Word on the Street (John 1:1 - 14)

     The Word, the logos, became flesh—was enfleshed, as we sometimes say—and came to live around here. Right here, among us, the denizens of Greenhills, Ohio, USA, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the universe. But it wasn’t new to the universe, to the cosmos, not by a long shot. It was there all along, in the beginning, we just couldn’t see it. In fact, it was there in the beginning with God, and we all know that was a long, long time ago. What if our spirits were to take wing like time-traveling doves, and fly back through time to substantiate this claim, that the Logos was there in the beginning, maybe we stop at the rise of us, of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, we stop and look around with our spirit-sense, and yup! There it is, right there where John claims it is . . . and once again we take flight, slipping through the air, passing through time like smoke through leaves, and around us we catch fleeting glimpses, and everything of course is running backwards, a great cloud coalesces around a fiery point and a while-hot ball emerges out of the sea, and we come to realize we are looking at the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, and sure enough, there they are, thundering around the plains and through the jungles and seas . . . we alight for a moment, and dodging a Stegosaur, we determine the presence of the Word; and how are we doing that, you might ask, how are we so sure the Word is present wherever we alight? Well, I can only say that like pertains to like, that our spirits are of the same stuff—not matter, you understand, but the same . . . essence—as the Word, we vibrate on the same frequency, a frequency far too subtle to detect with any detector we’ve ever invented, and just as birds recognize other birds, trees detect other trees and rocks other rocks, our spirits, our divine sparks register the spark, in fact our spirits just barely resist dancing a little jig in its presence, like the one John the Baptist does in Elizabeth’ womb, when his spirit recognizes the incarnate Word.

Anyway. Our spirits flutter back through time, dodging flying reptiles, batting away giant mosquitos—wouldn’t you just know that they’d be able to see us?—and dive into a sea teeming with fish and then—as the age gets younger—no longer fish but arthropods, trilobites, then progressively simpler life forms, swimming in that primordial soup, until zap! a blinding light that would sear retinas, if our spirits had retinas, and behold! The first living thing, and our spirits immediately feel the Word, coiling around and within the organism like an all-pervading serpent, and once again our spirits are off, back through the eons, and though we are at a frequency much more subtle than the material world coming into being around us, we still dodge and metaphysically wince when volcanoes belch up underneath, or when continents crunch together like ponderous bumper cars. Our spirits know they cannot be harmed, but old habits die hard. And through it all, like a background weave, like a pulsing electric ligament, winds the Word.

We suppose, though our spirits’ adventures, that Paul was correct when he wrote that in Christ all things are held together, because our spirits—reporting back to our hearts—tell us that the Word, the one that was enfleshed, pervades everything, and as they keep voyaging back though time, things get more and more dodgy—thank God our flesh is not there—and they sense that the Word is in everything and everything is in the Word . . . and now the Earth is a fiery ball, we’ve seen it go from cool and green and ocean-covered to molten red, as if heated in a cosmic forge, and now it’s hurtling through space, racing around a sullen sun, and it comes apart before our spiritual eyes, back into its constituent pieces, the loose rock and space dust it was before centripetal force coalesced it, and still the Word is there, and it is becoming apparent that John was just a bit conservative, a bit off in his metaphor-shifting. He likened the Word to light, the light of the world, as a matter of fact, and it’s a metaphor that certainly had legs, it’s lasted to this day . . . light, that allows us to see, that illuminates dark corners, that becomes associated with truth, and those dark corners? Why they’re always associated with false, and everybody knows that false is wrong, it’s bad, and so things that are dark must be that way, no? The night—the life-giving darkness, when plants respire, when people are refreshed by sleep—the night must be bad . . . at night, with the glittery stars and garish, silver moon . . . the twinkling stars that were to the ancients holes in the firmament, or to the Aztecs, demons held back only by sacrifice . . . the poetry of John’s prolog didn’t create this false dualism, but it certainly helped it perpetuate . . .

But what if we think of this light as what physics has revealed it to be? What if we think of it as energy, as streams of photons . . . the light of the Word, the light that is the Word, powers the world, some—like theologian Father Bruno Barnhart—say it has powered the whole enterprise in the West, in Europe and the Americas, first the flowering of society and educational institutions under the church, and then as science and secular rationality, all powered by what Father Bruno calls the Christ Quantum, that bursting of energy and creativity release when the Word became flesh. And what do we know now about light? Is it not both wave and particle? Is not the metaphor John wrote even sharper, even more apt today? If light is both-and, so is the Word, who was both with God, separate from God, and at the same time, identical with God, the same as God . . . light from light, light as light: two natures, God and not-God, all at once.

But our wandering spirits are further back than that, by some 5 billion years or so, and the weight of the intervening millennia grows heavy, and now there is only our sun, which grows smaller and smaller even as we watch, until it is no more, and we are suspended in the void, and here’s the thing: it is a void, it is empty of matter, but not of the Word, not of the Christ . . . what? Christ Quantum as Father Bruno would say? Christ Omega, as Teilhard de Chardin would put it? Perhaps Word is the best we can do . . . but it’s not Word as we conceive of it today, not a static thing that lies there on the page, nor is it an assembly of characters that points to an object—or objects—in the so-called “real” world . . . it is a dynamic presence, always has been, always will be, always changing, always vital, always new.

