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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Our text for this morning comes from our Gospel lesson. You may be seated. When a new store or a new attraction comes to town, the business will often celebrate with a grand opening event. The hope is to attract people to their business in an attempt, of course, to sell them something. I’m personally looking forward to the grand opening of the new Chick-fil-A, scheduled to reopen near our house. I look forward to the opening day of baseball season. Today is the opening day of football. When something or someplace opens, it can mean several things. It can mean a new beginning, the revealing of something that you didn’t know about before, the opportunity for new possibilities.
Today we’re going to meditate on grand openings of the spiritual variety. In international missions, we would often speak about how open or closed a particular country is. A country is open when the government there is more or less willing to let Christians live and worship without being harassed by the government. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, there was a great openness in many areas to hear the gospel. For years, people had been told that there is no God at all. And they were open to hearing the truth, to hearing about Jesus. Sadly, now that door is somewhat less open in many former communist countries, but the churches that have been established there continue to work to open hearts through the proclamation of God’s Word.
Now, openings are not always a good thing. One opening in particular comes to mind. In the garden, Satan promised to open the eyes of Adam and Eve if they would only eat from the tree. He promised that when their eyes were opened, they would be like God, knowing good and evil. What possibilities they must have thought to be like God, to truly know. Their eyes were opened, tragically, open to the reality of sin, open to see their own shameful nakedness, open to the realization that God hated their disobedience. The opening they would ultimately experience would be the open grave, that of their son Abel, and finally their own. As the hymn writer says, open-eyed, the grave is staring.
In a similar vein, we might hear the word open used in our day and age. Embracing whatever lie or immoral act is being celebrated by the world is often called being open-minded. It’s considered right to be open to new ideas about sexuality or to be open-minded about the truth of other religions. Have you ever heard about the idea of open marriage? Maybe we should be open to the possibilities that perhaps the creation account in Genesis isn’t really how it happened. We are told to be open to new understandings of God’s Word.
Perhaps there are some personal openings in your own life that could have gone better. Have you ever opened your mouth and an instant later wished you hadn’t? Are we oftentimes only open to relationships with people who seem to meet some criteria that we set forward, as the Apostle James writes about? Or are we impartial, as James encourages us to be? From God’s Word, we know that sin really doesn’t open anything to us, except maybe tragedy and misery and death. The reality is that sin closes us, closes us off from the source of life, namely our Lord Jesus, and only he can open us back up to receive forgiveness.
Today’s gospel lesson is an account of a truly glorious grand opening, namely the ears and the mouth of a deaf and speech-impaired man. We don’t know how long this man was without his hearing, most likely not his whole life, since he could speak to some degree. There would have been no sign language in his time, no support community, and he was unable to communicate. But he had friends, very good friends indeed. And they bring him to the one person they think might be able to help, our Lord Jesus.
Jesus had compassion on the man, touched his tongue and his ears, and then speaks that one faithful word, Ephphatha, be opened. Instantly, the man can hear and speak without difficulty. Not only that, but those who witness this event can’t help but open their own mouths to proclaim what they have seen. Some of them make probably the greatest understatement ever about Jesus: He does all things well. Indeed, only God himself could do such things.
However, it wasn’t enough for Jesus to open this man’s ears and loose his tongue. The spiritual effects of sin were still very real for him. Even if some of the physical effects of living in a fallen world had been removed by our Lord, Christ would still have to close the book on sin once and for all on the cross. Without Jesus’ sacrifice, heaven remains closed to us as it did to this man. When the book of life is opened on the last day and our names appear there, it will be because of the cross. It is from the cross that Christ opened heaven to the thief with the words, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” It is from the cross that heaven opens to us.
When Jesus was baptized, he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him. And the same is true for you because of your baptism. Heaven is open to all of us. In Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus died, we read, “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” The declaration of victory over sin and death is what we witness at Christ’s open and empty tomb.
God is the only one who could open the mouth and the ears of the man in our text, and it is only God who can open our mouths to praise him. Only he can open our hearts to love him. Only he can open our eyes to see Jesus as our Savior. Scripture is full of such prayers and promises. In Psalm 51, David prays, “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” After the resurrection on the road to Emmaus, Jesus appears to two disciples, and we read, “Their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.” They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road? Did not our hearts burn within us while he opened to us the scriptures?” Later in Luke 24, we find Jesus opening the minds of the other disciples to understand that all of Scripture was written about him.
And here today, God opens our mouths to praise him, to thank him. And he will fill our open mouths with his holy and precious body and blood. God is the one responsible for such grand openings in our lives. And like the friends of the deaf man from the gospel lesson couldn’t keep their mouths shut about what they had seen, so Christ opens our mouths to proclaim his saving word and work. As in Acts 8, we find Philip talking with the Ethiopian eunuch. And Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with the Scripture, told him the good news about Jesus.
Christ called St. Paul to open the eyes of the Gentiles so that they may turn from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God. We are those Gentiles who have been opened—opened to hear, opened to see, opened to believe. And this is God’s continuing mission for his church, that our eyes might continually be reopened and our ears receive the word of God so that we may fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith, to open our mouths in testimony, to open our mouths in confession, as we’ll do momentarily, so that the heavens may be opened to all those who hear and repent and believe.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, you have had your ears, your eyes, your hearts, your mouths, your lives open to our Lord in no less a miraculous way than what we heard about in the gospel lesson. Christ has poured himself into you with his word. He poured himself over you in your baptism and continually feeds you with his body and blood. And when that final trumpet sounds and the Lord’s voice booms again with the words, “Be opened,” it will be your graves that are opened—yours and all those who have departed in the faith—and you will arise to live eternally with him.
Let us pray.
Lord, open now my heart to hear and through your word to me draw near. Let me your word air pure retain. Let me your child and heir remain. Lord, open hearts and eyes to see that Jesus died upon the tree to open wide the gates of heaven and sinners welcome there within. Amen.
And may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
