Isaiah 35:4-7a | James 2:1-5 | Mark 7:31-37

 Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and received adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

The scriptures this week begin with an issue that I think is probably one of the most important issues for all of us who are believers in the God that is revealed in the Old Testament and New Testament, and that is the issue of fear.  There is nothing stated more often in scripture than the phrase, “Be not afraid.”  It’s 365 times.  I think that’s so interesting, a time for every day of the year, and yet there’s so many of us that live a kind of fear-based life, and it’s an interesting thing.  Why is it that we human beings have this sort of anxiety in the core of our being that somehow we’re not enough, or the relationships we have will not be there for us, or that financial security in the future won’t be there for us?  There is this voice that I always talk about, this voice that is a critic that comes along and constantly tells us we’re not enough, and if you’re told you’re not enough and you have to look at your future, you’re wondering, “Who outside of me or what outside of me is going to take care of me?”  And then you end up with a severe to mild case of anxiety, and it stays with you.  And I never thought of this before, but one of the reasons why we get addicted to things that relax us, be it some kind of medication or alcohol or activity or whatever we choose that keeps us from thinking and feeling things, that the root cause of so much of that addiction is simply that we have this unsatisfied longing for something that we think needs to be there in order for us to make it.  And I’m thinking to myself, “What is it about believers in God that doesn’t trust the most simple, direct statement that he’s made to us throughout the history of his story revealing himself to us?”  For the most part, he’s there for us.  He’s there to care for us, to awaken us to things that will satisfy us.  There’s a life that he’s created for us, and he promises that we’ll be able to be in touch with it.  And it’s core value is that it has a resonance of peace and well-being.  When he says over and over again, “Don’t be afraid,” another way to say that more positively is, “Be at peace.  Relax.  Everything is going to be okay.”  

Now, what’s interesting to me about this notion of not trusting God, one of the reasons, I think, is because the God of the Old Testament had a way of entering into our life and being there for us.  And it’s not as comforting as it is in the New Testament, but basically, when God entered into people’s lives through Abraham and then the journey to freedom from a place of slavery, the core gift that God gave to his people to give them a sense of hope and well-being was a law, the Ten Commandments.  We talked about them last week, and when you think about it, basically the law was given to people, and its effect, how it worked on them, it was controlling their behavior.  And it controlled their behavior with a certain motivation, and the motivation was reward or punishment.  So the most part, you look back at the Old Testament, and you see a God who is dealing with people who, I would say, from the way he dealt with them, were very childlike.  I think it’s interesting.  Just recently I’ve been doing research on how long ago was Abraham.  When did he appear in history?  And it was 4,000 years ago.  That was the time when the wheel was invented.  The alphabet was invented.  The government, the kind of control of a government over people, all that was brand new.  So to have a God entering into the lives of these people at a time when, in a way, they were just beginning to understand the fullness of who they could become, it made sense that he had to treat them like children.  “Do this, and if you don’t —”  What he’s really saying is, “If you don’t do this, your life is going to be miserable, and you’re going to be living in fear and anxiety and worry, and blah, blah, blah.”  But basically he said, “If you don’t do it, I will punish you.  I will destroy you.”  And that doesn’t exactly instill in a person a lot of confidence, because if a God who is giving you the things you need to do, if you have to do them in order to please him and you don’t do them that well, then you’re always going to be, in a sense, anxious over whether or not you’re going to be condemned.  So you’re afraid of his judgment.  

Now, take that as something that is in the Old Testament.  Take that as our origin in our families.  Often we have — it depends on the parents that we have.  I know when I grew up in the ‘40s, disciplining a child was the smartest, wisest thing you could do.  Punish them whenever they do anything wrong.  That’ll teach them both what’s right and wrong, but it’ll also teach them how to be disciplined, control their behavior.  And that lingered, still lingers in people’s imagination.  That’s what we’re here to do, control our behavior so that we act in the way that we’re supposed to so that people accept us and God accepts.  And that isn’t very comforting, because you know what it’s based on?  My performance, my ability to do what I’m told.  

So in the New Testament, it’s very, very different.  In the New Testament, we have a God who is revealing not simply the wisdom of a law, a way of life that we’re asked to live and if we don’t we’ll be punished.  He brings something else onto the scene, and it’s very different.  I will call it the gift, a gift that he wants to give us, not a rule to live by but a gift, and the gift is something that he’s going to give to you and to me that awakens us and empowers us.  The law had the role to awaken, awaken people to what people really basically want.  They want to live in a community where people are grounded in something besides their own egos.  They want to live in a community where people are caring and loving and supportive, but when we come to can you do that, what’s the motive to do that, well, it seems like the motive that you need, in the New Testament, which is where we are supposed to be living now, the real core challenge is not to follow a rule or a law but to believe in a promise.  And the promise is, “I will really take care of you.  I’m not any longer going to hold you responsible for your actions.”  This is something that’s really hard for people who are grounded in the Old Testament to believe, that God comes with this most amazing gift.  He wants to be the one who comes, and he just basically takes care of you and forgives all of your sins and releases you from everything you owe.  And all you then have to do is allow him to take away all your faults by just not paying attention to them, and then he’s going to be there to take care of you and guide you and lead you and empower you.  

