Title: Being Loud and Being Quiet
This past Thursday Douglas and I went to Chicago to pick up a cat that
went missing the day of our move from Houston to Coloma—a friend
found it and it was shipped via airplane to us and we went to Chicago to
pick it up. On our way back from the airport, as we moved closer into
Michigan, we kept being passed by a car with two young men in it, which
is not that big of a thing, because neither of us are fast drivers—but what
was unusual about this car was that in the back of the window, someone
had made a homemade bumper sticker with white lettering you might get
from a Home Depot, and it simply gave the address of a website on the
world wide web, the internet: something like www.nextgeneration4Christ.
net. On Friday morning, I tried looking the address on the internet, but
either I got the address wrong, or the site went dead at some point. And,
of course, the car had a for sale sign in the window, so maybe they’ve
gotten tired of driving around with a religious billboard on the back of
their car.
You know, I’ve always wondered and maybe even struggled with how to
be public with faith, and I know that sounds odd as a minister, because
people usually see me as a professional religious person. But the
problem, of course, is that I am not the only religious person and
certainly not the only Christian, and sometimes we Christians have a
habit of embarrassing ourselves, and embarrassing other Christians,
and worse, of course, I think we sometimes embarrass God with our
words and our lives. When the United Church of Christ began its
national “God is Still Speaking” campaign, the national church was all
about having UCC members put bumper stickers on their cars with that
phrase and I really struggled with doing that, with putting it on my bumper
sticker. And its certainly not because I don’t think God is still speaking,
that God is still in relationship with us, and maybe saying a “yet new
thing” to humankind, as God said something new in the life of Jesus of
Nazareth some two thousands years ago. It’s just that having a religious
sounding bumper sticker on the back of my car might actually mean I
need to drive a little bit more carefully, and not pass someone doing a
100 or doing something like cutting someone off in traffic, and having
them give me a gesture that proclaims their anger at me, not their belief
that I am number one! We Christian often embarrass God enough with
our loud words and our lack of actions to back up those words, so I have
tried to minimize the damage to God’s reputation and the reputation of
my fellow Christians by limiting the amount of religious bumper stickers
on the back of my car.
I mean, we all fail our words, of course: we all fail to live up to what we
say we believe in or what we believe to be the right thing to do is. We all
end up being hypocrites at some point in our lives, and that is why I am
always defensive with others who complain that all Christians are
hypocrites—failing our words is as human as being alive, but I think what
some people are saying when they complain that we Christians are all
hypocrites is that most people don’t claim as much as we do, that most
people don’t go around telling other people how to live their lives as
much as we do, and that is what really annoys them—and annoys me as
well: I certainly don’t like to have other people tell me what to do. But I
also am saddened when I fail to live up to live up to my words, when my
own life doesn’t match my words. I wonder if the Christ wanted to protect
us from ourselves, from our human propensity to not live up to our words
when, in the Gospel of Mark, he repeatedly tells the people that he has
healed to be quiet.
You see, in Mark, which is probably the earliest Gospel written that we
have in our New Testament, the writer constantly has Jesus telling the
people that he has personally healed to be quiet, to not speak of the
healing they have just experienced. Scholars call it the “Markan secret,”
this interesting phenomenon you find most prominently in the Gospel of
Mark—Jesus tells people to be quiet after their extraordinary healings,
and to not tell anyone about what has happened to them or whom has
done this extraordinary thing for them. There are all sorts of possible
reasons why the writer has Jesus doing this—“my time has not yet
come,” he says to the disciples over and over, warning them to not rush
into a future they do not yet understand and, in truth, the disciples never
do really come to terms with the idea that the end may include the
crucifixion of their Master. By telling those that he healed to be quiet,
perhaps he is trying to delay the backlash of the Romans and the
religious authorities that will inevitably come. Messiahs are dangerous
to Roman governments and all governments and to the religious
establishment, any religious establishment, who have an interest in
keeping the status quo.
But I wonder if one of the other reasons that Jesus tells those he has
healed to be quiet is because of the same reason I cringe when I read
people proclaiming their faith on the bumper of their cars: we people of
faith have a tendency to embarrass ourselves when we talk about God,
when we proclaim our beliefs too boldly, and we have a tendency to
make others uncomfortable when we demand that everyone else have
the exact same spiritual experience that we have had of the Divine. We
often think of our more conservative Christian brothers and sisters in the
faith as making that mistake, but we can do it too: sometimes we demand
that others embrace our more expansive ideas about God, we even
demand they accept our understanding of God as the only true,
liberating expression of God. I wonder if Jesus wanted to warn us
against speaking too much about our faith, in order to protect from one
of our most common sins, which is, of course, hypocrisy and arrogance
when we speak of God. When we speak of God and our experience, of
God we often demand that others walk OUR path, that they believe the
way we do, that they become healed the way we have become healed. I
want to come back to this mistake in a second, but before that, I want us
to observe a few things from our text from Mark today.