Problem is, we often do not conceive of it that way, everybody kmows what the word of God is, it’s this book right here, written down anywhere from two to three thousand years ago, argued about by Roman Catholics and then Protestants and Catholics, finally settled as to its contents by 70 CE in the former case and 1500 CE in the latter, and here it is, you can hold it in your hand, see? Certainly not a part of us, certainly not dynamic in any way, and if it was made flesh, as our passage would have it, it certainly isn’t that way now . . .

And our spirits have accelerated in their flight . . . ten billion years ago, twelve . . . we see the accretion and scattering of whole constellations under gravity’s inexorable weight, and still there is the Word, wound through and around everything, all the nascent stars and wobbly solar systems . . . and are there other life-systems to which this Christ-Principle, this powering and empowering evolutionary engine is central? It is not for us to know at this time, but someday perhaps we will . . .

Fifteen billion years ago, sixteen . . . things are getting packed, now, much more compact, and we are swept along toward a discernible center, and galaxies and interstellar dust are zooming at super-hyper-dooper-sonic speeds towards that center, and right before the crash we close our metaphysical eyes, and . . . we are back in the present: I suppose there are some places—or rather, some times—even our spirit selves cannot penetrate, and if ever there was such a space-time, the Big Bang would be it. But John assures us—and I have to take his Word for it—that the Word was there in the beginning, and that implies even before the Bang, and that everything was created through the Word, everything was created in the Word, and that Word was there when it all happened, in the beginning, and that means before the Big Bang when literally God only knows what was there, or even if there was a there.

The Cosmos burst into being with a Bang . . . all of a sudden there was space, all of a sudden there was time, and seventeen-odd-billion years later, here we are, like all created matter, trapped in space, bound up in time. Except . . . except that part of us that is divine, the divine spark, as I call it. In our journey through time, we discovered that John wasn’t exaggerating when he says things are created in and through the Word. Paul wasn’t whistling Dixie when he says in this Word all things—all things!—hold together. And today, do you want to see this Word? Do you want to feel it? Hold out your hand and touch the back of the pew in front of you. Run up to a tree, rub your hands over the bark. Heck, plant your feet in the Greenhills streets, ‘cause the Word isn’t just on the street, it’s in it as well.

And one more thing: if you want to experience the dynamic Word, the ever-changing, ever lively Word, you don’t have to sit with 2000-year-old writings and wait for the Spirit to make them come to life—although that’s not a bad thing to do, everything has its place. But all you have to do is look at your neighbors and family and friends, and really be present, really listen to them, and you’ll see the Word shine through in everything they do. Amen.

The Forerunner (Luke 3:1 - 18, Advent 2C)

When I was an undergraduate, there was a campus preacher named Hubert Lindsey, but everybody called him “Holy Hubert.” He got his start at Berkley in the 60s, and got beat up over 150 times, most notably by the leadership of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, he was responsible for bringing a lot of young people, a lot of “hippies,” as denizens of the counterculture were called in those days, to Christianity. He had a knack of showing up at protests and turning the talk toward Christ; then-governor Ronald Reagan quipped that the State of California owed him millions in crowd control and, of course, he was darkly accused of being a tool of the State because of it. And though he was seen by students as something of a joke, he nevertheless is considered to be one of the fathers of the West Coast Jesus movement.

I saw him on the campus of the University of Washington in the early 70s. He’d stand in front of the Husky Union Building—the HUB—and draw big crowds of students, who would joyfully heckle him as he preached. I say “joyfully” because there was no malice in it, from either side, really. He would say outrageous things—“bless your dirty little hearts!” and “everything about you is evil, everything about you is defiled”—and the students would eat it up, they’d laugh and throw verbal jabs back at him, attempting to best him in debate, which, of course, they never could. But there was no animosity in it, and if you go back and look at some of the videos—YouTube has some, just search under “Holy Hubert”—you can see the compassion underneath all the fire.

I think of Holy Hubert every time I read about John the Baptist—it’s almost like, in my mind, he’s a spiritual descendent. Every time I read John’s taunt—you brood of vipers!—I think back to Hubert calling the students “You little devils!” And predicting hellfire for each and every one. The difference is, of course, that John was the forerunner, he was heralding the coming of Jesus into the world, and Hubert was an evangelist, trying to save souls after the fact, more akin to John the Gospel-writer than John the Baptist.

But stylistically, at least, they have something in common. Like Hubert, who preached up and down the West Coast, John preached up and down the Jordan. Like Hubert, John minced no words: “You brood of vipers!” he’d spit, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?“ Like Hubert, he preached of repentance, urging his listeners to turn away from their sins. And I wonder—if you were to get into a time machine—maybe H.G. Wells’, I hear it’s not being used at the moment—if you were to get into a time machine and go back to watch John the Baptist there on the rocky Jordan banks, what would you see? Did the locals taunt the hair-shirted prophet? Did they fling jibes and insults at him like the modern kids did Hubert? Did the Jordan prophet fling ‘em right back, did he seem to enjoy the game as much as 70s preacher?

One thing I’m sure of is that underneath any playfulness he might have had, underneath any compassion he might have shown, there was the same resolve, the same overwhelming sense of mission. Just as Hubert was deadly serious in his desire to see students brought to Christ, John the Baptist was serious about his calling as the forerunner, the messenger, the harbinger of Christ. “I baptize you with water,” he’d say, “but one who is more powerful than I am is coming, and I’m not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In other words, he’s saying, he’s not worthy to be Jesus’ slave.

