I Want to See: Two Sermons on Bartimaeus

 

                        Regular Version

Imagine with me, a young girl working on an assignment in math class. Brows furrowed, heart thumping, she tries to work out the problem in her book. She anxiously taps the eraser of her pencil on her desk. She doesn’t want to admit to the teacher that she can’t figure out the answer. There seems to be some kind of system to these numbers. There seems to be something significant about the patterns, but she can’t quite grasp what it is. Erasing, re-erasing, scratching wildly with her pencil all over the paper, she finally makes the numbers work. “Oh, yes, now I SEE!” she thinks with relief. Her body relaxes and a smile spreads over her face. “Now I SEE.” The patterns make sense. The pieces fit into their fraction of the whole. “I see!” What a relief! What a marvel it is to see!

          Seeing is so much more than merely the seeing that we do with our eyes, isn’t it? When we “see” something, we understand it. We grasp it. If only all of life were as easy to see as a math problem or a word puzzle! If only all frustrations could be reasoned out. If only all inconsistencies could be smoothed away with a well-placed answer. Sometimes we pretend that our own mental gymnastics or our own right actions can bring us the understanding that we seek. But blindness always lurks in the corners and beside the way.

I imagine that many of us are worried today about our elections, about war and hatred all around the world. It’s hard to see the way forward. The world—other people—our loved ones—those people we just don’t understand—they can’t always be solved like a math problem, can they? Suffering never makes sense. Evil certainly doesn’t make sense. How does life become a chaos, a problem with no acceptable solution? “O God, why?” we shout in our hearts, over and over again. When we can’t see the path ahead, we can’t help but call out in our blindness, “Jesus have mercy,” even when others might tell us to hush and to calm down.

Mark’s story of Bartimaeus is about more than a blind beggar regaining his eyesight. Have you ever noticed that it’s rare in the Gospel stories for the people whom Jesus heals to have names? Usually, they’re just “a leper,” or a “lame man,” or “a bleeding woman.” But in today’s Gospel, the blind beggar has a name: “Bar-Timaeus,” which means “Son of Timaeus,” a fact that Mark wants to be sure that we notice, since he quite plainly and redundantly points it out. “Bar” is the Aramaic for “son of” and Timaeus is a Greek name. Why a name that combines two languages in this strange way? Timaeus isn’t just any old Greek name, either. Timaeus is the main dialogue partner in the Greek philosopher Plato’s famous work, The Timaeus, a work that was well known among the Hellenistic Jews of Mark’s time and place.

The Timaeus is about the cosmos, about the mathematical beauty and wholeness of the universe—it’s about the perfect pattern of all things. For Plato, sight is our most important sense. Only sight allows us to grasp the beautiful truth of the cosmos, to comprehend time and the seasons, to attain the heights of philosophy.  In the Timaeus, Plato writes, “God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God."[1]

For Plato’s Timaeus, wise humans can learn to imitate a perfect, clockwork universe. A person who is blind, a person without sight and reason, is thus bereft of wisdom, unimportant, cast aside in his imperfection. Mark’s naming of the healed beggar as Son of Timaeus could well be meant to jar the minds of his Greek-speaking Jewish readers. It could turn Plato’s perfect universe upside down. The suffering have no place in Plato’s harmonious system. But in Mark’s Gospel, the suffering are directly engaged.

In Mark, Bartimaeus, the Son of Timaeus, sits beside the Way, a beggar rejected by a society that won’t even abide his cries for help. But Bartimaeus is courageous enough to risk the taunts and jeers of those who exclude him. In complete humility, he cries out to a savior that he can’t see, a savior who rips open Plato’s perfect cosmos and comes down to a beggar in his small, sightless corner of the world. God comes down into our suffering world in the form of Jesus: Jesus who dives down into our suffering with a love that leads to his own crucifixion.[2] 

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks Bartimaeus—using the exact same words that he offered James and John in last week’s Gospel. In that exchange, James and John are still trying to figure out how God works. They think that life has an answer that will lead them straight to a place at Jesus’ right hand in glory. Bartimaeus, though, asks only to see. His suffering has taught him that the way to eternal life lies on the way that Jesus is walking, on the perilous road to Jerusalem. He asks to see a road that the twelve disciples are still too blind to grasp.

