September 7, 2003
By Jack Price

Series: Life's Detours

This morning begins a new sermon series called Life's Detours.  Kansas City is full of detours, if you haven't noticed.  The almost frantic pace of road construction makes it virtually impossible to go anywhere without changing your direction at least once.  Life is like that.  Some twenty years ago, the highly respected Dr. Wayne Oats, professor of religious psychology at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, recognized this truth and wrote a book coincidentally titled Life's Detours.  Over the next few Sundays, we will hear some stories of people whose life detours not only changed their lives, but made all the difference in them.  We will come to see, in their lives and in our own, how these detours shape spiritual growth.

This congregation is approach its fifth anniversary as a church.  A few people have said to me, over the past year, something along the lines of this, "Crossroad just does not seem to have the same spirit it used to have.  There's a kind of spiritual flatness."  And then a suggestion, curious for a cosmopolitan and progressive church, "We need something like a revival."  Even more curiously, I agree!  After four and half years of becoming church, through the heady and exciting process of shaping a lengthy statement of values, continually moving to different locations, and wrestling with all the tensions and challenges birth and growth entail - including breaking in first an interim and then an installed pastor - many people are tired, emotionally drained from the effort and the stress. 

We need a revival of spiritual sharpness and the time is right for Crossroads Church.  Because being filled with the Spirit requires being open to the Spirit, we will be offering a series of spiritual disciplines for the whole congregation to do together.  Beginning in the next couple of weeks, in conjunction with this series on Life's Detours, I will be working with the Spiritual Practices team to suggest a different spiritual discipline each week for us to try during the following week.  The goal is for our community, through an emphasis on personal discipleship and growth that we do together, we will begin to experience a new life, a revival, of openness to the Spirit. 

            Today's sermon is called The Church as Prophet and Priest.  Though perhaps a somewhat daunting title, the idea is pretty excited.  The church as a whole, each congregation in particular, and each member have the opportunity to engage both these roles.  The prophetic role is that of discerner of truth, even when that truth seems obscure or confusing.  The prophet is a teller of a truth that heals, even when it is a hard and challenging truth.  The priestly role affirms liturgical truth, the truth of symbolic action that builds up.  The priest is a conduit for communal healing.

            This morning's Gospel lesson, Mark 7: 24-37, can help us get a sense of these roles.   The lesson includes two stories that we will look at individually.  In Mark 7: 24-30, Jesus travels as far north as he ever does in Mark's gospel, to the region of Tyre.  At the time of the writing of Mark's Gospel, around 70 CE, there was tremendous sensitivity about Jewish-Gentile relations.  It was in 70 CE that Jerusalem was decimated by Roman legions and the Temple was destroyed. 

            Mark suggests that Jesus, following a long dispute with the Pharisees, went up north to go on retreat.  He entered a house, maybe for him a retreat lodge, and did not want people to know he was around.  He needed to be alone!  Typically, when we want to be alone, someone always seems to manage to walk in.  In this instance, a woman intruded on Jesus space.  She was a Gentile woman, non-Jewish, who was also from that area - a Syrophoenician and therefore pagan woman who finds him.

Being interrupted in our quiet time would probably irritate you and me equally if that person were a pagan, non-Jewish woman or if it were a religious, Christian man.  But her presence represented a lot more to the readers of Mark's Gospel than it would to us today because of the honor culture in which they and Jesus lived.

The realities of an honor culture are hard for us to understand.  Honor tells you your place in society, your status, and also your intrinsic worth.  This status is generally acknowledged.  Honor is both individual and collective.   You represent your family as well as yourself.  The traditional male role was to defend status and entitlement while the female role involved a consciousness of boundaries, of shame, and of a sensitivity to what others think.  The female role around the issue of shame was a vital part of the corporate honor system. 

Jesus' interaction with the Syrophoenician woman breaks the traditional roles and expectations of his honor culture.  It would have been shocking to those hearing the story since it undermined the listener's view of a social order.  None of this is to say that we do not have our own "honor culture."  Modern western social order is based on the possession of power due to wealth, education, or celebrity - power that is definitely affected by one's race and gender.  This woman's action would have been an affront to Jesus.  An unrelated, Gentile woman invades a Jewish man's privacy and then compounds the insult by asking him a favor!  There was a societal expectation that Jesus would rebuff her and that is what he did.  Jesus used a traditional insult by essentially calling her and her daughter were "dogs."  Such an insult was often used of idol worshipers and people who ate with them. 

