Jesus took the man who was deaf and had an impediment of speech aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers in his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then he said “Be opened” and his ears were opened and his tongue was released and he spoke plainly.

That seems very strange and I expect it seemed very strange to the people in that moment as well as the early Christians who first heard Mark’s gospel. Jesus was perfectly capable of healing people from afar, as he did the girl in the other healing we heard this morning. Why did he go farther than simply laying his hands upon the man as requested?

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Many years ago, a parishioner gave me a book for my birthday called The Maker’s Diet. The author suffered from Crohn’s disease, which is a chronic auto-immune condition that attacks the small and large intestine. After seeing 70 doctors and trying every diet, drug and supplement he could find without success, he decided to see what the Bible said about healthy living; diet and exercise and so on.

There's nothing quite like a gift that at once says, "I really care," and "You're getting fat."

What goes in may not defile, but it sure can hurt. I thought at the time it was a trendy diet, but it turns out that like finances and a lot of other areas, we find the Bible has very practical truth in it.

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We heavily emphasize scripture in our weekly worship, usually two Old Testament readings including the psalm and two New Testament readings including the Gospel. Wise preachers work in and from the text.

The word scripture is drawn from the Latin word scriptura which means simply writings. The Greek word for writings is grajh, from which we get our words graphics, graphite and, well, graph. In other words, these writings are so important that the ancient words for writings refer, just as the ancient Greek word for book, biblos, came to be synonymous with THE Book, or the Bible. 

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