Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 7, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Our scripture lessons this morning tell us the being deaf is a bad thing. Isaiah 35:5b says that the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, this is in list of great blessings to come from God upon the return of the Hebrew exiles from Babylon. Our Gospel story from Mark is all about hearing being returned to one who is deaf. The story clearly sees this miracle as a great blessing to the man on whom it was performed.

Now, as many of you know, my late wife Francie was a sign language interpreter. From her I learned a great many things about the Deaf. It may come as a surprise to you, but it is true nonetheless, that a great many Deaf people, by which I mean people who were born Deaf or who became Deaf at an early age, would not see giving hearing to a Deaf person as a blessing. Today, many Deaf people do not consider their lack of hearing a disability. Rather, they consider it an identity, as a human characteristic that makes them part of a particular culture, the culture of Deafness. Deaf couples often hope that their children will also be Deaf, clearly not because they are wishing anything bad on their own children but because they want their children to be part of their own culture and not part of the alien and usually hostile world of the hearing.

So because I have that contemporary understanding of Deafness, I hear these Scripture passages differently. I hear them, in part, as a reflection of an ancient culture that did not have the understanding we have, or can have if we pay attention, of Deafness. Because of the sensitivity I learned from Francie, I have to ask: How would a Deaf person hear these passages? Hard as it might be for some of us to understand, we must realize that many of them would hear them as an attack on their very identity as human beings. We must approach all Bible lessons with the awareness that the ways in which our understandings of the human condition differ from those of the ancient worlds that produced the Scriptures may require us to alter our understanding of the meaning of the lesson, or even its applicability to us.

And yet I must acknowledge that there is also a profoundly true spiritual message in these passages. We can get at that truth, however, as we can get at virtually all Biblical truth, only if we understand these references to deafness metaphorically and only if we understand them as talking about us, not about somebody else. What is the symbolism of God, or Jesus, opening the ears of the deaf and enabling their speech?

Because these stories are about us and not about someone else, we have to start with the assumption that there is some way in which we are deaf and mute, that is, that there is something that we are not hearing, something that we are not saying. And that something can’t be just anything. I has to be something that God wants us to hear, that God wants us to say. What is that? The Word of God of course, in Christian terms the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, you might say that you hear the Word, the Gospel all the time. I mean, most of you come here regularly on Sunday. One whole section or our service, the part we’re in right now, is captioned "We Hear the Word." So are these passages about the deaf hearing and the mute speaking meaningless to us? Not quite.

I say "not quite" because the only way you can say that someone has heard something is if you hear them repeating it. Even more than that, you don’t know that someone has truly heard something, that is, understood it, internalized it, made it their own, unless you see them living it. So to the extent that we are not living the Gospel you can say that we are deaf to it. With this understanding of what it means to be deaf, it’s easy to see that Deaf people, in the sense of people who do not have a functional sense of hearing, may hear the Word a whole lot better than those of us with functioning ears; and indeed many of them do.

So, if we have to admit, and I think we do, that we are to some extent at least deaf to the Gospel, what are we to do about it? These Bible passages about God opening the ears of the deaf give, or at least suggest, the answer. In these passages it is God who opens the ears of the deaf. They don’t do it themselves. They can’t. God can do it for them and does. The same is true of our own deafness to the Gospel. We can’t overcome it on our own; but God can overcome it for us. We have to take the first step by asking God to do that for us. Then we have to take the second and far more difficult step. We have to listen; and when we hear we have to respond. We have to act on what we hear. That’s scary-very scary. We have to trust that God will be there with us when we respond; and indeed God will be. That is very good news indeed. So let’s pray that God will open our ears to the Good News of God’s love for all people and will open our tongues to proclaim that Gospel to all the world. With God’s help we can do it.