And if you want to know exactly how we’re supposed to imagine that fulfillment of who God is — because he talks about it in the Old Testament, but the Isaiah piece we have today is part of the Old Testament, but there’s so many other passages in the Old Testament that sort of fly in the face of that.  So it’s interesting about the New Testament and Old Testament.  There’s 300 references in the Old Testament to the New Testament, but the New Testament didn’t happen until God entered the world as a human being, and this incredibly [sic] connection between humanity and divinity, this God and this man were in such union.  And they did something for the human race, and they took away all of the punishment, all of the retaliation that is due us because of our faults.  It’s all gone.  Well, if that’s all gone, then I guess we can do anything we want, right?  Well, that’s probably what they would have thought back in the Old Testament 4,000 years ago.  They had to have some kind of punishment.  What we have now is the image that we have in the gospel of a healer, a miraculous healer.  This is the image of God now not just holding us against a law that we have to — that controls our behavior but a God revealing to us a promise, and the promise is, “I will awaken you into who you are, and I will empower you to live out of that awareness you have of your core nature, your authenticity.”  And so that’s the miracle.

And the one we have in the gospel today is the one that I think might be the most interesting.  He basically is saying that the gift — I don't know if this makes any sense to you, but I think it’s interesting that I heard this this week, but it’s the idea that of all the senses that we have, the last sense for us, if you’re dying, let’s say, and your brain is shutting down, the last sense to go is hearing.  To the very end, you’re listening for something, listening.  So in this gospel from Mark, we have one of the miracles of Jesus, and it’s the one in which he enables a person to speak clearly by improving the way he listens.  Now, think about speaking as proclaiming something that is true and authentic.  That’s what we’re here to do.  We’re here to speak the truth, and the thing that keeps this figure in this gospel that’s healed, what keeps him from doing that, he can’t hear.  He can’t hear right, and it’s true.  Speech is a — how would you say it?  It is established in our brain by what we hear.  So if you live in a certain country that has a certain language, you’re going to speak that language, but let’s just say the speaking that we need to hear, in God’s plan for us to grow into who we are, is the truth.  So the man can’t hear.  He’s not ready for the truth.  When you tell someone the truth about who they are or what they’re doing, they’re very likely to say, “That’s not true, because I can’t hear it.  I can’t accept it.  I’m not open enough to it.”  So he opens his ears with his finger.  It’s interesting.  And then he does something else interesting.  He takes spit, which is considered to be breath, which is the Spirit of God in a tangible form, in saliva, and touches his tongue.  Your tongue is now touched by Spirit, by truth, and the other interesting thing about this thing is that, when Jesus does this, he does two things.  He looks up to heaven, which is to say, “This is not me, the man Jesus, doing this.  This is God.”  And he groans, and I don’t know what the groan is.  It’s fascinating.  What is — was it difficult for him, or was it risky for him, because he knew, if he did this, it was going to get in the way of his ministry, and that’s one of the reasons why he would always say, “Don’t tell anybody about this.  Don’t tell anybody”?  But he almost had to do it, which is a beautiful image of God.  He can’t resist the healing that he wants to give to people.  So in this story, we see then the man who can hear the truth is able to speak the truth, and everybody is astonished.  And you look at all the miracles of Jesus.  It’s so interesting.  Every single one of them has to do with awakening and empowering some natural quality that we have from God in terms of being a human beings, eyes that see, ears that hear, tongues that make speech clear, hands that get the work done, legs that get you going.  Every one of them, if you think about it, direction of awakening and empowering human beings to be exactly who they were intended to be.  

The law, it seems, in the Old Testament was controlling people, and they weren’t yet able to understand the reasons perhaps that they had to follow these regulations.  But the New Testament is all about somebody now who realizes these regulations are nothing other than who I really am and who I want to be to the people I love and what I want other people to be to me.  And all of a sudden, the healings don’t sound so like they’re magic and out of the realm of what happens naturally.  No, to me, the miracles that Jesus performed are the natural ways in which grace works in your life and mine, and that’s what we trust in.  We trust in that, and if we live in that kind of life, with all of those senses active and alive, we’re going to have the capacity to surrender our anxiety and our fear and be free of our addiction to whatever we have.  Another glass of wine, another big deposit in our bank, another absolute certain sign from a friend that they’re not going to leave you, all of that kind of melts away into the fact that, if this is the God who I believe in, if this is the God who I believe is real, he’s doing all this for me, giving me all this capacity to handle it.  Why wouldn’t he be able in doing that to give you everything you need to deal with whatever loss or whatever struggle you’ve got in your future?  God doesn’t promise to not have difficulty, not have us go through difficulties, but if you understand how he’s always about empowering people to handle whatever comes their way with a kind of — not without pain and the need for grief and all that and loss, but never are we going to have that experience that fear sets up for us that we’re going to be in a situation where we will not survive.  That’s impossible to believe if you know who God is and you trust him and you allow him to be exactly who he is for you.  That’s peace. 

Father, you tell us over and over again not to be afraid, but it seems to be something that we tend to fall into more quickly and more often than we wish. So bless us with this confidence that comes not so much from how the world is going or how our situation is unfolding but rather in a deep conviction that you are there with us in everything, and empower us to be able to cope with whatever comes our way. So bless us with confidence. Take away our fear, and we ask this is Jesus’ name. Amen.