23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) – September 8, 2024

St. Paul – Lyons, KS 

Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146:6-10; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37

The War of the Worlds’ Hysteria

Back in 1938, America was in the middle of the Great Depression. And at that time, radio was beginning to take off. People were becoming more and more accustomed to listening to radio for entertainment as well as to get their news in the evenings. Just like we will sit and scroll through Facebook or watch Netflix, in 1938, families would gather in the living room to listen to the radio. This is how people found out about what was going on in the world.

But on October 30, 1938, in the middle of a normal, regular music program—all of a sudden there was a bunch of breaking-news bulletins. And the news anchors and reporters were frantically describing an invasion! It was war! And as you would expect, people started getting more and more anxious. They couldn’t believe it! Was this really true? And confusion and anxiety and even hysteria started to grow.

Why? Well, the broadcast and the news anchors and the reporters were all anxiously and breathlessly describing this invasion… an alien invasion from Mars. They were describing them. There were sounds of “deadly heat rays.” There were reports of entire cities being destroyed. And the effect was that many people (not everyone, but many people) began to mistake this radio show for the actual news! Many (again, not everyone, but many) anxious listeners, believing that the end of the world was near—they began to flee their homes, others gathered weapons and prepared to defend themselves against the aliens. Phone lines became jammed as these listeners tried to call police and newspapers to find out information or to get reassurance.

And soon, the police showed up at the CBS studios where, in the radio booth, a young man by the name of Orson Welles and his cast were performing a modernized version of the story by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. There was even a fight that broke out between the cops and radio executives, who were desperately trying to prevent them bursting in and stopping the show. And in the days that followed, Orson Welles and his team faced intense backlash for this program both by the media and the government.

And it became a sort of watershed moment in the use of this form of media. Three years later, Welles was doing a radio program when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and when the news bulletin came in that America had been attacked, many didn’t believe it for a while, “Oh just ol’ Orson, at it again.” Real news came across, and people didn’t believe it!

One of the things that the event of Orson Welles and his broadcast of The War of the Worlds really made clear for me is how easy it is to miss the message, miss the point, completely misunderstand the message when we misunderstand the genre, when we misunderstand the medium communicating them message, when we don’t know what’s really going on. When we don’t know what genre we’re listening to—we think it’s an actual news report when it’s actually just a story of fiction—when we misunderstand the medium—we think that radio always communicates truth, and never fiction—when we don’t know what’s going on—we think there is an actual invasion when really it’s just a radio program—when all of this is going on, it is easy to miss the true message, miss the point, and we’re left confused.

“Hysteria” Around the Bible

And this is especially true when it comes to the Bible, to the Sacred Scriptures. When we pick up a book, the medium of communication that we know as a book, as writing—well, it’s easy to assume that we know what’s going on, and yet we miss the point. I mean, when we pick up a newspaper, or read the news online, we know what genre we’re reading: this is an editorial, or this is an op-ed, this is the sports section, these are the comics, this is the weather. We know what’s true, we know how to interpret what we read, we get it. When we pick up a book we know this is a biography, this is a novel, this is a science textbook. But what about the Bible? I think a lot of confusion come from reading the Bible because of this simple fact: we don’t know what we’re reading, we don’t know the genre, we don’t understand the medium—but we assume that we do.

For example, when people begin to read the Bible, where do they begin? At the beginning, yeah! Why? Because that’s how you’re supposed to read a book, right? And so what do people run into first? The book of Genesis—oh boy! And when you begin to read Genesis, you read about God creating the world in seven days, yup. And when this is your first dive into the Bible, what do you immediately begin to think? Typically one of two things. One, you begin to think, “Oh, this is a fairy tale, a work of fiction.” Why? “Because I took a class about physics and evolution, and the world was definitely not made in seven days. I mean, where are the dinosaurs?” Yeah, one thing you immediately think: this doesn’t match up with our scientific understanding of things, so it must not be true! The other thing someone might think is, “Well, I guess to be a Christian I have to believe in young earth creationism, believe that the world was created in seven literal 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago.” You think that in order to believe the Bible is true you have to believe in something unscientific. These are apparently the only two options: it’s either an ancient science textbook that has been disproven, or it’s something I have to believe even though it seems wrong.

But this is the point! The Bible isn’t a modern science textbook, or a modern history book, or any of that! The Bible isn’t even just a book. It is a library of books; 73 books or scrolls written over a thousand year period by over 40 different authors and editors. And it was written in a bunch of different genres: narrative, prose, poetry, myth (and myth doesn’t mean fake), law codes, parables, apocalyptic. For example, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not a scientific textbook or a work of modern history, no, not at all. They are best described as mythic poetry, which does’t mean fake! It means that the truths they are revealing are so deep and profound, they have to be communicated in a particular way. Or take the Song of Songs: the author writes to his beloved, “Your eyes are doves” (1:15). Does he mean that she has doves in her eye sockets? Of course not! So sometimes it is easy to know the genre, but other times it’s not. And based on the number of debates about Genesis and creation, reading the Bible sometimes involves a lot of peeling back the layers of debates and things we think we know in order to get to the truth of what is being communicated. It is easy for us to read the Bible as if we’re listening to the radio and Orson Welles’ program comes on, and we think, “What’s real? What’s the truth?”

Ephphatha—Be Opened!

This is what I’m getting at: in order to hear, to be open to the Word of God, to what he is speaking to us—we need a bit of assistance. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to a baptism (hopefully you have!). But there is one part of the ritual, after the child is baptized, where they have the chrism oil smeared on their head, and a candle. But one thing the priest does is touch their ears and on their lips and prays, “The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak. May he soon touch your ears to receive his word and your mouth to proclaim his faith.” This is called the Ephphatha, and it comes from this scene that we hear about in our Gospel today. In this scene, just as in Baptism, our deafness isn’t so much about being physically deaf. There’s something deeper! What Jesus is getting at is, “Now you can hear the Word of God.” And this is the great challenge for us as well. To hear, to listen.

I mean, we are so blessed. Just think, the God of the universe, God himself wants to speak to us, to you! We have the awesome privilege of being able to listen to God, to hear his words to us. There is a wisdom that is being given to us that is greater than anything this world could even provide. And there is nothing as life-changing as this!

Our challenge: to listen, to be taught how to listen. For example, we heard all of these beautiful readings from the Bible today: Isaiah, James, Mark. But here’s the question: do you know where all of these fit in the story? We know Isaiah was a prophet, but what is a prophet, when did they live, what were they talking about? James: who is James? What is he writing about? Who is he writing to? Is he before Jesus, or after Jesus? And Mark: yeah, he’s writing about Jesus, but where are we at in Mark’s Gospel, what’s going on? If we don’t know the context or what is the broader story, we can miss the point. My favorite example is from a devotional calendar. It was one of those calendars that’s like a big pad of papers—one for each day of the year and you rip it away, right? And one quote was, “I will give you everything if you bow down and worship me.” Sounds beautiful, right? “Oh yeah, I should worship God.” But who said that line? Anyone? Satan, yeah. Satan says it to Jesus. If we don’t know the context or the broader story, we can easily miss the point.

And so I want to encourage you again: get involved in our introduction to the Bible this Fall. Groups begin this week—Walking with Purpose on Monday evenings, Men’s group on Wednesday mornings—or we can help you with your own group or even to do it on your own. Take this opportunity. Just like Jesus does in the Gospel today, he wants to take you off on your own, away from the noise and busyness and distraction of everything else, and there to give you a life-changing encounter with him, through his Sacred Word—to open you to his sacred word! When we begin to listen, to hear his voice, everything will change.