strangers to that saying but we may be to its meaning. In a clear allusion to the contrast between the story of Moses receiving the Law and the story of Christ’s Transfiguration on the Mount, the point is that we are to be transformed in our outlook and understanding about God and our humanity, about ourselves and our lives together as Church and people through the Incarnate Christ. We are being opened out to something new which changes our outlook and our activity. Or should.
The principle of that change is the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Nowhere in the Gospels do we have a healing miracle which reveals so much of the logic of the Incarnation and of the theological idea of grace perfecting nature and not destroying nature. If we attend simply to the letter of the law, the letter of our literal outlooks and expectations, we will die. Condemned. Why? For our failure to be opened to the glory of God in Christ Jesus who effects – a strong word – our transformation. The healing miracle here happens in and through the very ground of our lives. It happens where we are with Christ – in the churches of our communities.
It is all about our being transformed into Christ, into what Christ would have us be. What that means is our hearing not just the words but the meaning of the words of Christ. What that means is not only being able to speak but to speak about the things of God. To give him glory is our glory.
Mark is emphatic and clear. “He hath done all things well.” And what he has done is to make the deaf hear and the dumb speak. But we have to want to hear and we have to want to speak; to give praise to God is our highest speech. It is the very meaning of our liturgy.
We do not return any longer to our regular and ordinary ways except in denial and despair in the face of an uncertain and disturbing world of violence and disarray. We can only pretend that we are removed from it. The reality is that we aren’t. We are very much a part of the global confusions and contradictions that surround us. The challenge is to be open to the things of God revealed in Jesus Christ, to be opened to the spirituality that seeks the healing of our humanity in all of its awful disarray. It will mean an openness to the things of the spirit proclaimed in Word and Sacrament.
If I may say this without insulting you, this is what happens in each and every liturgy. God is making the deaf hear and the dumb speak – you and I. We are the deaf and the dumb. Christ would open us out to more than the closing down of summer, to more than the closing down of our lives, to more than the closing down of true culture and belief. He would have us open to the miracle of life which He is. He would have us open to his transforming grace which seeks not our condemnation but our being glorified in him who is our glory. May we hear and may we speak. May we be opened to him who is our glory and to his glory in us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 12, 2014
Christ Church, Windsor
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/09/07/sermon-for-the-twelfth-sunday-after-trinity-3/
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