October 25, 2015
Texts: Mark 10:46-52
Jeremiah 31:7-9
Our text begins with a blind beggar sitting beside the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. Jesus and his disciples, followed by a crowd, come along the same road, and in response to the blind man’s insistence Jesus speaks to him in a way that changes his condition and his life.
Let’s follow the details, both those spoken and unspoken. Let’s start with Bartimaeus, the blind man. Let’s try to get under his skin into his situation and his longing. Let’s imagine ourselves as Bartimaeus.
He is not a lump of clay. He has feelings. He has a history. He has a story. He has longing. Apparently at an earlier point in his life he could see. Something happened to take away his sight. Mark doesn’t supply the past history but gives us enough details to get a feel for this guy.
He is fully alive. He can hear what people are saying. He can sense what is going on around him on a given day. He is a Jew and he understands in that culture of the time his blindness cancels out his rights and dignity as a Jew. It was generally believed that one’s blindness was the punishment of God. As a result he was not permitted to worship with his countrymen in the Temple. His blindness excludes him. His blindness marks him as a person to be shunned by folks who are blessed with the privileges of normalcy. Today some people come up against as this “white privilege.” This exclusion takes different forms all over the world still today.
Inside this man something rages – a rage for life, for normalcy, for inclusion to be loved as a person of value, treated with respect. We see that rage, that energy, in his reactions in the story. He hears that Jesus of Nazareth, this new beacon of hope, this prophet who seems to be turning the world upside down, is coming down that very road, surrounded by a lot of people. The blind man raises his voice as loud as he can, trying to get Jesus’ attention. If he can only get Jesus’ attention, who knows what might happen. He shouts over and over, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” People standing nearby consider him a pest and try to shush him, but his cry for mercy reaches Jesus. Jesus stops in his tracks and tells his disciples to call the source of that voice to hm. When they tell Bartimaeus Jesus is calling, he leaps up and runs as best and fast as a blind man can to Jesus with the disciples steering him.
As I said a moment ago, this blind beggar is no lump of clay. In him is a rage for life and this rage empowers and compels him to go to Jesus.
The fierce language of the poet Dylan Thomas’s ode to his dying father comes to mind. Its closing line reads: “Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Here the poet brings together resignation to death and rage for life and calls upon his father to choose the latter even as he is being enveloped by the former. Perhaps it’s my own age, perhaps something more, but that line challenges me to the quick. I dare say that in his lament Dylan Thomas was speaking to the whole modern world.
In this age and culture we are daily bombarded by images of the dying of light. We see them nightly on television news, every morning in the newspaper, and unceasingly in scholarly articles and books of fiction. Reports from the Middle East, the broken relationship between black and white, the growing inequity between rich and poor, the as-yet-unanswered challenge of climate change, and the polarization of our Congress and country leave us no escape from the dying of the light.
What gets far less attention is its opposite—the rage and passion for life which I heard in the recent debate of Democratic candidates for president and what we all noticed in the recent visit of Pope Francis and his address to Congress.
Let’s stop here for a moment and ask: Where is your rage for life? Where is mine? Is it alive and beating in your chest or have you become so resigned to the dying of the light in the world or in your private life that, if Jesus were to come by, you would ignore him? Whatever your state of mind this morning, I urge you to let your rage for life come to the surface.
Let’s go back to the story. When the hope-driven, rage-for-life-driven man reaches Jesus, Jesus calmly asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”
Note the shift here – to a two-way encounter between a rage-for-life-filled blind man and Jesus, in Mark’s view the rage-for-life Son of God. Who is this Son of God? He is the agent of God, the revealer of God, the human face of God. Whenever we are in the company of Jesus, we are in the company of God, the power under, behind, over and beneath Jesus—the rage-for-life-filled Creator God.
John 3:16 comes to mind: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Reduced by his blindness to begging by the side of the road day after day, Bartimaeus is perishing in his blindness. He wants to live now. He has a rage to live now. He cannot settle for some shadowy afterlife in a distant future. The scuttlebutt he hears on the street about Jesus tells him that this agent of God will understand the rage for life in a marked, rejected man like himself and would help him. In the larger story told by Mark in the next four chapters (11-15), which is the Passion Story, Jesus himself is marked and rejected because his vision of God’s solidarity with this world is deeper than the temple hierarchy and the Romans can tolerate.
In response to Jesus’ question “What do you want me to do for you?” he replies, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus responds, “Go, your faith has made you well.” “Your faith”—the faith of this despised and rejected man of the streets has made him well.
I was talking with Kent Beduhn Thursday night about the music for today and Kent, who had been mulling over the text this week said, “The thing I don’t get in this passage is: How does Bartimaeus’s faith make him well?”
