October 25, 2009
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8, 19-22; Hebrews 7:23-28;
Mark 10:46-52
The terrain and climate of Jerusalem/Israel is almost identical to the terrain and climate in California where I grew up. When I visited there as a newly ordained priest some twenty years ago, I was delighted to see bougainvillea and azaleas and camellias, but also the weeds looked familiar and the landscape was rolling brownish hills with a kind of eternal beauty all of their own. It was just like home. I was amazed at that connection I felt between terrain and landscapes so many thousands of miles apart. But Bartimeaus had never seen it, I thought, I as prepared to think about preaching this week.
And he never saw the terrain of all the other places I have lived, from the rocky mountains of Colorado, to the dust bowl of Salt Lake City and the ten thousand lakes in Minnesota. He never saw any of it. He couldn’t; he was frozen in the time of first century Palestine, forever. And unlike us he could not travel to such places or ever know them no matter if he was sighted or not. Regaining his sight would not have helped him to know the Rocky Mountains.
But what I would wish for Bartimeaus and for all people of first century Palestine is the same as I would wish for all those Californians who have never been out of California, or the Utahans who never leave Salt Lake City, their promised land, or the Rockies’ dwellers who live on the mountain tops. I would wish they could all come to Acton, to Westford, to Maynard, to Stow, in late October. Come and see the glory of God in the trees. If I could have, but I do not have the technological know-how, I would have taken all the thousands of snapshots that I have recorded in my mind this week and put them on the screen and invited you to ponder them. That would be sermon enough on blindness! For the colors have been glorious and the air and the rain and the cold, then the warmth – weather ever changing as it does here, has coaxed the colors to even brighter shimmer each day until my breath has been taken away time after time merely by going round a bend or seeing the reflection of those trees on Nagog Pond. Those pictures would have been all I could say, all that need be said, all anyone could say about blindness, Bartimeaus’, the disciples or ours. The trees hold all that glory all the time. But do we see it? Do we really see it? Or are we blinded by time, by the rush we are in, by the music on the radio, by the voice of our children in the back seat? Are we prevented from really seeing the glory that God has put out there for us?
Blindness comes in so many forms, and it is a plague for each of us in some way. Few of us will ever know the physical blindness that Bartimeaus knew. None of us who have eyes will miss the beauty of the fall trees altogether, but we may forget to see it, forget to take a deep breath and give thanks to God for the masterpiece. There are so many ways of being blind, spiritually, physically, emotionally, intellectually, blinded by our stuck-ness in our own personal quirks and beliefs, blinded by the time and space in which we live and move, or don’t move. Which kind of blindness do you suffer from?
We are all products of our environment, all products of the experiences of our own lives and the people we encounter and who form us. But we are also all products of the time and space into which we have been born, the century in which we live. The things we can know and the things that we are too blind to see are as engrained in us as the landscapes of our lives are by all these other things that seemingly would not cause blindness.
The disciples and the others didn’t want Jesus to bother with the blind man on the side of the road. They tried to quiet him; not let him embarrass them or bother Jesus. Their experiences blinded them to the true healing power that Jesus was capable of using. It may even have blinded them to the desire to help the poor man see.
But Bartimeaus was one who made a choice to see that which was impossible to see. He saw before Jesus healed him of blindness. He chose faith in Jesus. He chose it as a blind man who knew no landscapes at all, and he allowed faith to seize him. And his faith allowed him to shed everything that he had known as true. He let go of the possibility of being blind for life and instead embraced the idea of seeing again because he believed Jesus could make that possible.
I invite you to think about that. He believed in a way completely inconceivable given anything he had ever known. Frankly, it would have been as impossible for him to think that he could see and expect it to be possible for Jesus to heal him, as it would have been for him to imagine the colors of the trees in the autumn in New England. Yet he dared to believe it and to act on it.
That is what faith does to us. It allows us to shed our own blindness and see an “impossible” reality. It sheds the blindness from our eyes like a lizard shedding its skin or a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Faith give us new eyes to see the impossible and accept it as the new reality. Faith allows us to see what others can’t. The disciples didn’t have faith that Jesus could heal the blind man. They didn’t even think to use him as a potential campaign propaganda piece for their journey toward the reign they hoped Jesus was about to usher in.
But Bartimeaus had faith. They didn’t.
Sometimes we all have faith like Bartimeaus. But if we are honest, mostly we don’t. Mostly we believe in the myths of our time and place in the cosmos, the ground we can touch, the stories we hear from our parents and our history books. We trust the sciences of medicine and math and engineering and chemistry. But every once in while we dare to step apart from that entire preconditioning and let faith dare to lead us down a different path. We dare to let faith open our eyes.
And when we do, we see what we have never seen, create what has not been created before. When we do, we cure the blindness of our life or someone else’s. When we dare, faith can reshape the very world we live in. And when we dare to proclaim it and follow it, all of us together, I believe that the incredible beauty of the trees we have experienced this Fall will seem dull by comparison to the glory of God that is worked through us.
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd