The ministry of our Lord is a ministry of presence, of touch, and of words. He is where He needs to be and He touches even the untouchable with the grace of life. Eventually it becomes the charge laid against Him – He is too chummy with sinners. He knows us by name and knows our secrets and loves us still. He calls us by name and we hear, recognize, and follow Him. That ministry of presence is also what the pastoral office is about. You are where your people need you to be and you offer them the personal touch of a name and hands joined in prayer in recognition of God’s presence and His high touch ministry.
The world does not get this. The world knows power, raw power, and does not understand or appreciate a God who is present with His people and who works not primarily through demonstrations of power but of acts of mercy. God shows His character through His presence with those who suffer, His touch upon their hearts, and His grace to forgive their sins and lift up in hope their sagging spirits. Earthly kings send men to die in battles to preserve their reign but the King whom we know as Jesus dies in our place and manifests His reign from the throne of a cross, a baptismal font, and an altar.
Today the Lord’s mercy is manifest in two things that we too often take for granted. The ability to hear is seldom valued until hearing fades or is gone and the ability to speak is considered routine until our voices are lost to us. We know how important our eyes are but we do not always appreciate how important our ears and our voices are. Yet in this miracle of Jesus it is exactly with the ears that do not hear and the mouths that do not speak that our Lord manifests the fullness of His mercy, grace, and compassion.
Imagine for a moment never being able to hear the sound of your children or your parents, never hearing the bird’s song or the sound of waves breaking upon the shore or the crack of thunder or the sound of a symphony. Imagine never being able to open your mouth and speak of your love and affection to your family or to call out in warning to someone in danger or be able to tell others what lives deep in your heart or the forefront of your mind. Words are the key. Words that we hear, words that we speak, and words through which we communicate with others are so drawn from our isolation and loneliness into fellowship and family. Words are essential to who we are as people, to who we were created to be, and to a quality of life God intended for us to know and enjoy.
So Jesus meets a man who cannot hear and who cannot speak. This man is not only isolated from those whom he loves and from the whole of society, he is isolated from God, from the fellowship of God’s House, from the voice of the Good Shepherd speaking to him, and from the song of praise that erupts from the joy of God’s presence. Jesus has not come to make the man’s life easier or more convenient but to restore the man to the life God intended for him.
Words are key to worship. Words are key to knowing the Lord and responding to the Lord’s grace and mercy. God speaks and we say back to Him what He has said and in that we discover who we are and who He is. More than this, we are drawn into a familial relationship in which words are not optional or incidental but essential and pivotal to what it means to know the Lord and belong to Him. Jesus was not simply fixing the man’s ears or tongue but restoring the man into the fellowship of God’s people.
This is what our Lord does for you. Your ears may hear but what you hear is the sound of anger and dispute, of sensuality and lust, of pride and unbelief. You hear everything but the one thing you need to hear. That is what sin has done. It has left us deaf to the sound of God’s voice and unable to address the Lord as our heavenly Father. Instead of being fully conversant with God, we know vulgarity and pornography, hate and contempt, arrogance and selfishness. We are on a first name basis with every sin but unless the Lord opens our ears and our tongues we neither know Him nor can respond to His goodness, mercy, and compassion.
The ear Jesus touched and the tongue He loosed were not about giving the man hearing and a voice but the chance to hear God’s voice and to respond with the song of praise that rises up from faith. Ours is a God of words, the Word made flesh, who speaks creation into being and who becomes incarnate so that we may hear of His steadfast love and mercy. Jesus was not simply letting the man hear his wife’s voice or address his children but to know the Lord and to be able to say amen to worship and praise of the gathered people of God.
What a shame that we not only take for granted the gift of hearing and speaking but that we waste it on words that do not matter. God’s Word does that of which it speaks. By His Word we are addressed with Christ’s forgiveness and set free from the bondage of our sins. By His Word we are called by name in the waters of baptism so that we might be His own and live under Him in His kingdom.
By His Word He addresses our sins with a power greater than sin and we are forgiven. By His Word He speaks and bread becomes His body to feed us eternal life and wine becomes His blood cleansing us from all our sin. By His Word He will call forth the dead from their sleep and raise them to everlasting life. This is why we need to hear and why our ears are given to us to hear God’s Word.
Worship is words. We are gathered by the Spirit, invoking God’s presence we assemble where He has promised to be. We pray together and give our Amen to the prayers and petitions of God’s people. We offer praise and thanksgiving with words that God Himself has given us. Worship is not about the meditation of the heart or the thoughts that fill the mind but about the voice of God calling us to be His own and the Spirit working through that Word and the song of praise that erupts from within us because God has spoken love to His in His Son.
You are the man in the Gospel for today. God has opened your ears to hear His voice. God has loosed your tongue to speak in worship and in witness all that He has said and done. God sends you forth with His Word upon your lips so that you can speak Jesus in your homes, at your workplace, and where you live. God has given you ears to hear His voice and a voice to proclaim His Word. You were made for this. Sin shut down your ears so that you heard everything but God’s Word and sin filled your voice with the impure and empty words that mean nothing. But now you hear the Lord, delight in His saving work, and are sent forth as His witnesses to speak His Word to others. This is why you were created. Not to pursue your own will but the will of Him who made you and redeemed you. Thanks be to God!
No comments:
Post a Comment