Prayer, Community, and the Holy Spirit

 

There are two occasions when I turn to the Lords’ Prayer faithfully. One is when I pray at the Eucharist, when we say the words of Jesus’ prayer all together, like we’ll do in our liturgy today. And the other time ... is when I’m nervous on an airplane! I’m a white-knuckle flyer, especially these days, with all the turbulence and near-misses I read about in the news. So when the air currents get bumpy, or the descent takes too long, or when I hear rumors of “weather” ahead, I close my eyes and obsessively recite the words that Jesus taught us to pray. Now, any kind of prayer is always a good thing. And repeating words of comfort is a wonderful way to calm the nervous system. But I’m pretty sure that Jesus’s teaching on prayer intends for me to go deeper.

In our Old Testament reading, we also have Abraham’s bargaining prayer. I’m no stranger to bargaining prayers on the airplane, either, I’m afraid. I’ve been known to scan incoming passengers during boarding, looking for cute babies and cozy families. When I spot them, I pray, “OK, God, you won’t bring down a plane with that cute child on it, will you?” Or, “Surely, you’ll save us so that nice family won’t perish ...?

Such questionable theology isn't what we’re supposed to take away from our first reading, either. Abraham has just welcomed God in the guise of three strangers, offering them model hospitality in his desert tent. He and Sarah have just received the promise that they will have a son in their old age. It’s God’s plan that the descendants of Abraham, a just and righteous man, will become a “great and mighty nation” that will, in turn, bless all the nations of the earth. So as our reading begins, God and Abraham are looking over at the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the outcry of the people, the desperate outcry of the oppressed, has reached God’s ears.[1]

Sodom and Gomorrah are not wicked, by the way, because of the sexual orientation of their citizens! It is clear from the text that Sodom and Gomorrah are wicked because they ignore the most often-repeated divine law in the whole Hebrew Bible: their people mistreat the stranger, the sojourner, the foreigner, in their land. Instead of generous hospitality, they offer violent abuse to those who have come into their borders. Because of their repeated offenses, God’s justice demands that these unrepentant cities be destroyed.

Abraham, being the just and righteous man that he is, is concerned not only with his own family in Sodom, but with the fate of the whole city, good and evil alike. God and Abraham both seem to understand that goodness has to reach a critical mass in order for it to offset the evil around it. For the Jewish writer of Genesis, that critical mass is ten. That’s why Abraham stops his bargaining there. Ten is the number that constitutes a “minyan;” it’s the number that represents Jewish community.[2] Without a community to stand up to evil, to practice right relationship with God and with one another, evil tends to prevail. For Sodom and Gomorrah to turn from their cruel ways, it would have taken more than a couple of individuals—it would have taken a righteous community.

So Abraham courageously and persistently bargains with the Holy One, just as cleverly as he might bargain with a powerful spice merchant down at the local bazaar. What’s interesting in this prayer isn’t Abraham’s bargaining skill, though. What’s interesting is that God offers Abraham the opportunity to bargain. God knows that the innocent will be allowed to escape. God knows that the cities are going to be destroyed. So why tell Abraham about God’s plans? God wants to give Abraham a chance to demonstrate his own righteousness, by trying to convince God to save the whole.[3] God always wants us involved in doing justice and righteousness.

Jesus, too, encourages us to ask “shamelessly” and persistently for the salvation of the whole. He teaches us to pray for God’s Kingdom to come on earth, for God’s rule, God’s dream for the world, to be made real in the world of humans. What’s that Kingdom like? It is a kingdom of right relationship with God and with one another, a kingdom where justice reigns, a kingdom where we all have the bread, the sustenance, that we need each day, a kingdom where we forgive one another like God forgives us, a kingdom without the burden of debt. Scholar John Dominic Crossan describes Jesus’ prayer this way: “The Lord’s Prayer is . . . a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of Christianity for the conscience of the world . . . . [It is] a radical manifesto and a hymn of hope for all humanity in language addressed to all the earth.”[4]