If you look at this text from Mark, there are actually two healing stories—
one is of the deaf man, the man that Jesus tells to be quiet about what
has happened to him, and the other healing story comes before that
story: it is the story of a non-Jew, a Syrophoencian woman, a Gentile,
who has the gall to ask a Jewish rabbi to heal her daughter. The
separation between Jew and Gentile was high, and Jesus here in this
story reflects the biases of his time: his mission is, first, to the Jews, God’
s chosen people: the children, he says, need to be fed first, before the
dogs, a term often commonly used by the people of his day to describe
non-Jews, or Gentiles . I have preached on the Gospel of Matthew’s
version of this story, which is slightly different than Mark’s version, and I’
ve said that it was a moment when Jesus himself was converted by the
strength of this woman, she who was an outsider on some many levels:
she was a non-Jew, first and foremost, and she was also woman, which
in a very patriarchal, male dominated culture, puts her pretty close to
bottom rung of people one ought to listen to, at least for a man in that
culture. And yet, Jesus listens to her and is changed by her arguments,
by her loud and relentless arguments about the wideness of God’s
mercy, her idea that it includes everyone, Jews and Gentiles. Jesus
heals her daughter because she will not let him get away with the pat
answers, and an amazing thing about the story is that her culture would
have usually prohibited her from speaking directly to him, because this
man was not her husband. But she is loud and relentless in her efforts
to be heard—she will not be quiet, because what she needs is the
attention of the man that can save her daughter’s life.
And then in the next healing story in our text today, we have the deaf
man who also could not speak—there will be no loud begging from this
man, even if his spirit had been willing. This man cannot speak, and
Jesus takes him away, away from the crowds, and puts his fingers into
the man’s ears and spits into his hands and touches his tongue with
hands, and prays over the man, with his eyes lifted to the heavens, he
prays, “be opened!” and the man instantly can now hear and speak. Its
interesting the way that Jesus heals differently in these stories: with the
woman’s daughter, he heals her from her afar, but in the second story
the healing touch is incredibly intimate, it’s almost messy with human spit
and fingers in ears! In the first story, her loud and relentless voice
becomes what convinces Jesus that he should make the circle wider, to
even include a syrophoenician woman, and in the second story, there is
not even a quiet voice—there is no voice at all, with this deaf and mute
man left only with his pleading eyes to give voice to his deep hunger for
healing. “Be opened,” Jesus says to this man, and the man hears and
speaks again, and yet in the first story, it is Jesus who is opened up by
the voice of this outsider, this woman made an outsider because she is a
woman, and also because she is not a Jew, not one of the chosen
people.
I think the hard part for us is to know when we are called to speak, and
when we are to be silent, of how to find the middle way in between those
two extremes. Don’t get me wrong: I get that both the woman and the
deaf man did not have a choice about whether to speak or not: for the
woman, she had to speak for the sake of her daughter’s life, she had no
real human choice, and the deaf man could not speak, even if he wanted
to. But we have that choice, we have choice between being loud or
being quiet, between putting bumper stickers on the back of our cars,
and never allowing a bumper sticker anywhere near our bumpers. It is
risky thing, you know, to do one or the other: if I speak, someone may
listen to my words, and hold me accountable to them, and if I am silent, I
may be held accountable for not speaking up when my voice would have
made all the difference between life and death for myself or for some
other. At different times in our lives, both actions are needed: either to
be loud or to be quiet, but most of life is found in the middle way,
between the extremes, either between extreme silence or extreme
loudness. How do we not embarrass God by what we say, or by what we
put on the back of our cars, as we cut off that fast moving car who wants
to quickly pass by us? Is the best approach silence? And yet, how do
we know when we need to speak up, to speak the truth as we know it,
and to do as the woman does in this story, when particular truth needs to
be spoken?
I tell you what I think I found in this story, and now I speak for myself, but I
share with you the wisdom I have found in the larger tradition of the
church that has helped me, on how to answer the question of navigating
the waters between these poles, between the two extremes that tend to
mess us all up. There has been a long tradition of giving witness, of
telling the divine story as we know it and have experienced it. The
difference between giving witness to our spiritual stories and being
preached to and being preached at, is that we ONLY tell OUR story of
how God has healed US, of how God has walked beside and before US,
and we let go of demanding that others tell the same story of how God
has worked in their lives. That has always been the sin of the church,
the demand that our spiritual stories be exactly alike, that we all
understand God exactly alike: it is what leads to inquisitions, to people
saying that they can no longer walk with each other, whatever. We do
not have to experience God exactly alike and we do not have to tell the
same stories in order for each of them to be true stories about how God
has worked in our individual lives.
I think we must do what the woman does in this story, we must give
witness to our needs and to our experiences of God—and for her, it was
her witness that the God of Israel included her and her daughter in the
great circle of humanity. But they always must be understood as ONLY
OUR stories, and we cannot demand of others that THEIR stories
become OUR stories: that is what keeps dividing up the church, our
demand that EVERY story be like OUR story. Maybe Jesus opens up
more than the deaf man’s ears and tongues: maybe Jesus opens him up
to a new way of hearing and listening to God, and Christ gives him
speech so that he can later tell that particular story, his story, to others.
But also, maybe Jesus tells him to be quiet for right now, tells him to keep
his healing a secret because Christ knew that if his story got out, then
everyone would demand a repeat of that man’s incredible story. They
would demand to be healed just as he was healed, and I think Christ
knew that not everyone was destined for healing, and that it was not
possible for him to heal everyone, and that not every story needs to be
one about physical newness in order for it to be a story about
resurrection, about hope, about new life. We are asked to give witness,
to speak of how God has met us…and yet we are also asked to be silent
when others speak, and to listen to their stories of how God has met and
loved them. These stories, they do not need to be the same story—
these healing stories from our Scripture today aren’t—for them to be true
stories. Let’s just listen to each other, let’s just let each other give
witness to what we have experienced of God, and then when we are
asked to speak, we will tell our own story, knowing that it is not the ONLY
story, and then I think we will have done what the Christ has asked us to
do, and we will be able to walk together, knowing that God is big enough
for the both of us, for all of us. “Be opened!” Christ tells the deaf and
mute man. I think I hear the same from the Christ, and I hope we all do,
so that one day we can speak our good and yet very different stories
about how God has healed us and made us whole. Amen.
