Worship Guide - Year B, Ordinary 23 (Proper 18)

The rich and the poor have this in common: 
​the LORD is the maker of them all.
~Proverbs 22:2


Yet another spike in infections and, tragically, deaths. The schools are open, but the hospitals are full again—dangerously so—sparking widespread concern and anxiety for what is and what may come. To the surprise of few, the ICUs are populated with COVID patients, the vast majority unvaccinated.

It’s all over the media—social and otherwise: We are experiencing a crisis of empathy, or so we hear. Empathy is like a pie, there is only so much to go around, or so we hear.

Even Jesus is wrung out, the pie plate empty. He goes to Tyre and hides away in a house there, looking for some respite, not wanting “anyone to know he was there” (Mark 7:24). But this is a futile hope, of course. A Syrophonenician woman full of anxiety for her daughter offers, perhaps, a mirror to his own soul. And by the end of the story this one whose empathy was on on empty is now out in the open more than ever, getting dirty—fingers in ears, spitting, touching tongues. What fire is this?

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head,” said Nelson Mandela. “If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” Ephphatha is Jesus’ own original, Aramaic language.
Ephphatha, be open.
​
Is empathy really so fragile, so scarce a resource?

​Let us come together to worship God. Enter into worship.

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