Showing Up, Being Persistence

Epiphany UCC

Jesus and his followers came into Jericho. As Jesus was leaving Jericho, together with his disciples and a sizable crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, Timaeus’ son, was sitting beside the road. When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was there, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, show me mercy!” Many scolded him, telling him to be quiet, but he shouted even louder, “Son of David, show me mercy!”

Jesus stopped and said, “Call him forward.”

They called the blind man, “Be encouraged! Get up! He’s calling you.”

Throwing his coat to the side, he jumped up and came to Jesus.

Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

The blind man said, “Teacher, I want to see.”

Jesus said, “Go, your faith has healed you.” At once he was able to see, and he began to follow Jesus on the way.

Hopefully you had a chance to hear Chris Stedman last week, as he shared with us a bit of his story and how he arrived at both his atheism and his eventual desire to find places of cooperation and understanding between theists and atheists. What I admire about Chris is that he is doing something rather different, something pretty unusual, in this day and age, and that is simple bridge building, attempting to find some way people of different opinions can actually have a conversation with each other – and see if that dialogue with each other will give rise to some common good beyond the dialogue. Reading his book, and thinking about the difficulties of being an open and active atheist in our culture, even now, it just reminds me that this is no easy thing. The reality is that Chris gets pilloried and mocked by some in his atheist community who believe that seeking any common ground with religious people is a fool’s errand – and who believe that the goal of atheism should be the elimination of religion. Chris tells a story of a cocktail party he attended right here in Chicago with a group of local atheists who were stunned to hear his views on the need to find points of cooperation with the religious – and how he was derisively labeled by a guest at the party as a “faitheist,” which is where the title of his book comes from. Some in his own community of non-believers are not just indifferent to religion, but campaign for its elimination – not violently or forcibly, but through an intellectual expose of religion’s follies – and sadly, there is a lot of material to work with on that account. But let’s not get too self-righteous on our part about this desire to eliminate religion by some atheists – there has been far more persecution of atheism and atheists by religious people of all stripes than there ever has been of atheists persecuting religious people. Christians, when in political power through the centuries, have had a tendency to outlaw anything that could be seen as anti-religious, and have sometimes tortured or killed those who expressed religious skepticism or outright atheism. And so Chris gets pilloried by some Christians for being an atheist and then gets pilloried by some atheists for being someone who wants to build bridges between atheists and Christians. And yet, he persists in this work, he continues to do this good work of trying to find common ground between theists and atheists, despite our differences. This takes a special kind of moxy, a fortitude that not easy to find, to stay in the game, to show up to the work, when its rarer and rarer to find those who think it is a good work that you are doing – especially the work of bridge building.

That persistence, that willingness to remain, to remain faithful, so to speak to this cause, to stay on-course, and to live out of a sense of core principles, it’s a testament to tenacity, to persistence on his part. And that persistence, that tenacity, is something that is present in the story we just heard a few minutes ago, and it is a story of persistence that I think we can learn from, or at least I can. Now, it’s interesting, that this is the last miracle story in the Gospel of Mark—this is it, at least when it comes to the flashy displays of divine healing power because the next thing that happens is Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, into that time of passion when Christ will teach in the temple, when the jealousy of the religious powers within the Temple come to a head, a time when the calculation is made that it is better for one man to die than to have a whole nation be destroyed, and the political machinery of death and crucifixion become greased with the blood of those who are understood to expendable in order to keep the peace.

Think about it: the very last story told by Mark, in this the earliest of the written Gospels, before the coming drama of Jesus’ crucifixion, is this story of blind Bartimaeus who comes to receive his sight back. Blindness is not something uncommon in the ancient world—the reality is a lot of people lost their ability to see in Jesus’ day – remember, Bartimaeus had lost his sight, meaning he once could see, and he wants it back again. In the ancient world, one of the most common reasons for losing one’s sight was a highly contagious disease that spread through flies, which would then cause an inflammation of the eyelids, causing the eyes and eyelids to enlarge and eventually cause permanent damage. And, of course, there are the other reasons that people became blind, including being born with it, and so if the person was lucky, so to speak, they would be given permission by the authorities to try to support themselves by begging for a living. Some people even think that the cloak Bartimaeus is wearing and which he throws off when he is called forward to meet Jesus, some think that cloak is a traditional garment meant to designate him as a blind man, thus giving him permission to beg for a living. But before that moment, our friend Bartimaeus is loud and persistent—he is not willing to be told “no.” So when the crowd following Jesus make a rustle as they go through the town, when he hears that Jesus, this miracle worker is passing by, Bartimaeus calls out to this Jesus, this Son of David—“have mercy on me!” Have mercy on me—the great kyrie eleison that has so resonated in the liturgy of the church that it has become a part of our worship, a part of the early Latin mass and even we Protestant use in some of our confessional liturgy. It’s interesting that here you find kyrie eleison being used not to confess sin, but as a way of attracting the attention of the Holy man who walks past, who possibly can give this man back his sight.

Nonetheless, Bartimaeus is loud, and his loudness, and its increasing persistence is not making him any friends, and they, the crowds around him, they want him to shut up, they want him to be quiet—they’ve got a celebrity in their midst and he shouldn’t be bothered by someone like Bartimaeus. The reality is that Bartimaeus is low on the totem pole of people that matter in that world, but even that stark reality won’t shut him up, and his cries for mercy grow louder and louder until his persistent cries and screams stop Jesus in his tracks – “he stopped” the texts says – something about the desperation and the volume made Jesus stop and listen to the cries of this man. Jesus asks his disciples to “call him here.” And now, instead of people telling blind Bart to be quiet, they tell him to take heart, to be encouraged, and to get up because “he’s calling you.” That’s the moment the cloak goes flying off his shoulders and the hands and fingers of the people who were moments ago trying to shut him up, those same hands and fingers are now guiding him to this Jesus.

