TO HEAR BETTER John M. Buchanan

Mark 7:31-37 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 26, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

Archie Bunker never could hear very well. The sounds stimulated all the
proper neurological responses; it's just that Archie had a notorious and
distressingly familiar inability to hear what other people were saying to him.

One pithy vignette occurred in front of a television set. Archie and
his idealistic, socially-aware son-in-law were about to watch TV. Mike turned
on the Public channel to a program dealing with various threats to the envi-
ronment. Archie walked over to the set and switched on the ball game. Mike
protested, and what I thought was a very funny conversation ensued. Mike
suggested that since they were both adults and each wished to watch something
different, they ought at least to discuss the matter. Incredulous that anyone
could possibly prefer looking at dirty lake water to the New York Yankees,
Archie finally shut off the TV with a flourish and agreed to have a discussion.
Mike launched into a long and eloquent presentation of his case: how important
the issue of the environment is to everybody; how adults really should be
attending to life and death concerns instead of games; how it was a one-time
program and there was a ball game on TV everyday. Finally he concluded; it
was obviously Archie's turn to respond. Slowly Archie got up from his chair,
walked to the TV and turned it back on. "What are you doing?" Mike protested,
and Archie answered, "You wanted a discussion. You had your discussion. Now
I'm gonna watch a ball game."

it is not easy to hear what others are saying. There are many obstructions.
Psychoanalyst Rollo May says that listening is our most neglected sense.
(Freedom and Destiny, p. 166) In fact our inability to hear, or our unwilling-
ness to listen, comes close, I believe, to a good, working definition for sin.
It is what is wrong with us, essentiakly. We can't, or won't hear one another.

The first and fundamental skill seminaries teach eager young students in
counseling curricula is how to listen. More often than not that task is first
a matter of teaching the student to be quiet. What a rude awakening to learn
that as counselors we didn't have the solutions to people's problems, that the
solutions we thought we did have were probably wrong, and most eritically,
that the act of dispensing answers, like 25-year old ecclesiastical gurus,
back - that is to say - when one knew all the answers, was itself detrimental
to any therapeutic process. What we had to learn to do was shut up and listen.
It was not easy and is not easy. Some of us never learned it. The trouble is
most of us ~ clergy or laity - are relentless problem solvers. When someone
presents a set of problematic circumstances we feel compelled to offer tidbits
of helpful advice to resolve the problem or at least tidy it up a little.

When someone expresses anxiety we are almost obsessive in our assurance that

it will be OK. When someone tells us about a relational problem, we prescribe
a book, or a way to deal with it. We are habitual problem-solvers. But on
those occasions when we've summoned the strength to resist the urge to dispense
resolutions, we have discovered that what was required of us was not sage
advice, but a little active, therapeutic listening.

It is not an easy skill, but to be heard, to be listened to is a funda-

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mental human need. It has to do with our sense of worth, our sense of seif, Aa te et
our very sense of identity. People will find someone to listen - a husband or waa “
a friend, a psychiatrist or a bartender, a preacher or a call girl. ye We OS

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Jesus restored a man's ability to hear one time. The incident occurs
early in his ministry as described in the Gospel according to Mark - the first
account to have been written. He used two folk remedies of the day, known to
have been employed by other healers: he placed his fingers in the man's ears
and touched the man's tongue with his own saliva. The crowd was astonished
at the restoration of the man's hearing and speaking. The astonishment is
subtle, I believe. It was not the healing itself that so amazed the onlookers.
Rather, what Mark wants us to understand, is that the people who actually
witnessed the life of Jesus of Nazareth, identified what they saw with scrip-
tural promises they had repeated by memory since childhood. One of them is a
compellingly beautiful vision of God's kingdom written centuries before, by
the prophet Isaiah. In times of oppression, military occupation and humilia-
tion their old promises of a wonderful kingdom coming into the life of the
world were terribly important to them.

Listen to what Isaiah wrote: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be
opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped: then shall the lame man leap
like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy." (Isaiah 35:5, 6)

Part of the restored wholeness in the human condition which happens when
God's kingdom is present is that people will be able to see and hear and speak
clearly. When Mark relates these stories of Jesus healing blind, deaf, and
dumb people, he wants his readers to notice and be astonished, not at the
wonderful miracles alone, but at what those signs are pointing to, namely the
presence of God's kingdom on earth in Jesus Christ. In God's kingdom people
can see clearly, and hear one another, and speak with one another. A charac-
teristic of anyone, or any institution, which identifies itself with God's
kingdom, therefore, will be a finely tuned sense of hearing. ”
The man Jesus healed was deaf, and there is a sense in which it always _ 684M
requires a bit of a miracle for people actually to hear one another. Some- =
times we don't hear because we don't want to hear. A discouraging development
in the 70's, during the campus troubles, was that the people who were most
vociferous in demanding the right to be heard, shouted down voices which
advocated positions different from their own. People gathered under the banner
of free speech were unwilling to extend the right to be heard to representa-
tives of the State Department, say, on the subject of Vietnam. Hugh T. Kerr,
Editor of Theology Today, wrote, “The failure to communicate is not a problem
of communication as if it could be solved by discovering better media. We
have more media than we know what to do with. Our problem is that so many of cops |
us don't want to communicate in the first place, partly because we have nothing CULgVe'
to say to each other and partly because everybody seems too mad." (Our Life in = «°°

God's Light, p. 137)

Whenever I think of hearing difficulties I think automatically about my
grandfather who was hard of hearing, and to whom I had to shout in order to be
heard as a young boy. I was told, however, that he was a selective hearer,
blessed with the uncanny ability not to hear most of what was said, but to
pickup-with the power of a multi-directional microphone - anything anyone
said which was not intended for his hearing. I have ever since regarded the
ability to hear with great respect and careful uncertainty.

