October 24, 2021
Hebrew 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52
Several times recently I’ve been talking with people in their seventies and eighties, and they’ve described this feeling of sadness and futility they sometimes have, this sense that there’s nothing more to look forward to.
And I know that feeling very well. I’m getting up there, too. Seventy doesn’t seem that far away anymore!
But for us as Christians this is a serious mistake, not just because we have an afterlife to look forward to, but because in our sadness and anxiety we’re not living in the moment. We’re stuck in a past we can’t change. We’re anxious about a future that hasn’t happened yet.
But in the present moment we’re neither young nor old. We just are. In the present moment life is what it’s always been.
The mist in the trees. Our morning coffee. Our little tasks for the day.
Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine died, someone I knew and worked with for many years. She was very important to me, but our relationship had its ups and downs, and for days after she died I couldn’t shake feelings of guilt and regret.
But regret like that is a temptation, because it traps us in the past, where’s there’s nothing more we can do. In Christ there’s always more we can do. The call is always to the present moment, and the future is always opening up before us, and in Christ even death is not the end.
We can console those who remain. We can reach out to those we’ve kept at a distance. And we can ask the dead to forgive us, as we can forgive them.
Because the dead are not truly dead. They live in him, as we all live in him.
Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.
Today is World Priest Day and we pray in thanksgiving for our priests. We’re very lucky to have the priests we do. Very blessed. We pray in thanksgiving for their energy and their enthusiasm–and most of all for showing us what it really means to be called. That it’s God who calls us, not we who call God. A priest isn’t ordained because of his virtue but out of his humanity. A priest can “deal with us patiently,” Hebrews says, because he, too, is “beset by weakness”–and like even Christ himself, he is not “glorified in himself” but in God and through God. Just as in our different ways we all are. We all are.
Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.
Can you imagine what it be like to really hear those words? How thrilling that would be?
But we do hear those words. We hear them every day.
And look at how this works in the literary structure of the Gospel at this point. How all of this has this context.
It’s not an accident that Mark in his genius as a writer puts the healings of two blind men on either side of the Transfiguration scene and Jesus’s teaching about the crucifixion, that we have to die to ourselves, that we have to be servants of all, that this isn’t about power and glory but about humility and faith. And the disciples don’t get it. They see that incredible light and they’re still arguing about who’s on first. It’s just brilliant the way Mark does this. He doesn’t come out and say it, but here are the disciples who can see but are blind to who Jesus really is and who they should be, and then, right before and right after, here are these two blind men who are blind but can see, who do know Jesus and know that he can save them if only they humble themselves.
Bartimaeus does call Jesus, and Jesus does answer the call. But Bartimaeus calls out, in his weakness and his need, and Jesus answers in his compassion and his love, and he comes only to call him in return.
Two blind men, one in chapter 8, on the way up the mountain, the one Jesus heals with spit; and now Bartimaeus, in chapter 10, as they’re coming down the mountain, and Jesus is still trying to teach those egotistical, self-involved disciples that they have to let go.
Us, in other words.
The transfiguration is right in the middle. The light. The marvelous light.
This is where we always are, at exactly this same spot.
Before too long I’m going to have to go to this big event—not a Church event but something secular—and the other day I told a friend that I was really dreading it. I said I knew it was just going to be this big, two-dimensional thing. That’s the word I used: two-dimensional. Because it’s just going to be a secular gathering. Because it won’t involve any talk about God, any prayer.
And my friend called me on it–very gently, and not in so many words–but he sort of implied that maybe the problem was me. Maybe I’m the one being two-dimensional.
I’m the one who is blind.
Grace is at work everywhere, in everywhere situation. God loves everyone just as much as he loves all of us at St. Mary’s, and maybe I could plan on going to that event and looking for that grace and listening for that grace. Because it will be there. God will be there where anyone talks about him or not.
Maybe, instead of just talking about Christianity, I could, you know, actually try to be a Christian.
I’m glad Jesus is just as patient with me as he is with those clueless disciples. Again and again he is telling all of us where true greatness lies and true freedom and true joy. In dying. In weakness. In letting go.
Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you. He is calling all of us. He will cure all of us of our blindness if only we ask him to. If only we first realize we can’t really see. O Jesus, Son of David, have pity on us!