Sermon Text...
September 8, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Mark 7:24-37 The Federated Church, UCC
Years ago, a clergy colleague of mine at another church told me that she had decided to preach all her sermons one year on the gospel of Mark. She would read through a little section of it every Sunday until, by the end of the year, she would have covered the whole gospel. What she hadn’t counted on when she developed her plan was just how many healing stories there are in that gospel. So week after week, she found herself addressing the theme of healing. The challenge was that each week she thought she needed to come up with a new angle on it.
This morning, we see a little bit of what my colleague was talking about. We hear two stories of Jesus healing people. In the first story, after a spirited exchange with a desperate woman who comes to him for help, Jesus heals a little girl who has “an unclean spirit” (7:25).
And in the second story, the one we’ll pay more attention to this morning, he heals a person who is plagued by difficulties in both speaking and hearing. And he effects the healing in a way that is, frankly, somewhat peculiar, putting his fingers into the person’s ears and touching the person’s tongue with his own spit. Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber says Jesus must have missed all his seminary classes on boundary training. I want you to know that if you come to me for prayers for healing, I will definitely not be putting my fingers in your ears or touching your tongue with my own spit. If you have refrained from coming to me fearing that, you need worry no longer!
The healing Jesus offers here is, of course, to hearing and speaking. Now if you have no trouble with your own hearing or speaking, you may well dismiss this story as having very little to do with you. Even if you have hearing aids, you may think, ‘I hear and speak fine, thanks. This story must be for others.’ And on a literal level, that’s true for many, if not most, of us. Our speaking and hearing are not drastically impaired, so we may think this healing story of Jesus is virtually irrelevant to us.
On a figurative level, though, it may be that this story of Jesus speaks a needed word to this culture of ours, this world in which hearing and speaking have been so severely compromised. The simple word Jesus speaks to the person he’s healing is “Ephphatha—be opened” (7:34). Politically, of course, as has been said a zillion times, this “opening” to each other can be excruciatingly difficult. We talk right past each other. Adherents of one candidate seem to adherents of the other candidate to be living on a different planet. Disgust is the shared ethos of our various political tribes. We can hardly bear to hear a single word from those in another camp. As a result, we dismiss them and have as little to do with them as possible. So organizations such as Braver Angels, in which several Federated members and friends participate, seek to find this “opening,” to find language and a way of speaking that will at least allow mutual hearing to occur. And of course, there is always more to be done on this political front to enable us to listen carefully and to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15).
There’s another level in which speaking and hearing have deteriorated immensely, though, and in which such opening would be entirely welcome. It’s a level that is only more recently receiving the attention it deserves. This other communal healing that’s needed has to do, it seems to me, with the extent to which our screens have commandeered our attention and sucked our focus away from connecting with each other. If you’re in school now, or have a child in school, you are much more familiar with this dynamic of addictive screens than you’d like to be. Screens so often become barriers that isolate us from each other. They keep us apart.
I became much more aware of this several years ago, during the COVID pandemic. Our daughter-in-law, Cynthia, was then an eighth-grade science teacher. And when daily classes went to Zoom in the early days of the lockdown, she taught from home in front of a screen. Her students were arrayed before her on her laptop, each in their own home, checked in on Zoom, and not one of them had their camera turned on at home. Not a single one. Cynthia stared at a blank screen not having the slightest idea whether anything she said was being heard, or whether any of her students were paying attention. It seemed to me to be unthinkably awful—light years from being opened to each other.
Of course, that was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The issue now is related but different. Classrooms are beset by students who are intent on their own devices. David Leonhardt, who writes for the New York Times, says he is regularly invited into school classrooms to talk about what he does. Usually he arrives a few minutes early and sits at the back of the class. “These experiences,” he says, “have shown me what a dominant—and distracting—role smartphones and laptops play in today’s schools.
“From my perch behind the students, I can see how many of them are scrolling through sports coverage, retail websites, text messages, or social media, looking up occasionally to feign attention” (“The Morning,” Sept. 6, 2024).
As are a huge number of school systems, the Chagrin Falls schools are trying to figure out a way to deal with this. Some argue that students should have their cell phones accessible so parents can communicate with them and they can let their parents know relevant news or, in the worst scenarios, the danger that is stalking them. Others, on the other hand, argue that the harm to education and real connection from our ever-present phones is so great that something needs to be done to let ourselves be opened again to each other.
