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We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.

Be Open:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Did you hear that?  Did you hear what Jesus said to that Syrophoenician woman?  He dismissed her.  He dissed her.  He called her a dog.  A female dog.

What do you make of this story?  How do you square what we’ve just heard with  the Jesus you know and love?

Some people give him an out.  They say, “He just called her a little dog, a puppy.  It was no big deal.”

Other people say he was just testing her—her and his disciples.  They say he knew all along he was going to heal that little girl.  They say he just wanted to make a point about her faith or their understanding of his mission.

I don’t buy it.  

I think something else was at work here.  Something far more powerful than a test or a misplaced term of endearment.

Look where it all takes place.  In Tyre.  On the borderlands.  In a place where Jews and Gentiles, Israelites and Greeks rub shoulders and not always lovingly.  A land beyond the limits of Jesus’ sphere of ministry.  A  land far outside his comfort zone.  A land fraught with danger and with possibility.  A limnal land.  A limnal space.

Remember what’s gone on before this encounter with that brassy woman.  Jesus’ own family thought he was nuts.  His neighbors chased him out of town.  Pharisees and scribes were plotting to do him in.  His disciples—they grew denser by the minute.  I can imagine how he might have felt.  Disappointed.  Dejected.  Maybe even doubting himself and the work he thought he was called to do. It was a moment fraught with danger. A moment filled with possibility. A limnal moment in his life and in his ministry.

We all have those limnal times and places in our lives.  Times and places fraught with danger.  Times and places we’d rather not be.  Times and places filled with possibility if only we are open to it.  Times when you get scared down to your boots.  Times when you want to call back your words even as you are speaking them. Moments when we wonder if we will ever see our way clear to a new day.  Times when the tectonic plates in our lives rub up against each other and threaten to swallow us up. Moments of fear, pain, shame, vulnerability and sometimes, if we’re lucky, an amazing kind of openness. Times and places infused with the holy. Limnal moments in our lives.  Moments when amazing transformations can occur.  

Richard Rohr once called such moments, “a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them.”  I wonder if Jesus was in such a place that day the Syrophoenican woman burst through the doors.  There he was holding tight to what had worked for him in the past.  There he was holding tight to an outdated vision of the ministry to which he was called.  No wonder he says to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”(Mark 7: 27b).   He can’t let go of that old vision even when it’s not working as well as he might wish.

But she won’t settle for a “no”.  She’s got a daughter that needs healing.  Her words echo through the room like a gust of fresh air:  “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”(Mark 7: 28b)   “Ephphatha.  Be open,” she might just as well have added, for with her words came a shift—a major shift—in how Jesus sees himself and the ministry he is about.  Transformation in the moment.  He says to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter”(Mark: 7: 30).  Her words opening the way to new life for her, her daughter and, in a way, Jesus, too.  

It’s almost as if those words of hers send Jesus off in a new direction.  Off to the Decapolis, another hotbed of Gentiles, where he encounters a deaf man with a speech impediment.  A deaf Gentile man.  This time there’s no hesitation at all.  Jesus pulls the man aside, sticks his fingers in the man’s deaf ears, spits on the ground, touches the man’s unruly tongue, and says,” Ephphatha.  Be open.”

That’s what Jesus says to us as well when we find ourselves in one of those places where we’ve lost all our moorings and have not yet found a place to drop anchor.   “Ephphatha.  Be open.”  “Be open to God’s grace at work transforming pain and shame and fear and dread and emptiness into the stuff of new life.”   “Be open to the possibilities inherent in the moment.”

“Ephphatha.  Be open.”

Echoes of Love Songs
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Sometimes I just feel like singing.   Singing from the rooftop at the top of my voice so that the whole world can hear.   Singing my heart’s delight.  Singing  my saddest songs.   Sometimes singing just because it’s good to be alive.  There are times when folks just have to sing.

Falling in love is one of those times
    -- falling in love with a lover, a partner, a spouse
    --falling in love with a newborn
    -- falling in love with a community
-- falling in love with God
 
Take a minute.  Still your mind.  Listen in to a love song; listen in to the Song of Songs:

“The voice of my beloved.  Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills....Look, there he stands, behind our wall, gazing through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me, ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’”

Listen for the melody.  Hear the beat.

 “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Do you hear  echoes?  Echoes of love songs you know--songs you sing.   Take a minute.  Let  the music play  in  your mind.  Listen to the I-pod in your heart.

Hear the echoes of songs of new love.
    Songs you hum with a smile--songs that put a bounce in your step--    songs that     make you quiver.

I’ve been hearing echoes of Ella Fitzgerald all week long.

“In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble--they’re only made of clay.  But our love is here to stay “

There are other times that call for other tunes--times for singing the “you don’t know the half of it dearie blues”.  Times for humming along with U-2’ “With or Without You or  The Supremes’ “My world is empty without you babe” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Empty Sky”
 
Take a minute to hear the haunting tunes  of songs that carry you through the hard times, the lonely times, the times when love seems hidden.   Listen for echoes of the blues. Even the blues are a kind of love song.  People don’t sing the blues if they haven’t known love or longed for love.

But the song we hear today from the Song of Songs is a song about the blush of new love.

“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come.”

That’s a love song,  one of many love songs in the Song of Songs.  Listen in.   Hear the lovers as they sing--songs of new love and songs of love longed for.

“You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes...”    

Listen, too, for echoes of the blues in the Song of Songs.

“Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought  him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer.”  

That lonely lover might as well be singing along with U-2,
“Sleight of hand and twist of fate
 On a bed of nails she makes me wait”

    
*Some people wonder what the Song of Songs is doing in the Bible.
*Some people say the Song of Songs just doesn’t fit with the rest of the Bible.  
*Some people say, “Save it for weddings.”  

But I wonder if the Song of Songs isn’t of one piece with the rest of the Bible.

Isn’t the Bible, like the Song of Songs, a collection of love songs and the blues--songs of gratitude, songs of praise  and songs of lament, songs that tell the story of a grand love that endures through good times and bad.  

Take a minute.  Listen for those echoes of love songs.

“I will sing to the Lord as long as I live:  I will sing praise to my God         while I have my being.” sings the psalmist.

Mary sings, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in you, O God, my Savior, for you have looked with favor on your lowly servant.”    

You can hear echoes of the blues in the Bible too.
    
    The psalmist cries, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept….
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange     land?”

    The song Jesus sings from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you         forsaken me?”

There’s another love song embedded in the Bible--the love song of God for God’s creation. It’s a song of faithfulness, a song of persistance, a song of delight. The love song of God for God’s beloved.  We all are God’s beloved—short and tall, male and female, easy to love and easy to dislike, fearful and brave, gay and straight, old and young—all the beloved of God.

And we are all lovers of God.

How do we, lovers of God,  sing a song to our beloved?  How do you and I sing a love song to God?

We do it through our prayer--in the duets we sing with  our beloved—both our prayers of thanksgiving and our prayers of lament.

And we do it through our worship.  Each week our awakened hearts sing out love songs to God.  

Yet James cautions, that’s not enough.  It’s not enough to sing praises with our lips.  It’s not enough to gather in worship.  Remember, James says, “…be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

James calls us to sing a love song with our lives.  Indeed, our very lives make up our love song to God.  That’s dicipleship—our love song to God.  

A song we sing as we walk the path of Jesus of Nazareth
    --serving the poor
    --tending the sick
    --reaching out to those excluded by others
    --turning the other cheek when we’d just as soon issue a caustic retort
    --working for justice when it might be easier to duck and cover
--spreading God’s reconciling love to those whom we encounter along our way.

How do we sing a love song to God?

We sing it with our lives.