Community Parson: With Jesus, on the Way, from blindness to sight

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

With Jesus, on the Way, from blindness to sight

Proper 25 B

October 28, 2012

Job 42:1-6, 10-17

Psalm 34:1-8, 19-22

Mark 10:46-52

Seeing is believing. What you see is what you get. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Today, Jesus restores sight to a blind beggar. What is going on here? What does Jesus want us to see?

Two weeks ago it was the rich young man. Last week it was James and John. Today a beggar by the side of the road. In these three stories, who is the true disciple? Which one was truly blind, and which saw what was truly going on?

All during the Epiphany season -- you may or may not remember as far back as last winter -- we read stories of Jesus healing and teaching. Traveling through Galilee, he proclaimed that God’s rule was now here. Everything he did was to show that what people thought of as “the norm” was not the way it truly was. Isolated, poor, an outcast in society? Jesus showed that you were at the center of God’s care. Sick in body, mind or spirit? Your nature was restored to wholeness with God’s justice. Even the dead were brought back to life. And this was not just for a few people – it’s like “Save the Rain” in Onondaga County: everyone benefits, whether you would have lived next to that sewage treatment plant that didn’t have to be built or where you just benefited from better control over your water rate. In these stories from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was not acting as a prototype for Robin Hood, robbing from the rich, the secure, the privileged and the happy to give to the poor; right and wrong were not merely re-ordered: Jesus revealed the true order of the world as God created it to be, just as “save the rain” falls on the just and the unjust. It’s all right there, if you could only see it.

All of this terrific healing stuff Jesus did throughout Galilee has caught the attention of people with power and privilege who just don’t want things to change. Throughout the Gospel, we read rumblings of discontent from people who benefit from keeping things the way they are. Over and over Jesus tells the disciples this is not going to be easy; this is the Way of justice and wholeness and healing, yes; but it is also the Way which leads to suffering, and even death. It’s like what St. Paul will later write, the whole creation is groaning – as God’s order is revealed the old order is cracking, breaking, resisting with all its might.

The disciples don’t want to see this. The rich young man, devout as he is, doesn’t want to see this. James and John, who just want some of the privileges of the new age, certainly don’t want to see this. Riches, privilege and power are not Jesus’ to grant, but those closest to Jesus just don’t seem to want to see it that way at all. Jesus is on the Way to Jerusalem. Jericho is the last stop before the entry into Jerusalem, riding on the donkey, the beginning of the Passion, the Way of the Cross. Who will go with Jesus on this way? Who is the true disciple?

Bartimaeus sits by the side of the road, blind, with his beggar’s cloak as a sign of his station in life. He, like the other people Jesus has healed, is not only poor and disabled, but a social outcast – someone who can never better himself or pull himself up by his bootstraps. The whole system of who has money and land and family and status and health and a future will never let him have any of those things. Unlike the rich young man, he does not ask about eternal life. Indeed, in his eagerness to approach Jesus, he leaves behind his cloak, his one possession of any value. Unlike James and John, he does not seek out “top posts in the new administration,” but asks only for mercy, for sight. And what is Bartimaeus’ response to receiving sight? To follow Jesus on the Way as the true disciple, the one who really sees what is going on.

But the other side, those – even those friends of Jesus – who resist the demands of discipleship? What of them? What are the costs of not seeing? Of not being able to part with possessions? Of not taking that risk to follow Jesus? Of not leaping up off the side of the road joyful but turning away sad? What is unbelief but despair, despair that nothing will ever really change, despair that paralyzes us and locks us into what is and keeps us from seeing what could be, what God wants to be.

But really: the Gospel of Mark is not about them, way back there in history. The Gospel is about us: do we see what is going on? After all, the characters in the Gospel of Mark do not know the ending of the story. They do not know that through the suffering, through the passion, through the death on the cross that something else happens. In fact, we are more like Bartimaeus: once we were blind but now we see, and we see that following Jesus on the Way, to the other side of the cross, through all the disappointments and losses and griefs and sorrows, through trials and errors, through sickness and health, through leaking roofs and crumbling foundations: on the other side of the cross is life abundant. It’s like being able to swim once again in a clean and clear Onondaga Lake – impossible, but within reach. Do we see it yet? It’s just coming into focus …

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Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.