If you have any history as a church person, whether it’s here at 2CC or with some other special place, you’ll know without being told that “Homecoming Sunday,” or “Rally Day,” as some other places call it, can be a kind of Church-ese. 

In some places, “Homecoming Sunday” might be translated as: “We know you are home, so you’d better be coming” Sunday. 

Maybe Rally Sunday is Church-ese for “Rally yourselves back into your blazers, fellas” Sunday, or something like that.   

My childhood church was sort of that way, at least on the surface.  

But whether you were elsewhere for a big part of the summer or not, the church offers a deeper call home that still gets you. 

You’re driving south on 95 and over the Mianus River bridge and there it is, especially at night.  And you can’t help – or at least, I can’t help – but look over and say “wow.”

Or maybe it’s the very end of winter, the part I find the hardest, when everything is brown and windy, and you drive past Put’s Hill just over there, going about your daily round…and then one day, you see the crocuses…sometimes even pushing right through the snow, which they do because they know what’s what, and they will not be deterred, which is just to say: neither should you.  

What a blessing it is to call this place home. 

Some of you have told me about finding your way here, not so much because you’d left another church, but because you came to feel like another church, a place you loved, left you…and yet, painful as that was, you decided that weren’t going to let go of God without a fight.  

You’re in good company. 

The Bible tells us that the word “Israel,” means “struggles with God,” and it’s a name that debuts in the context of a literal wrestling match. 

It’s an experience both fundamental and familiar enough to name a people after it.  

And while there are those who read that and say, “what a great story,” there are also some of you who read it and go “yep,” and know it for having lived it, yourself.  

Because that’s how it was for you until one Sunday when you came here, and your heart told you that the search was finally over. That the fight was finally over.  That you were home.  

That whatever else you still had to wrestle with, it didn’t need to be God.  It didn’t need to be church people.  

It still doesn’t. 

How appropriate, then, that our Gospel for this morning is the story of two healings, which are precisely what a true home makes space for.  

The first happens as Jesus takes a short and rather unsuccessful vacation of his own, up in the region of Tyre, outside the boundaries of Israel.  

It’s unsuccessful because, whatever his own needs may have been, the needs of the world still manage to find him there.  

And it’s not just the emails from the office that he can’t resist checking.  

It’s a whole new situation that seems at first as if it should be none of his concern.  

A woman pushes her way through the door of his hotel room, and it’s brazen enough that even Jesus, who is no shrinking violet, is like, “really?” 

Except that the woman is desperate.  

Her daughter has an unclean spirit, which is to say, something so wrong and inexplicable to everyone around her that it didn’t seem like just an illness, but more like a curse.  

And as mother and daughter have wrestled with that illness, they’ve found themselves abandoned by whatever god they’d been taught to worship and by whatever church where they’d been told to pray.  

They’re fluent enough in the local Church-ese to know when they’re being told to hit the road.  

At first, Jesus doesn’t make it any easier. 

But the more important point is that eventually he hears her.  He sees the look on her face.  

He sees all the fear and fierceness of a parent in full mama bear or papa bear mode.  

He recognizes a soul hanging on by its fingernails.  

His heart opens.  And the words he speaks are words of healing and of home.  

Is it any wonder that, as he calls off the rest of his trip and heads back to Galilee, the very next healing he offers shows that he still has that woman and her daughter in mind? 

Jesus encounters a man who can neither hear nor speak, and according to Mark, he looks up to heaven and sighs and says, “Ephphatha,” a Greek word which means, “Be opened.”  

It’s something between a blessing and a command. 

It’s as if he says to the man: “As God and life have opened and healed that woman and her daughter back in Tyre…as God and life have opened and healed me, may you also be opened, and may you also be healed.” 

The blessing comes quickly.  

…And as any truly serious Christian can tell you, living into the command both takes a lot longer and asks a lot more. 

In fact, quite often, it asks more than we knew we had in us, which may only prove how little we actually know ourselves.   

Because faith argues that to know ourselves truly takes three things: it takes space, it takes time, and most of all, it takes God. 

If we are to “be opened,” as Jesus promises and instructs, it takes all three, like plants in good soil, which find their fullness only as they slowly reach up for the sun. 

That’s why we need church.  

And not for nothing, it’s why God needs us to be the church—to offer time, and space, and the example of our own hearts reaching up for God, so that others might finally be opened, and all life might begin to blossom. 

Welcome home, church.  

And with open arms and open minds, may we learn to live with open hearts.  

Amen.