Let us pray: O God, we pray that we would be open to your word. May these words which I speak be ones which help us to follow along that way. Amen.

There were times during the summer months just past when I was very happy to have walls to retreat to. It wasn’t so much a safety issue as a comfort issue when hordes of mosquitoes and even more those annoying black flies had zeroed in on the fact that I was breathing out some CO2. The point, of course, is that there are many times when it is very important to have walls, and a roof to cover them. Walls protect us from many things: wind, weather, rain, cold and pests. It is therefore no wonder that whenever human beings move into new places the very first thing they do is put up walls to ensure safety and comfort - whether those walls are the ripstop nylon of tents, sod or log houses, snow shelters or suburban dwellings. A couple of weeks ago, the Hebrew Bible reading told the story of the desire of Solomon to build a temple in which would rest the Ark of the Covenant. Walls are not only places of safety and protection, they are built as places of honour and beauty - symbolic statements of what is important in our lives and society.

We also know the destructive and harmful aspect of walls. What might begin as a wall of safety soon becomes a wall that prevents understanding and co-operation. Walls meant to provide protection become walls of alienation, separation, and ensconced biases. Think of some of the walls you can remember from history - both recent and ancient - the wall going up between Palestinian and Israeli settlement areas, the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, the tall pointed stockades of fur trading posts, the battlements of ancient castles and even the figurative wall known as the Iron Curtain which in many ways became a metaphor for the kinds of walls that exist even if they are not represented by physical structures.

It is these walls of fear, these walls that inhibit understanding and community, whether they are built from real materials or imagined from misplaced stereotypes, cultural learnings, and homogeneous associations that influenced my reflection on this week’s scripture passages.

We are comfortable around people who are like us and we build walls to keep it that way. We build walls to shut out the undesirable, to block our view, to inhibit our interactions with situations and people that we fear or avoid. But the gospel is clear - God wants us to be open, not closed. God wants open doors in our understanding, our attention to those outside our boundaries of comfort, our approach to those who are not like us.

Nothing could be clearer than in the reading from Mark’s gospel this morning. It is perhaps the most striking passage of any from the four Gospel writers, perhaps the most striking in all of our scriptural record. Jesus, the exemplar of being open to God, of making ready for God’s presence to be made known, is himself exposed for his stereotypes and narrowness of thinking. We could put it down to any number of things - his annoyance that a search for a quiet place of rest within walls or repose and detachment were yet again interrupted, his focus on those around him such that the appearance of someone who was clearly an outsider, a Syro-Phoenician woman, left even him, the one who was always inviting people to think more broadly, to set aside their biases and narrowness, in a moment of narrow-mindedness.

According to the story as Mark tells it, it didn’t take long for his close-mindedness to be revealed. And, as if to underline the incident, the very next event involves an opening-up - a man, both deaf and mute, is commanded by Jesus with the word Ephphatha, which literally means - “be opened”, or “open up”.

This message, of course, is made stark on this the eve of September 11, the anniversary of an incident which while it involved the horrific destruction of the walls of the World Trade Centre towers and the lives of people inside them, also served to build walls of misunderstanding and alienation. Many radio reports over the past few days have noted how this, the fifth anniversary of that terrible day, seems to be a watershed anniversary, one which separates the time of grief and horror from a time of deeper reflection and understanding. Many books are coming out, along with feature films, media interviews and discussions.

The gospel is clear - whether we hear and read it from the short and pithy sentences of Proverbs, the poetic pronouncements of the Psalms, the call to action of James, or the dramatic surprise that Jesus can be called into a position of more openness - we are called to offer a different perspective, we are called to radical openness, we are called to retreat from the protection of walls that fortify our stereotypes and biases, we are called, even if it means a movement away from safety, to speak out and live out the message that God is God for all, the message that if God shows any partiality at all, it is for those who are weakest and least in the world’s eyes.

The world needs us to be that kind of God’s messengers right now. There is much going on that is trying to build walls - around countries, around communities, around ways of thinking. That’s not God’s work. God’s work is to break down walls of fear, stereotype, difference, and misunderstanding. And if you listen to James - we are God’s workers.

What are we waiting for? Amen.