23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B; St. Peter's, Provincetown.
I
was talking to a friend of mine this week who also teaches college students,
and she told me about an exercise she regularly does. She has them read a
certain historical set of letters from the period she teaches, and the students
just have to do a short write-up of what was remarkable, or different from their
culture, in them. One of the topics in these letters is a lively back and forth
between the different writers about whether or not it’s OK to go to gladiator
games. In previous years, she told me, they would often comment on the fact
that there were real gladiator games to go to. This year, though, a surprising
number of students commented instead on the fact that the letter-writers could
disagree deeply and sharply about something really important and weighty and
still be civil to one another, and even remain friends.
That says
something to me, initially something pretty scary, about how polarized we’ve
got as a society, that the students found it far more culturally foreign that
people could have amicable disagreements than that gladiator games existed. And
I say, initially pretty scary, because reflecting on it a little
further, there was also something there that gave me hope: that these students
had been willing to really listen in a deep way to these voices of long dead
letter writers, find something in them that they found strangely compelling and
admirable, and maybe even might try to emulate.
Because
how broken and wounded so often is the way we listen, or, more often, don’t listen,
to the voices of those we’ve written off for whatever reason. How broken and wounded
is the way we speak about some of our fellow humans. But there is hope, for in
the gospel today, we see that Christ heals what is broken and wounded. Christ
healed that man who could neither hear nor speak. Now that man in the gospel had
physical impairments that prevented him from hearing or speaking. We don’t know
of any moral flaws he had, and Jesus doesn’t tell him to stop sinning. Jesus’
healing in the gospel is physical. We need something a little deeper. And we
can have hope that our world, that is often very noisy, might too be healed,
and learn to hear and speak. Because Christ can do that too.
How? God
can heal however God wants to (God is God after all), but we see in this gospel
a few ways that are typical of how God heals in Christ. The first is that the
man who is embedded in community. Some unnamed “people” bring him to Jesus. Our
relationship with Christ is incredibly personal, but it’s not individualistic. It’s
through the ascesis of friendship, oftentimes of family, of intentional
community, that we often encounter Christ’s healing. The second thing to notice
is how Jesus uses touch, uses his own body. In the most powerful way possible,
we encounter that body here in this place, on this altar, where we are fed. But
we encounter Christ’s body too in the poor served, in whatsoever we do for the
least of our sisters and brothers. In friendship, community, sacrament, and
service, we encounter Christ who can heal.
We also
know that if we want to become better speakers and listeners, prayer is a
powerful training ground for that. Taking time to shut out the noise of the
world, to just listen to God however we do that, whether it’s through quiet
meditation, the contemplative reading of scripture, the admiration of the
beauty of the natural world, we can open ourselves up to God’s gifts and let
God train us to hear better. It’s just like in training for a sport we drill
and drill the same techniques in practice so that during the game, when we’re
fatigued, our form stays good. We practice listening in prayer so that we might
listen to the voices that challenge outside of that.
And we
speak, we speak in prayer. We offer God our thankyous, our pleases, our sorry-s,
and our wows. We lift up not just our needs, but those of others’. We give thanks
not just for our gifts, but for those of other’s too. We try and turn a
judgmental thought into a prayer for another’s growth. We try to turn a word of
gossip into a prayer for God to accompany someone through a tough time. And as
we pray, we ask ourselves if we might be part of how God answers that prayer,
and we ask for the strength to do that if possible.
And then
we might find that we’re part of a world being healed, being redeemed, by God
to be sure, but to some extent, however small, through us.
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