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Preached by Pastor Jeff Hamling Sunday, September 5, 2021   Mark 7:31-37 When Jesus Spits   Introduction:    This story speaks to two very different views of the world.    On the one hand there are certain Christians who are only concerned about spiritual matters. For them, to be a Christian means that when you die you go to heaven. This world and this life are just a big waiting room or lobby where we hang out until Jesus takes us away.    Oliver Wendell Holms once said, “There are some people who are so heavenly minded they are of no earthly good.”    On the other hand, there are people who believe that the material world is all there is. There is no such thing as a supernatural realm. People don’t have souls. There is no God.    In the words of John Lennon, “No hell below us, above us only sky.”    This story in Mark invites us to ask:  What if reality is something more than either of these views?  What if the spiritual realm and the physical world were intended to kiss?  What if heaven and earth were made for one another?    This is a short passage, only 8 verses, so we’ll just walk through it a couple verses at a time.     v.31-32   31 Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. 32 There, some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand on him.   Two observations about these verses: Mark reports the geographical journey of Jesus.    He travels from Tyre to Sidon to the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Decapolis.    If Jesus were wearing a Garmin watch with a GPS, it would show that he took a circuitous route to get from Point A to Point B. It would be like us going from here to Livingstone by traveling through Helena. Not really the shortest distance.    And this is precisely why Mark reports Jesus’ trek. These are not just random places on a map. Tyre, Sidon, and the region of the Decapolis were all places where Gentiles (non-Jews) live.    Jesus’ message is not just for people like him—the Jews. He is launching a global movement. He goes out of his way to move toward people who need to hear the gospel.    It’s worth pausing and asking: If you could look at a map of all the places you went this past week, what would the map look like? Where did you go? Who did you go and see? Was it only people who are like you? Who believe what you believe?    Jesus’ journey shows that he moved toward people unlike him.  Jesus returns to the Decapolis   This region was called the Decapolis because it was an area with 10 different cities.    Jesus has been here before. In Mark 5:1-20, Jesus enters the Decapolis and meets a man possessed by multiple demons named “Legion.” Jesus casts out the demons and sets the man free spiritually.  But here, in this story, when Jesus returns to the Decapolis, he meets a man who suffers not from a spiritual disability, but a physical one. This man is deaf and unable to speak.    And so already, in just these first two verses, we begin to see some sort of collision between the spiritual (a demon possessed man) and the physical (a deaf man).    We wonder, “How will these two worlds come together?”    V.33-34 33 After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. 34 He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”).