As soon as Jesus heals him and gives him sight, Bartimaeus takes off to follow Jesus, on the Way—no longer beside it—on the way to Jerusalem, on the way that leads to the Cross. Given sight, what Bartimaeus sees isn’t Plato’s cosmic mystery. He doesn’t learn why he was born blind. He doesn’t find out the answers to all of our curious questions about God and the universe. All he sees … is Jesus. When the light enters his eyes, he looks straight into the face of Jesus, crucified Son of David, living Son of God. Without missing a beat, this unlikely Son of Timaeus sheds his beggar’s cloak and his old way of life, and follows Jesus’ Way.

Jesus is always taking our stories, our schemes and our plans, and turning them inside out, isn’t he? Every time we think we have life and the universe figured out, he turns our solid, rational answers into a vulnerable, loving face. Every time we think that we’re peering into certainty, Jesus presents a picture of mercy, instead.

Once, I was troubled by a recurring image that frustrated me to no end. I saw myself alone and unhappy in a desert, standing beside a winding path. I could see buildings and people on the left, and I could see life-giving water and green trees behind me. Ahead, I only saw the path, stretching into the horizon. But I couldn’t move forward or even step sideways onto the path, because on the right, I was blind. I couldn’t see anything to the right of the path, no matter how hard I stared. It was as blank as an empty page. Like the little girl trying to solve the math problem alone, I was distraught at my blindness. For the life of me, I couldn’t see “what was right” and it terrified me.

When I told my spiritual director about this image, she suggested: “Maybe you’re afraid to see? Maybe you don’t want to know what is right, because it’s difficult.” Yes, she spoke the truth. After reading today’s Gospel, I think that I could have stopped straining to make logical sense of that old dream. I could have stopped trying to peer ahead into my story.  Instead, if I had quit trying to predict the future and cried out to Jesus, for all that I was worth: “Lord, have mercy on me!” Jesus might have bestowed on me the healing gift of his loving face, of his faithful presence.

          Is there anything that you are afraid to see? If Jesus held out his hands to you in your blind places and whispered, “What can I do for you?” what would you say?

                        Attempt at Intergenerational Version for a Goodbye Service

Before I was a priest, I was a teacher. I was even a substitute teacher sometimes. So I know what kids think when they see a strange sub standing up in front of the classroom! They miss the comforting presence of their regular teacher, and at the same time, there’s that glee that they might just get a free day, a chance to mess around or tune out! Right? Well, I am your sub for today, and I want to let our young people know that I’m not standing here just to talk to the adults. I know that you’re in a long church service and missing time with your friends, so I thank you for giving this old sub a chance to share some thoughts with you about the story of the blind man that we just heard.

We all have a lot on our minds and hearts this morning, I imagine. Perhaps some of you are really sad about Chris leaving town. Maybe you’re worried about what youth group will be like without him, and with a new leader that you don’t know. You’ve had lots of new leaders in the past few years, and comings and goings are hard. Anticipation—waiting in the unknown-- is hard, even when it’s good anticipation. I’m sure that Chris is excited about his upcoming wedding and new home, but I imagine that he’s also wondering how all the new things will be. Many of us here today are also full of worried anticipation about the election coming up soon. We’re all overburdened with campaign ads, and we’re filled with really scary news of war abroad and rumors of violence in our country. If you’re like me, you’re got a dread in the pit of your stomach that your world is spinning out of control.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could see into the future? If we could always understand what is happening in our lives and in the world? If we always knew what path was right to take? If we could just see what lies ahead and prepare ourselves?