When Jesus encourages us to ask, to knock, to persist—when Jesus promises always to answer our prayer, notice what Jesus promises to give us: Jesus doesn’t promise us a new house, a better job, a miraculous cure, or a safe airplane flight. Jesus promises to give us the gift of the Holy Spirit. “How much more your father will give the Holy Spirit from heaven to those who ask him,” Jesus assures us. Some ancient manuscripts of Luke 11 even add, “Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us” after the well-known words “your kingdom come.”[5] The prayer would then read, “Your Kingdom come; Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us. Give us every day the bread we need.” In other words, God’s Kingdom coming has everything to do with the Holy Spirit, with that Spirit that binds us together in Community, that Spirit that gives birth to the Church.

It makes sense: God’s Spirit—the Advocate, the Comforter—makes present in us the Kingdom of God that Jesus himself made present in his bodily words and actions.[6] Just like God visited Abraham, blessed him, and gave him a chance to speak out against evil, so too the Holy Spirit surrounds us, blesses us, and gives us the strength to speak out against evil. As we know from St. Paul, when we have the Holy Spirit, we have those fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.[7] In the Spirit, we form a beloved community that can withstand testing and trial, a community that can stand against evil.

A Roman Catholic friend sent me a newsclip yesterday as I was writing this sermon. The article described how Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami gathered with 25 Knights of Columbus on motorcycles to pray the rosary in front of “Alligator Alcatraz” last week. The Archbishop is concerned for the detainees because of the dangerously hot and unsanitary conditions that have made this camp infamous around the world.[8] The Catholic Church hasn't been allowed inside to hold mass for the imprisoned migrants there, but the Archbishop is determined not to give up. He and his fellow Christians showed up to be Christian community in the only way that they could--to face down evil, to bring the outcry of the suffering to God, to pray the prayer that Jesus taught us.

I had a mysterious prayer experience once as a teenager that’s etched in my heart and soul. I was on a school trip to Europe, a self-absorbed teen with a Peanuts quote on my bulletin board that read, “I love humankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” One afternoon, I was sitting on a hillside praying very hard for the health of our trip leader, a kind and loving teacher who had injured his back. I wanted God to heal his back, and probably to prove God’s existence to me at the same time. Some bargaining may have been involved. Suddenly, the sky above me turned tremendously and beautifully blue. I heard the words—not aloud but still clear as a bell—“I am Love, and I want you to love my people.” I’ll never forget that moment. You see, my teacher’s back was healed the next day. It might have been a coincidence; it might have been an answer to prayer. But the healing is not what marked my soul. In that prayer, I had glimpsed the Holy Spirit, and I had been called to love. I’m the one who was changed, empowered, and made whole.

There are all kinds of ways to pray—some more mature than others. But we know one thing for sure. Given all the evil in this world, God needs God’s righteous community to speak up without ceasing, to bang on the doors of heaven and earth, crying out for right relationship and justice for the whole of creation.

 

 

 

 

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[1] This noun is associated in the Prophets and Psalms with the shrieks of torment of the oppressed. See note for Genesis 18: 20 in Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Vol. 1 (New York: WW Norton, 2019), 58.

[2] Carla Friedman, “The Education of Abraham,” 2005. Found at https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/education-abraham.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Quoted by Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings,” July 26, 2025. Found at https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com.  

[5] Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love that is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 45.

            [6] Ibid.

[7] Galatians 5

[8] Gina Christian, “Archbishop Wenski Leads Knights on Bikes to Pray Rosary at Alligator Alcatraz, in The Boston Pilot, July 25, 2025. Found at https://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.php?id=200365.

What Do We Do When Everything's A Mess?

 

Good morning! I’m a retired Episcopal priest from Boulder County, and am lucky to be part of a great clergy wellness group with Pastor Seth. I’m honored that he asked me to join you all today! I think, though, that Pastor Seth and the Holy Spirit have a sense of humor for sending me out to preach on today’s lesson from 2nd Kings. You see, I’ve been spending my time over the past year on a very frustrating medical journey with my husband. He has an illness that takes a lot of medical management, and that’s all I grumble about at our clergy group: Doctors, medicines, and exasperation. So I really understand poor Naaman from our reading.

