Sermon for Sunday, 6 September 2015: 15th Sunday after Pentecost (ELCA's "End Racism Sunday")

Sermon for Sunday, 6 September 2015

Mark 7:24-37

15^th Sunday after Pentecost

Lutheran Church of the Redeemer,Jerusalem

The Rev. Carrie Ballenger Smith

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Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Exactly ten years ago today, I was sitting in my first class at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. It was seven years since I first enrolled in seminary in Minnesota. It was six years since I dropped out to stay home with my children. It was three days since I moved from Waco, Texas to Chicago.

And it was two weeks since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States.

I was sitting in this first class, a Christian Ethics class, with my Bible on my desk and my pencil and notebook poised and ready. After some introductions, the professor turned our attention to the wall, where she had projected two images from news coverage of the hurricane: One showed a black man in water carrying supplies in his arms. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans.” The other showed a white couple, also in water, also carrying supplies. The caption of this photo read, “Two residents wade through chest deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.”

The professor then turned to us and invited discussion about what it means that the black man was “looting” and the white couple was “finding.” 

I remember well the confusion I felt at that moment. I’d like to say I was thinking deep thoughts about racism and injustice and media bias, but really I was thinking “What does this have to do with Christian Ethics?” and then “What does this have to do with Jesus?”

You may have heard someone talk about having a “Come to Jesus moment” – a time when you find yourself at the crossroads, forced to make a decision, to tell the truth, to confess, to choose a new path. Well, for me this was something else. This is what I like to call a “Brought to Jesus moment.” Because the truth is, I didn’t even know I needed to be there. I didn’t know I had anything to confess. I was a good Christian, after all, sitting in seminary (for the second time) studying to be a pastor. But what I didn’t understand, what I didn’t even recognize about myself, was that I needed healing. Like the deaf and mute man in today’s Gospel story, I needed someone else to pick me up and take me to Jesus. I needed someone to set me at the feet of Jesus and beg him to touch me, to open my ears and to fix my tongue. I needed healing, because whether I realized it or not, I was a racist.

That first seminary class was one of many “Brought to Jesus moments” in my own ongoing, and sometimes messy, journey of healing from the racism which is so embedded in our culture that we often don’t recognize that we suffer from it.

Of course, healing is not always clean, quick, and efficient. Just look at the deaf man who was brought to Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson. He didn’t come to Jesus on his own, either—others brought him to Jesus and begged for help. They had heard the stories of his miracles. They heard how he rebuked unclean spirits, forgave sins, stilled storms, and raised a little girl to life with only a word. They even heard about a woman who was healed just by touching the edge of his coat!

So when they brought their friend to Jesus and begged him to lay a hand on him, I suppose they didn’t expect Jesus to stick his fingers in the man’s ears, and to spit, and to touch the man’s tongue, crying out to heaven, “Ephphatha! Be opened!” I mean, why, Jesus? You can turn water into wine without touching it. You can multiply bread and fish without shouting any magic words. Couldn’t this one be a little less gross? Couldn’t this be one of those clean, quick, “didn’t even have to touch the person” kind of healings?

But then, we don’t get to choose how healing happens. I didn’t get to choose to not be a racist on that first day of seminary. Instead, after I was brought to Jesus, Jesus brought me to professors, friends, neighbors, difficult conversations, plenty of mistakes, and tears. Then Jesus brought me to a black church on the South Side of Chicago, where I started to learn how to preach, but more importantly learned how to listen. More recently, Jesus brought me to Jerusalem, where I’ve been learning how a conflict which is often billed as being about religion, politics, or real estate, not so surprisingly turns out to also be about…race.

Thanks be to God for the professor who started my seminary studies with those pictures, and who set me out on a journey of healing which continues today. 

Thanks be to God for all those who are truth-tellers in our lives, opening our eyes to the way we’ve hurt them, or are hurting ourselves, or are participating in systems of injustice and oppression which hurt others.

Thanks be to God for those who have brought us to Jesus and his life-changing love. Amen!

Amen!…which brings me to the other healing story in today’s appointed Scripture lesson.  

The deaf man was brought to Jesus by friends, but in the first part of today’s text we read that the girl with the unclean spirit was left at home, and what her mother brought to the feet of Jesus instead was her love for her daughter.

This week, it is difficult to read the story of a woman begging for healing for her daughter without seeing the image of that Syrian toddler, washed up on a Turkish beach. Again and again, I read the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman.  Again and again, I imagined her as the refugee mother who desperately brought her child onto a boat because the land, her land, was no longer safe.

And again and again, I saw the image of that little boy on the beach. This week, our hearts are broken, and we cry out to Jesus, “Do Syrian lives matter? Do refugee lives matter?” This week, we are all the Syro-Phoenician woman.

On the other hand, we are also her daughter.

What we know is that this little girl suffered from an “unclean spirit.” In the time of Jesus, that could mean many things—demon possession, or mental illness, for example. But it also could have been addiction. Or ADHD, or epilepsy, or any number of ailments that had no treatment in 1^st Century Palestine.

But sisters and brothers, racism is also an unclean spirit.

So is the illegal occupation of another people, and the silent justification and participation in such a system.

And so is our collective ability to see photos of dead children on beaches and to do nothing.

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ, the refugees need a home, but we are the ones who need healing, because we are the ones who are sick.

We are the ones who need to be brought to Jesus this week, because while the image of a Syrian toddler washed up on a beach has stunned and horrified us, so did the images of a toddler and his family burned in Duma.

And so did nine church members shot in South Carolina because they were black.

And so did 500 children killed in Gaza last summer.

Such images and stories always capture our attention and horrify us and inspire poems and prayers and vigils and hashtags and then…life goes on. Life goes on, not because there has been healing, but because there has been a new tragedy. A new photo. A new media focus.

And it will go on like this, until the day when we are healed.

Humanity’s inhumanity will go on until we are brought to the feet of Jesus, and by the power of the cross, our hearts are healed, and our ears unstopped, and our tongues unbound.

Humanity will go on harboring the unclean spirits which allow us to forget, ignore, rationalize, and hide such horrors until the Syro-phoenician mothers of the world bring us to Jesus, demanding to be heard, pounding not only the doors of heaven, but also the doors of the presidents, the prime ministers, and the United Nations.

Dear sisters and brothers, on this “End Racism Sunday”, and at the end of a week which saw thousands of refugees washing up on beaches, decomposing in trucks, and flooding into European countries, it’s time to confess that we are sick. We need healing.

We need a love for our fellow human beings that doesn’t fade at the end of this news cycle.

We need a love for the stranger that will not allow boats of people to be turned away and sent back to war zones.

We need the kind of love for our neighbor that will not stand for them to be killed for their religion, their gender, their national identity, or the color of their skin.

This kind of love isn’t found just anywhere. But it is found at the foot of the cross.

It’s found in the love of the Great Healer, Jesus Christ, who loved all of humanity so much that he couldn’t stand to let us stay sick in sin, but instead emptied himself so we would be filled with the same love.

Thanks be to God, we have been brought to the feet of this same Jesus. By the power of the cross, we are being healed even now, for he has done everything well;

He even makes the deaf to hear the cries of the refugee,

And the mute to speak for justice.

Lord, forgive us.

Lord, heal us.

Lord, make us whole.

Amen.  

HOW TO HELP: 

READ how Lutherans in Europe are responding 

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