23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Living in Hope
Healing of the Deaf Man, ca. 830. Fresco, north wall of nave, Church of St. John, Müstair, Switzerland.
My grandparents retired from the Midlands in England, to Nelson New Zealand; a beautiful small city at the top of the South Island. Just out of Nelson, around the bay, is an even smaller township called Hope. My grandmother had a cheesy joke she’d tell from time to time: “Do you live in Hope? No, but my friend Eleanor does.”
Today’s scriptures have a common thread of hope. The words of the prophet Isaiah are full of hope, written for a people in the despair of oppressive exile. “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God … he will come and save you.” Times are hard, incredibly hard, but ours is a God who saves. The promised Messiah will come, and even those in the deepest despair – the blind, the deaf, the speechless – will be released. The dust of the desert of these present times will be transformed into a flourishing oasis.
Our epistle today, from St James, exhorts us to see through God’s eyes. Those we may see as hopeless are in fact God’s chosen ones; the poor are in fact heirs of the riches of God’s kingdom. For our winter study group this year we studied Sam Wells’ book A Future that’s Bigger than the Past (Canterbury Press, 2019). It is a book about hope. The message is simple, and drawn from experience: church renewal is tied up with our being a blessing to the wider community. In this increasingly secular age of shrinking congregations, not to mention pandemic lockdowns, our stressed churches are renewed as we look beyond ourselves, and actively explore ways of serving and working in partnrship with the wider community. Echoing the thrust of James chaper 2, for example, Wells writes of three types of homelessness (p. 114): “The homelessness of the streets, the homelessness of ourselves, and the homelessness of God.”
The homelessness of the streets is perhaps easiest to recognise. Our homeless friends come for breakfast each day here at St Peter’s. We also connect throught the social enterprise Meals Program with many of the new homeless, international students and others out of work who are unable to keep up with the rent through these lockdowns.
The second type of homelessness is our own; those of us who have physical homes, but who may not recognise our spiritual homelessness. Wells writes (p.114): “Many are searching; some are isolated; others pine for belongoing, relationship, home, acceptance, or an end to prejudice, exposure, failure, humiliation or scorn.” We may function reasonably well, but we have a spiritual absence, we are homesick.
Thirdly, there is the homelessness of God. Behold, I stand at the door and knock … but you do not open the door … I am locked out in the cold. “Jesus is saying,” writes Wells, “I have no home but yours. Yours is the heart where I belong. Yours is the home I long to enter … And the door is constantly closed, or slammed in his face. That is the shame of God, not just on the cross, but today, every day … from those whom we might most expect a welcome.”
The message of hope in the Book of James speaks directly into this homelessness: “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who
love him?” It is a message for us, for the poor and needy we seek to serve, and for the Christ in every stranger locked out and in exile.
St Mark’s are also words of hope. In the previous chapters there have been many healings, but this is the first healing of hearing and speech; a man both deaf and mute. As well as a physical healing, it is a symbolic act. The crowds, and even the disciples can’t hear what their Lord is saying; they can’t yet preach the gospel because they don’t understand it. But the Christ, the Messiah, unstops the man’s ears and enables him to sing for joy, as Isaiah foretold. These are words of hope for the early church. They are baffled, fearful because their Lord has left them and has not yet returned to save them as they had hoped. But don’t you see? I am here already. In the very suffering you see as absence; the crucified and risen Christ; the real presence of Eucharist we share.
As Rowan Williams underlines in his Meeting God in Mark (SPCK, 2014) the evangelist is writing for the hopeless, the suffering, those in pain: “writing to reinforce a faith in the God who does not step down from heaven to solve problems but who is already in the heart of the world, holding the suffering and the pain in himself and transforming it by the sheer indestructible energy of his mercy” (p.47). It is a profound message of hope for challenging times.
So, do you live in hope? Do we as a church live in hope, and so bless the community around us? If we live in Christ, in the promise of word and sacrament … well, the answer is surely a resounding “yes”; in and through our faith and the strength we draw from one another and from our God.