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Sometimes we can't hear because we don't wish to hear what is being ‘ A ¢

said. And sometimes we can't hear because we don't like whose doing the TL haget"

talking. The obsessive concentration on the self - self expression, self

realization, self awareness of the past decade gave us the philosophical

argument we needed to plug our ears to everyone. The New Narcissism told

us that our own voice was the only one that mattered; that what we had to

say needed to be said - shouted if necessary, not on the basis of any intrin-

sic merit, but simply because it was ours. No matter how innane, unintelli

gible, or selfish, an idea was worth expressing in the market place of ideas,

simply because it belonged to us.

Fritz Pearls wrote a defiant little poei which caught up the incredible
arrogance of that sentiment...

"I do my thing and you do your thing

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you and I am I;

If by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped." |
Trouble is, it can be helped. Trouble is, the minute you adopt that f et 4

rhetoric as a credo, there is no possibliity of communication with another [ i”

human being.

One hundred years ago the present malaise was anticipated by Henrik Ibsen.
Peer Gynt is visiting an "insane asylum" in Egypt and the director is explain-
ing that the inmates are there because outside they cannot “be themselves".
He says:

“Here we are ourselves with a vengeance:
Ourselves and nothing whatever but ourselves.
We go full steam through life under the pressure of self.
Each one shuts himself up in the cask of self,
Sinks to the bottom by self-fermentation,
Seals himself in with the bung of self,
And seasons in the well of self,
No one here weeps for the woes of others,
No one here listens to anyone else's ideas."
(see Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny, p. 143)

It is, of course, a denial of one's very identity, not to be heard. You é,
have experienced it.....In the middle of a conversation it becomes evident vv
that the person with whom you are talking isn't listening to you, perhaps 0b
isn't hearing you. It never feels very good when it happens. In fact,

it is a kind of non verbal assault on your personhood. Not to be heard is to
be told that you don't count, you don't matter, you don't exist.

And sometimes we don't hear because of deeply felt religious conviction.
To know the absolute truth is always to have difficulty hearing a different
position. Religious fanaticism always carries within it the seeds of tragedy
because it cannot tolerate alternative points of view. It's not the trand of

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morality of the Moral Majority that bothers me so much as the absolute certainty Wy

that any other position is immoral. I did something I have never done before

this morning. Someone had left the television sitting on the kitchen counter

and I turned it on. It was a mistake. Three preachers - on three channels - ie

told me I was going to hell before I had my first cup of coffee - with such cur

certainty. Paul Tournier once observed, "Nothing is more dangerous than to | yt \\4

believe ourselves to be authentic interpreters of the divine will. This is

the source of all brutal intolerance...and fanaticism." (The Violence Within, p. 29)

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Communication...Dialogue...Speaking clearly and hearing clearly are not deo PS
easy. In fect, it may be a miracle of God's grace, a foretaste of glory divine, +t

whenever it happens. It is, of course, more than a matter of transmitting in-
formation to one another. Listening is a way of loving. Hearing what another
is saying is a way of affirming that person, acknowledging, and celebrating
that person's worth. Our only existence is in relationship. Apart from other
selfs, the solitary self begins to dissolve. When we listen to others we love
in a creative and life affirming way.

We need to learn that simple lesson. We need, as achurch, to learn to listen
better to the world. When women in the church, for instance, say to us that our
language, our titles, and our organizations, make them feel less than whole, we
need to hear that and not respond by suggesting that it is inappropriate for
people to feel that way. That isnot listening...intentionally not hearing.

When brother and sister Christians in Central America find voice to express
fear and rage at the poverty and oppression in which they live, it is impera-
tive that we start to hear that as well as the hope they want us to share with
them. When young people express dismay at injustice, or marvelous optimism at
a future which still looks wide open, we church folk need to listen.

We need, as individuals, to learn to listen to the silence of the world.
The mystics have always known that secret. In silence one begins to hear an
infinite variety of sounds. The late Thomas Merton wrote: "...if you go into
solitude with a silent heart, the silence of creation will speak louder than
the tongues of men and angels." (No Man Is an Island, p. 191)

The saints across the ages teach us that prayer is not so much saying words
to God as it is listening to the world. God speaks, not in the sonorous tones
of a Hollywood movie portrayal, but through his creation, in the voices of his
people - and through our own inner voices which are audible only when we listen
to the silence,

God's kingdom comes when we hear one another. Something of God's kingdom
appears on earth when we listen, truly listen, to the joy another person wants
desparately to share with someone, anyone. We advance God's kingdom when we
resist the urge to tell our story and allow another person to tell us his or
hers. God's kingdom exists when we muster strength to listen to the pain and
hurt of others; when, in love, we hear grief and resist trying to make it right
by mindless platitudes and simply, lovingly, listen «then someone says, "Oh God, wy
it hurts." Wee
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Each of us needs to be heard, to be affirmed and valued by being listened we
to. The Good News is that Jesus Christ restores hearing; and that each is we” yg
heard by the Creator and Lord of all; that a bit of God's kingdom on earth is as
established when people, by his grace, hear one another. Amen.