I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, March 6, 2011. The text is Mark 7:31-37; read it here.
I wonder if you’ve ever witnessed that moment when a child moves from pure emotion, into speech. I’ve seen it most often when a kid is really angry or really hurt. They’re somewhere between two and five -- learning about language but still not in complete command of it -- and something happens that fills them with rage or pain and sadness and it’s as if you watch them take a cognitive step backwards and lose any facility with language they may have had, just moments ago. All they can do is cry, or scream, and they simply cannot put anything into words. Until finally they take a deep breath and yell out “He hurt my feelings!” or “The door slammed on my finger!”
And sometimes, it’s almost as if that verbal expression has somehow released the emotion, and they calm down, stop crying, finally take a deep breath. In a few moments, they’ll be able to tell you the story of what happened, and though telling the story, make sense of it. But there’s something about words, about words that are impeded and then released, that shows so clearly in that moment.
The man in our story has an “impediment in his speech,” and in all the translations of this text, the one we just read and the King James version and Hebrew, the word that’s used to describe his problem is the same. Impediment, for instance, is from the latin word, impedire which means “to shackle the feet of.” Other translations say that this man’s tongue had a string or a bond on it. His tongue was tied, impeded, restricted, in some way held back from allowing him to say what needed to be say, expressing what needed to be expressed.
Perhaps you’ve had moments of feeling like this man,
with a tongue that is tied,
unable to express what you need to say.
Unable to find the right words
to tell someone that you’re sorry,
or tell them how you feel,
or tell them something you really need them to know.
Perhaps in moments of pain or anger or deep sorrow,
you become the child,
overcome by raw emotion,
unable to find any words at all.
Or maybe it is not your tongue that is tied,
but some other part of you.
Maybe your heart is bound up.
Maybe your feet are nailed to the ground.
Maybe your hands refuse to work.
Maybe your eyes will not see clearly.
Close your eyes for a moment,
and search your body
for that place within you that is impeded,
shackled,
tied down.
The good news of this Gospel story
is very simple,
and very scary:
What ever part of you is bound up,
Jesus puts his hands there to touch it.
And then he says one word:
Ephphatha.
Be opened.
He looks up to heaven,
and sighs,
and breaths out and looks to you
and says,
Be opened.
I don’t know about you,
but I don’t actually want Jesus to touch me where I am broken.
I would rather protect that place,
because it is tender and fragile,
and I don’t want anyone to see it.
But sometimes, well,
it’s not up to me.
Jesus touches my tongue, and it is released.
He touches my ears, and they are opened.
He touches my hands, and they release.
He touches my heart, and it opens.
The good news of this Gospel is very simple,
and very scary.
Whatever part of you is bound up,
Jesus touches it and says, be opened.
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