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Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 6, 2009
I’ve heard it told that back in the day - before you needed three remote controls just to work the television – before there was television or even radio at all for that matter – about the time when the first Labor Day holiday was celebrated - September 5, 1882 in New York City, by the way - when people would come together on a special occasion for an evening’s entertainment, they would gather in what was then called the parlor, now more commonly known as the living room, and play games, parlor games.
From what I’ve read, the Victorians were very keen on this sort of entertainment, deriving great enjoyment from playing, “Lookabout,” in which the host shows everyone a little knickknack in the room. All the guests then leave while the host hides it. When the guests return, everyone is to look for the item until they spot it. When they do, they are to sit down. The last one seated loses, or has to be “it.”
Tiring of “Lookabout,” the guests may switch to playing “Pass the slipper.” In this game, an object, known as the “slipper,” (perhaps the same object which was earlier hidden) is passed from person to person behind their backs while someone in the middle - also known as “it” - stands with his or her eyes closed. When the center person’s eyes are opened, he or she has to guess who is holding the slipper.
After people exhausted themselves from so much physical exertion, they would play a variety of guessing games, one called “The Name Game,” in which assorted clues were offered until a selected name was guessed; another called “I’m Thinking of Something,” in which people could only ask “yes” or “no” questions before hazarding a guess. And, along the same lines, guests would enjoy playing “Secret, secret, who’s got the secret?” So popular was this game that it found its way out of the parlor and onto the radio and, later, TV.
In 1952, the year of my birth as a matter of fact, “I’ve Got a Secret” debuted on the CBS television network. Lasting until 1967 – fifteen years, during which the country underwent a major cultural shift – the U.S. version of this program was the longest running and most popular game show in the history of the genre.
First hosted by Garry Moore and then by Steve Allen – once enormously popular but now largely forgotten TV figures – the show’s format was essentially the same as the old parlor game, only featuring four semi famous celebrity panelists and sometimes a celebrity contestant. Sitting together on one side of a plain set, each of the panelists took a 30 second turn questioning and then guessing a contestant’s secret. If a contestant succeeded in stumping the panel through two rounds of questioning, he or she was awarded the big prize: $80.00 and a carton of Winston cigarettes. Now cigarettes cannot be promoted on television and game shows are giving away millions.
Now, on “I’ve Got a Secret,” the truths revealed were hardly the kind to make a Victorian, or a 1950s and 60s American blush. The very first episode featured the actor Boris Karloff’s revelation that he was afraid of mice, hardly the stuff of tabloid fodder. One time, in a bid for relevance, they had the man who invented electronic television – a secret the panel failed to discover. They also failed to discover the secret of one Samuel J. Seymour, who appeared on the show in 1956, when I was but a “wee bairn,” a small child.
Mr. Seymour, it turned out, was the last surviving person who had been at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. It’s kind of scary for me to realize that I shared the earth for four years with someone who breathed the same air as an American icon. Perhaps I should have kept that information to myself.
Secrets, we all have secrets, and there is nothing wrong with that. Even though we live in a tell-all culture in which even the most minor celebrity feels compelled to share his or her most intimate or embarrassing thoughts and experiences on reality TV, most of us would never get anything accomplished – and likely we would have far fewer friends – if we spent our days revealing every little detail about our lives to everyone we meet. Frankly, most people are not all that interested; they have enough problems of their own.
So what we do to get along in the world is project a certain image; we play a particular role. At different times and with different people, the way we present ourselves, and what we reveal of ourselves, varies. With family, friends, co-workers, strangers, each of us acts in a slightly different way. You wouldn’t talk to your boss the same way as you talk to your small child; if you did, odds are you would not have a job for very long.
And, as someone whose job often requires the wearing of a clerical collar, I am acutely aware that I best be careful how I react publicly when someone in traffic cuts me off or when the elderly lady in the line ahead of me in the Jewel can’t seem to find the dime she just knows is at the bottom of her purse. Hand salutes and vocal sighs would hardly be appropriate.
Projecting images, playing roles, keeping secrets, they are all part and parcel of our lives. But, when the roles and the secrets take over our lives they cease to be a social necessity and become instead a form of bondage, spiritual bondage, trapping us in ourselves almost as much as those obsessions and compulsions I spoke about last week.