 We get an answer to our anxious anticipation in today’s Gospel lesson, when Jesus heals a blind man named Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus has lots of worries, too. He can’t see, so he can’t work. He can only sit by the side of the road and wait. He can only wait for unseen people to drop a few coins or a bit of food onto his spread-out cloak on the ground. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be blind, but I do know what’s it’s like to sit alone, off to the side of the group. I do know what it’s like for people to tell me to be quiet, to turn their backs to my words.  I do know what it’s like not to see the way forward, not to understand, not to be able to say, “Oh, I SEE what’s going on.”

Even though Bartimaeus can’t see with his eyes, his heart can feel and hope and pray. When he hears the stories about Jesus, Bartimaeus’ heart tells him that Jesus is special, that Jesus just might be able to help him. So when Jesus comes down the road into his town, Bartimaeus starts hollering to get Jesus’ attention.

And Jesus listens to his cries. Jesus doesn’t make fun of him like other people do. Jesus gets his friends to invite Bartimaeus over to him. I can imagine Jesus reaching out and taking Bartimaeus’ cold hands in his. “What do you want me to for you?” Jesus asks kindly. “What do you want me to do for you?” Doesn’t it feel wonderful when someone asks us this question? Then Jesus opens the blind man’s eyes to sight, just like Bartimaeus so deeply desires.

I think what’s important for us to notice is what Bartimaeus sees after he’s healed. He doesn’t see into the past, into all the reasons why he had to be blind in the first place. He doesn’t see into the future, reassured that now he’s going to live happily-ever-after. He simply sees Jesus’ face, Jesus’ loving presence with him; he feels his hands being held. He hears God’s healing blessing right in that moment. Bartimaeus doesn’t take much time, either, worrying about what he’ll do next. He doesn’t go back to his old life at all. He immediately follows Jesus on the way to Jerusalem, on the rocky path of the Way of Love.

Every time we think we have life and the universe figured out, Jesus turns our solid, rational answers into a vulnerable, loving face. Every time we look for certainty, Jesus presents a picture of loving-kindness, instead.

When we all lay our hands on Chris in a few minutes, when we all give him a blessing, Jesus will be there among us, filling us each with his healing love. In all of our worried anticipation today, listen for Jesus asking you, “What do you want me to do for you?” What would you tell him? 

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[1] Quoted in Abhishek Solomon, “From Plato’s Timaeus to Mark’s Bar-Timaeus,” October 23, 2021, https://www.trinitymethodist.org.nz/post/from-plato-s-timaeus-to-mark-s-bar-timaeus.

[2] Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), 33.

Christian Nationalism, Millstones, Hell, and Peace

 

Never one to miss a good theology lecture, I was excited to learn last week that the seminary at Sewanee was going to livestream a lecture by Bishop Rob Wright of Atlanta. I enjoy hearing Bishop Wright speak, but even better, his lecture was advertised with the title, “Why Christian Nationalism isn’t Christian.” These days, you see, I just love to be horrified about Christian Nationalism. It’s my favorite thing to look down my nose at. It’s my favorite thing to use to stir up in myself that exciting feeling of fear and anger, seasoned with some smug superiority.

I fired up my computer with great expectation and was disappointed to find out that I had missed the first few minutes of the lecture. As I listened, I kept waiting for Bishop Wright to start bashing Christian Nationalists. But he just kept talking to us Episcopalians about how we can miss the mark and how we can be better followers of Jesus. So I kept waiting, more and more impatiently.  “Maybe he made fun of Christian Nationalists at the beginning of the talk,” I mused. “And I missed it! Darn!”

As the Bishop wound up his lecture, he just kept talking about how the world needs God’s Love, and the ways in which we can respond to hatred. It was an excellent lecture, and I certainly had to agree with everything he said …. But deep down, I turned off my computer a bit disappointed not to have gotten my fix of picking on a group of people with whom I profoundly disagree.