Let’s look again at the text. Obviously, given Jesus’ answer, faith in this instance is something under the blind man’s control. In a number of places in scripture faith is a gift, an enabling. In this text it is Bartimaeus’s blindness that is beyond his control. His faith is another matter. It seems to me that his faith comes into play when he hears and responds to Jesus’ summons to come to him. I can imagine something going off in Bartimaeus’ mind in the form of a powerful, loving summons, “Come here in your blindness. Let your rage for life loose by coming here.”
Clearly, faith in this story is the blind man’s decision to answer a summons, the summons to come to Jesus, trusting in his love and his solidarity with people like himself. Mark closes the story saying to the reader, “Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.”
I invite you to retain this story in your memory bank and, when it pushes unexpectedly into your consciousness (as I predict it will, probably when you least expect), let it speak to you in the situation you face at that time. This story and countless other Bible stories have the potential to become for you and me the “word of God” and, as such, a lifting in that situation of your and my blindness. Remember the Lectionary text from the Epistles two weeks ago on October 11, Hebrews 4:12ff “…the word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, penetrating to the very division of soul and spirit … all things lie open and exposed before the eyes of him with whom we have to reckon.”
In the story Jesus gives the blind man his sight back by the act of speaking. In other examples of healing, he lays on hands or does something else. Here Jesus simply speaks and attributes the healing that results to the recipient’s faith—pointing in the case to Bartimaeus’ reception of the word of God.
Yesterday I was meeting with Deb Koch who read the scripture earlier and is in the Discipleship Year program. She has asked me to be her mentor, which I happily accepted. Yesterday she said, “One of our sessions I would like to hear what you think about being part of an entirely lay-led congregation.”
It is interesting to me that David Hilfiker and I were having that very conversation on Thursday. We were comparing what it was like when we both came to the Church of the Saviour when the church had a full-time professional minister, Gordon Cosby. That was his calling and his life’s work, and we were fortunate to have had a time of being led by such an able and creative leader and pastor. David and I then compared then to now not only for 8th Day but also for most of the Church of the Saviour faith communities.
Back then when things became kind of flat and Gordon and others began to notice a dying of the light, Gordon would come up with some new initiative or radical change of structure that would shake the church up and launch a new beginning. The last one came in the late 1970s with what we called the New Lands vision. This vision led to Gordon pushing out of the nest all that were willing to go, saying in effect, “Now is the time for you to create and build your own churches, and how you do it is up to you.” At that point we changed from being a professional-minister-led church to being small, entirely lay-led churches.
This decision to vacate the nest released a lot of energy and creativity. There is no doubt about that, but at the same time it left us with a dilemma Christian churches through the ages have faced, which is how do we discern the leading of Jesus such that we are able to follow him? Church history tells us loud and clear that this reoccurrence of Jesus’ healing, liberating speech comes most often through a serious engagement with the written word of God and the intervention of the Holy Spirit.
Some people thrive more within a called, professional-minister-led congregation. Other people thrive more in a lay-led congregation. The individual has to make the choice of what works best for him or her and their family and which seems like God’s calling. Both have been and are being used by God and blessed by God.
However, both must deal head-on with the tough issue of spiritual flatness, protracted blindness, inconsistent faith and the dying of the light. This issue is always with us: How can we hear the word of God and discern the leading of God through the Holy Spirit? No church can be casual or cavalier about this issue without paying a big price.
How do I answer Deb’s question? My answer is that at this point in my life and for the last 40 plus years I have felt called to a lay-led congregation. Deb and I will discuss that at more length. Right now, the question for us in this room is how do we unleash the God-given rage for life within us that gets us to Jesus and puts us and keeps us on his way?
In the course of this sermon I have mentioned three people in this room who have helped me significantly with this sermon whether they know it or not – Kent Beduhn, Deb Koch and David Hilfiker. This is the third draft I have written out in full for today. In the providence of God and I believe the leading of the Holy Spirit, David read carefully and responded to both of the two previous drafts and informed me in a loving and honest way that neither, as written, was hitting the mark.
As a result I started over yesterday morning about 10 o’clock after reading David’s critique of my second draft. Following a lot of David’s suggestions and Kent and Deb’s questions, I sat down with paper and pen and the sermon virtually wrote itself. I don’t know what you think about it, but I feel good about this work and I thank David for loving me enough to tell me his truth which got me going on a fresh start. For me the point of this experience is simply this. They say “It takes a village to raise a child.” This experience tells me that it takes a community to hear the word of God for us and our situation.
Folks, we have a challenge. A single charismatic figure like Gordon is no longer around. This means we have to take on the leadership he provided by taking up this challenge as a lay led community utilizing to the full all the Spirit gives us. One of those gifts is the Bible and the tool of the lectionary to push us through the whole Bible in its incredible depth and breath. Our hope is grounded in the promise declared by an English preacher a century ago: “There is more light yet to break forth from God’s word.” I suggest we explore seriously learning together as a community how to listen to and discern in scripture the word of God summoning us to life and service to God’s mission to the world. It seems to me deepening our use of the lectionary scriptures in private and in common worship is a promising place to begin. Let’s explore this further.
God bless.