PROPER 18B – Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37 –

6 September 2009 – A sermon given by The Rev. Peter A. Munson for St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado

Open to Transformation

INTRODUCTION – Jesus trying to get a break

Have you ever needed a break? What have you done? Read a good book? Slept in? Taken a few days off? Taken a road trip?

Jesus needed a break, and he took a road trip – on foot. He left his hometown area, the land they still call The Galilee, and set off to the northwest. He went right out of the Jewish region into a whole different area and into a whole different culture, where almost all the people were Gentiles. Those unclean Gentiles, despised by most of the Jews of Jesus’ time. And based on the first part of this story, Jesus did not view the Gentiles very highly, either. Anyway, he headed northwest from northern Israel to the shore of the Mediterranean, to Tyre, which is in modern-day Lebanon. Mark tells us that he entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. “Yet he could not escape notice,” Mark tells us. (Mark 7:24) This was 2,000 years before cell phones, and Jesus is trying to hide out in an area where no one knows him. He’s gone across the border. There is no one to check his passport. And yet, someone finds him. A Syrophoenician woman. Someone from that area, in other words. A Gentile, in other words. But someone who was smart enough to find Jesus, and someone who was perceptive enough to realize that Jesus could probably help her daughter, who had a demon of some sort.

And we have this interesting exchange between Jesus and the woman, where she begs him to help, and Jesus sized her up and says, in effect, “The food – the blessings - are for the Jews, not for dogs like you.” He totally slanders her, and calls her a dog. And she, undeterred, says, “Sir” – or “Lord” – “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (Mark 7:28) He couldn’t deny that. He thought about that for a moment. He thought about how this woman didn’t answer his “dis” with a “dis” of her own, but stayed right there. And then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.” And she went home and found her daughter well.

And then Jesus took a weird route to the Decapolis – he first went 20 miles north to Sidon before doing a big u-turn and going east and southeast of the Sea of Galilee. He must have still been trying to catch a break. A deaf man with a speech impediment was brought to him, probably another Gentile. The man’s friends begged Jesus to lay his hands on him. And he did. And this man was healed, too. And Jesus didn’t even call him a dog first.

So who was transformed in these two encounters? Well, the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter certainly was, and probably the woman herself. The deaf man certainly was. And what about Jesus? I’m thinking he was, too. You get the sense that up to this point, Jesus thought his mission had to do only with the Jews.

After this point, he appears to be an equal-opportunity healer, and the message of repentance and renewal and the kingdom suddenly has shifted, and he realizes it is for anyone who will listen – for everyone.

THE GOSPEL OF TRANSFORMATION

If you were ask me what the Gospel is about, I would say it’s about the new revelation of God in Jesus – God-in-the-flesh. If you asked me if the Gospel is about grace – what God does for us that we don’t necessarily deserve – I would say, “You bet.” If you asked me if the Gospel is about love – the power of love – I would say, “Yup, the revolution of love.” All those things are true, but they don’t sum up the Gospel. It’s an incomplete Gospel unless you say at least one more thing, and that is this: it’s a Gospel of transformation.

We are called to be transformed by our relationship with the Lord Jesus. The grace of God is the power source – transformation never happens without God’s grace as the great instigating force. And love, well… when people really learn how to love, they are transformed and the world is transformed.

You might ask: What kind of transformation am I talking about? Well, if you pay attention to these Bible stories that we read every week, and if you pay attention to your own experiences of the transforming love of God, there are lots of examples. It looks like this:

FROM                                                                                           TO

Sickness/addiction                                                                Health/recovery

Criticism                                                                                       Appreciation

Apathy or hatred                                                                   Love

Stinginess                                                                                    Generosity

Being paralyzed by fear                                                   Faithful action

Receiving                                                                                     Giving

Giving                                                                                            Receiving

Withholding                                                                               Revealing

Competition                                                                               Cooperation

Shrinking back                                                                        Shining

Being unconscious                                                               Being conscious

Being self-absorbed                                                             Being self-aware and other-aware

Withering on the vine doing something                Living out of your most creative, productive

                  you hate                                                                                       joyful self

A scarcity mindset                                                                Seeing the abundance of God

Deficits                                                                                          Surpluses

Depression                                                                                 Joy

Divisiveness                                                                              Unity

HOW TRANSFORMATION OCCURS

Here’s what I think I’ve learned about transformation:

1. It doesn’t happen without God, or without God’s grace being involved.
2. Spiritual transformation doesn’t tend to happen without you or I being engaged in the basis spiritual disciplines – prayer, reading and listening to Holy Scripture, being faithful in worship, serving others, paying attention/asking questions/being on the lookout for God in your life and God in the world.
3. Transformation doesn’t happen without being open – period. You’re not going to be transformed until and unless you’re open to being transformed. (This is why you can’t change your partner. About the best thing you can pray for is for you to be open to being transformed.)