Jesus would not have been pleased with me, as I was acting just like John in today’s Gospel lesson. In today’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are nearing the time when Jesus will face crucifixion. He doesn’t have much time left to communicate to his followers how they are to live into God’s Kingdom, into God’s dream for the world. To top it off, the disciples, like us, just don’t seem to understand. Here’s Jesus, with a little child still sitting on his knees, the little child we Christians are supposed to emulate. Poor Jesus has just explained how we’re to seek humility and love, rather than greatness and worldly power. And here’s John, all excited to rebuke Christians who aren’t a part of his group!

Contrary to the idealized portrayals in the book of Acts, the early church was as fragmented and quarrelsome as the Church has always been, and Mark has Jesus addressing the issue of “us” versus “them” in no uncertain terms in our Gospel lesson. This part of the Gospel always reminds me of the church history lesson I used to use with teens in Confirmation class. To engage the kids in my lesson, I’d give them each a handful of old Playmobil figures from my basement. Like the real Church, these figures are a motley crew: some hold props like canoe paddles, suitcases, or even guns. Some are missing body parts, and some are faceless adults and children. The task for the confirmands is to move these figures in and out of groups as I outline the history of the Church.

As we go from a small community of persecuted Christians to a church split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, to the divisions and wars of the Protestant Reformation, to the fragmentation within the Protestant Churches that creates all of our present-day denominations, the kids frantically try to keep up. As the communities in our story fight and morph, divide and dwindle, the teens move the Playmobil figures around the table. At the end of the exercise, we’re always left with tiny groups of pitiful Playmobil figures, clumped in irrelevant little circles all over the table, with their guns and canoe paddles and missing limbs. It’s hard not to shake our heads in sorrowful self-recognition at the sight. I’ll never forget the comment of one wise middle-schooler as the lesson drew to an end: “Rev. Anne,” she said, “why can’t all these groups just concentrate on what they have in common, instead of on the things they disagree about?” Jesus couldn’t have said it better.

Jesus goes beyond just chastising the disciples for a lack of unity in today’s Gospel, however. He seems to start threatening us about something even deeper. Like a parent worried sick for her wayward child, Jesus uses strong language with his followers, doesn’t he?! He needs us to stop what we’re doing and hear him now. Using words of frightening hyperbole, Jesus warns us to quit focusing on that log in someone else’s eye. Jesus knows that it’s going to take each of us, all that we have, and all that we are, to live lives of Christian discipleship. Rather than asserting our own superiority, our attention needs to be on caring for the littlest and the least. We need to watch out for the series of self-imposed roadblocks that litter the path of a Christian life, a life that even our own hands and eyes and feet can pull dangerously off course from one moment to the next.

All the talk of “hell” in this passage might cause us squeamishly non-hellfire-and-brimstone-Episcopalians to squirm and shut our ears. That would be unfortunate. “Hell” here isn’t about the afterlife. Neither is it Dante’s Inferno of pitchforks and eternal fire that we might imagine when we read Jesus’ words. And this “Hell” is certainly not for other people, for the people we deem unfit for our circle. This “hell” in the Greek text is the word “Gehenna.” Gehenna is a real place. It’s valley near Jerusalem where, at once point in the history of ancient Israel, human sacrifices were once offered to foreign gods. As such, it was always known as a defiled and unclean place. In Jesus’ day, Gehenna was a garbage dump for the city, a place where burning trash smoldered night and day. What a fitting image of desolation, defilement, and decay![1] 

If you want life in God, Jesus cries out to us, you need to rid yourself of everything that’s a stumbling block, even if it seems as essential to your present life as your hands and feet and eyes. If you hang onto your stumbling block, it will burn away your time and your will. Instead of living into God’s Kingdom, you will smolder in a metaphorical garbage dump of living death, until nothing is left but dust and ashes.