If it was important to John that he not be mistaken for the one whose coming he foreshadowed, it was equally important to the early Gospel writers. Disciples of Jesus that they were, they wanted to make sure their readers knew that Jesus was the one, not John, the followers of whom may have been still around. In fact, some Biblical scholars think there may have been a rivalry between the followers of John—beheaded by Herod for speaking truth to power—and those of Jesus, crucified for doing the same.

Well. Be that as it may, it’s important to note the content of John’s message. “You brood of vipers!” he’d say. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Don’t tellnme you have Abraham as an ancestor. God can make children of Abraham out of those rocks over there. That’s not gonna cut it any more. It’s not about ancestry it’s about the fruit you bear. In fact, even now the ax is on the tree, it’s on the tree of Israel, the leafy ancestors of Abraham, ready to cut it down if it doesn’t bear fruit, ready to cut it down and feed it to the fire! As we’ve seen, John could be a just a bit over the top . . .

 And his followers would say “If it’s not about our ancestry, if it’s not enough to be sons and daughters of Abraham, then what shall we do?” And it’s as important to notice what John doesn’t say as much what he does. He doesn’t say “just believe in the one to come,” he doesn’t say “you must follow the one named Jesus.” He tells them that they have to reform their behavior. Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do the same. It’s not enough to mouth platitudes, it’s not enough to just believe, you’ve gotta change your behavior, you’ve gotta put some money where your mouth is.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the whole New Testament, from the Gospels to the Epistles. Over in Matthew, Jesus tells a parable of a king (clearly meant to represent himself) who separates the sheep from the goats according to how they take care of the poor—whatsoever you’ve done to the least of these, the king says, you’ve done to me. In John, Jesus says that he has come so that we might believe, Paul is the avatar of salvation through faith, but the author of James insists that faith without works is dead. There is a tension in the New Testament between being and doing, belief and action, faith and works.

Here, John comes down squarely on the action side. How do the Israelites avoid the ax and the fire? Give clothes to the naked and food to the hungry. Don’t take more than is your due, especially if you’re a tax-collector. Don’t use your power to extort money from folks by threats or false accusation, and don’t be greedy, be happy you have a job, for Pete’s sake.

Traditionally, John is seen as an avatar of the old, the last of the hair-shirted prophets, preaching hell-fire one last time before the coming of grace, and there’s certainly something like that going on. But I think he represents something else as well: an acknowledgment that the Gospel is to be practiced, not just believed. John was the forerunner of Christ, all right, but he was also the forerunner of a new social order, which combines prophetic action—you will be known by your fruits—with forgiveness by the grace of God.

And there’s one other thing John was a forerunner of, and that’s Christianity as a whole. He prepared the way for the entire Christian enterprise, that begun with the coming of the one whose sandals he was not fit to untie. He prepared the way for the apostles and St. Paul. For Benedict and Augustine, St. Francis and St. Teresa. He prepared the way for John Calvin and John of the Cross, for Martin Luther and Billy Graham, for all the evangelical preachers right down to good old Holy Hubert. And last, but certainly not least, he prepared the way for the denizens of Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian—he prepared the way for us.

But not only did he he showed us how to prepare as well. Advent is a season of preparation, and not only did John the Baptist prepare the way for Christ and every Christian to come, he showed us how to do it as well. We’re to examine our lives, how we relate to each other, how we conduct the business of living, how we relate to God. The meaning of repentance is turning ones life around—each Advent we’re invited to examine ours and see what needs turning. Amen.

Holding Our Breaths (Advent 1C)

I was talking to a pastor one time from another denomination, one that doesn’t follow the church calendar, and he said to me rather wistfully: “I kind of miss Advent,” and I said, “well, you can always put some in . . .” as if it's a commodity, like put a little tiger in your tank.  But it’s true, you can put a little Advent in, you don't have to hurtle full-throttle from Thanksgiving right on into Christmas, like some mean, holiday-celebrating machine. My sister and brother-in-law used to plan worship for a little Baptist church in Gold Bar Washington, and even though Baptists don’t do Advent – or Lent or Baptism of the Lord Sunday, for that matter – my sister and brother-in-law did Adventy-kinds of things for a while before Christmas day. But in many Protestant traditions, including my fellow pastor's, Advent has been lost, and to reintroduce it can cause dissension in the ranks.

These days, many of our fellow Christians can’t seem to wait for December 25^th to roll around . . . they want to start celebrating Christmas right after Thanksgiving, just like everybody else. And why not? It’s a festive, joyous season . . . Andy Williams called it the “Hap-happiest time of the year!”  We go out and sing carols, our breaths all puffy in the cold, and come back inside to drink hot spiced cider and eat cookies with those little sprinkles on top. Cities large and small construct mini-wonderlands out of colored lights and people walk or drive through them in great numbers. There’s a state park up the coast from where we used to live in Oregon that lights up the night right up until Christmas Eve, and the combination of Christmas cheer, crashing surf and barking sea lions is stunning and unique.

