Just by the voice
she knew who it was.
“Hi, Mrs.
Minister!”
She sighed. One of those unbidden, spontaneous sighs that
expresses so much.
She was
busy. And this greeting from her open
door was one of the blessings and burdens, one of the opportunities and challenges
of working at a church this close to The Projects.
But didn’t she
always tell her people that it’s in the interruptions that God comes? That it’s through the cracks in the way we
set things up that the kingdom of God seeps into the world? Wasn’t it she who helped convince the Official
Board to install the new signs over every external church door? The ones that say, “All are welcome. Everyone counts.”
So she lifted her
fingers from the keyboard and her gaze from the screen, turned her chair
towards the open door of her office, looked the interrupter squarely and kindly
in the face, and resolutely said, “Hi, Jeanette. How are you today?”
Jeanette was all
smiles as she held out a CD for her minister to see. “I got this at the Thrift Store. It’s Hillsong,” she said. Praise music.
In someone else’s castoffs, Jeanette had found – to her, a pearl of
great price. And she had her CD player
with her, to be able to share it.
With another sigh
the minister said, “Oh, that’s great! Do
you have a favourite song? Why don’t we
listen to it, so we can talk about what it means to each of us?” And unspoken, “then maybe you can be on your
way.”
Jeanette put the
disc in, found a track, and turned up the volume. The teenager and the minister together
listened to the song of praise and adoration, and as the minister committed
herself to listening she found herself remembering the Christian rock she herself
had listened to years ago. She listened
more carefully, and particular words and lines of this song now began unexpectedly
to speak to her, and catch her heart, and open it up to something – Someone,
beyond her, that she knew very well and now in a new and welcome way as well.
It was no longer
just her, the minister, managing a few minutes with Jeanette. She was not in charge anymore. Someone else was. And it wasn’t Jeanette, either. It was God.
But it was because of Jeanette and Jeanette’s song and the minister’s decision
to take Jeanette’s song seriously, that the minister found herself delightfully,
deeply opened in a new way to exactly the gracious presence of God that she so
often preached about to others.
Barbara Brown
Taylor, a Christian preacher and teacher, writes this: “The hardest spiritual work in the world is
to love the neighbour as the self – to encounter another human being not as
someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but
simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will
allow it.”
It is hard,
especially when we believe we have the truth and we have what other people
need.
We don’t need to feel
bad about that, though, because it was hard for Jesus, too.
In this morning’s
story, Jesus is tired – worn out by the mission in Galilee and by the range of
responses he is getting to his work. He
takes a break. He heads out of Galilee
to spend time with friends where he can rest and recharge. He knows what he needs, sets the agenda for
his spirit, draws a boundary around himself, and closes the door – just him and
a few friends and God.
But you know what
happens to closed doors. What God thinks
about them, and does to them.
In this case it’s a
Syrophoenician woman – a Gentile, not one of God’s people at all, not one who
he Jesus has come to help, who comes knocking and asks him to heal her
daughter. To which Jesus says, no,
that’s not what I’m about, because you’re not who I’m here for. You aren’t the mission God has given me; you
aren’t one of God’s people.
To which the woman says, are
you sure about that? And in the way that
she puts it, and makes him take her seriously, Jesus can’t help but come to see
that the mission really is somewhat bigger and more open than he had imagined.
Debie Thomas, in the blog, Journey with Jesus, puts it so nicely
that in this story “it is Jesus himself who has to
have his eyes opened and his ears unstopped, who must … allow himself to ‘be
opened’ to the full, glorious, uncomfortable implications of the gospel.
“The
Jesus we encounter in this story [she says] is fully human, shaped as we all
are by the conscious and unconscious biases, prejudices, and entitlements of
his culture. And he is God incarnate, a
holy Son … meant to share the Good News. But even he needs to ‘be opened’
to how radically good that good news is.
“The
Syrophoenician woman schools him… and the best part … is that Jesus accepts the
instruction of the woman who challenges him. He allows her – an ethnic,
religious, and gendered Other – to school him in his own gospel…” In other words, to help him more than he is
able to manage by himself, to be the Jesus God has called him to be.
Ephphatha. Be opened.
It’s the way to really become what we think we already are. The way to grow into the fullness of what we
believe to be true.
A
generation ago the members of this church wrote a mission statement to guide
them in how they went about being church, and it has guided us well for a
generation now.
Our church family [it says] celebrates the love of Jesus
through the active participation of children, youth and adults
in worship, music, prayer and praise.
Striving to live and grow in our faith in Jesus Christ
and united in our love of God,
we reach out to serve our community.
Respecting the beliefs, concerns and spiritual needs of others,
we offer a place of welcome, fellowship and support.
Openness
is affirmed in every line. Openness to
the gifts of all members – children, youth and adults alike and equally. Openness to the community, and the call of
God to us to reach out. Openness to the
beliefs, concerns and spiritual needs of others – to make room, offer
friendship, give support.
And that
openness, when we’ve practiced it, has served us well. The comfortable, and especially the sometimes
uncomfortable encounters it leads us into, when we’ve taken them seriously,
have helped us grow into the kind of church we are called to be.
Ephphatha. Be opened.
In the stories of Jesus and in the history of the church this is the way
of growing into the gospel that’s always bigger than we are and that we imagine
it to be.
In three
weeks we will be gathering for a few hours after worship – as many as wish to
take part, to be guided in a process of creating a new mission statement for
our church as it is now. A mission
statement for today, that will put into words what we are called to do now, and
the kind of church we are called to be in Winona today.
And I
wonder as we do that, what kind of openness we are called to take on, and
commit ourselves to? What others around
us, what people different from ourselves are we called to go out to, and take
seriously? What kinds of encounters –
comfortable and uncomfortable, when we let ourselves face them, will help us
grow into the gospel we believe?
What kind
of openness will help us now to be the kind of church we are meant to be, and
can be?
I like
Debie Thomas’s closing words:
“ ‘Be opened’ [she says.] Be opened to the truth that God isn’t done
with you yet. Be opened to the destabilizing wisdom of people who are
nothing like you. Be opened to the voice of God speaking from places you
consider unholy. Be opened to the widening of the table. Be opened
to Good News that stretches your capacity to love. Be opened.”
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