Scripture: Mark 10:46-52
Given on 10.28.2018
Being of a certain age and casting my vision back into my childhood, I can remember being Presbyterian in a town in which at least the mold of being a Presbyterian was thought to be indicative both about your standing in the community, and about your perceived financial health. Our town, like most little southern towns was neatly divided between Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, with a smattering of other denominations. And while there is a certain amount of ebb and flow that happens in churches, sometimes the Baptists have all the inertia towards growth and life, sometimes the Methodists, when I was growing up while under the leadership of my friend and mentor Sam Shumate, it was my church that possessed that movement and that energy. We were the “it” church in town. We could brag that we had doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, factory managers, and politicians who called our church home. And this status surely had a direct impact on the manner in which the adults in the church understood themselves but, more indirectly, it affected the young folks of the congregation. There was pride in being a member of the church. Now, pride in church is often times a good thing. It is crucial for folks to have pride in and love for their church. This is where folks come to meet Jesus face-to-face, come to find community and pride leads folks to take that part of the ministry into the community. But, especially with children and young adults, who at times don’t know how to best walk the line between pride and exclusivism, there was always the potential for cliques to form and for the lines of demarcation that are drawn on Sunday mornings all around town continue through the week, until something like the Jets and the Sharks (minus the dancing, of course) begins to happen during the school week, at the pool, on the basketball court. A certain amount of standoffishness towards those who were not Presbyterian can quickly invade those areas in which community interactions take place. Wholly separate from church, one can see this phenomenon play out in the schools. From an increasingly early age, kids tend to create circles of friends that are difficult to break into. So there are, at any given school, the jocks, the band geeks, the nerds, the goths, the cool kids, the Jesus freaks, and the otherwise strange folks who don’t fit in any of the groups who tend to form their own group. In a similar fashion, at church, as antiquated as it sounds now, we formed at tight circle of Presbyterianism and often wouldn’t let anyone in who wasn’t the right kind of person. And then came the arrival at the church of Adam.
Somewhere around cub scouts, we had an odd kid that none of us knew begin to show up at most of the youth functions. His mother would pull up to the side door of the church and push him out and keep going. His name was Adam. Adam, did not go to the same school as any of us, whereas we all went to the schools in the town, he was a country kid who attended one of the rural schools. (though, as you know, in the small town south the difference between the town school and the country school is pretty minimal) While virtually all of my friends lived in one of 3 or 4 neighborhoods, Adam lived on the edge of the large swamp that sits to the south and west of my hometown. My dad, at the time, was a banker, my best friend’s parents were a lawyer, a factory manager, a teacher, and the owner of the largest auction house in the county. Adam’s dad drove a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what his mother did. Adam bore the signs of being both poor and rural. He spoke with a much thicker accent than did most of the rest of us. He often showed signs of playing in the mud and dirt that was down on the swamp. He often wore worker’s boots rather than the newest athletic shoes. And he generally didn’t fit in to the mold of person that we had created at the church. And I’m honestly not sure if it was the manner in which the adults leaders interacted with him that made him feel a seamless part of the group, but Adam continued to come to just about every church function that he could be at and slowly but surely he found a place for himself at the church. And then a funny thing happened. As I got to know him and his family I discovered that I liked both him and them. His mother had an odd sense of humor but was incredibly kind. His father took time to hang out with his kids whenever he wasn’t on a delivery and was able to score us kids Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies from his truck on a fairly regular basis. By the time I left my hometown, Adam and I had been on camping trips together, he had spent the night at my house, had come to birthday parties. What I didn’t realize at the time was that part of being a follower of Christ means always making room for the one without a space and seeing that person as you brother or sister just by their sheer presence in the world.
Jesus and his disciples are walking through the city of Jericho and by this point in the story, there was a great deal of commotion and attention that was paid to Jesus whenever he would come to a community. People would often surround Jesus in hopes of hearing that word from God that they desperately needed to hear, to find that peace that surpasses all understanding, and to find healing from all that burdens them spiritually and physically. And with this commotion, with this attention, came a certain degree of respect garnered by Jesus. When he would talk all the people around him would fall silent and listen as if the whole of their lives depended on the words that he spoke. There was a quiet reverence offered by the people all around him because, in many ways, Jesus was teaching the people to find church, to find spirit, to find God all around them and so, worship and prayer was no longer limited to the synagogue, the Temple, God’s spirit could be found everywhere. And in the midst of Jesus’s words, in the midst of Jesus showing folks the eruption of the Realm of God all around them, they discovered that the whole of the cosmos was alive with holiness and all they could do was sit quietly in the moment and be blessed. At least, that was how it was supposed to go. It was supposed to be a moment of shared holiness, a moment of shared community, in which all the people could see the spirit of God all around them and wasn’t this amazing and we could stay here, literally, forever, until, on that day, as if out of nowhere, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” We’ve all had those times in which the solemnity of the moment has been shattered by the voice of one who doesn’t realize that we are supposed to be solemn in our passage from one instance to another. If you are a parent, you certainly have had the experience of reading or praying or meditating or sleeping only to have your child come crashing into the experience. And so we can understand the measure of frustration experienced by the crowd when this blind beggar man is invading “their” space and acting in a manner that is deemed unacceptable. And so they try to quiet him. The bible tells us that they “sternly ordered him to be quiet.” But this only emboldened the man all the more and he called out even louder, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And you can almost see the look on everyone’s face as this old blind man is screaming out at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” That look of embarrassment mixed with anger as they try and try, in vain, to make the man be quiet and to act in a manner judged to be proper. And can you imagine the shocked look on folks’ faces when Jesus, making his way through the crowd came to a screeching halt and asked for the man to be brought forward and upon his arrival asks the man what he most wants in his life. And we see that all this old, broken, blind beggar wants is to see again. And Jesus, looking on him with compassion, tells him to go, that his faith has made him well again and immediately, the blind beggar could see again and he immediately joins the crowd that is following Jesus along the road.