It is especially hard these days not to engage, like John and like me during that lecture, in doubling down on difference, in making ourselves feel superior by bashing those with whom we disagree. The media, social media, even authors and speakers we rely upon, make it hard for us to walk in love across a minefield of difference. With a perilous and fraught election looming, with violence growing at home and abroad, with opinions and beliefs so different within and between Christian groups, today’s Gospel is hard to hear and to follow. Please note that I’m not saying that we should ignore the danger presented by Christian Nationalism or any other hate-fueled group. Rather, I want us to hear Jesus’ warning to us, in our own lives and communities. It is so much easier to put all of my time and energy in criticizing others, in explaining why someone else is not Christian, than it is to get out there and do real works of love. But to get out there and do real works of love is what we are called to do as followers of Jesus.

Jesus ends his own lecture in today’s Gospel with verses about salt, telling us to “have salt in ourselves, and be at peace with one another.” One commentary calls these two verses, “among the most difficult to interpret in the entire Gospel,” which isn’t encouraging![2] It helps to understand, though, that salt is associated in Hebrew Scripture with God’s Covenant. In the Book of Numbers, a covenant of salt is an everlasting covenant between God and God’s people. Yes, salt purifies through the fire of sacrifice, yet salt also creates a bond, a promise to be forever in relationship with God. To share salt with someone is to share fellowship with them, to be in covenant, in relationship with them.[3]

Instead of the conflict and strife that began today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus ends by offering us the peace of covenant fellowship, the peace we know at the altar rail, the peace we know in our beloved parish communities. Yet, for Jesus, we aren’t just responsible for peace, for wholeness, within our parishes. We’re responsible for peace and wholeness with everyone who bears the name of Love, whether they agree with us or not, whether we like them or not, whether it’s easy for us to share with them or not. It’s like the little poem says:

He drew a circle that shut me out—

          Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

          But Love and I had the wit to win:

          We drew a circle that took him in.[4]

 

Just like Bishop Wright said in that lecture.

 

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[1] Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Blacks New Testament Commentaries, 1991), 232.

[2] Elian Cuvillier, L’Evangile de Marc  (Paris: Bayard, 2002), 199.

[3] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 264.

[4] Edwin Markham, from Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913.

Eternal Connections

 

Do you ever look around at your world, at your life, and find something missing, without being able to define your longing? Do you ever move mountains for something that you want, only to get more than you bargained for?  When my daughter was in the ninth grade, unsure of who she was and who she wanted to be, she decided that a new puppy would be the key to happiness. With all her being, she longed to show dogs, just like her new high school friends did.

          I of course knew better. I knew that a dog wouldn’t solve all her problems. I didn’t want a new puppy to end up as my responsibility, either, just like our other dog, and the rabbit, and the gerbils, and the hermit crabs…. But my daughter was undeterred. She argued and argued with me. She spent every free minute scouring the Internet for information on dog breeds and kennel-club rules. Somehow, she, who had always let money drift straight through her fingers, had managed to save more than enough money to pay for a show dog. She was so earnest, so sure of herself, so determined that this dog and this new hobby would finally bring her happiness …. that I caved. One fateful, late-summer’s day we brought home a cute, harmless-looking beagle puppy with a pedigree. His papers said, “The Cowboy in Me,” so my daughter named him “Buck.”

Buck was trouble from the minute that we brought him home. Despite my daughter’s research and even with visits to a canine psychologist (!) Buck turned out very much like those kings that are described in our reading from 1 Samuel: He was a burden to our family and a usurper of freedom. He marked everyone’s territory as his own. He was quick to steal what didn’t belong to him. He was ferociously violent in keeping what he stole, snapping at friend and foe alike.  Everyone who met him was shocked that a dog could get into this much trouble. Now, Buck crossed the Rainbow Bridge many years ago, but when a Facebook memory of him came up this year on my feed, I got responses from old friends that I hadn’t heard from in years, each with their own “Buck disaster story” to add.

