Mark 7:31-37

Then [Jesus] returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hands on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and he put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

I spent some time, a week ago Friday, wandering around the art museum at Newfield’s, here in Indianapolis.

Among so many other things, there is an exhibit there called “The Message is The Medium.” It was closed, for some reason, but there was at least one piece of that exhibit outside of its confines and closed doors.

This piece of contemporary art is called “Who’s Your Tree?,” and it was created by a Korean artist named Nan June Paik. It consists of 34 old TVs, that flash seemingly random images of things that are quintessentially Indiana … images of the Indiana State House, the Indy 500, other pieces from Hoosier artists and, of course basketballs.

I can’t say I was all that moved or impressed by that one, so I kept looking and found some other artwork that seemed to fit the “Message is the Medium” bill. Like this one, called “Outside the Coal Mine” by a Black artist from Alabama, named Thornton Dial.

It’s a mess of artificial flowers, cloth, metal, wire, canvas scraps, found wood, paint can lids, industrial sealing compound, and enamel … on canvas. A quotation by the artist, about the piece, said, “I only want materials that have been used by people, the works of the United States, that have did people some good.”

It’s not pretty. It looks like a mess, on purpose. “Outside the Coal Mine.” The message is the medium.

But my favorite was a photograph of a work in progress … a piece of performance art, actually … called “Borrando la Frontera,” by a Mexican artist named Ana Teresa Fernandez.

In 2011, Fernandez set up shop along the border wall that separates Tijuana from San Diego, and she started painting the border wall with a pale blue color matching the sky behind it, which had the effect of making the wall seem to actually disappear. The artist means to encourage people to ask better questions about the geographic and political boundaries that separate us.

“The Message is the Medium.”

All if this made me wonder about today’s Gospel … and what in the world might Jesus be up to, if we pay close attention to, or focus particularly on, the “media” he chose that day: the laying on of hands, I mean; the fingers and the ears; the spit and the tongue, even; the sigh of deep breathing, and the sound of his words.

All of it’s incarnational, right? It is something much more than performance art, for sure. And it’s bodily. Physical. Tactile. And a little messy and gross and unsettling and beautiful. And I’ll come back to this in a minute, if you don’t mind.

Because there’s something else going on in this morning’s Gospel. And that’s the curiosity about why Jesus tells people, as he does often in the Gospels, not to tell others about what they’ve seen him do or what they’ve heard him say. It’s a long-disputed, curious quandary theologians have mused about for ages, called the “Messianic Secret.” Why does Jesus, over and over again, order his followers – like he does this morning – not to tell others about the miracles they’ve witnessed?

Some think Jesus didn’t want the attention, “because his hour had not yet come;” that the timing wasn’t right. Some suggest “his hour hadn’t come,” because he wasn’t ready to face the cross and his own crucifixion, just yet. And who could blame a guy for that?

I decided a couple of years ago that Jesus didn’t want people crowing about his miraculous healings, at every turn, because he knew not everyone gets the miraculous healing they long for, and bragging about your own can come off as prideful, selfish, and insensitive, in the wrong circles.

And this week I wondered about yet another reason Jesus may have told the people who watched this healing happen to keep their mouths shut, to keep his “Messianic Secret,” to themselves. I wonder if the reason for that … if the message, today … is in the medium. I wonder if that message is in the hands, the fingers, the ears, the spit, the tongue, the breath of his deep sigh of what he’s up to.

What if Jesus told his followers not to tell anyone about what they’d just seen, because he wanted them to go and do something about it, instead?

And maybe he meant spit and tongues and fingers and ears. I don’t know. (I kind of hope not, to be honest.)

But maybe the message in his medium was, somehow: “Get your hands dirty, people.” Maybe he meant get close, come near, be open, and not so afraid ... or so shy … or so timid. Maybe he meant don’t leave this all – or only – up to Jesus. Maybe he was calling for more than “thoughts and prayers” and more than all of our best intentions, too. Maybe he was calling for some of our blood, some of our sweat, some of our tears, some of our sacrifice, more often than we’re inclined to offer them up for the good of the cause … for the sake of the Gospel … on behalf of our neighbor.

Maybe the message we send about the faith we claim is in the medium of our lives – in what we’re willing to give up and give away, perhaps. (Is it generous and sacrificial, like Jesus asks us to be?)

Maybe the message we send about the faith we claim is in the medium of our lives – in if or how we’re willing to love and serve our neighbor. (Does our definition of “neighbor” include the least, the last, the lost – and not just those who live next door? And how do they know that we love them?)

Maybe the message we send about the faith we claim is in the medium of our lives – in how and why we cast our votes. (Do we do that with our own interests in mind or do we consider the needs and interests of others, too?)

All of this seems to be what James calls us to, just the same, when he suggests that a faith without works is dead. It’s something St. Augustine was after when he proposed we “Preach the Gospel at all times.” And that we “use words if necessary.”

The message of our faith is, indeed, in the medium of our lives. It’s in the physical, tangible, tactile, visible, measurable ways we love, serve, give, comfort, care for, and elevate the lives of those who need it most.

It’s in the money we share. It’s in the sacrifices we make. It’s in the time we offer. It’s in the love we prioritize and proclaim – not merely with thoughts and prayers or even in worship on Sunday morning. It’s in the loving actions those thoughts, prayers, and this worship bring to life … to others… and for the sake of the world, in Jesus’ name.

Amen

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.