The fact is that every year, Christmas appears out of nowhere, almost as if someone’s thrown a switch.  The stores pipe carols through their Muzak speakers and lights twinkle merrily on electric shaver displays and if you like Jimmy Stewart, you’re in luck because It’s A Wonderful Life gets the royal treatment from NBC, and every time a cash-register goes ka-ching, another angel gets its wings.

Why would anybody in their right minds want to put this stuff off? Don’t we have a right to be happy? Aren’t we sick and tired of politics, politics and more politics?  Don’t we want a little joy in our lives? Well, of course we do, and truth be told, not many of us will forgo these things entirely in the next twenty-three days. So what’s the point of Advent? Why does the church insist that we stop and linger these four weeks when everybody else hurtles full-tilt-boogie into a winter wonderland?

Well, one answer is . . . we’re not everybody else, or at least we’re not supposed to be . . . and more importantly, Christmas is not everybody else's festival, or at least it’s not supposed to be. It’s our holiday, our story, and it started long before the year of Christ’s birth . . . we believe that God was working divine purposes long before four B.C. or whenever the latest guess at Jesus’ birth year happens to be. We believe that all of creation waits for final redemption, and that we must wait as well, to re-enact the yearning, longing desire for the coming of the Lord.  Isaiah expresses this well: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” He craves that presence, that over-riding comfort, as many of us do, deep down where our souls live . . . we are tired of the fighting, tired of the hate and oppression, and we ache after the spirit-balm of the coming of the Lord . . . can you not feel it? Can you not taste it, blowing on the winter winds? That's what Advent is about . . . it's about the longing, the anticipation, the preparing for the savior of the world. In short, it's about the waiting.

Jesus Christ, the savior of the world . . . who'll save us from more than just our sins. He'll free the oppressed, feed the hungry and we ain't a-gonna practice war no more. The ground-zero beating heart of Christian hope will be born 23 days from now, in a manger, in an out-of-the-way town in a minor Roman province. That's when Christmas is . . . it's not today, it's not next Sunday, or the Sunday after that. It's December 25^th, and until then, there is just the waiting.

But Isaiah also says that God works for those who wait upon the Lord, and this makes lingering, it makes abiding a virtue. Of course, it's a virtue we seem to have less and less of these days . . . advertisements blaring want and desire leave little room for waiting, little time for patience . . . the credit-card industry has been built on impatience, people ruin their lives for the benefit of the CitiBank bottom line. It's much easier to hand over that little piece of plastic than to wait.

But at Advent, we're required to wait upon God, and that's not a bad thing. Good ol’ Isaiah says that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They'll mount up with wings like eagles, run and not be weary. They'll walk and not faint. God works through the waiting, it’s a means of grace, as theologians put it, and this recognition of waiting is at the center of contemplative prayer.  All the techniques for clearing the mind of clutter, all the ways of meditating on scripture, of rolling images of Jesus or words of comfort around and around in our minds, they're all aimed at one thing – to enable us to wait upon the Lord . . . to clear the mind of the debris of everyday life, all the centipedes of incidental thought crawling through our brains, all the extraneous detail of our full and busy lives. And when our thoughts are cleared, there is room for God to work in them and on them and thereby in our hearts . . . and it's a slow process, which seems much more like waiting than working. I know it's like that for me . . . I'm a product of our can't wait, why-not-have-it now society, and I want instant results from what I do. But when you do contemplative prayer, there’s most of the time no instant effect, no immediate improvements or change, and it can be discouraging.

But I’ve learned that God works in God’s own time, slowly and deliberately, perhaps because things easily gained are easily lost, and with anticipation comes value. As we wait, we have time to savor, to reflect, to integrate the changes fully in our lives, to make them truly part of us. And so at Advent, we're asked to wait for the Lord's coming, and as we do, God will work on us. As we take time to meditate on the season, and to contemplate our need for redemption, it becomes richer for us, and we come to know Christ more fully.

That's how Advent began – 1400 years ago it was a time of meditation and renewal, a time of cleansing and purification, a time for God to work on us before the coming of the Christ. As scripture says, we all become like one who is unclean, we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, our sorrows, our pain – like the wind—carry us away.

And as the years passed, it came to pass that Advent became a time for contemplation not only of the past but of the future as well . . . it became a time to look forward to not only Christ's first coming, but his second too . . . and so we read passages like the one from Luke, describing poetically the final days. And just as we can't separate Jesus' identity as the crucified one from that of the ruler of the universe, so we can't separate the babe in the manger from the final judge of us all. They are the same event, really—the coming of the kingdom of God.

The great theologian Jurgen Moltmann wrote that the first coming of Christ, on that cold winter's night, makes sense only in light of his promise to come again. God's kingdom reached its greatest expression yet in the person of Jesus. In fact, Jesus is the kingdom personified, as he himself told his disciples – he said the kingdom of God is here among you. And if we had only his first coming to celebrate, it would be hard to believe that our current existence – definitely not heaven on earth – is somehow God's reign. So at Advent, we hold two events together, in celebrated tension, so that we can see the kingdom for the trees, so that we can see that despite all appearances, despite the famine and the misery and the wars and rumors of war, God's kingdom is coming, and it's already here and it will be here and fulfilled in the future.

Christ himself said it to John, in a dream there on Patmos Isle: “I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” And he stands there, in the center, holding the past and the future together, and so through him is forged our present. Christ – at the center of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we take advantage of it or not, whether we allow him to mold us or shape us or use us or not. Christ at the center of the universe, within everything, holding together the past of bondage to corruption and sin over and against the future when our redemption is complete.

