Scriptures: Jeremiah
31:7-9 Psalm 34:1-8 Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52
In our Gospel readings this month, Jesus has been making his
way to Jerusalem. Along the way, he told
his disciples three times that in Jerusalem, he would be arrested, tortured and
killed, and would rise on the third day – though the disciples likely didn’t
have the slightest idea what that last part meant. At the same time, the disciples were
jockeying for position, engaging in intrigues and power struggles. They
encountered a young man who had everything a young man could have asked
for…..and yet still felt that something was missing from his life. Jesus told him that in order to enter eternal
life, he would have to leave behind his wealth, everything that comforted and
satisfied him – and for the rich young man, that price of admission was just
too high.
Today, Jesus and the disciples reach Jericho, their last
stop before Jerusalem. Some of our
longtime members may remember singing, “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,
and the walls came a’tumblin down.” But
in Jesus’ day, Jericho was a dangerous place, full of robbers – we may remember
that in the story of the Good Samaritan, it was a Jewish man traveling from
Jerusalem to Jericho who was set upon by robbers along the way.
But in today’s reading, at Jericho we encounter, not Joshua,
not robbers, not the priest or the Levite or the Good Samaritan, but a blind
beggar named Bartimaeus. He sat by the
side of the road with his cloak spread before him to catch whatever coins were
tossed his way by passers by. Mark’s
account of Jesus’ time in Jericho is very brief; we’re told that Jesus and the
disciples entered Jericho, and the next thing we’re told is that Jesus left
with his disciples and a large crowd in tow.
We’re not told what Jesus did in Jericho, but the mention that a crowd
was following him on the way out tells us that whatever he had said or done, it
had gotten people’s attention.
Meanwhile, Bartimaeus was by the side of the road, and while Bartimaeus’
eyes had failed him, his ears were working just fine, thank you very much. He could hear a commotion and asked what was
going on, and he was told that Jesus was passing his way. He must previously have heard of the
miraculous healings Jesus had done earlier in his ministry – and now Jesus was
passing his way. And so he started
shouting, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And the next words Bartimaeus heard, not from
Jesus but from the crowd were “Shut up!”
Perhaps not only from the crowd but from the disciples – at any rate,
we’re not told that the disciples did anything to stop the hail of “Shut ups”
raining down on Bartimaeus. But
Bartimaeus wasn’t going to be intimidated – his eyes had failed him, but just
as his ears worked just fine, his lungs and his mouth worked even better, so
instead he shouted louder, over the voices seeking to silence him, “Son of
David, have mercy on me!” And Jesus
heard him. We’re told that Jesus stood
still – the procession that had been following him stopped in place – and Jesus
said, “Call him here.” And now where
Bartimaeus had heard angry voices, he heard encouraging ones, “Take heart; he
is calling you.” Hey, Bartimaeus, you
got Jesus’ attention! We read that,
“Throwing off his cloak” – the cloak that had kept in warm by night and which
he had used to beg in the daytime – “Throwing off his cloak, he sprang to his
feet.” Jesus asked him, “What do you
want me to do for you?” And Bartimaeus
replied, “My teacher, let me see again.”
So we learn Bartimaeus had not always been blind; he had once been able
to see, but now he couldn’t….until that moment. Jesus said, “Go, your faith has made you
well.” We’re told that immediately Bartimaeus regained his sight – and he
followed Jesus on the way, leaving his cloak behind, because he would no longer
be begging for his daily bread.
I wonder what it was like for Bartimaeus when he was able to
see again. Remember, he had once been
able to see before, and so before his healing, he had memories of what the
world had once looked like to him. I
wonder whether those memories had faded as the darkness engulfed his field of
vision, or whether they had become even more vivid as he struggled to hold onto
them against the darkness. And while he
was overjoyed to see again, I wonder how he responded to what he saw. Voices that he recognized connected with
faces that now looked older – faces now heavily lined with age, hair gone gray –
older than what he remembered from before.
While the major landmarks of his world likely hadn’t changed, perhaps
Jericho was now a larger city than what he remembered from before. While he was overjoyed to see again, might
Bartimaeus in some cases have preferred his memories of the past to the
realities to which his eyes were now opened?
This text from Mark comes up in the lectionary every three
years, and always on the last Sunday in October. Since in our tradition the last Sunday of
October is Reformation Sunday, in past years I’ve tried to connect the
restoration of Bartimaeus’ sight to Reformers’ vision of a more faithful church
– and how the Reformers, like Bartimaeus, were shouted down by those in
authority. In so doing, I’ve also
preached that the work of Reformation is never done, that more than once the heirs
to the Reformation themselves needed to be reformed – and those heirs
themselves shouted down those who later pointed out the need for ongoing change
- that we in the church have been called
time and again over the centuries from our captivity to the past and from our
self-serving dreams to the vision of the reign of God as proclaimed by Jesus
and the earliest Christians.
However, in those past years, we hadn’t just gone through a
week in which pipe bombs were mailed to political leaders and a news
organization. In those past years, we
hadn’t just gone through a day in which a synagogue in our own state had been invaded
by a gunman armed, in the words of a statement from the national offices of the
United Church of Christ, with an assault weapon, several guns, and hate. At the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s
Squirrel Hill neighborhood, while worship was in progress, including a bris
ceremony celebrating new life, the birth of a baby boy, weaponized hatred
invaded what should have been safe space, as at least 11 were killed and six
others, including four police officers, were injured.[1] We’ve
seen the events of this past week unfold in our media, seen things we’ve never
wanted to see, things that once we see them, we can’t un-see them, as the
saying goes. But we wish we could, or at
least I wish I could. it’s tempting, at
least to me, to want to ask Jesus to do a reverse Bartimaeus, to plead with
Jesus and to ask Jesus, “I can’t deal with all this. I don’t want to see this. My teacher, make me blind again.”