And then the question comes, the already familiar question to the readers of Mark’s Gospel, “What do you want me to do for you?” And unlike James and John, who want to be the top dogs in the coming world order, as seen in verses right before this one, this man just wants to see: “let me see again!” And unlike the other miracles that Jesus tends to perform in Mark, this one does not even require a touch from Jesus—there will be no healing balm made from Jesus’ spit and placed on the eyes such as you find in others healing stories centered on vision. Faith is put front and center here, and that faith, embodied, incarnated in Bartimaeus, is persistent and persuasive even, though I suspect he has spent a life time crying out to a million would-be healers passing by him in the dusty streets of his town of Jericho. We sometimes forget that would-be prophets and would-be faith healers were all over the place in first century Roman occupied Palestine, stirring up trouble, making all sorts of claims, though obviously having little of the impact as Jesus finally had. I suspect Bartimaeus had cried out a million times, to anyone within earshot, words like the ones we heard today, have mercy on me, give me healing. And each time he uttered those words, shouted those words, he showed his persistent faith, in his belief that he was somehow going to be healed.

Now, of course, it was a literal blindness, but rarely are the healing stories in the Gospels ONLY about the physical – they usually are also a metaphor for the spiritual, the emotional, the social and most profoundly, about the soul being healed, along with the body, with the soul actually being as important, if not more important, than the body. The man wants to see, literally see, and he wants something else – he wants to see the world as it really is, he wants to see the world that God sees, he wants to follow Jesus “on the way” the Gospel says, and to see what Jesus sees in the coming days ahead, and he will, of course, he will likely see so much in the beautiful and dreadful days ahead in that emotionally charged city of Jerusalem, where Jesus will spend his last days. But getting to that point, waiting on the side of the road, crying out to every would-be prophet that found its way to the city streets of Jericho, and finally finding one that could help him see, help him really SEE everything, it took persistence, so much dogged persistence, years and years of just showing up and waiting and shouting and hoping that one day someone would hear his cry, until, of course, one day someone did.

Think of the all the times you and I have just shown up, day after day, attempting to do right by our family, our work, our children, our friendships, our simple acts of kindness and even justice that didn’t seem to do much of anything, and yet we did them, because it was the right thing to do, even when the results weren’t obvious, when our cries on the side of road didn’t seem to be heard by anyone, anyone at all So much of our lives is just about showing up – as Parker Palmer has wisely said, I don’t ask myself how effective I’ve been but how faithful I have been. And that is true of faith as well, the simple showing up, being present, and being ready at the side of the road just in case the Savior should pass by on this particular day. Sometimes it’s coming to church on Sundays, and never quite getting anything from the sermon, or even from the people next to us, whomever and whatever, and then the Christ walks by, and the Spirit seems clearly present, at least to us, in that moment – some word is spoken from this pulpit, some act of generosity is accepted, some THING happens, and we have our own moment of throwing off the cloak and being getting it, of getting what we needed, if only for the next couple of hours or days, because that was what needed to get through and get beyond what we were going through. Some of us in this life, including me at times, we stop showing up, and we stop crying out for mercy, literally, figuratively, emotionally, we stop showing up for the ones we love, and we find ourselves struggling to love them, and we just stop showing up, no matter how many times God passes us by, despite all the hints that divinity was found in the rumble of that crowd that just passed us by, the crowd that the one with our Savior right in the middle of it. And we don’t cry out for mercy, and we ignored the rustle of the God passing by us, or we stop crying out simply because we’ve made our way to another place, a place where we were sure God would not find us, unwilling to be in relationship with a God who allowed us to be blind for too long.

The life of faith requires persistence, like all of life does – you and I don’t get where we are without showing up to class, to a marriage or relationship, to a friendship, to a job, to a child, day after day, moment after moment. I know we will live in a culture that demands everything right now, including spirituality, including even salvation – but the Bible over and over again seems to imply that salvation, which implies wholeness in the original Greek, salvation, wholeness takes a long time, and is a long journey, this slow turning to God, and the ability to see comes to those who cry out constantly for God to give them mercy, who show up at the side of the road, listening always for the rumble of the God passing them by. I think the persistence of Epiphany, with its Welcome Meal served every Wednesday for many, many years, with its many thousands of meals served, its many volunteers come and gone, and come again, as well as the many guests who have come and gone, and come again. And yet, hunger remains, and so does homelessness and yet we show up on Wednesday night and we serve a meal to some soul, and we do it again the next week, week after week, year after year – we are persistent. The ancient Greek poet Ovid said that “dripping water always eventually hollows out stone, not through force, but through persistence.” So, to follow after the way of Jesus, to go with him on the way, as the Gospel of Mark says, we must do as Bartimaeus did: we must show up, here, and there, and we must listen for the rustle of God passing by us in this world, and we must cry out until we are heard by the God who just passed us by, until she stops, and asks for us to come closer, and who says to us, that our faith, our persistent faith, our persistent trust, has helped to heal us, and helped to heal this world, a world so in need of people who will show up, and do the right and kind and just thing. “Jesus, Son of David, show me mercy!” Bartimaeus cries out until he is heard by the Master amidst the rumble and din of the crowd passing him by on those dusty streets of Jericho.