(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)

So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

On Tuesday, I got really angry. I love my son dearly, but Clive will not stop climbing on anything, everything. The chairs, tables, the kitchen counters; he’s sneaking and oddly daring for being my son. Tuesday he climbed on a chair, then on the kitchen table for the 52nd time in the last hour. I was angry and grabbed him off the table and, getting as close to his little ear as I could, told him to stop climbing on the table.

As soon as I let go, he pouted his lip, cried big tears, and I felt terrible. After putting him to bed, I turned on the local news. The first story was about how three children in Indianapolis, five years old and younger, had lost their lives from finding a gun and accidentally firing it. And I thought if I should be outraged about anything, it shouldn’t be my son acting like the toddler he is, but rather that toddlers are losing their lives from completely avoidable situations.

What makes you angry, outraged even? Is it the high cost of living that only seems to be getting higher? Is it that suicide among young people continues to grip our community? Is it that it's easier to get a gun in Indiana than to adopt a pet, in most cases. Whatever the source, what do you do with your anger? For many of us, anger is a motivator, a catalyst in our lives. We hear something, see something, that hurts us or someone we love or experience something that we know isn’t right and we feel compelled to act.

Action, what we do with our lives, is the main concern for both Jesus and James today. And it's tempting to think that this righteous anger, this outrage over something that isn’t right in the world, is a good thing.

It was for Cecilia Munoz; her outrage did a lot of good and got her pretty far in life. The source of her anger came from a dinner she had at 17 with her parents and a close friend. The year was 1980 and the conversation at the table focused on the wars going on in Central America and the involvement of the US.

After dinner, Cecilia’s good friend looked her in the eyes and said that if the US were to ever go to war somewhere in Latin America, he believed that her parents belonged in an internment camp just like the japanese-americans during WWII, because they were immigrants from Bolivia (a central american country).

She couldn’t believe someone who knew her, knew her parents, who sat at their table for meals, could say and believe such awful things about her parents. She was outraged and, as she wrote in an essay, that outrage became the propellant of her life, driving her right into the immigrant rights movement, fighting for people whose story was a lot like her parents. And according to Cecilia, “a little outrage can take you a long way”. It took her to Washington, then to the white house, and even becoming a MacArthur Fellow for her work with helping immigrants.

Isn’t this what James is talking about when he says be doers of the Word, not just hearers?

We hear God’s call to welcome the immigrant and the stranger, to care for the weak and the vulnerable, the orphan and the widow as James puts it, and then we do those things.

That's what God wants from us according to James. Does it matter if anger is the fuel that gets us to do the right thing?

Well Cecilia has a warning, “anger has a way of hollowing out your insides”. For every fifty families she would help, she could only think of the five who didn’t get the documentation they’d hoped for. The defeats were more than the victories, which is often the case with any injustice or problem out in the world. And anger could only take Cecilia so far before it started carving out her soul.

Or as theologian Fredreick Buechner puts it, “Of the 7 deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun… in many ways anger is a feast fit for a king. The main drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you”.

Our outrage at the problems, struggles, and pains of this world are not misplaced. We should get mad when we see our neighbors being harmed, when we witness the misuse and abuse of creation, when we hear the cries of the poor and brokenhearted. Those same things anger God!

Yet, when anger is the source of our action, the fuel for what we do out in the world, it will eat us up. The problems are too great, the struggle too strong, the hurt too deep for anger to be the motivator.

It won’t sustain us for the work that God calls us to nor does it accomplish what God desires, at least that’s what James thinks. Which is why he says we must be slow to anger, because it will feed us for a little while, but then it starts to carve a hollow place in your soul.

Yet what of Jesus, he seems pretty angry with the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites! And what about that other time he flips tables over in the synagogue? What is that if not outrage? Yes this is true, Jesus certainly gets angry. But it’s good to remember or be reminded that we aren’t Jesus and his ways are always higher, better than our ways, Isaiah reminds us. Jesus' concern though is with actions too and what motivates them, just as James is, but from a different perspective.

While James tells us that anger shouldn’t be the catalyst for our actions, Jesus is worried that our actions are simply going through the motions; that we do what’s considered the right thing, but one’s heart isn’t really in it, saying the right words but it’s all lip service. The Pharisees weren’t wrong for following the tradition of washing hands. But, Jesus is angry because they cared more about the tradition than they did their neighbors and God’s instruction to care for them.

Is that not still the same today? We hold to all sorts of traditions, all sorts of ways of doing things, over caring for our neighbors, with one glaring example being gun violence. We hold so tightly to human tradition, this right to arm oneself that we either forget or outright abandon God’s commandments, like don’t kill, love your neighbor, and protect the vulnerable.

It’s not enough to extend thoughts and prayers after the next act of gun violence or mass shooting if we are unwilling to forget human tradition, advocate for gun reform, and hold tight to God’s commandments. If not, it’s all lip service.

So if it’s neither anger nor tradition that motivates our action, what should?

Cecilia Munoz says anger didn’t eat her away completely because that hollow place carved by outrage got filled with other, more powerful things, things like: compassion, faith, family, music and the goodness of people around her. These things filled her up and tempered her outrage with a deep sense of gratitude.

Anger, righteous or not, rarely produces what we want. Clive still climbs on tables after all.

So, what fills you up with a sense of gratitude? What are those things more powerful than anger that sustain your action?

Thanks be to God for every generous act of giving, every perfect gift that comes from God, filling the hollow place hewed by outrage and anger. May we all be so overwhelmed with gratitude for the good, more powerful things of this life: faith, hope, love, family, music, joy, that we can’t help but be doers of God’s word.

Perhaps then we will accomplish not only what we want, but what God wants too.

Amen