You might ask: What should I be open to, then?

Open to learning, for starters. Open to growing. Open to taking risks. Open to feeling. (Transformation tends to be a full-body experience.) Open to being uncomfortable, and hanging in there long enough when you are uncomfortable to wonder, and ask questions about what you are feeling, and what you are noticing. Open to failing. Open to succeeding beyond your wildest dreams. Open to revealing the deepest parts of yourself to two or three other human beings. Open to feedback. (How do you think the new Christians that James was writing to reacted when he called them to task for giving the rich preferential treatment? Well, how they reacted depended totally on how open they were to receiving feedback, which gets back to the question of how open we are to learning.)

Julia is reading a book right now by Elizabeth Lesser. It’s called Broken Open. Ms. Lesser refers to Dante’s Inferno. At one point Dante writes:

In the middle of the journey of life

I found myself within a dark woods

Where the straight way was lost.

She goes on to say that the philosopher William James wrote that there are two kinds of people – the Once-Born and the Twice-Born. Of course, I’m thinking that Mr. James got that idea from none other than Jesus. You’ll recall, of course, when Jesus told Nicodemus that no one could see the kingdom of God without being born from above, or born anew. (John 3:3)

Elizabeth Lesser goes on to write:

“Once-Born people do not stray from the familiar territory of who they think they are and what they think is expected of them. If fate pushes them to the edge of Dante’s famous dark woods – where the straight way is lost – they turn back. They don’t want to learn something new from life’s darker lessons. They stay with what seems safe, and what is acceptable to their family and society. They stick to what they already know but don’t necessarily want. Once-Born people may go through life and never even know what lies beyond the woods – or that there are woods at all.”

“Perhaps a Once-Born person awakens one morning and feels the beckoning finger of fate loosening disturbing questions: “Is this all there is to life? Will I always feel the same? Do I not have some purpose to fulfill, some greater kindness to give, some inner freedom to taste?” And then he gets out of bed and dresses for work, and he doesn’t attend to the soul’s questions. The next morning, and all the next mornings, he lives as if the soul was the figment of a flighty imagination. This inattention makes him confused, or numb, or sad, or angry.”

“A Twice-Born person pays attention when the soul pokes its head through the clouds of a half-lived life. Whether through choice or calamity, the Twice-Born person goes into the woods, loses the straight way, makes mistakes, suffers loss, and confronts that which needs to change within himself in order to live a more genuine and radiant life…”

“The journey from Once-Born to Twice-Born brings us to a crossroads where the old ways of doing things are no longer working but a better way lies somewhere at the far edge of the woods. [Or as far away as Tyre or Sidon or the Decapolis, or in spending 40 years in the Wilderness before you reach the land of Canaan. – my addition] We are afraid to step into those woods but even more afraid to turn back. To turn back is one kind of death; to go forward is another. The first kind of death ends in ashes; the second leads toward rebirth. For some of us, the day arrives when we step willingly into the woods. A longing to wake up, to feel more alive, to feel something spurs us beyond our fear. Some of us resist like hell until the forces of fate deliver a crisis. Some of us get sick and tired of filling an inner emptiness with drugs or drink or food, and we turn and face our real hunger: our soul hunger.” (Broken Open, pp. 18-19)

CONCLUSION

Do you want to be transformed? Do you want to be a Twice-Born person, who has ventured into the woods and come out the other side, a wiser, more alive person? God is all around, and God’s grace is at work for any who are willing to open up to it. Opportunities for learning abound – in your family, at your job, right here at St. Ambrose. It is mostly an interior journey. No one can make you take the first step into the woods. Only you can do that.

Even Jesus must have said, “Do I have this right? Is this my life and my call? Is Galilee the only place where I should be?” And he started walking. And his “woods” emerged as he left his homeland, as he reached Tyre and encountered the Syrophoenician woman, and he continued north to Sidon, and did that big u-turn that led him eventually to the Decapolis, and to the deaf man and his friends.

Jesus could only talk to Nicodemus about being born anew – being Twice-Born – because he had traveled that road himself. What about you? What about me? Are we open to the Gospel of Christ? Are we open to being transformed?