Like my daughter, and like the people of Israel in the days of Samuel, we can be so sure that we know what it is that we long for. We can make ourselves so knowledgeable about the things that we want; we can work so hard to get them, pouring our lives into that desire, praying and begging and pleading to God, hoping that God will relent like a loving Parent and give us what we clamor for. The trouble is, our prayers are often so driven by all of the things that we want from God that we fail to recognize the earth-shattering transformations that God wants to make in our lives.  God offers us exhilarating freedom, and we beg for the security of a king; God offers us a sparkling, unique self, and we want to be just like others. God offers to transform us with divine fire, and we shrink back in fear. God pours out love and glory upon us, and we don’t even notice. While my daughter was scheming and dreaming for that show dog, she never once noticed the devotion of good old Max, our elderly family mutt. Poor Max followed her faithfully from room to room each day, waiting only for a pat on the head and wishing for nothing more than to love her with all of his heart.

In a sermon on today’s epistle, C.S. Lewis writes that what we all want more than anything is to be acknowledged, praised, and loved. We want to “meet with some response,” from the universe, “to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality.” Lewis calls this universal longing our “inconsolable secret.”[1] We think that kings or puppies will be the bridges that we need, but they can’t be, because what we hunger for is God’s undying love. In 2 Corinthians, St. Paul calls God’s loving acceptance of us the “eternal weight of glory.” God’s glory, God’s gift that “welcome[s us] into the heart of things,”[2] can’t be seen in our eyes or our stance, in our successes or in the things that we so carefully gather around us. God’s glory in us is the eternal love with which God continually sustains us, the love that death can’t kill, the love that suffering can’t dim. God’s glory in us ties us to one another and to the Spirit’s mysterious presence in the world around us. “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,” explains Lewis, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses … [I]n him also Christ … the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”[3]

          When I first read our Gospel from Mark as an anxious teenager, the part about the eternal and unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit worried me to no end. If there was an unforgiveable sin, I sure wanted to understand exactly what it was, because I knew that I would be just the one to commit it! Jesus isn’t trying to set some kind of hidden trap for us in this passage, though. Jesus is emphatically pointing out that we’d better look beyond the surface of things, beyond our expectations, beyond our fears, so that we can recognize the Holy Spirit at work.  As Bishop Owensby points out, we can’t receive God’s outpouring of love without allowing that love to transform us, to transfigure us “into who we truly yearn to be: the kind of person who loves from the depths of our enduring character.”[4]

In today’s Gospel lesson, you see, Jesus has come with the power of God to heal, to love, to set us free, to reveal God’s Kingdom among us. Yet even his own family fails to recognize God’s work in Jesus’ words and deeds. Instead, they worry that he’s gone too far, that he’s lost touch with every-day reality. The religious authorities accuse him of acting in the name of Evil itself. Jesus doesn’t look like the savior that they’ve pictured for themselves; he doesn’t act like the Messiah that they’ve been praying for. He threatens the status quo; he threatens their authority. In Jesus’ healings and teachings, the scribes are looking straight at pure divine glory, pouring down upon them from heaven, but they call it Satan.

We, too, cry out to God: “Heal us! Save us! Give us what we need!” We hold out our arms toward heaven, yet when God comes to lift us up to lives of joy and meaning, we’re too busy bending over and searching the ground for a path that we recognize. In St. Exupéry’s story of The Little Prince, the Prince, who had left his home planet in confusion over his love for a very difficult little rose, arrives on a planet filled with rose bushes. Seeing thousands of blooms that resemble the beloved rose that he had believed to be unique in the world, he falls into deep despair. The rose garden, no matter how beautiful, gives no meaning to his world; there’s no special welcome in it. And then a small fox finds the Prince and asks to be tamed. For the fox, to tame is to create an eternal connection with another creature. It’s to become unique, though love, for the other. It takes time, patience, and responsibility. Day after day, the fox and the Little Prince slowly grow closer until they become friends. Then the fox shares a secret: “It is only with the heart that one can truly see,” he whispers. “What is essential is invisible to the eyes….”[5]

Perhaps we avoid that “sin against the Holy Spirit,” then, by taming and being tamed, by allowing eternal connections with God and one another, by looking for Christ beneath the surface and by taking responsibility for one another’s flourishing? In the power of the Holy Spirit, God enters into our very being, digging eternity out of time-filled clay. God sees us, and loves us, and wants to give us life and joy everlasting. Shall we turn away unseeing? Shall we remain in a closed-off world, with meaning always a distant mirage? Or shall we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit? Shall we look at our neighbors and see, yes see, not  strangers, but beloved parents and siblings, a glorious family in Christ, tamed and bound together forever? You know, if I could learn to tame even my daughter’s crazy beagle—and yes, to be tamed by him, as well—then perhaps there’s hope for us all.

