September 6, 2015

Helen Jacobi

Ordinary Sunday 23     Isaiah 35:4-7     Psalm 14      James 2:1-17     Mark 7:24-37

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“The earth dries up and withers; the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants … desolation is left in the city: (Is 24) “The streams will be turned into pitch; and the soil to sulphur; the land will become burning pitch. Night and day it will not be quenched; from generation to generation it will lie waste; thorns will grow and nettles and thistles; it will be the haunt of jackals.” (Is 34)

Do you think those words are from a climate change action manifesto? Sounds like it, but they are from the prophet Isaiah chs 24 and 34; Isaiah paints a picture of what will happen to the earth if the people lose touch with God. It is in the context of the people of Israel heading into exile (from 587 BC fall of Jerusalem) at the hands of the Babylonians with war waging this way and that. Absolutely similar to the exile of current refugees from Syria and other countries. The words of utter desolation of people and land laid waste sound very current. And then all of a sudden we have the passage Caspar read for us. The tone changes to one of hope “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom”.Many scholars think the editors of Isaiah put this passage in the wrong place – it seems to belong with the later chapters of Isaiah from ch 40 on which have all the hopeful passages from the end of the exile “Comfort, o comfort my people …”

Barbara Lundblad says “Isaiah dares to speak a word out of place. A word that refused to wait until things improved.” [1] While these words don’t seem to belong, they show us it was the prophet’s job to name both the despair of the current situation and the hope for the future. And so in the same breath we have desolation and hope.

The writers and prophets of the OT were always firmly grounded in their understanding of God as creator of the earth and the people. To tend the earth and care for it was the task of the people. And if the earth was suffering it must be because the people had failed in their duty to God. OT people saw a line of cause and effect from actions of the people – to the actions of God towards the earth. We would no longer say that the rivers have dried up because God is “punishing” the people for their wicked ways. But we do understand now that our actions lead directly to the drying up of rivers or the rising of sea levels and so have the potential to wipe out whole communities in the Pacific Islands. Isaiah and others instinctively understood that actions have consequences. Now we have the climate change science to show they were right. Prophets did not predict the future but named the reality of the present. In this case they seem to have predicted the future as well.

“Isaiah dares to speak a word out of place. A word that refused to wait until things improved.” [2] It is when people speak words out of place that change happens. At the recent film festival we saw “Merchants of Doubt” [3] a documentary about both the tobacco industry and climate change and how the various messages get twisted and used by different groups according to their own interest.  From the climate change perspective it traced how the world has gradually shifted to understand the science of climate change and how the early deniers claimed “science” was on their side while many were not in fact scientists. The early lone voice of James Hansen has now become more the norm of the client change debate. He was one who dared to speak “a word out of place”.

In our gospel reading today we have the story of Jesus’ encounter with the unnamed Syrophoenician woman. Remember that Jesus as a Jewish man would not normally interact directly with women (a rule he broke all the time) and certainly not with a Gentile (non Jewish) woman. And so he responds to her request for healing for her daughter with a very rude and derogatory reply “let the children be fed first (ie the people of Israel), it is not fair to take the children’s foods and throw it to the dogs.” She is the one then to “speak a word out of place” and talks back to him “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”. And her word out of place changes Jesus’ mind and he heals her daughter. She speaks out, she protests, she names the reality of the divisions between Jew and Gentile, man and woman. She protests and change happens.

This story of healing is not told by Mark to recount the individual personal story of this one woman and her daughter; Mark tells it to make a much bigger point about the breaking down of divisions and the way the new community of followers of Jesus is going to be. Even Jesus had to be challenged in order to break out of the exclusive mould that was the norm for his time. And so the new community of followers could be brave enough to break down their barriers too. [4]

The same is true in the healing of the man who was deaf and had a speech impediment. The language of this story echoes the language of Isaiah “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the tongue of the speechless shall sing for joy”. Any of Mark’s readers would recognise the language from Isaiah and make the link from one individual healing, to the healing of the earth Isaiah speaks of: “the tongue of the speechless shall sing for joy and the waters will break forth in the wilderness and steams in the desert”. The personal healing and the healing of the earth are all the same. They are all part of the great dream and vision of the kingdom, the realm of God.

And the healing comes about when someone speaks a word out of place – the prophet Isaiah in the midst of the doom of the exile; the woman rejected by Jesus; the man who could not speak but his friends hoped he might.

As the world looks towards the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December and as the world continues to warm, we are looking for leaders who will speak – who will name the reality of where the world is and give us ways to act for change and give us hope that we can change. Sometimes the key to change is not just to paint the doom and gloom but to give people hope and even some certainty that if we change our ways it will have an impact and will be worth the effort. For people of faith the ground we stand on when looking at environmental issues is the heritage of 1000s of years of understanding of our relationship with our creator and so our relationship with the earth. The earth suffers when we forget our sacred duty to care for it and not abuse it. The earth flourishes when we are in tune with our creator and the creation. It is not by chance that the opening words of our Bible are “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth …” (Gen 1:1) but that is next week’s sermon.

In the meantime, as Archbp Tutu said “love the earth as much as God does.” [5]

[1] Barbara Lundblad http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1941

[2] Barbara Lundblad http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1941

[3] http://www.nziff.co.nz/2015/auckland/merchants-of-doubt/

[4] see my sermon Aug 17 2014 on the Matthew version of this passage http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/#!Inviting-the-Other-to-the-Table/cm37/hzqbw3ws79

[5] http://www.greenanglicans.org/diocese-of-lesotho-environmental-conference/