Like many of us here today, I’m a person of relative privilege, a person used to nurturing the illusion of control over my life. I’m used to having my aches and pains treated and cured by top-notch doctors; I’m used to managing capably any bumps on my journey. I’m used to having things mostly turn out fine in the end. That is, until they don’t. At some point in our lives, all of us find ourselves stymied by life, whether it’s from chronic illness, or a broken relationship, or a natural disaster, or drastic changes in our country or our church. 

Look at General Naaman: he’s a person of wealth, power, success, importance. He’s used to directing troops, telling others what to do. But now he’s sick, likely with the disease of leprosy, a death-sentence in his day. Suddenly, he has the dreaded disease that turns kings into outcasts; the disease that turns beloved family members into shunned figures on the margins of society, their very flesh rotting on their bones. Naaman is used to top-notch treatment from the best healers that money can buy. He’s used to managing his cure. But this time, he appears to freeze in panic, unable to take any action.

Instead, it’s his wife’s Hebrew slave girl who puts things in motion for Naaman. Did you hear that? The one who offers help is a slave, a foreigner, and a young woman at that! And where is he told to go for healing? To the backwater country that he’s recently defeated in battle. Then, despite Naaman’s chariot-load of riches, the King of Israel is afraid to receive him. Instead, Naaman gets shuttled off to see some unknown prophet, and the prophet won’t even bother to come out and meet with him. The prophet Elisha sends out one of his servants, who tells the great general to go wash in the muddy waters of a second-class river. Oh, how I can feel Naaman’s desperate indignation! It’s like expecting help from a renowned specialist, yet only being seen by a medical student, who tells you to take a few Tylenol and rest for a week!

          Of course, the lesson here for all who seek healing is that God doesn’t need our wealth, our power, or our knowledge in order to make us whole. Instead, God tends to work through slave girls, obscure prophets, and muddy little rivers. God works through poor, unwed Mary, shepherds, and babies born in stables. God works through ordinary bread, wine, and a body broken on a Cross. Like Naaman, we’re expected to grab the hands of the people God sends us, no matter who they are. We need only to lower the barriers that we hide behind and allow ourselves to feel vulnerable, to listen, to let love do its work. And it’s the lesson that Jesus wants to teach us in today’s Gospel reading, as well.

          Jesus, too, strips his followers bare of all illusions of control as he sends them out on their mission of healing. I love how preacher Nadia Bolz-Weber paraphrases Jesus’ command: “OK, [she writes.]  The first thing you need to know is that we are under staffed. Second, there’s a high wolf danger so watch out for that. Third you can’t take any money or change of clothes or bag or even sandals. Forth, stay with whoever will share the peace with you and don’t try and trade up and if there are sick people around take care of them and fifth, the food might stink but eat it anyway.”[1] Jesus’s followers aren’t to demand or expect success. If they accomplish amazing things, they’re not to take the credit. There’s no promise of glory, no promise of nice church buildings, or financial pledges, or pews full of families with young children. There’s merely the command to show up and to heal the sick and broken in Jesus’ name.

          I can still remember having disdainful thoughts on my first day of clinical pastoral education in seminary. The hospital chaplain was lecturing us newbies on the importance of simply showing up in a crisis. We didn’t need the answers, he said. We just needed to be present. “What?!” I thought, “How dumb. Just stand there with no explanations while people are suffering?! What good does that do? That’s way too simple. Who wants to see a strange pastor-type they don’t even know lurking around in times of grief?” As I found out, that’s exactly what people want. Loving presence. Standing with. Vulnerability. Showing compassion, like a young slave in a foreign land helping the general who led the assault that likely led to her capture.

Between the Covid pandemic, the Marshall Fire in my town, traumatic events around the country, and my husband’s illness, the shield of my beloved privilege feels like it’s slipping. My certainty that everything will work out has been deeply shaken. In these recent turbulent weeks, I feel as if I need to do something as an American, and certainly as a priest. I want us to be healed of our collective leprosy. I want to fix things for those who are suffering. But everything that I can come up with sounds too weak and common, like trying to cure a deadly disease by bathing in a foreign stream, like holding the hands of dying patients in the hospital.