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[1] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 1965), 11.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 15.

[4] Jake Owensby, “Is Anything Unforgivable?” Found at The Cottage, https://open.substack.com/pub/dianabutlerbass/p/sunday-musings-afd?r=1ir6u8&utm_medium=ios.

[5] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Paris : Gallimard, 1946), 72. (My translation).

Hear What the Spirit is Saying to God's People

 

Rather arbitrarily, I first decided to preach today on our first lesson about Samuel because it reminded me of my mother. She found her life-long calling as a Sunday School teacher, continuing to lead and teach the children at her church until she was well into her eighties. (Hear that, Barbara, Toni, Ellen?!) My mother had a favorite story about today’s lesson. She was reading it to the children, when a 5-year-old boy in her class blurted out excitedly, "Teacher! I heard God's voice, too! Last night!" When she asked the boy what God said to him, the child, named Gray, proclaimed in a voice filled with love, mystery and awe, "God said 'Gray ….? Gray….?'" Over the years, my mother loved to remind everyone--especially Gray--of that story, since he grew up to become a leader in the Presbyterian church.

I love my mother's story, and yet it’s the scarcity of “the Word of the Lord” that I really feel called to speak about today. I feel as if it’s getting harder both to hear and to speak our familiar words of faith. Words like salvation, hope, fellowship, grace, blessing, mercy... Once, these were words that we could hear and share, words that had meaning. More and more, though, I feel as if the hate-filled world has stuck a pin in our precious Christian words. It has popped them like a balloon—I feel God's Spirit drifting out of them, and the words falling hollow to the ground, limp and shriveled artifacts. I feel as if some of our fellow Christians are using our beloved words to promote hatred and injustice, day after day after day. And the rest of us are trampling the shreds of the words underfoot, ignoring them in our rush to get about our daily business. How do we hear the voice of our God in these troubled times?

"The word of the Lord was rare in those days," our first lesson begins. This is the only time in the Hebrew Bible that this phrase is used. The story is set during a deeply troubled time in the land of Israel. Change is shaking the old, trusted foundations. The story takes place when the familiar government by judges is about to give way to the unknown perils of monarchy. In the meantime, chaos reigns. Eli, the trusted high priest, is old and failing. His sons have filled the land with corruption and shame and greed as he sits idly by, doing nothing to stop them.

 As the story begins, night shrouds God's holy Temple in darkness. Eli is blind, lying helpless in his bed, no longer able to provide God's vision and hope to the people. Samuel is the long-awaited child granted by God to the barren woman Hannah. He’s then torn from her side as a toddler, offered to God’s service by Hannah, as a sacrificial gesture of thanksgiving. I wonder if young Samuel misses his mother and father in the quiet of the night? In this story, he's probably a young tween, still living and serving in the Temple.  He's just an apprentice--a teenage acolyte, let’s say, chafing under the weight of adult expectations and sweaty robes. He must feel the empty darkness of the Temple and the troubles of the land, even if he doesn't understand them. Even though he sleeps in the heart of his religion's holiest place, he still knows little of God.

          "What's the point?" Samuel must have been wondering in the darkness.

But wait! This story isn’t all darkness and gloom. Our text says that "the lamp of God had not gone out." Even in the darkness, God's light is burning beside Eli in his blindness. And God's voice is calling young Samuel's name. Over and over again. Despite his youth and his inexperience. The Word of God keeps calling.