I am always struck by this passage. I am struck because at the heart of this story are the actions of a man who doesn’t know how to fit in with the rest of the crowd as they wind their way through the streets of Jericho. He doesn’t know that you aren’t supposed to holler at such a venerated man as Jesus as he is making his way past him. He doesn’t know that he’s not supposed to waste the rabbi’s time with ridiculous requests of sight. He doesn’t know. I am struck by the callous response of the crowds. The one’s who try to silence him. To keep him from bothering Jesus. I am struck by their harsh response to not bother Jesus. And I am struck by the compassion shown to the man by Jesus. The care and concern that responds not as the people in the crowd do, but as God does. Accepting, loving, healing, and making whole and holy again. The man acted differently from all the rest of the crowd, but, in that difference, found the new life that he was seeking and with that new life, we are told, he followed Jesus as he left.
A few weeks ago, right before I left for paternity leave, the session of this church spent a number of hours meeting and discussing the mission of this congregation and we began with a single question, “who do we want to reach out to and invite into this space?” And in answering this question a shared vision emerged throughout the words and responses of the whole of the group. We want to reach out to those that have been forgotten, ignored, disregarded, or hurt by other churches in the area. We want to reach out to the blind in our midst that cry out from the side of the road asking for a restoration of sight. We want to invite in the one that wants to be unburdened of the brokenness that we each so often carry and welcomed to follow Jesus on his journey with us. We want to welcome the one that questions her faith, the one that has been hurt by the rigidness of church in the past and just wants to try and find healing from his spiritual wounds. We want to be a community of acceptance for folks who just need someone, anyone, to care. From that moment of shared vision, emerged in my head a dream that I have had for church for as long as I can remember. We should seek to be a church of the misfits. A church that welcomes the stranger, the disinherited, the forgotten about, the abused, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the blind, the poor, the oppressed, the captives, the addicted, the lost sheep, the broken, the sinful, the struggling, the one’s that no one else cares about. We should be intentional about welcoming all those folks into this place and then we should work to be fully inclusive in our efforts to be community with them. For we have woven into the fabric of this church, a welcoming spirit that is unrivaled by any other church of which I have been a part. We are kind and inviting to the one who comes into our midst, to the one that sits next to us in the pews, the one prays with us, the one that sings with us. What would that look like to take that kind of welcoming spirit, that kind of love and acceptance out into the world and offer it as the gospel of Jesus Christ to each one we meet? What would it look like to allow all the walls that we construct between one another to fall away as we see the unity that is in the holy spirit that dwells in each of us? What would it look like if we said we don’t care, who you are, what you have done, what you believe, we just want to share in the family of Christ with you? Can you imagine what the world might look like if all that divides us was washed away in the baptismal waters of the Jordan?
This week has represented something of a kairotic moment for our nation—that is a time pregnant with great meaning, and opportunity, and hope. We have seen in a number of ways the manner in which the hatred that dwells in darkened corners of the internet and social media was on full display as one person destabilized the whole of the body politic through the dispersal of pipe bombs, another was thwarted in entering an African American church in Louisville only to go down the road and shoot black folks in a Kroger, and a man with deep seated anti-Semitic hatred in his heart walked into a bris ceremony in a synagogue in Pittsburgh and began to shoot everyone he could. Over the course of 72 hours, all of this came into the national consciousness and evidenced the threat that comes when difference is seen as deficiency and and the accidental qualities that distinguish one group from another are viewed subhuman and demonic. Into this world, the church is called to lead the way, declaring that the gospel of Jesus Christ is for all people, that, “in Christ there is no east or west, in him no north or south,” that, “in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Gentile, Male or Female, for all have been made one” in the salvific power of the gospel. That is the gospel. And that is the best gift we as a church, both this community of the faithful, and the church, writ large, can give to a hurting and fractured nation and world. The gift of acceptance and love and grace in the face of all that seeks to divide us one from another.
In times of great national tragedy it becomes easy to point at that which is external to each of us. To point to the bomber, or the shooter, or the overt antisemite, or the overt racist, misogynist, bigot and say, “it’s that guy over there. He’s the one that did it.” But that, my friends, is not Christian. It is never Christian to passively accept the hatred of the world. We must always be about the liturgical work of confession and repentance. Of cleansing our own self and seeking to be better followers of Jesus and members of the human race. And it doesn’t take much. It requires no national groundswell to be an inch kinder to one another, it takes no mass movement of people to refuse to return evil for evil, it takes no collaborative effort amongst the many gatherings of people that make up this world to love the one in front of you. It takes only the willingness to be a conduit for the light of God and the love of God to shine over your little piece of darkness and cover it with light. It takes only the commitment to say that whatever cycle of violence I encounter will stop with me. It takes only the desire to please God, to follow Jesus, and to be shaken from our slumber by the Holy Spirit who dwells in each of us, who bends the moral arc of the universe towards justice, who makes the crooked straight and the hilly flat, and who calls all of the children of God back home. And so thanks be to God for the gift of this day, in which we might spread the love of God to all we meet and glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.