Christ at the center, in time as well as outside of it, in our world and yet transcending it, coming again – soon! – and yet for the first time ever. And our task over these coming weeks is simple – all we have to do is wait upon the Lord, who will act and has acted in his own good time. And it's a profoundly subversive task, a counter cultural task in the best sense, for it goes against the dominant tide of our culture. “You don't have to wait for anything,” it roars, over and over, time and again, and yet, we Christians – some of us, anyway – wait. We wait because we know it's a virtue, because we know that God will bless those who wait for the Lord. We wait because we know that in the waiting, the thing we await becomes sharper and sharper in focus, that as we meditate and cogitate and contemplate, when it finally arrives, when Christ comes in a lowly manger and in fire and cloud-bedecked glory, his arrival will be all the more sweet. Amen.

Truth and Consequences (John 18:33-37)

      So here we are, the last Sunday before Advent, the season that begins with the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends Christmas Eve, and our reading is from the middle of the passion narrative, of all things. You know the passion narrative, don’t you?: The story about the trial and death of Jesus Christ? And it’s relevant because it’d also Christ the King Sunday, and contains a discussion of what makes a monarch in the Kingdom of God. And the very fact it’s from the passion narrative lends it a poignant irony over and above any words that might be said, because the first thing anybody would ever ask about Jesus, who was nailed to that tree, is what kind of ruler, what kind of sovereign, what kind of king gets drug through the streets of Jerusalem, poked and prodded and jeered at, and then hung up to die on a cross? And, by extension, what kind of religion is bult around such a thing? Because make no mistake, Christianity is as much about the crucifixion as it is about the resurrection, as much about the crash of winter as the coming of spring.

It was early in Christianity that Christians started calling Christ their king, right along with calling him Lord, which befuddled Jews and Greeks and just about everybody else in the Greco-Roman world, because getting killed made one kind of a failure, didn’t it? It made one kind of a loser, and less kind individuals would have gone around making the L-sign on their foreheads, if English had been invented, which of course it hadn’t. Losers weren’t any more respected by the general populace in those days any more than they are today, and a guy who got himself killed definitely wasn’t a winner in their books. The guy had done all kind of miracles, all kinds of signs, and shown power over life and death, for St. Peter’s sake, but cracked like a soft-boiled egg at the first sign of Roman opposition. He wouldn’t even save his own life. Was it any wonder his disciples had scattered like quail?

And here he was up before Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, who would not have made anybody’s most-cuddly list. History would remember him as a ruthless, vicious ruler, who’d keep the Roman peace at any cost, who ate scruffy revolutionaries like Jesus for breakfast. In fact, he had a some-time insurrectionist named Barabbas just waiting for the right moment to string up, which apparently would be right after he got done with Jesus. Now Jesus had been brought to Pilate because the Israelite religious authorities could sentence anyone of anything up to, but not including, death, and they wanted Jesus dead. But Pilate, despite his cutthroat virtuosity, is hesitating. And this has always puzzled biblical scholars, because it was way out of character for him, so the more liberal amongst them proposed that the Gospel writers, ah, embellished the scene, trying to curry favor with the Romans by blaming the Jews. See, they’d say, we’re good Roman citizens, we don’t blame y’all for Jesus’ death, it was those evil Jews!

But you know, I wonder if it’s something about Jesus that gave Pilate pause . . . after all, we know that the disciples only had to see him and hear his voice to up and leave everything and every one to follow him. Jesus seemed to radiate, to exude something that wasn’t of this world, at least any world that anybody in this one’d ever seen. Cynthia Bourgeault calls it a “recognition event,” that people recognized something in Jesus that resonated with them on a deep, and not-particuarly-rational, level. And perhaps that’s what we’re seeing here, that the Pilate historians know would even twitch at putting a rabble rouser down may be a testament to Jesus’ magnetic and holy presence.

Well. Our passage tells of Pilate’s final confrontation with Jesus, and to me, it looks he’s just trying to get a handle on it all. “Are you the king of the Jews,” he asks, and he knows full well that that’s what Herod styles himself as, king of the Jews, and perhaps Pilate is trying to get Jesus in trouble with the Romans’ pet overlord, but more likely he’s just trying to find out what he’s being charged with. Because in fact, he hadn’t been told. The Sanhedrin had just hauled him over and dumped him off on him, saying “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” What kind of trial is this that the judge doesn’t even know the charges?

So Pilate is trying to do his job, and to do it he needs to know what the charge is, and so he asks “Are you the King of the Jews?” Cause if he thinks he’s the king of the Jews, then he’ll know what’s up. And Jesus’ answer—“Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”—has been taken to be kind of smart-alecky, like “did you figure that out all by yourself, or did you get help?” But I don’t think it’s meant as an insult, I think he really wants to know. We already know that Jesus makes a sharp distinction between what comes from the inside versus what comes from without . . . remember? He says it’s not what comes from outside that defiles, but what comes from inside. Similarly, Jesus is asking whether Pilate’s question comes from within Pilate, and thus is sincere, or whether he’s parroting what he’s heard.