          When I sit in church, or when I pick up the bible to read, I often announce proudly to myself: "Look at me, reading Scripture like I’m supposed to! Teach me something, God! Move me! I'm waiting! Make it quick, though, because I have a lot to do today!" I expect something to happen between me and God, one on one. I expect God to enter the words for me and bring them to life. But that's not the way it works in today's lesson, is it? Samuel needs Eli's wisdom before he can recognize God's voice. We all need the wisdom and support of other human beings in our faith journeys. The old and the young need one another. The strong and the feeble need one another. The educated and the innocent need one another. Because God speaks to us all.

As a matter of fact, do you know why we Episcopalians read so many scripture lessons as part of our Eucharist? It's because we believe that Jesus comes to us in Scripture when we’re joined together as the Body of Christ, just as he comes to us in the bread and wine. We surround ourselves with the voices of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the songs of the ancient psalmists, with the admonitions of the early church leaders, and with the good news of the Gospels. We take all of these varied, swirling, often confusing voices, and we wait together for God to appear in our midst through these words. “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” is just another way of saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.”

          And there's another important piece. Our lectionary leaves out the end of this story—an end that we need to hear. When Samuel finally listens—really listens—to the voice of God calling him in the night, the word that he receives isn’t one of cozy comfort. When Samuel opens himself to God's word, God gives him a hard task. A task that’s going to change him forever. God tells him it’s up to him to stand up to his mentor Eli. He's told to proclaim drastic change, to tell Eli that God is going to take away the power and authority that Eli and his sons have misused.

When God calls me in the night, I'm hoping to be comforted, not changed and challenged. I don't want God's voice to turn my world upside down. Who here wants to tell their boss that they’re fired? Who wants to bring bad news to their beloved mentor? Who wants to stand up to power and oppose it? We all know how dangerous that is. Look what happened to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, whose courage-- and sacrificial love--we celebrate tomorrow.

          The most dreaded voice for a parent to hear in the night is that of their crying child. I remember it well: "Mama, Mama, Mama," it whispers in a mother’s ear, breath hot against her cheek. "Mama, mama, my tummy hurts bad." All parents know that this is the beginning of a sleepless night, a big disruption in plans, and a lot of laundry. It is a voice that inspires a loud, "Nooooo!" in your heart and a deep desire to hide under the covers. But it's a voice that you can't deny or refuse; it's a voice that makes you who you are—a loving parent.

          That's what God's true voice offers us—to make us who we’re meant to be: God's responsible and loving presence in the world. As Rowan Williams says, the Word of God that speaks to us in Scripture doesn't call us to "jot down ideas and think about them." God speaks our names in order to transform us, to make us see and live in the world in a new way.[1] Scripture is a summons, a voice in the night. It's an invitation to be part of Christ's Body acting in the world.[2] It gathers us and forms us around the Altar of sacrifice. It doesn’t ask us to mouth empty words like pious puppets. It asks us to translate what we hear into courageous, self-giving action, into shared dependence on God alone.

When the world rejects migrants and turns its back on the marginalized, God's Word invites us to embody love for the stranger. When the world armors up for protection, turning its back on the vulnerable, God’s Word calls us to turn our guns into plowshares. When the world destroys God's creatures in a greedy search for riches, God's Word invites us to "serve and preserve" creation, instead. When the world draws tight circles to exclude any of God’s beloved children, God’s Word encircles us all with the power of Love. When the world exploits the poor and rewards those who are number one, God's Word invites us to live in such a way that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

God's call, God’s invitation, is also a promise. At the end of our reading, Samuel becomes a prophet. God is with him and lets "none of his words fall to the ground." As it was my mother’s little student, Gray …. As it was with Samuel …. So shall it be with you, beloved people of St. Ambrose. God is calling, and the world is desperate for words of meaning, words of love. Continue to open yourselves as a community to hear God's call. Continue to listen together. Continue to respond together. Don’t be afraid—you see, God never really leaves the words. As Christ's Body, we are "in the words," with Christ, and will never be forsaken.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 4.

[2] Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 44.