Thank God there’s a way out.
“Ephphatha,” Jesus says today in a story found only in Mark, removing his fingers from a deaf man’s ears. “Be opened,” the first words this man ever heard, the first words of so many that would go on to guide his life. “‘Be opened,’ and immediately – recall how much Mark likes that word – “Immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” Literally translated, the scene has an even greater impact: “Immediately his hearing was opened and the bonds of his tongue were loosed.”
Tongue tied – the man’s tongue was in bondage. “He had an impediment in his speech,” Mark says, as people who have never heard a spoken word usually do. Now that his ears have been unblocked through the Word, now that his soul has been set free through the Word, he is now free to speak the Word – plainly, truthfully, openly.
Dwelling in silence, barely able to understand or be understood, he has been brought by his friends before Jesus in the midst of the teeming throng. And now he stands before Jesus all alone. “He took him aside in private, away from the crowd,” an unusual occurrence since Jesus performed most of his healings in public view. “(Jesus) put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him ‘Ephphatha…’” Be opened.” No magical incantation, no abracadabra – a word which some people theorize also has its origins in an Aramaic word - this event is a demonstration of the power of the living word, a word sometimes heard in public and sometimes, as today, in private.
Consider: there is no one else around during this encounter; no spouse, no children, no co-workers, no friends, no cranky drivers or bewildered old ladies. There is no one to whom this man has to present a certain image, or fulfill a particular role, or withhold an unpleasant secret.
It’s just him standing before God. It’s just him as he is – uncertain, afraid, not sure what, if anything, is about to happen to him. As distressing as his silent, inarticulate life may be, he’s kind of gotten used to it. After all, it wasn’t his idea to approach Jesus, was it? He was dragged there by his friends.
And now, standing in front of him, looking at him, touching his ears, touching his tongue, talking to him in a way he can actually understand, is Jesus as he is: the Word, the Way; the truth, the life.
From now on the way things have always been for this once afflicted man is not the way they will always be. More than the gift of hearing and speech, this was a new beginning, for him and for us; a sign that our lives are not pre-scripted; that we are not held in bondage by the past or by the present circumstances; that God’s freedom and creativity will not, cannot, be contained. “Be opened,” yes, but keep playing “I’ve Got a Secret,” at least for a while.
Now, the fact that someone can finally hear and speak is the sort of miraculous message that anyone would be eager to share, but Jesus tells him to “to tell no one.” Why? Because, simply, the time is not right. The fullness of God’s freedom, the extent of God’s creativity, the meaning of God’s miracles will not be revealed until the cross is climbed, the stone is rolled and the tomb is empty. What the man experiences and what the disciples witness is only the temporary restoration of the senses to the body brought by Jesus’ words and touch, and not the eternal salvation of the soul brought by the resurrection.
Until that time comes, those who witness Jesus’ healing miracles are not just instructed, they are ordered, to keep what an early 20th century German theologian called “The Messianic Secret,” a phenomenon found most frequently in Mark.
Jesus may know who the deaf man is but exactly who Jesus is will not be known until the sun rises on the first day following the week we call holy. A day we discover that Jesus is more than someone who can astound us with his words and deeds; a day we discover that he is the one sent in love by God to a world which far too often refuses to hear. A day we discover that Jesus is the Messiah, who brought us our freedom through his suffering, death and resurrection. Something the disciples should have known but never did quite get; earlier in Mark Jesus tells them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.”
Now, it’s been given to us as well; to all of us who live in the magnificent mystery that is found on the other side of Easter; to all of us who live in a world in which nothing seems to stay the same; a world, it sometimes seems, of nasty secrets and petty games.
Now, now, the time is right and the joyous secret is out in the open, available for all of us to hear, available for all of us to share. Now the prize cannot be measured in dollars, no matter how many mega millions are available. As Paul told the Philippians, “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”
God’s willing, self-sacrificing love can not only defeat our deafness and loosen our tongues, it can free us from ourselves so that we may hear the cry of others and reach out to them with the same hands that have touched us; speaking to them with the same voice that speaks to us; opening them to the love that sustains, to the hope that endures, to the news so glorious it cannot be contained.
No matter how many days may pass, that truth will endure.