Sermon, by Pastor Joel
Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 8, 2024
Isaiah 35:4-7a
Psalm 146
James 2:1-10, 14-17
Mark 7:24-37
The context of this sermon is
100% written by a human
This summer, the week before returning home, I witnessed faith at work. A small boat club hosted a sailing regatta. Nearly two dozen sailors came from across the country and raced for four days around the islands of Mahone Bay. A winner was declared. The band played. But this was a special regatta called the Mobility Cup. To get ready, the members of the boat club had to pull off extensive renovations - replace the deck, the doors, the washrooms, the ramp to the wharf – all to make the club accessible for this very special regatta. They had to be ready to hoist and lift and serve as valets for the visiting athletes. The sailors, of course, arrived with their own stories. Many of them were in wheelchairs. A few would sail with “sip and puff technology” to control the trim of their sails. Among them was Tracy Schmitt, who goes by the nickname Unstoppable Tracy. She was born without fully-developed arms and legs. I met her in the parking lot when she wheeled up to shake my hand. Watch for me on the water, she said. Her sailboat was called “Silver Linings.”
Now the ocean is an unpredictable place to go on a small boat when you can easily jump off. I consider it a high octane sail on the rare occasion the toe rail gets a little close to the water on our creaky 50-year-old sailboat. But these people – many of whom learned to sail after they suffered injuries or became ill – were truly fearless. You could go out on the sea like this only if you had faith: faith in your support circle and the strangers volunteering to help you, faith in yourself, faith in the sea and the world around you. So yes, what else could this be but the gospel at work?
I thought of these people when I pondered our reading this week. We hear of the healings of Jesus. A man who cannot hear receives hearing. A child suffering from an unspecified illness is made well. These are the promised acts of a loving God. One who, our first lesson says, sets the captive free, opens the eyes of the blind and loves the righteous. For it is, as the gospel tells us: Jesus has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
Perhaps we hear those words for ourselves and think of our wounds and sufferings. But it is equally important – as our second lesson so pointedly reminds us – to consider what happened around those healing moments. Who had been deaf and was given hearing? Who was mute and yet emboldened to speak?
The family of the man who had been deaf could not contain themselves: they would be heard, proclaiming what had been done. And in the case of the daughter, we know the speaker to be her mother, who bravely confronted Jesus, when he might otherwise have turned away. “Am I not also fit for a place at your table?” she asks him, with humility. “Do not discount me so quickly,” she says to him. And he is altered by this exchange and heals her daughter. And so we see how the healing did not just restore health only to those who received it directly. It changed irrevocably the people who witnessed it. They now heard and saw the world in a new way – as a place connected by purpose and meaning and beauty.
If I think about the scene of that regatta, I see this all at play, the many pieces that need to come together for healing to happen. Had the volunteers said “Come and use my wharf” but not stepped up to help, what good would a wharf have done? Had the sailors not been resilient in the face of adversity who would there have been to savour that beautiful ocean? It was not enough to extend an invitation; work had to follow it, or else that invitation would have withered. Healing happened in an ecosystem—a pulling together of many parts, and many configurations. We are healed by caring. And we are cared for into healing. My youngest son, Samson, who managed the front-of- house staff at the restaurant, later told me that this regatta – more than any others at the club – was the most joyful one he’d worked. It was full of people being healed as they both offered and provided care - sailors and volunteers both.
Of course, we cannot forget the main player on this wonderfully human scene, so easily admired, and then so often neglected -- the ocean. When we consider what it means to be alive with faith through works, surely the environment is the perfect example. We can write odes to the sea, but it’s nothing if we don’t look after it. We can give thanks for the forest, but it will be lost if we don’t care for it. This kind of empty faith is not just dead, but it also causes death. “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith, but do not have works?” Faith that works beyond prayers, that includes an offering of ourselves, our time and resources, that are not only alive: it is the definition of hope.
And hope is what I saw on that shining, sunny sea last week in Nova Scotia. It did not mean that every wrong was made right, and every injustice fixed. It was the hope of people coming together to enjoy one another and the bounty of the ocean. The hope that comes from innovation, resilience, and courage. The hope when people find their voices and open their eyes. The world is not made perfect, but it becomes a step or two better. Surely that is the healing power of the gospel at work -- alive and doing everything well. Amen.
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