"Courage for New Vision"
Isaiah 43:18-21; Mark 10:46-52
One
of the major themes in Mark's gospel is how spiritually blind the disciples
were. Last week we heard Mark's account
of how James and John were so spiritually blind that, in their grasping for
worldly privilege, they asked Jesus to let them sit on his right and left sides
in glory. They didn't seem to know there
was anything wrong with their vision.
In today’s gospel lesson, we find
Bartimaeus sitting by the side of the road, begging for his living. He doesn't have a perfect understanding of
who Jesus is. But he knows what he needs. Even though Bartimaeus is physically blind,
he's clearly focused on what he wants more than anything else in the world. He wants to be able to see. And so, when he hears that Jesus of Nazareth
is coming down the road, Bartimaeus calls out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on
me!"
Now, in asking to be healed, Bartimaeus is taking a risk.
It'll be the end of his old life.
If he regains his sight,
he won't be able to sit by the road and beg for a living. He might see some things he won't want to
see. His new life will be strange and new.
Mark holds Bartimaeus up as a model
of faith. He knew what he needed and
wanted more than anything else in the world.
He had the courage to see strange, new things. He believed that Jesus could heal him. So—even though there were people trying to discourage
him, telling him to be quiet-- Bartimaeus dared to cry out to Jesus-- over and over-- and ask for vision. "Let me SEE again."
And just like that. Just words.
No mud or spittle this time, like the last time Mark told about Jesus healing a blind man.[1] Not even a touch. In the blinking of an eye, Bartimaeus can see! His faith has made him well!
"Go your way," Jesus tells him. But Bartimaeus doesn't go his way. Right then he decides that Jesus' way will be
his way, and he chooses to walk with Jesus, on the way.
His faith and his new vision enable him to follow Jesus as his disciple.
"Go your way," Jesus says.
Jesus doesn't force or coerce us.
He invites us to choose freely which way we go.
After years of blindness, I imagine
there were places Bartimaeus might have wanted to go... things he wanted to see. Yet it's clear in the story that immediately
Bartimaeus becomes a disciple and
follows Jesus on the way. It’s as if—once
he can really see-- there's no other
way.
From earliest times in the church,
restoring of sight has been a metaphor for the new life experienced in
Christ and for spiritual discernment. In the early days of the church, the act of baptism
was referred to in Greek as “enlightenment.”
The story of the man born blind and the story of blind Bartimaeus became
part of the curriculum of instruction for new church members.
When we open ourselves to Christ’s
healing grace, we begin to see things differently. As we begin to see the world through Christ’s
eyes-- the eyes of love-- our values are changed... and our priorities are re-ordered. We’re re- formed.
Today on Reformation Sunday, we remember
our history as a church... to remember
that our Reformed tradition is a living tradition. One of the great watchwords
of the Reformed tradition is “Semper
Reformanda": The church Reformed,
always being reformed, by the Holy Spirit, according to the word of God.
Reformation Sunday commemorates the
occasion in 1517 when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in
Wittenberg, Germany. Just as
God worked through the reformers who came before Martin Luther and John
Calvin-- Jan Hus and the Czech Brethren,
the Waldensians, John Wycliffe, and the Hussites, as well as those who came after them-- Zwingli, John Knox, and others, God has continued to work through the Spirit
during the whole sweep of Christian history.
In several recent books, Phyllis
Tickle describes the time we live in now as “The Great Emergence,” and offers a
big-picture theory of how Christianity is changing and why. In her book The Great Emergence, Tickle observed that about every 500 years
the church cleans out its attic and has a “rummage sale.”
Going backward in time 500 years
before our
time is the Great Reformation. Five hundred
years prior to the Great
Reformation is the Great Schism, around 1054, when the Greek or Eastern Orthodox branch
of Christianity and the Roman branch separated.
Five hundred years prior to that
takes us back to Gregory the Great, who became pope in a time of total upheaval
following the fall of the Roman Empire… a time of bitter dissension, when the
Oriental branch of Christianity—Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syrian-- was
separated from both Western and Eastern Christianity. Pope Gregory is known as “Great” because he
was able to build on the work of St. Benedict in the monastic movement in building
a kind of church-political coherence of monasteries and convents that were
centers of learning and service, and that would protect, preserve, and
characterize the Christian movement for the next five centuries through the
Dark Ages.
If we look back approximately 500
years before that, we’re looking at what Tickle and others call the Great
Transformation 2,000 years ago-- the age
that gave us the Christian faith in the first place.
I’m grateful to Tickle for her big-picture
framework of how the Spirit of God has worked over the centuries to reform the
Christian faith, and for how she shows how the re-formation in the church has
always been related to the political, economic, and social upheavals that were
also taking place.
Tickle and others point to
historical forces that combined to produce the Great Reformation: the invention of the printing press, the rise
of nation-states, corruption in religious institutions, and the emergence of an
educated elite. Every religion is tied
to the culture in which it exists, just as it informs the society. Five hundred years after the Great
Reformation, we are experiencing corresponding challenges in communications,
politics, religion, and scholarship.[2] Think of the changes in our society in just
the past few decades!
This
is a whole new time in the church, and for a lot of people it can be
scary. In a major study released earlier
this year, the Pew Research Center describes a “changing U.S. Religious
Landscape,” in which Christians have been delining sharply as a share of the
population, while unaffiliated and other faiths continue to grow.
This
is the context we live in. I agree with
Diana Butler Bass when she writes: in
this new context, “we need to know who we are with great clarity and personal
commitment. At the same time, we need to be able to love
our neighbors and work beyond faith boundaries to create a new shared sense of
common good. This will call for a
different sort of church than the one we knew in the centuries that came before.”[3]
The church is being called to a new
way of life. We’re being called to
re-create our identity building on the wisdom of the past, and to embrace the
questions of an emerging future in which Christians may be a minority in a
pluralistic society. Part of the good
news of this is that Christians have often been more faithful and creative when
we are not in charge of the society.
On this Reformation Sunday, we could
celebrate what happened 500 years ago…and then hold on for dear life to the way
we’re comfortable with doing church. We
could do
that. But I don’t think that’s a faithful way
to celebrate the church’s journey in faith.
We live in a broken and fearful
world, and we could find so much to be afraid of.
As a congregation, we could retreat into our familiar ways of doing
church, and try to find comfort and security in being a nice and friendly little
congregation.
Or we can ask Jesus to give us the
ability to see things in new, fresh ways.
We can hear the call to “take heart”—to have courage—and follow Jesus
gratefully into new opportunities and possibilities.
We can remember how God spoke to
faithful people in a hard time, saying, “Look.
I’m doing something new. Don’t
you perceive it?”
God is still working on us, leading
us further into the truth. The church
does make progress. It comes through the
painful process of repentance...
changing our minds... and
correcting our practice.
The good news is that-- in God’s presence-- miracles do happen. And so, my friends, take heart. Do we have the courage to see?
Jesus offers us the gift of vision,
so we can see to follow him. He invites us to come and see the world through HIS eyes... to see new possibilities... and have new values and priorities, both as
individuals and as the church. He
invites us to have our eyes opened to the truth of God’s redeeming love... and to follow him in an adventure of faith.
And so, my friends, take heart!
Amen.
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
October 26, 2015
[1] Mark
8:22-25
[2] Diana
Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story
(Harper One, 2009), p. 154.
[3] Diana
Butler Bass, “What Can the Church Become?”
Posted October 25, 2012 at http://seaburynext.wordpress.com/
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