We live in a time where it’s an important distinction, don’t you think? We’re constantly bombarded with information and opinions, squabbling talking heads and news that is of doubtful provenance and veracity (notice how I didn’t call it fake news?). If we let ourselves be swayed by everything that comes from without, from everything we are told, we’ll be like those bulrushes over in Isaiah, but instead of our heads being bowed, they’ll be whipping around like bobbles on a spring.

But how does our dependence on all these outside influences dovetail with Jesus’ teaching that it’s only what comes from within that defiles? All those buffeting viewpoints can’t defile, can they? After all, they do come from without . . . Well, Buddhist psychology puts it this way: in everyone there are seeds: seeds of violence, seeds of compassion, seeds of fear, seeds of joy . . . every human emotion, every human behavior is within us in embryonic form. For fans of Western psychology, it’s akin to C.G. Jung’s collective unconscious, where human behaviors are represented by common archetypes. In the Buddhist metaphor, these seeds—of violence, evil, compassion, joy—lie dormant until they are “watered” by something from the outside. Thus, watching or participating in violent activities water the seeds of violence, watching or participating in deeds of compassion water seeds of compassion, and the person grows increasingly violent or compassionate. Does it mean they will be actively violent or compassionate? No. But, according to Buddhist thought, their tendencies, their propensities for them will increase.

And so, according to this thinking, outside influences—news, movies, political rallies, and the like—can actually change how we are on the inside, and therefore, as Jesus would say, come from inside and defile—or make better, for that matter. And so, when Jesus asks whether the question about his kingship is asked on his own, he is taking Pilate’s spiritual temperature, speaking from a far different spiritual place than was Pilate. Jesus is trying to see into his psyche, Pilate is just interested externalities: “I am not a Jew, am I?” he says, “Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” And in fact, Pilate doesn’t know, they haven’t told him,

So we have Jesus being Jesus, plumbing spiritual reaches, and Pilate being Pilate, just trying to figure out just what is going on. And Jesus makes it clear that he’s interacting with the governor on a whole other level: “My kingdom’s not of this world. If my kingdom were from there, my followers would be fighting to keep me free. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” And there it is: Pilate is speaking of worldly things—things of this realm—and his notion of kingship is based there. Jesus, of course, is speaking of the Kingdom of God, his natural habitat, and his notion of kingship is based there.

And Pilate takes one more stab at understanding this enigmatic man with the entire universe in his eyes: “So you are a king.” And once again, Jesus reply is from another realm: ”You’re the one who says I’m a king. But here’s the reason I was born and the reason I came into this world: to testify to the truth.” He may be on trial in this temporal realm, but his testimony isn’t about that. His testimony is about the eternal, it’s about truth. And whoever belongs to that truth listens not to the things of the world, but to his voice. But once again, Pilate hears things from his own perspective: “What is truth?” he asks, shaking his head as he walks away.

And of course, that’s the problem: Pilate is talking about the truth of the powers that be, the powers and principalities, as Paul would call them. Political truth, that shifts with the wind; human truth, which blows around like those bobble-head bulrushes. That truth is tied to authority, to whomever is in power, who holds the reigns of the media, who can control the dominant narrative. The truth of which Jesus speaks is a more basic truth, a more fundamental truth, a truth that doesn’t vary, that doesn’t budge. It’s a truth that underlies reality. And this is John, remember, where Christ’s own self is that word of truth, so Jesus testifies to himself and God, the ground of being that sent him.

And those who belong to that truth listen to that truth, they listen to him. which shouldn’t be hard to do, because they—we!—are intimately connected to him, as branches to a vine. In fact this Word, this truth abides in us, and we in him. It is our center, below any Buddhist seeds, more fundamental than any Jungian archetype. And we are fundamentally grounded to this truth, and have recourse to it, if only we will, when the chaos and confusion and obfuscation of modern existence seems too much to handle.

Sisters and brothers, this is the kind of king Christ is, one who points to truth, one who is that truth, available to us through scripture and through his own indwelling self. All we have to do, as the old hymn says, keep our eyes on him. Amen.

Class Act (Mark 12:38 - 44)

     So here we are, the first Sunday of stewardship season, where our board—which, for some obscure and (likely) boring reason, we Presbyterians call the Session—where the Session comes up with a budget and then we talk about ways to fill it, most usually, of course, from pledges. And it’s kinda like pledge season on National Public Radio, and it can be just as annoying—not here, of course—with people asking for money, money, money . . . and why is that, you may ask? Well, unlike public radio, which gets about half its budget from the gummint, we get virtually all our budget through donations. A little something called separation of church and state, don’t you know.

     And so we have our own pledge season here at Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian, only unlike NPR, we only do it once a year, and isn’t that nice of your Session who loves you? And instead of thank-you gifts like crank-powered emergency radios and CDs of piano players nobody’s ever heard of, we get to have a warm, well-lit place to gather for worship and professionals like Brad to help lead it. And this morning’s passage is the one that a lot of pastors—including yours truly—have used at pledge, er, stewardship season over the years because it seems so perfect: here are some rich folks, parading past the offering plate, plonking in ginormous sums of money, making a joyful, clanking noise, and here’s this poor widow-woman, hobbling up to the pot and throwing in her two pennies. And it’s obvious that Mark wants to paint a sharp contrast between the rich folks—for whom, remember, it is harder to access the Kingdom than a camel to get through the needle’s eye—he wants to set up a contrast between the rich folks and the widow, whom he makes sure we know is poor.

