Ephphatha! Be opened

Ephphatha! Be opened.

I have a great love of nature which I got from my father.

When I was growing up, my father was a forester inspector,

and he loved the land and loved nature.

It was a great career for him.

He instilled all that love of nature in all of us as children.

He would take us out to the land,

and he helped us appreciate nature

and what nature is to us, a gift from God.

I was always amazed how well

he seemed to know every plant and every tree by name.

Even those big long names too.

He knew the real name, right?

The Latin or the Greek names.

I remember once in a field I was looking at a thistle and he said,

“Oh, that is a Cirsium-arvense,” or some Latin word.

I went, “Oh, it looks like a thistle.”

“Yes, that is the real name for thistle.”

I went, “Okay, alright.”

He had this sixth sense about nature.

One of the things he taught us was

how important it was to enter into nature,

not to step away from it, but to lean into it.

He had a great gift.

He could look at a piece of land,

assess it, value it, determine how rich it is,

and where you could plant the best trees.

We were in Christmas tree farming and, and he would say,

“Well, nothing will grow up there.

Here is where you need to plant all the cross trees.”

We would take expensive soil samples from all over the field,

send it off, and the results would be exactly as dad said.

To do this he would walk the land.

He would walk the whole land and look,

and he would dig down, grab a handful of soil,

run it through his hands and smell it and get a sense.

Sometimes I think he ate it too!

But he was not quite that bad!

He had that intimate relationship with the soil and the land

that he could really know it and what it could produce.

That moving in close is what he really taught us.

The older I get, the more I appreciate

those lessons that he gave us back then.

I am trying my hand at gardening, he was also a gardener,

I am appreciating the difference in the soil

and having to mess with the soil a little bit.

But also how I need to move in close.

For example, a tomato plant is not just a tomato plant.

There are Heirlooms, there are Early Girls,

there are Purple Cherokee and the list is endless.

Even within the Heirlooms, there are multiple types of Heirlooms.

There is not just a tomato.

There are a whole variety of tomatoes

that you can grow. Some will grow better in this area

versus that area with that soil versus this soil.

There is a great sense when we move in close

to understand nature, to understand what we are eating,

understand what we have before us,

the great gift that is before us.

The reason why I bring that up is

this is true not only of nature and plants,

but I think it is also true of you and me, of us.

If we stand back at a distance,

we really cannot know each other, not in any real way.

But it is only when we move in close,

and we come to hear each other and experience each other,

that we really start to understand each other.

It is hard to hate up close it.

It is one of those things, the more you move in,

the more you realize somebody else’s life and what it entails.

In today’s gospel, Jesus moves in close with this deaf and mute man.

He moves in real close, and it is Mark’s gospel.

It is one of the features of his gospel.

And Jesus just does not say be healed or be opened in this case,

he sticks his fingers in his ears.

He puts his spittle on his tongue.

I mean, that is moving in pretty close.

He is intimately engaged.

It is ultimately what Jesus did in becoming human,

he entered into his humanity.

He did not just stand from a distance,

he became one of us.

He moved in close, and then he associated with us.

He spent time, and most especially those who were on the edges,

who were disenfranchised, the wounded,

the sinners, the prostitutes, the orphans, the widows.

These are the ones he moved in close to

because they felt the furthest away.

What Pope Francis calls the existential peripheries,

the peripheries of our society where we need to embrace them.

This is what Pope Francis is calling us to,

this a culture of encounter.

I might suggest it is a culture of close encounters

that we are called to move in to,

to listen to our each other is stories.

Because it is only when we move closer and we hear

that we can understand the stories of each other’s lives.

If I stand at a distance, I cannot hear you.

But if I move in close and I can hear your story, then I know.

Only when I can move in and understand and hear your story,

only when I move in can I start to really understand your story

 and the layers and the complexities of it.

When I move in, I better understand

that you are dealing with a loved one who is at home and sick,

and what a struggle that has been.

A parent who is dying and the dementia that goes with that

and how hard that is.

It is only when I move in close,  

can I understand the ravage of age

has taken upon your body and how hard it is for you

as you slow down to adjust to this slope.

Or I move in and I listen and hear the struggle

you have with your young children

with certain learning disabilities

and the struggle they have at school.

Only when I move in, can I begin to understand the close encounter.

Only then are my ears open.

Only then can I really hear you.

Here is the challenge:

we have to do that for each other in our community here.

We want to have a culture of encounter here

where we really do not just stand at a distance and

say hello to each other, but move in and listen

and let them know that they matter and their story matters.

If we could do that for each other,

I think that will make a huge difference.

But we need to do it more than just for ourselves.

We need to also move in and have a close encounter with others.

Those who feel most disenfranchised,

those who are divorced and remarried,

the L-B-G-T-Q community,

the elderly who feel cut off, put off to the side,

no longer useful in our society.

Or maybe the immigrant who no longer feels welcome,

who feels on the edge of society.

Or the homeless person who truly feels nameless

because no one listens to their story.

We are called to create a culture of encounter to be opened.

The Lord promises that he moves in close to us

and becomes one of us, and he brings healing to our ailments.

And then we are called to do the same for others.

The only way we can do that is

if we move in close to a close encounter.

And in doing so, we will hear the story.

We will see who they are.

We will come to love them for who they are

and not how we judge them.

My friends today, as we come to receive Christ,

we come also to become Christ to others,

to be the healer of ailments.

And how we do that is by moving in close,

a close encounter, and to be opened.

Ephphatha! Be opened.