Now if you have a different take on this, I very much want to hear it. And I welcome the opportunity to talk more about this. I’m going to explore the difficulties posed by our phones a little further, though, because the argument strikes me as remarkably persuasive. In his recent book, The Anxious Generation, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sounds an alarm about the damage phones are doing to all of us, but particularly to children. Here’s how he puts it: “Gen Z,” he says—those born after 1995—“became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and . . . unsuitable for children and adolescents. . .. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by autoplay and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development” (p. 6). You who are parents of children and youth know this better than I do, of course. This is your lived reality.
Being opened, to use Jesus’ word, is the challenge. The line of Haidt’s that hits me most strongly is his concern that children are spending so much less time “playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families.” Part of what’s striking about Jesus’ healing of the person who has trouble speaking and hearing is that he touches the person and encounters them directly. Remember the fingers in ears and saliva touched to the tongue. Crude maybe on one level. But on another level, it’s a parable of encounter. It’s a story of really hearing each other and being present to each other. Of speaking gently to each other. Of touching each other on a metaphorical as well as physical level. It’s a story of being opened to each other.
I suspect Jesus is freeing us, and indeed spurring us, to hear each other, to encounter each other—or as we commonly say, to see each other. As we begin a new program year here at Federated, I can think of no more compelling mandate for this church and for us as individuals than that. “Be opened,” says Jesus as he heals. And he’s inviting us to be opened to each other and to the luminous possibilities inherent in human connection.
Lauren Greenfield is a filmmaker who has recently released her latest project. Called “Social Studies,” it’s a five-part docuseries that looks at teen media use and its effects. She was eager to explore the curated nature of social media, in which people present the image they want others to have of them. So she invited some teens to help her understand. When she got them together as a group, having seen the way they presented themselves online, she was surprised that “nobody dressed up . . .. People were not wearing makeup, they were not curating outfits.” They were much more relaxed and natural than she had expected.
And she says, “I remember a long time ago, somebody told me, ‘If you spend enough time [with people], you really get authentic selves,’ because posing or pretending takes a lot of energy, and eventually, it’s too taxing.” And as Greenfield got the teens to trust her, and to spend time with each other, she found that they connected. In an interview, she was asked, “What do you want audiences to take away after watching this documentary?” And she said, “Empathy, connection. When [the kids] say at the end, ‘Here we are without phones; we’re just talking’—it’s so great. One time when I was watching that, I almost just started laughing because it’s like a revelation—we’re without phones, we’re talking, and it’s so amazing” (The Plain Dealer, Sept. 4, 2024, p. B10).
That, I think, is part of what Jesus is offering and nudging us to: we’re talking, and it’s so amazing. One of the great gifts of being human is being opened to each other. It’s connecting with each other. It’s talking with each other. It’s listening to each other. This is how we are healed. It’s how we become whole. It’s how we encourage each other and make each other better.
Sharon Brous, in her book The Amen Effect, tells the story of “a mother who desperately wanted to connect with her oldest child, a teenager, who had become agitated and somewhat explosive. The house was a battleground—even simple questions like How was school today? And Do you have any plans this weekend? were potential land mines.
“The mother finally told her daughter, ‘Listen, I’m not going to ask you how you’re doing anymore. But I am going to be sitting in the kitchen with a chocolate babka every night at midnight. You know where to find me when you want a late-night snack.’ She went to the kitchen late that night in her robe and slippers and waited. Nothing. She went back the next night, and the next. A week passed. It was two months later when one night her daughter timidly walked into the kitchen at midnight. ‘Ima,’ she said, ‘can I sit down?’
“The work wasn’t done when the teenager sat down. It still took all the restraint in that mother’s body not to jump in with suggestions and solutions. But it was an opening [same word as Jesus used!]. A chance to be together and to listen” (pp. 187-8).
No phone can do that. No screen can connect with someone else and offer the sort of healing that mother offered. Here in this community of Christ’s people, we are about something finer, something richer, something more deeply healing than any screen can provide. We’re about authentic care. We’re about being opened to each other. We’re about finding the richest sort of life in the simplest moments of human connection. Today, and in this new church year, as we rally together, may we be opened to the healing presence of Christ who blesses us and, through each other, offers us grace that knows no limits. Ephphatha: be opened!