Sermons
Sunday 7th September 2014, Trinity 12, evening
Ezekiel 12:21-13:16; Mark 7:24-37
by Revd Chris Palmer
How do we hear and speak the word of God right? This seems to me a really important question for the church and for all religious people. After all we live in a world where lots of people claim to speak for God, often with a great deal of certainty, and they say a wide range of very different things. People claim to speak for God when they judge others, claim roles for themselves, espouse this or that political view, justify violence, tell other people who to behave, or claim rights to property or land. Some claim the direct authority of God, meaning God spoke to them; others claim the authority of scripture, meaning their interpretation of scripture; others claim the authority of the church or other religious authority, meaning this or that office or person in the church. And because they can’t all be right, others naturally suspect claims to speak for God. I’ve quite often said myself that claiming the authority of God is usually a way merely of raising the volume on your own point of view, or an attempt to recruit God to our own cause. God won’t be recruited.
I once read that its usually evil people who are very sure they’re doing the right thing. Good people are filled with doubt and questions. And that leads those who are suspicious of people who speak for God to give up on prophecy altogether. There’s a certain brand of liberalism in the church, probably in society at large, that is so hand-wringingly anxious about misguiding people, that it avoids guiding them at all. In part this might be caution about saying the wrong thing, though such caution usually means never saying the right thing either. And in any case, if my own mind is anything to go by, too much caution is usually rooted in not wanting people to be cross with me, rather than worry about saying the wrong thing. It’s about not looking bad; and in any case that’s no guarantee of looking good. So even in its own pathetic terms it’s a doomed approach.
In the reading from Ezekiel God says that he’s going to put an end to the false prophets, their flattering words, their false visions, their lies – and instead speak the truth. And the job of the true prophet is to prophecy against the false prophets. They offer an easy reassurance for the comfortable: peace where there is no peace. The failure to confront the reality of a situation, the inability to challenge vested interests. But the Ezekiel reading doesn’t really help me in seeing how we do begin to say the right thing.
But I think the Gospel reading really does, because it is the story of people who find their prophetic voice in encountering Jesus. More than that, they find their prophetic voice in daring to defy Jesus.
The first is the Syro-Phoenecian woman. I preached about the equivalent story from Matthew’s Gospel a few weeks back on Sunday morning. I said that it’s a story set in an honour culture, where the social norms of honour and shame could lead to exclusion, violence, and even death. And the woman radically defies the convention of the honour system to demand Jesus heal her daughter. And at first Jesus conforms to the honour conventions by dismissing and demeaning her to keep her in her place. But in the end, when he’s raised the stakes so high that his own honour is on the line, he accepts shame by conceding to her, and so restores her honour. It’s the opposite of those who seek to restore their own honour by humiliating or killing another.
And within this the woman’s prophetic voice comes through in her willingness to argue with Jesus. She asks for what she wants, and when he’s downright rude to her she comes back and argues more. And she isn’t speaking for power, she’s speaking against power – against religious privilege, against gender privilege, against ethnic privilege.
And then there’s the man who’s deaf and mute. In one sense I think his deafness and muteness are a parable of someone who can’t hear God’s word or speak God’s word. And he comes to Jesus, or is ‘brought to Jesus’ – somehow his muteness means he can’t even come himself. And Jesus, privately, performs this prophetic act of putting finger in his ears and touching his touch, and ordering them to open. And it says, ‘his tongue was released and he spoke plainly’. He gains the capacity to speak the things of God. But how’s he use it? It says, ‘Jesus ordered them to tell no one, but the more he order them, the more zealously they proclaimed it…’ I’m assuming the ‘they’ includes the man himself. He uses his power of speech, his power of prophecy to defy Jesus instruction.
What I’m suggesting is that we are most likely to speak truthfully the things of God when we have the courage to confront God. As long as I stand with my back to God, but claim that God is whispering in my ear, and you have the privilege of me telling you what God is saying, then the chances are I’m getting it completely wrong. If I dare to confront God, to confront Jesus, to talk at him, or even to go off and defy him in good faith, then there’s a chance that what gets said along the way might have something of God in it. This confronting God is not a form of rejection, it’s not spurning faith: both the woman and the no-longer deaf man believe in Jesus – but they still defy him.
When I started thinking about this, I realised how many prophets were people who argued with God. Elijah, sitting in his cave moping that God’s abandoned him. Jonah, who runs away from God, which turns out to be the best way of really encountering him, speak to the Ninevites in bad grace, and then moans at God because his preaching actually worked and they repented and Jonah thinks he looks stupid because they didn’t get punished. And most of all, Job, chapter after chapter shouting at God and telling him he’s got it wrong, but with so much more prophetic wisdom than Job’s comforters who claim to speak for God but get it totally wrong. And of course, Jesus, who in Gethsemane argues with God, and then accuses God of abandoning him on the cross.
Prophecy rarely comes from those who establish themselves in a neat and tidy ministry as God’s spokesmen (it usually is ‘men’). It is found in those who wrestle with God, defy God, and shout at God – and somehow the by-product of the struggle is a message a truth, words of grace, an announcement that is powerful to liberate and heal and move to penitence.
So avoid the cul-de-sacs of appointing yourself as God’s ambassador or of saying nothing for fear of looking stupid – and instead engage in a daily struggle with God, and in the fray you and others might hear and speak the word of the Lord.
