Sight to the inly blind

Mark 7:24-37
Lord, open the eyes of the inly blind; and lift up those who are bowed down… Amen… 
    Growing up is a hard thing to do… 
    While I didn’t necessarily know it at the time, I was raised in a very privileged and comfortable home. 
    My dad worked full time in Geisinger’s finance department, which allowed my mom to scale back her hours in retail to stay at home and raise my sister and I. 
    As far as I knew we never had to worry where a meal would come from, or how the bills would be paid. 
    I vaguely remember some anxiety around the 2008 recession, but overall my family was well off. 
    We went on vacation, we splurged on new things, and life was good… 
    When you grow up in a rather privileged environment, it can be difficult to see and understand that not everyone enjoys that same experience. 
    Of course I was sort of aware of it in the sense that I went to a public school and some of my peers clearly didn’t have the best home situations, but like many kids and even adults who lead comfortable lives, I hung out with other people who were like me. 
    And when we grow up this way, and spend our time only with similar people, and have a sheltered life, we don’t quite grasp the true extent of this world’s problems. 
    Like many people untested by the world, I came of age naive to the complexity of life. 
    And uniquely to my generation - we came of age at the advent of social media. 
    I resisted social media until I graduated high school, but when I did join in, all of the sudden, my young adult self was bombarded with, at first, nice and fun things - like pictures of people’s pets, and the vacations that friends took, etc etc. 
    But as the rest of the world joined in, including the news media, I started to see a lot more content about things that were deeply upsetting, but that I had absolutely no experience of: poverty, hunger, homelessness, natural disasters, the drug epidemic, violence, war… 
    And just like many people, I began to form opinions… 
    As I’m sure we all know from this year and election years past - it is very easy to form opinions of who and what are in the spotlight. 
    And once we engage those opinions, through watching videos and liking and sharing, those algorithms keep on feeding us content that reinforces our views - no matter how informed or well thought out they are… 
    In our digital age, it is easy to maintain our preconceived notions of the world when so much of our lives are lived through screens. 
    We pretty much only see what we want, hear what we want, and talk to who we want… and in doing so build around ourselves an echo chamber. 
    This is exactly what happened to me, and I know happens to so many other folks… 
    And very often, the only way to break ourselves out of our echo chambers is to meet and talk to new people, and to confront the issues we see not from behind a screen, but head-on, face to face. 
    For me, this change began to happen when I moved to Berkeley, California to start my seminary education. 
    Grace and I made our pilgrimage from rural Pennsylvania, to the progressive “Mecca” of the Bay Area. 
    We arrived with all sorts of preconceived notions of what that place would be like, what our schools would be like, and ultimately what our lives would look like.
    And very few of those ideas came to pass… 
    Yes, the weather was gorgeous, always 72 degrees and sunny. 
    Yes, the food was delicious, and there were always fun things to do. 
    But what we never imagined, was what the simplest parts of our daily lives would actually look like. 
    Putting aside that we lived there at the height of the Covid pandemic, we experienced an epidemic of another kind - homelessness. 
    Everywhere we went, people were sleeping in tents and cardboard boxes, relieving themselves openly in the streets, some were shooting up drugs in plain sight, and others still chased and harassed and threatened passers-by, including us and many of our friends… 
    Our seminary was in the heart of downtown Berkeley, nestled against MLK park, a sad irony, given that the park was now regularly filled to capacity with tents, which every Saturday had to be removed by city officials to make way for the organic farmer’s market… 
    At first I was shocked, and we were always afraid, up until the day we moved out of that state… 
    But for the year that we lived there, I quickly realised a sad truth - that it is easier to ignore a problem, than to address it. 
    I worked at a cathedral church in San Francisco, and that is one of the best experiences of my life. 
    And one of the most valuable experiences that came from it was that, my timid, sheltered, privileged, central PA self, was forced to come out of my shell, and engage with the scores of homeless folks and drug addicts who came to the doors. 
    Many of them asked for help, some just wanted to come in and pray. 
    But over the course of my time there, I was privileged to speak to these folks and learn about their plight. 
    Some interactions were good, some were bad, and some were truly dangerous. 
    But many of my peers and even professors, when I’d attempt to share about these experiences, or even encourage us as a seminary to engage in community service at a soup kitchen literally down the street… would just come off as indifferent. 
    They were numb to the situation… they put up blinders, and didn’t have to see it and think about it. 
    But I’m from around here, and I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could just ignore this, and pretend it was okay. 
    And I wish I could say otherwise, but as I grew more and more disturbed about it, and the lack of a compassionate response for these people by my Christian brothers and sisters, the only thing I can remember someone saying to me was … 'you shouldn’t call them homeless, they’re the unhoused’. … 
    Really?  They’re not homeless, they’re just unhoused… 
    This is what our society does when it doesn’t want to see an issue… people develop talking points, they form opinions and play word games, they post virtuous messages on their social media feeds, and don’t actually do anything about it… 
    In our reading from James, we hear the troublesome phrase for Lutherans, that ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’. 
    As Lutherans we believed that we are saved by faith through grace, and ideally, our Christian faith will call us to do good works. 
    But I think we need to be careful here, because many people in our world today do not care for nuance, especially when it comes to their faith. 
    It would be very easy for us as Lutherans to just sit down in our pews on Sunday morning, worship God, and go home and just keep doing what we normally would be doing… completely unchanged… 
    And many people do this… 
    Like people untested by the world, many Christians will think that faith in Jesus as a personal saviour is simply enough for them, and for the world. 
    But if we live lives that aren’t just about us, but about each other, and about the whole community, our faith requires us to live differently. 
    Jesus, in our Gospel passage from St. Mark, heals two people, the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter, and the deaf man.  
    In both of these instances, Jesus models for us what it means to care for those around us. 
    He heals both Jew and Gentile, discriminating against no one who needed His healing mercies. 
    And He does so modestly, asking people not to give away where He was and what He was doing…. 
    Jesus shows us that to do good works is not to simply say the right words and believe the right things, but to meet people where they are, to have compassion, to serve them generously as individuals, not as tokens of a broader social issue. 
    Everyone deserves to be seen, recognised, and cared for - whether you’re well-off or living on the streets. 
    To be a Christian is to be transformed by Christ, strengthened by Word and Sacrament, to love and serve others, and to be open to new ways of seeing the world… and seeing Christ in the face of others… 
    I’m not perfect… I’m guilty just as much as the next person of putting up blinders.
    But we live in community.  We are the Church, together.  And when we come together, and when we act on our faith, we can and do help one another live the kind of generous lives to which Christ calls us… 
    Today we participate in God’s Work, Our Hands Sunday, along will millions of our ELCA brothers and sisters in Christ.  Today we have brought what resources we can spare to share in loving-kindness with those in our community who need them. 
    And we do this not to be virtuous, not because it means we’re doing the right thing, but because this is the work to which God has called us. 
    Jesus is saying to you today, open your eyes, put away your words and your opinions, and see the humanity in your neighbour - in your poor neighbour, your hungry neighbour, your homeless neighbour, … every neighbour. 
    When we see step outside of our bubbles, we will see the immense need that exists in the world, and that is overwhelming.  But God has equipped us to be the Body of Christ here in this place, and calls us to action in His holy Name. 
    May our service today, in its modesty and simplicity, be a reminder that every day we are called to see differently, to recognise the need in our communities, to leave, if just for a moment, our lives of privilege, and to walk in love, as Christ first loved us… 
    In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit… Amen…