Year B
Mark 7:24-37
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
No Walls Can Separate God’s Love
It seems extremely appropriate with this being Labor Day weekend and with a continued pandemic that has dramatically increased poverty rates, that today our lessons clearly direct us to the plight of the working class and the poor. We live in a culture of excess. The gap is widening between those who have more and more and those who have less and less. The most recent figures supplied by the US Census Bureau indicate that 45 million Americans, or 14.5% of the population, are living in poverty. For those living in poverty, it is a horrible thing to endure and our lessons today are concerned with this matter and they urge us to generosity.
Martin Luther once summarized our responsibility to the poor when he said: “We should learn well how to please Christ. We do please him by dedicating our entire life with all possible diligence solely to the service of our neighbor. Down, down, says Christ; you will find me in the poor; you are rising too high if you do not find me there.” The God who became poor, seeks out the lost and the despised, the immigrant, and the street person, to advocate for all creation not just its entitled few and the challenge for us this Sunday is to acknowledge how hard it is for us live up to our Christian calling and risk hospitality, friendship, and generosity to all whom God calls us to love. This is our faith put into action.
Latin American liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez put it this way: “There is no authentic evangelization that is not accompanied by action on behalf of the poor.” We participate in God’s generosity toward us by a faith that expresses itself in action toward others. The texts today all emphasize this faith in action. Proverbs calls the rich to wise responsibility and stewardship of their wealth in their relationship to the poor, threatening them with poverty and loss by God’s judgement if they foolishly disregard the wise counsel. Proverbs often has wisdom for us. In these six verses, we learn a lot about God. We are reminded that the Lord is maker of us all: rich or poor, good or bad, black or white and is generous to all. In God there are no distinctions.
It’s true God created a world filled with diversity, yet challenges any partiality to one group or the other, to the rich over the poor. Americans tend to display a partiality toward the rich, the successful, the beautiful, and the famous. And we tend to think that the rich are blessed by God and the poor are being punished. These verses aim to refute the thinking that all who are rich are blessed by God and all who are poor are overlooked or being punished by God. God challenges our thinking and our partiality and calls all who seek to live godly lives to act with justice and generosity to all. We cannot understand God’s generosity in our lives if our lives show preference for one group over another.
Therefore, we are called to champion the cause of all who need justice, and defend and protect the poor and afflicted from those who seek to take advantage of their weakness. The two miracles of Jesus today in the gospel help us to see God’s mercy as Jesus seeks out the outsiders and outcasts. He deliberately travels to Gentile territory to the Sea of Galilee, a sign of God’s love for all people. In the first story Jesus shows grace and compassion to one who many thought didn’t deserve it. The Syrophoenician woman persists in her request to Jesus to cast an unclean spirit from her daughter which makes her a model of persistent faith. After curing the girl, in the second story Jesus miraculously heals a deaf man with an impediment of speech, but wants no one to know it. Despite his efforts to keep the crowd silent, they zealously proclaim that “He does everything well.”
As Jesus’ two miracles today make clear, our treatment of other people is in an important way our treatment of him. In the life of Jesus made known to us by the Gospels, we see the attitudes that God looks for in us, the quality of life that should be ours and what God is really like. God’s kingdom proclaims itself; and those who have witnessed it cannot keep quiet about it. Christ has given us the capacity to hear and see truth, as well as the means to express that truth in our lives as he did by action as well as by word. When we respond to the gospel, when we respond with God’s mercy to all, our ears are opened and our tongues are released. As Martin Luther once proclaimed in his sermon, “The ears and tongues of Christians are thus different from the ears and tongues of the world.”
In this new community called out in Christ’s name, there is no place for distinctions between wealthy and poor which James today, in his second-century epistle, calls attention to. He calls attention to class distinctions that baptized Christians make among themselves in the faith community. He is writing to a church where the teachings of Jesus and Paul are no longer the primary influence on the church. The rules of Roman society, the status quo values have infiltrated the church. It was dangerous to be different. James reminds his fellow Christians that they are supposed to be different from the rest of society and he calls the Christian community back to the values and standards established in scripture and in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
It is exactly those whom the rest of the world despises and rejects that Christians are called to embrace and welcome into the church: the street person, the poor person, the persecuted stranger, and those who most need to be welcomed and saved. James says the starting point is agape love, which enables us to bear one another’s burdens and his challenge to those Christians in his day and to all Christians down the centuries in a nutshell is: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” James calls us to a higher standard and in an ideal world of Christian faith, of agape love there are no distinctions, no partiality. What saves us now is the distinction between a dead faith-faith without works-and a living faith that is always accompanied by works.
We are not saved by works alone. We are saved by God’s love, God’s grace and by faith but faith with works can lift us beyond the confusion and conflicts of our time and help us to discern God’s hand working in our world, building the kingdom that is yet to be. It is of no value for us to claim that we have heard God’s word, unless we have become doers of that Word, and have determined to live our lives by it. For how else can faith be seen in our world except through love of neighbor and, especially through ministry to those who are in need?
The model for our lives is Jesus’ own attitude toward others which Paul states well in his letter to the Philippians: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interest, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
Status is a product of our own imaginations, invisible to God. There are no walls made of hungry bellies, withered hands, deaf ears, or troubled minds that separate us from God or should separate us from each other. Once we acknowledge that there are no walls that separate us, love and mercy will flow, eyes will be opened and all people will be seen as God see’s us and loves us.