     Now. Widows didn’t have to be poor, you understand: both Jewish and Roman law allowed women to inherit their husband’s wealth. And if a woman had sons and/or a father-in-law, they were expected to care for her after her husband passed. But for every woman whose husband left a sizable estate there were a hundred thousand who were living from her husband’s hand to mouth before the old boy passed, and now had no-one to provide. It was such a common condition that widows, along with orphans—as in the phrase “widows and orphans”—are code words, verbal shorthand, for the unfortunate. There are about eighty references to widows in the scriptures, and God's determination to care for them is frequently noted. In the Letter of James it is spelled out: caring for ‘widows and orphans in their distress” is seen as a hallmark of “religion that is pure and undefiled before God.”

     So Jesus is dealing with a loaded symbol here, and Mark calling her “poor” is almost redundant, but it certainly piles on the pathos. And she gives two pitiful, little coins—we translate the Greek here as “pennies”—and lo! it’s all she has, and Jesus makes it very clear what the point of this lesson is: The rich, he says, have “contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” Holy moley! That’s faith, that’s  dedication, she throws in all she has! And note: because she’s done this, she’s “put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.”

     Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anybody who’s been paying attention as we’ve worked our way through Mark . . . the last rich guy Jesus talked to asked what he’d have to do to inherit eternal life, and when Jesus told him he’d have to give up everything, he went away sadly because he had a lot of stuff; Bartimaeus throws away his cloak—surely all he has—before he’s ever healed, and now the widow has given it all away, to the evident satisfaction of Jesus. So we oughta be used to that pronouncement by now, but it’s still shocking: we’re supposed to give up everything? Really? How are we supposed to eat? How are we supposed to support our families? For that matter, if everybody’s given up all they own, who’s going to take care of all those widows and orphans God’s so concerned about? And finally, how do you reconcile Jesus’ commendation of it with his supposed compassion: does he really want the woman to starve?

     On the surface of it, it seems cut and dried. The rich man is told to give up all he has and the poor widow is commended when she does. Pretty open and shut. One way of getting around it is if we assume Jesus’ command to the rich guy is a specific deal, just for that particular man at that particular time, and therefore can’t be generalized. But what possible thing could they have in common—the rich guy, the blind guy, and the poor widow—that would make giving up all they had the right thing to do, and at the same time not being right for everyone?

     Of course, we could fall back on that old standby of spiritualizing everything, saying piously that Jesus doesn’t mean we have to give up our money, our material goods . . . no. What he means is we’ve got to give up our ego, our pride, our self-regard, things like that. And indeed, elsewhere he seems to say just that, but not in these stories. In these stories it’s very clear: the rich guy is to sell all his stuff, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus. Likewise for the widow: she puts in two very corporal, very solid, coins, they aren’t spiritual, they aren’t some bad habit she’s giving up for Lent. It’s money she can buy food with and it’s all she has.

     You know, it would be easy to see these folks—the wealthy lawyer on one hand and the poor widow on the other—as symbolic of two socio-economic strata in first century Palestine: the extremely poor he extremely wealthy. In fact, there were only two “classes” in those days: rich and poor, and there was nothing in between. To be specific, there was no middle class—that’s a particularly modern phenomenon: an entire stratum of people who have (a) disposable income and (b) the time to enjoy it. And in first century Palestine, there was no such animal. Either you had plenty of money, much more than you needed, or you had just barely enough, and in many cases, not even that.

     That’s why it’s hard to place ourselves in this story, at least class-wise. Because make no mistake: this is a story about class. It’s why Mark—and we—put the two episodes back to back: we’re supposed to associate the rich folks who put enormous sums into the treasury with those scribes who walk around in long robes. You know who they are: they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. Scribes were the lawyers of the day, and there was only one law: the law of Moses, the Torah. And what Jesus is saying is that they use that law to “devour widow’s houses”—in modern parlance, perhaps, foreclose on their mortgages when they can no longer pay. And they do this and then come to church on Sunday—oops! I mean to synagogue on the Sabbath—to say long prayers and show just how pious they are. They’re gonna get theirs, saith the Lord.

     And does the poor widow see the scribe who devoured her home flap by in his long robe, chest puffed out as he drops a boat-load of coin into the copper pot—clang!—after first making sure everyone’s looking? That’s what Mark implies . . . that the widow and those folks are related by oppression, and so the interesting question emerges: is the widow, in turn, making a statement of her own by publicly throwing all she has into the pot? Remember, it is the temple treasury, the money is going straight not to God, but to the institution that employs those scribes who’ve devoured her home. Is she saying “There! See what you’ve done! Here are my last two pennies! Take it all!” Is it a protest against the order of things, the powers that be, the system? And this, in turn, calls into question why Jesus commends her: not for giving up all she has and facing imminent starvation—why would he want her to starve?—but for standing up to a system that uses the law to enrich a few at the expense of the many?

     You know . . . I’ve said this before, but Mahatma Gandhi wrote that he learned all he knew about non-violent resistance from Jesus, from the gospels, and he knew that one of the most effective ways of resisting the oppressor is to ridicule them, ‘cause they can’t stand to be made fun of. And here these fine, upstanding citizens are, parading by, dropping their coinage into the pot, which everybody knows they can afford—it’s why Jesus reminds us it’s from their abundance—and then the widow hobbles by, throws in her pennies, which everybody knows is all she has, and does it ridicule those who have paced solemnly by, does it send a strong, condemnatory message? Those long-robed scribes certainly will receive the greater condemnation, but it won’t be from God. It’ll be from anyone standing by, and in the small town that is Jerusalem, word will get around.