          Today’s readings reassure me that no act of love is too inconsequential. Jesus is asking us to show up, vulnerable and open, like Naaman, like sheep among wolves. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, “wolves” are symbols. They don’t just represent violence and danger. They are metaphors for corrupt and greedy religious and political leaders who devour the poor and marginalized. Jesus-followers are to enter their presence unprotected, vulnerable, dependent only upon God and the hospitality of Christian community. Indeed, the very Kingdom of God, that Kingdom that Jesus says has come near, it’s an image for how the brokenness of this world could be healed, if each of us would turn back to living for the God who is love.[2] Joining God in bringing about this restoration of creation through Love is our very mission as Christians.

So what do we do when our lives or our world seem to be going haywire? We sit and eat with those in need of good news, live among them, stay with them, listen to them, live regular lives together, don’t waste time in places we aren’t wanted, and let God’s healing happen. It’s not very flashy. But such is the Kingdom of God. May we find, like Naaman, true healing there, in spite of ourselves.

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[1] Nadia Bolz Weber, “Sermon on Naaman the Leper and How the Common Can Heal Us.” In Sarcastic Lutheran. Patheos, July 7, 2016. Found at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2016/07/sermon-on-naaman-the-leper-and-how-the-common-can-heal-us/

[2] Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, The Love that is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 30.

Seven Last Words: "My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me"

 

The afternoon sky has been dark for three hours, daylight overpowered by the strangeness of night. At the worst of his pain, alone in the darkness, Jesus groans, using the only prayer that remains: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” With these words, Jesus begins to pray Psalm 22, joining his voice to the psalmist’s witness, joining his voice to the anguished voices of all who feel abandoned, forsaken, and vulnerable.

Pain pulls us in on ourselves, doesn’t it? It isolates us from others, from God, from beauty, even from love. Poet Christian Wiman, a bone-cancer survivor, says that “pain islands you.”[1] Yes, it can be the bone-crushing pain of cancer or the dry burning of fever. It can be the emotional pain of grief and loss, or of a depression so deep that we can only curl our bodies around our own despair. It can be the pain we absorb from our radically suffering world—from war, from natural disasters, from injustice, from genocide. Deep pain takes up all of our attention and makes us feel, oh so alone.

Pain and suffering also rip us away from any sense of meaning. Jesus’ “WHY” isn’t an intellectual “why.” It’s a why that pleads from deep down in the gut. It’s the Psalmist’s “WHY” of agonized wonder, the cry of “how can this horror even be?” How can “my God,” the trustworthy God of my ancestors, seem to have disappeared in my time of need? How can all the narratives on which I’ve relied suddenly crumble to dust? On the Cross, even Jesus, who knows an unconditional intimacy with his Abba—even Jesus enters the empty pit of meaninglessness that comes with suffering.

I wonder how much of the Psalm Jesus is able to utter before his death. Is it just this first agonized line, given to us by the Gospel writers? Psalm 22 isn’t just a testimony to pain and meaninglessness. It’s a testimony that shifts rather awkwardly to end in praise—in praise of a triumphant, saving God. As the psalmist dangles from the horns of wild oxen, God suddenly appears to him, like sunlight through the clouds. It turns out that God was never absent, after all.

I like to think that Jesus, in his dying, finishes the whole psalm, embodying both agony and grace, witnessing to God’s faithful presence, even when we can’t feel it. It can sound puny and clichéd when we say to someone in pain, “Oh, God is with you in your suffering.” But in Jesus’ own anguished cry, I can feel and hear and see that place where God’s unfailing, ever-present love runs smack into unjust, isolating, meaningless suffering. And that meeting of love and pain--that’s where the power of compassion--the divine power of “suffering with”—can grow and spread. And it’s this power of compassion that brings life out of death.[2]

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[1] Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 148.

[2] Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1990), 79.

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).