Dig Out Our Ears!

 2025-04
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year C), December 22, 2024
Micah 5:2-5a; Psalm 80:1-7; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-55

Did you hear our psalm today? The psalmist cries out to God: “Restore us!” Everything has gone wrong, and we need you to come and save us. In the name of our ancient ancestors, come be with us! We are in pain. We are sailing through a sea of uncertainty. We have wandered far in a land that is waste. Come. Come restore our fortunes. Don’t forget the people you love.

The psalmist urges God to hear, and hopefully we do, too. Hopefully we hear all these words from scripture—the words of the helpless and the hopeless, the lost and the wandering, and the earnest desires of those who only wish to see God’s face, so that we can begin again. Hopefully we hear these words and hold them alongside our own lives.

So now, pop quiz: In what language is the Letter to the Hebrews written? No, not Hebrew. It’s Greek—the most splendid, erudite Greek in the New Testament. Did you hear the sophistication of the writing as it was read? Neither did I—because we heard it in English! But scholars tell us that this author was probably a Jew who was highly educated in Greek. I spend a lot of time heeding the words of Bible scholars. Sometimes we need those with more knowledge to help us hear things that otherwise we would have missed.

It's not a new problem, things getting lost in translation. Ironically, it was also a problem for the author of this letter! When he quotes the Old Testament, he’s not quoting from the original Hebrew, but from the standard Greek translation that people used in the first century. That translation, called the Septuagint, was already a couple centuries old by then. And unfortunately, it wasn’t necessarily a very good translation.

We know all this now because there has been so much biblical scholarship over the course of Christian history. But we need to forgive the author of the Letter to the Hebrews for what he didn’t know. Today we hear him quote from the seventh verse of Psalm 40:

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.” The ancient Hebrews attributed all the psalms to King David, even those that were written long after his death. But the author attributes this quote to … Jesus. Whoa! How could Jesus speak these words a thousand years before Jesus? “A body you have prepared for me”? What a prophecy this must be!

OK, that’s thrilling and all, but I’d like to invite you all to get a red Book of Common Prayer out of the pew in front of you and turn to page 640. Look at verse 7 of that psalm, Psalm 40, as it’s written there. That’s page 640, Psalm 40, verse 7:

“In sacrifice and offering you have taken no pleasure (you have given me ears to hear you).”

Wait. Where’s the part about preparing a body?

I even looked up the text in Hebrew and attempted a halting translation myself, with help from a Hebrew lexicon. Here’s what I got: “Ritual sacrifice and offerings you have not delighted in. Ears you have dug out for me.”

Ears? Dug out?

Yet when we look in the Septuagint, there we find, in Greek: “A body you have prepared for me,” instead of “ears you have dug out for me.”

I learned this week that the Hebrew verb karah can mean to dig, to pierce, or to open. But it can also mean to acquire by trade … or to prepare something. Now, we also have words in English that mean more than one thing, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Think of the many meanings of the verb “to run,” for instance. But this linguistic phenomenon sure is inconvenient when we’re trying to translate the Bible!

Poetically, I do like to imagine God preparing our bodies from the clay, digging out holes for our ears so that we will be uniquely able among the creatures of earth to hear and respond to God’s call.  So maybe it can mean both things at once?

Keep hearing, then, as we turn to the Prophet Micah, who lived some 700 years before Jesus. Like the psalmist, and like most of the prophets of ancient Israel, Micah said that though we may seek to honor God with ritual sacrifice and burnt offerings, it’s not supposed to be a strictly transactional relationship. God doesn’t drink the blood of goats. God loves us whether or not we make temple sacrifices. And because it’s expensive to buy an animal and then hand it over to the priests for slaughter, the poor are supposed to have special provision made for them.

Micah had a big problem with sacrifices and offerings that were not accompanied by ethical action. A Christian equivalent today might be going to church every Sunday, but victimizing people the rest of the week—through a career where we insist we’re “just doing our job.”

To give gifts to God is of honorable intent. But when we do so instead of loving one another—or even do so in the process of exploiting one another—our rituals are shown to be empty. Have we not used the ears that God dug out of our heads? How dare we try to bribe God with things God doesn’t need? What does God ask of us, after all, but to seek justice, show mercy, and walk humbly in God’s world?

The Prophet Micah asks this rhetorical question in the chapter that follows the one we hear from today. But first, Micah envisions a new ruler emerging from the little town of Bethlehem. Hey, that’s where King David came from! Yet salvation will not come from great and glorious kings. Salvation will come from someone far more humble. Symbolism upon symbolism—this is how scripture and prophecy work together. The prophets give us ancient songs that we can always remix for younger ears. When the Messiah finally does come, his earliest followers will comb the scriptures, come upon this verse from Micah, and say, “A-ha!”

But we’re not in Bethlehem yet—not as we read from Luke’s gospel. Mary is from Nazareth of Galilee, a long way from Bethlehem. And when she becomes pregnant, she immediately visits her older cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant and who can, no doubt, share some feminine wisdom. I bet, though, that Elizabeth is surprised by the wisdom that proceeds from her mouth: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” For her child, John the Baptist, has leapt for joy in utero.

We pull all these threads of scripture together today: a thirst for justice, so children don’t have to be sacrificed to fund the salaries of insurance CEOs and gun lobbyists. A thirst for mercy, so that even the cold and unfeeling are not gunned down in the streets, but merely removed from positions of power as we seek healing for them, too. A thirst for humility, so that we will look to others to add their knowledge to our own, that we may not stupidly trample the vulnerable by our own lack of understanding.

And we’re not alone as we seek justice, mercy, and humility. Mary seeks exactly the same things. She’s not just excited to have a baby. She’s preparing for the revolution! And so she sings her magnificent manifesto:

“My soul shows everyone how large God is in our world! God is large because God comes to be with someone as small as I am. God’s mercy is always available to the humble. God’s strength is on the side of those who cannot save themselves from harm. God’s cause is to tear down the thrones of the powerful, so that they, too, will have no choice but to join us in our humility. God’s long-term plan is to feed us all, so that nobody goes hungry—so that nobody is shot in the streets or in the schools, nobody murdered in war zones or in their own homes. God has promised to be with us through all things—through danger, through violence, through suffering—all the way. And lest we doubt that God is serious about this, look! Here is God within my very body, kicking against ribs and bladder, somehow divine, yet now, in some way, not yet able to imagine all the wonders to come.”

Of course, that’s not really a translation of the Magnificat—that’s my poetic remix. I pray that it helps you hear.

To love one another, then, turns out to be the same thing as loving God. We can’t truly do one without the other. Mary knows this, and she proclaims it. The world is about to turn!

As we draw ever closer to the mystery of Christmas, let’s ask God to “dig out our ears”—to flush out the years of accreted wax that prevent us from hearing what God intends. May we never be deaf to the cries of those who feel so trapped, whose suffering is so deep, that they can only envision revenge. Yet may we never honor the urge toward revenge, but instead keep pointing back to the One who created us, who longs for hope and healing for each and every one of us.

In the four months I am away from you, I ask you to keep listening, hearing, and responding. Listen for divine justice, which is never mere punishment, but true reconciliation. Listen for divine mercy, which is never cheap, but costs the commitment our very souls and bodies. And listen for divine humility, which knocks all of us mighty from our thrones and prepares us for wonders and joys we cannot yet imagine.

Amen.