Bartimaeus was blind from natural causes – perhaps from age,
perhaps from disease. But there are many
ways to be blind, and I think we all – every last one of us, including me -
live with a certain amount of self-imposed blindness. Connected as we are around the globe not only
by radio and television but the internet and social media, our human minds just
can’t begin to take in the full enormity of all that is happening, for good and
ill, around the globe, in our country, or even in our city. Our brains aren’t
designed for the task, plain and simple. Indeed, we would have to be God in order to process
all that, and we’re not, so we can’t. We
naturally focus on what is in front of us, and so the death of one child whose
parents we know impacts us far more than the deaths of tens of thousands of
children around the globe from hunger, war, and weather-related
calamities. It’s been said that the
death of one child near us is a tragedy, while the death of tens of thousands of
children across the globe is a statistic.
However, sometimes we turn away even from unpleasant
realities that are right in our face, because we don’t want to deal with the
implications. If your home has ever been
invaded by pests such as fleas or roaches, intellectually you may know that if
you see a flea on your leg or a roach skittering across your kitchen floor,
there are many more hiding in the carpet or walls nearby. And yet you don’t want to deal with it, even
though you also know the situation will become so much worse if you ignore it,
and so sooner or later – hopefully sooner - you call the exterminator. Or I would refer to coal miners who carried a
canary into the mines with them, knowing that if the canary died from the
effects of toxic air in the mines, they’d be next if they stayed much longer. So the death of the canary pointed to
something larger.
It’s like that in our community life, in our national
life. The events of this week, the bombs
sent earlier in the week, yesterday’s shootings, horrific as they are, point
beyond themselves to a greater sickness in our national life. Look on them as dead canaries, telling us
that the atmosphere in our country has gone toxic. For example, Robert Bowers, the gunman whose
weaponized hatred claimed lives at the Tree of Life Synagogue, was consumed by
hatred of Jews. It was an obsession with
him. But he was also triggered by immigration
in general, and more specifically recent news commentary about the caravan of
immigrants making its way northward through Mexico. He had heard about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society, HIAS for short – a group that lives out the mandate in the Hebrew
Scriptures, what in our Bibles is called the Old Testament, from Leviticus
19:33-34, which states in part that “the alien among you shall be at the
citizen among you.” Mr. Bowers thought,
rightly or wrongly, I don’t know, that HIAS was aiding and assisting the
caravan, and more broadly that Jews were bringing what Bowers called “hostile
invaders” to dwell among us. Hours
before heading to the synagogue, locked and loaded, Bowers wrote on the social
media website “Gab”, ““HIAS likes to
bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get
slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”[2]
Bartimaeus told Jesus, “My teacher, let me see again.” I said earlier that after this week I’m
tempted to tell Jesus, “My teacher, let me go blind again.” It’s a choice facing each of us – seeing,
with all the untold beauty and horror that may entail, or blindness. Which choice will we make? Some have deliberately chosen blindness. In some of the fever swamps of the internet
and elsewhere, some speculated that the attack on the synagogue was a so-called
false flag attack made by Jews but blamed on others in order to create sympathy
for the Jewish community.[3] Similar speculation took place about the bomb
mailings, that they were false flag attacks; in fact, a coworker at my day job
made a $100 bet to anyone who would take him up on it that the pipe bomb
mailings were false flag attacks – just hours before the arrest was made of the
perpetrator. And more broadly, many look on these incidents
merely as one-off attacks by isolated individuals – which, from where I sit,
looks a bit like speculating that the dead canary in the miner’s cage just happened
to die of old age. Or perhaps treating
that dead canary as if it were still alive, like the supposedly pining parrot
in Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch.
Much of today’s political discourse is driven by hatred and
fear. The political atmosphere in our country has
gone toxic. Dead canaries abound, and
not just from the two attacks this week.
But, as Scripture reminds us over
and over, faith, hope, and love abide, and the greatest of these is love – and
perfect love casts out fear. I’m not
speaking of the soft, romantic love of flowers and candlelight, but a tough and
durable love that reminds that our lives are connected in what the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail called “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”[4], that “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”[5], that finally we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. It is true that we are called upon to speak
truth to entrenched power and to confront injustice, even if it means whipping
a few moneychangers and tipping over a few tables. In my own modest way, I’d like to think I’ve
done that myself from time to time – I’ve been known to attend a protest or
march occasionally – even though I’m more likely to bring a sign than a whip. It’s a very different thing entirely to
threaten the lives of our opponents, however reprehensible we may find
them. There is a clear and bright line
marking the difference between political advocacy and street protests and civil
disobedience on one hand, and murder of political opponents on the other. If we as a nation get to a place where we can’t
respect that clear, bright line in our heart of hearts, then we as a nation truly
have gone blind.
Bartimaeus asked Jesus, “My teacher, let me see again.” And Jesus said, “Go, your faith has made you
well.” May God’s faith, hope, and love
heal us from the toxicity that swirls around us, restore our health, and heal
our souls. Amen.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting.html
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-suspect-threatened-jewish-groups-pushed-migrant-caravan-n925256
[3]
For example, http://themillenniumreport.com/2018/10/false-flag-mass-shooting-pittsburgh-synagogue-targeted-by-deep-state-with-another-white-male-patsy/
[4] https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf
[5]
Ibid
No comments:
Post a Comment