Seeing What Blind Bartimaeus Sees

Proper 25B-24

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Fall has come to Chicago.  The incandescent season, when the trees reveal their fiery colors, the sky turns deep blue, the air is cool, and the sunlight is long even as the days grow shorter, is my favorite season.  Fall fills me with wonder and gratitude at the beauty of creation.

Wonder is the welcome and perfect antidote to fear and exhaustion. As we approach this national election, I want to unplug. I want to throw up my hands and turn away at the rising tide of lies being advanced and supported by our very own siblings in Christ. Christian nationalism is neither Christian nor patriotic but is the opposite of both. It comes to me as a surprise, but maybe I shouldn’t be. The greatest threat to Christianity is not secularism or atheism, but bad Christianity.

Bad Christianity is a problem people of faith have reckoned with before. The church is dressed in its red party clothes to signify the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in honor of the birthday of the Protestant Church.  507 years ago, on the eve of All Saint’s Day, October 31, 1517, an obscure monk, priest and bible professor, Martin Luther, sent 95 theses, or propositions, to church authorities for debate from a tiny town called Wittenberg, on the ‘Disputation of the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences.’  Luther’s post went viral.

One thing I value most about our Lutheran heritage is that the Reformation is not merely an historical event.  Reformation is an ongoing call at the very heart of our church to learn through humility and self-criticism. Each is called to speak their conscience, to listen more than they speak, to prayerfully discern God’s will, confident that we arrive at wiser decisions together than any one of us could on our own.

We may mourn the days when churches everywhere were filled and 1,000 people attended Immanuel on a Sunday.  And yet also give for the openness and inclusion in recent decades of women and LGBTQIA people. Reformation means celebrating the spirit of anti-racism and awakening to how the church has been complicit in perpetuating systems of white male privilege.

Reformation pulls down bad Christianity and fosters something more graceful, kind, compassionate, forgiving, and just. I celebrate the widening circle of incarnation that opens our Christian imagination to encounter God within creation.  I am challenged to conform my life to Kin-dom of Jesus rather than to consumer market of empire and extraction. I wonder, where do you see the Spirit reforming the church today?

Fear and exhaustion are tools cynically being wielded by those who would rob us of our dignity and freedom. Don’t forget to take your daily dose of the antidote.  Beauty, wonder, and awe flow from companionship and from creation. They sing to us of grace to reduce our anxiety.

And then, there is also what our gospel teaches today.  It is something which the father of Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, who died this week, would call reading the bible from the underside of history. Understanding God’s preference for the poor, not because the poor are good but because God is good, changes everything. Bad Christianity falls as we learn from Jesus to see the way blind Bartimaeus sees.

Bartimaeus was a blind beggar.  To unseeing eyes, the blind man by the roadside is invisible, and expendable.  His cries are not worthy of attention or even curiosity. “When the invisible one dares to speak out, the only efficient and reasonable thing to do is to shut him up.  The only priority is to restore order, re-establish the social hierarchy, and maintain a status quo that keeps the privileged comfortable.” (Debbie Thomas, “Let Me See Again,” Journey with Jesus, 10/21/18) But notice, moral blindness is the first thing Jesus heals in today’s miraculous healing story.

Jesus calls Bartimaeus to him and suddenly, the crowd responded with compassion. They say to Bartimaeus: “Take heart; get up; he is calling you.”  What the blind man needs is not physical sight alone; he also needs visibility and validation within his community.  Jesus grants him both.  This is double miracle story.

Notice that Bartimaeus — in his blindness — sees what the crowd does not.  He calls Jesus “Son of David,” a title Jesus doesn’t make public during his ministry.  We might say, then, that this is one of the rare and beautiful moments in the Gospels when Jesus himself is truly seen. (Thomas)

Bartimaeus “throws off his cloak” and follows Jesus “on the way.” Bartimaeus casts aside what’s most familiar and safe, in exchange for “a way” that is new, and full of uncertainty.  In shedding his cloak, Bartimaeus sheds his identity.  In setting out on “the way,” Bartimaeus becomes a disciple, a traveler, a pilgrim.  Next Palm Sunday, imagine Bartimaeus among those marching with Jesus into Jerusalem.  (Thomas)

Reading the bible from the underside of history means taking time to learn from people who are suffering about what they need. Jesus asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). Remember, last week, Jesus asked two of the disciples, James and John, the very same question.  They wanted Jesus to grant them positions of honor and power. By contrast, Bartimaeus, simply wants to see.  Someone asked Helen Keller once if there is anything worse than being blind.  “Yes”, she replied, “having no vision.”  Jesus restored sight to Bartimaeus.  He restored his vision.

The great 20th century theologian, Karl Barth, who watched and opposed Hitler’s rise to power in Germany wrote:  “The Church knows that all totalities of the world and society and also of the state are actually false gods and therefore lies. In the end you don’t have to be afraid of lies. Lies don’t have any legs to stand on. And in the Church one can know that. Whenever the Church takes these lies seriously, then it is lost. With all calmness and in all peace, it must treat them as lies. And the more that the Church lives in all humility and knows that we too are only human, and there are also many lies in us, then it will also know all the more surely that God sits in governance over and against the lies that are in us and over and against the lies in the world and in the state. And in that case, the Church, regardless of the circumstances and no matter how entangled and difficult the situation, remains at its task and knows itself to be forbidden to fear for its future. Its future is the Lord. He, not the totalitarian state, is coming to the Church.”

Learning to live as children of the reformation means centering our hearts and minds in wonder to cast out fear and exhaustion. It means learning to listen and discern God’s will prayerfully together.  It means reading the bible from the underside of history.  This is root of all good Christianity and the end of bad Christianity—when we go into the world, no longer blind but seeing; no longer unfeeling, but caring; no longer deaf, but hearing—then chaos and darkness take flight. Healing and sight, wisdom and love boundless as ocean’s tide roll in throughout the earth far and wide.  (ELW #673). Reformation is not a once-for-all event but a way of life.  Reformation came to Bartimaeus. Reformation is coming for us too, calling us to be formed again in the shape of the cross.