What's Inside the Sump Tank

 

I hear that Walter and Dan spent quite a bit of time this week looking into the drainage system that moves rainwater out from the patio and away from our buildings. They were trying to figure out why we got such a flood out here again this past July. When they lifted the top off of the sump tank in the grass, all they saw were solid walls of plastic—but no drain pipe. The bottom of the tank was covered by lots of muddy water, leaves, and frogs. When the two engineers ran more water down the patio drain, the water didn’t seem to reach the plastic tank like it was supposed to at all. “Oh great!” I cried out in righteous indignation when I heard what they found. “The rip-off drainage company didn’t even connect the drain pipe to the sump tank! How ridiculous! No wonder everything flooded!”

The image of that useless, closed-in tank stuck in my mind all week. It seems like such a good metaphor for the closed-off lives that we have all been living in “Covid-tide.” Think about it: We’ve been separated from one another by the muck of disease and discord, hemmed in by worry and sickness, left stagnant and full of decay. Look at our national life, our social discourse, our loneliness, our anger, our frustration. We look for someone to blame for our stagnant mess. We splash around indignantly in our little tanks, ready to throw out insults at others.

We are so tired of being closed off and closed down. At St. Ambrose, here we are, a loving community that yearns to reach out in love. We deeply desire to serve our purpose as Christ’s healing hands in the world, helping to drain away want and pain, hunger and hurt. Yet, instead, when we stretch out our hands, they hit the hard plastic walls of our own silo. We grope around for the opening, but there are too many obstacles that obscure our vision. We find ourselves up to our armpits in our own internal gunk: new worship technology, building repairs, more building repairs, reinventing how we do each little thing in a time of pandemic, more building repairs … It takes so much energy just to paddle around in our stopped-up little tank, we can’t do anything else.

I have good news for us tired paddlers today. In our reading from Mark, Jesus heals the man whose ears and mouth are stopped. Taking hold of the man, Jesus cries, "Ephphatha," or "Be opened!" And immediately, the man's ears are opened to hear, and his mouth is opened to speak with others. God’s desire for the wholeness of this man, and of us all, is that we may be opened: open to the richness in diversity, open to God's love, open to mercy and forgiveness, open to new life, open to learning new things, open to healing, open to taking risks, open to growth, open to grace, open to purpose and meaning, open to new possibilities.

There's a great story about medieval knights who used to hold their sword-hand up out of the baptismal waters so that they could continue to use it to fight and kill. They were willing to open up their lives to Christ, just not the hand that kept them safe and powerful. The truth of that story always makes me smile in deep self-recognition. We all close up parts of ourselves to keep God from meddling with them. For some of us, it might be our wallets that we lock safely away from God's wild generosity. For some of us, it might be our prized sense of superiority that we close up from God's abundant love for every human being. For some of us, it might be our treasured stability and safety that we bundle away from the risks of an encounter with God's life-changing Spirit. What parts of yourself might you prefer to keep shut? What parts of St. Ambrose might you want to shelter from God’s powerful touch? To allow Jesus to open us up completely is an act of faith and courage.

 In today's reading, Jesus himself experiences the shock of being completely opened to love. When Jesus first travels from Israel into strange Gentile country, he is closed up within the culture into which he has been born in human flesh. For Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, Scripture is clear that the Children of Israel are God’s chosen people. Of course, God also cares for the Gentiles: the Greeks, the foreigners, those who don't know the Law. But Jesus has been taught that the Jews must be saved first, and then, through them, the rest of the world will be fed with the bread of life. When the Gentile Syrophoenician woman begs him to heal her daughter, Jesus' response echoes coldly from out of the closed tank in which he finds himself: He refuses to help a woman who is "other," who is not one of his flock, who is outside of the Law, outside of his own limited mission. In his frustration, he even hurls an insult at her, calling her a Gentile “dog.”

This woman, however, surprises Jesus. Instead of slinking away, she opens what is closed in him with a clever retort and the powerful love of a brave "tiger-mom" defending her child. That love breaks through the blockage around Jesus, and he changes his mind. The divine love and healing power within Jesus burst through his closed-up notions. Those powerful forces join with the mother's great love for her daughter. Like water gushing through a pipe, wholeness and healing flow into the child and into the world. Jesus is empowered to go forward with a new mission—the healing of the entire world.

St. Ambrose has always believed in this mission. This summer, Charlie Jacobson kindly lent me a big file folder of papers that he has been keeping over his many years at St. Ambrose. In reading through them, I learned a great deal about our history. I was most interested to find that the parish had a motto, the tag line for a mission, that kept being quoted over the years, from our very beginnings. Perhaps some of you remember it? It was a mission to “share God’s healing grace with the world.” That phrase was usually followed by the statement that, without caring for the world, we would be turning our backs on Jesus Christ. Might I add: Without sharing God’s healing grace with the world, we would be like a sump tank with neither exit nor entrance, detached from our source and our purpose.

Yesterday, with help from Marcia, Walter and Dan learned that the patio drain pipe does indeed reach the sump tank. However, the pipe entrance had become so clogged over with layers of mud and debris that it was no longer visible. Before any water could flow freely into the tank from the patio, Walter and Dan had to slosh around through deep layers of gunk to re-open the hole. But lo and behold, there was a hole. The company that I was so quick to blame wasn’t at fault. We had simply forgotten to keep it cleaned out.

Could it be the same with our mission? Over the years of hard work, change, growth, decline, controversy, and now Covid, have we simply forgotten that there is an opening that connects us to our purpose, to our Lord? Has it gotten buried somewhere along the way? If so, there’s going to be a lot of muck to dredge out before the water and healing grace can flow again. But there’s nothing wrong with our design. We are aligned with Christ and a beautiful creation. Jesus is here with us, and he commands: “Be opened!” If Jesus himself can reverse course, if Jesus himself can be opened by love, then so can we. No matter how busy we are taking care of our own, God wants us to open our circle of love. Once again we will shower healing mercy in ever wider and wider circles, like the flood water pouring from our patio, like the healing grace flowing from Jesus to cover the whole earth.