The woman's response to Jesus' rebuff actually deepens the insult toward him.  She continues to "move toward" Jesus, verbally sparring with him, and seeking inclusion on his "radar screen."  It is at this point that the most surprising thing happens.  Jesus concedes the argument to her.  This articulate man who had just held his own when debating the Pharisees declares her the winner of their argument.  By so doing he concedes to her the man's place of honor and takes for himself the place of shame, a woman's place.  Jesus becomes "the least."  Mark is declaring, on the lips of Jesus, a new age of feeding and satisfaction for all people.

Immediately after this episode, Jesus moves on and has another encounter, as recorded in Mark 7: 31-37.   He leaves Tyre in Syria and travels to the region of the Decapolis, the ten Gentile cities.  By having him come to this area, Mark is symbolized the entire scope of Gentile civilization around Galilee, and doing so in the context of a time of great friction among the survivors of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.   In this area, Jesus encounters a man who cannot speak.  This stand in contrast with the previous story and a woman who talked very successfully.  On the man's behalf, his friends ask Jesus for healing.  And Jesus takes the man aside privately, as in the story of Jairus' daughter, for healing.  Notice what Jesus does.  He sticks his fingers into man's ears and then spits.  Now saliva is a bodily fluid and considered unclean.  It now becomes a contagion working in reverse.  Then Jesus touched the man's tongue, violating purity laws, looked "up" to heaven, and sighed.  Sighing is a deep emotional expression of compassion and probably fatigue.  And Mark records Jesus calling out in Aramaic, Ephphatha - "Open!"  He may well have been speaking to us as to this man.  Jesus announces that God's new creation, God's realm, is inclusive!  Healing and feeding are available for the Gentiles.  Healing and feeding are available even for Jesus own people, the Jews.  Healing and feeding are available to anyone who really wants them.  The key is to really want them!  To gain them, you have to let go of whatever "honor culture" leads you to exclude any that God has included.

What, then, do these stories have to say to us.?  Virginia Kreyer was born with cerebral palsy.  Her parents overcame all the challenges they faced as parents of such a child.  They loved her and did not foster dependency on themselves.  They helped her learn to help herself and she learned.  She learned to walk, with difficulty.  She learned to talk, with difficulty.  She learned to interact socially and to keep up in school, with no excuses.  Virginia carried those lessons with her as she pursued higher education.  After graduating from university with high honors, she went to theological school.  Such training, she felt, was vital for the chaplaincy work she planned to do with C.P. victims.  She was ordained in her denomination and then went back to school and earned a Masters degree in social work.  Words she wrote more than twenty years ago still speak to us today:

The essential attitude which the cerebral palsied person must adopt, if he is to succeed at all, is an acceptance of all that he is and is not.  It has been observed down through the centuries that those who have accepted their handicaps and triumphed over them are those who have learned to look beyond themselves for help [and] learned some of the ways of the spiritual world, and thus comes to see real meaning in his own suffering.

Jesus recognized the limitations of the "honor culture" into which he had been born, a system embraced by his own people.  He pointed the harsh light of prophetic truth on that system in his interaction with the Syrophoenician woman.  The healing she received had implications that reverberate in our present century, in the ghettos of our own nation.  He proclaimed that God's truth and God's healing is for all people.  Jesus  reached out and touched a single Gentile man who was deaf and speech-impaired.  In the context of Mark's Gospel, he actually embraced all the Gentile community that his own people had excluded.  In embracing them, he also embraced his own people with the love of a God who loves all people equally well. 

What is the prophetic and priestly task of Crossroads Church?  It is to challenge ourselves, each other, and our culture with the truth of the inclusive, embracing, and healing love of God.  It is to proclaim through word and deed that God's truth and God's healing is for all people - regardless of race or gender or gender orientation or status or belief.  It is to touch individual people with God's love and, in doing so, embrace all the non-Christian community that our Christian community has often excluded.  It is to touch those people in our neighborhood who are not part of a church community, to embrace those who reject the Christian faith while aching in need of the healing that only comes in the living Spirit of Jesus.  In embracing them, we also embrace Christians who feel rejected by the Church because of doctrinal belief or sexual orientation, because of social status or race.  In embracing them, we indeed find ourselves embraced by the God of all of us, whose way is as inclusive as it is true, and as true as it is lasting.

            On behalf of this congregation, I extend to you an invitation to be embraced by the living God.  This is an invitation to deepen your spiritual journey by participating in House Church, Sunday School, a small group, a ministry work group, and even a community meeting.  This is an invitation to join us on the amazing adventure of being church.  I look forward to hearing from you.