     Well. Where do we go from here? This passage certainly works very well at pledge time, and being that it is that time, we should note that it is so. And I’ll say what I always say: we’re all adults here, we know that to keep the lights and heat on, we need income. And the best way to do that—for the church, which needs to plan, and for us, who need a goal—is to pledge for the upcoming year.

     But we shouldn’t lose sight of the more fundamental fact, that this is a fable, a tale of the haves and have nots, the firsts and lasts of the earth, and we know what Jesus always said: those with means have their rewards right here on earth, and the first shall be last and the last first. Amen.

Up From the Grave, Part I (John 11:32-44)

     You could almost sing the old hymn “Up from the grave he arose” right about now, but it’s not quite right . . . our passage isn’t about Jesus rising from the grave, “with a mighty triumph o’er his foes,” it’s about Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary.  And no, it’s not the same Lazarus who died and went to be in Abraham’s bosom while the rich guy went to you-know-where to be tormented by you-know-who.  And no, it’s not Mary Magdalene we’re talking about either, but it might be the same Martha who gets mad when her sister Mary – who isn’t the Magdalene, remember – who sits at Jesus’ feet while she does all the work.  Are you following all this?  There were a lot of Mary’s running around in first century Palestine – at least four figure in the Gospel stories – and, apparently, more than one Lazarus as well.

Anyway, because thelectionary reading takes up in the middle of the story, to understand what’s going on you have to have at least an idea of how we got here . . . Jesus had been up North along the Jordan preaching the Gospel, and he’d heard that Lazarus was dead—as Mary and Martha had said in their message, the one you love is dead (hint, hint)—but instead of dropping everything and heading South, he stays two more days to wrap up his preaching engagement, and its only when he knows that Lazarus is dead – mysteriously, because no-one tells him – it’s only then that he heads back south to Judea, to the home of Mary and Martha in Bethany near Jerusalem.  And when he gets there he finds that Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days, and that’s significant . . . when you heard in those days about somebody being dead for four days, you knew that he was good and dead.  Jews of the time believed that the soul hangs out around the body, until it sees that the face has changed color, and that the person is well and truly dead, and this takes four days . . . and so what we’re being here is that Lazarus is definitely dead, and nobody can accuse Jesus of merely waking up a coma victim, or somebody sleeping . . . he’s really dead.

And the sisters are inconsolable in their grief . . . and resentful as well.  First Martha – and then, in our passage, Mary – chides him for not being there.  “Lord,” she says, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  And it’s nothing but the simple truth . . . if Jesus had been there, Lazarus would not have died . . . and lest we mistake it, and see only the chiding, this is also a backhand statement of faith in his healing power . . . at least as regards to healing someone who is sick . . . note that she doesn’t even consider the possibility that Lazarus might be raised from the dead.  That was so far from the experience, so far from the ken of good Jewish women . . . in fact, in some quarters, it would be considered an abomination to have a walking corpse shambling around . . . never mind that it’s not what happens at all—either now or that other time—it’s ripe the imaginations of some.

So Mary takes it as a given that Jesus can’t help Lazarus now.  If you’d been there, she says, Lazarus would not have died . . . and the unspoken addendum, that she doesn’t have to say, is “but now it’s too late.”  And it’s an heartrending scene—everybody is weeping, Martha is weeping, Aunt Jesse is weeping, along with Uncle Bill . . . what’s more, all the Jews that had come to be with her are weeping as well, and the first thing that comes to my mind is God’s lament in Jeremiah, “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.  Rachel is weeping for her children . . . because they are no more.”  Perhaps it reminds some there of it as well, I don’t know, but Mary and Martha are weeping inconsolably for their brother, because he will come no more.

And Jesus is not unmoved, in fact just the opposite: he is disturbed in spirit, John says, and deeply moved.  And in fact, he himself begins to weep . . . and those looking on see this “look how much he loved Lazarus,” they say, but others are not so sure: “If he loved him so much, they say, why didn’t he save him from dying?  After all, he did give the blind man back his sight . . .”  And were Mary and Martha among those who felt that way?

Personally, I have to ask myself: why is Jesus weeping?  Why is he greatly disturbed?  It couldn’t be for the same reason . . . could it?  It couldn’t be because his old friend was dead . . . Did he not know what he himself was going to do when he reached the grave?  Was he flying in the messianic dark, playing everything by ear?  Perhaps—and I think this is more the truth—perhaps he is weeping for the women and their distress.  His compassion is so deep, his empathy so high, that he can’t help but join them in their sorrow.

I’ve probably mentioned thus before, but the construction of the English word compassion is useful . . . it’s composed of passio, from the Latin for “suffering,” and the prefix com which means “with.” So if Jesus has compassion for the women, he is “suffering with” them, weeping with them, he has—in a sense—put himself in their shoes.

On the other hand, elsewhere in John, Jesus describes himself as abiding in us and we in him, to my mind a deeper relationship than attempting to imagine what the other is feeling . . . abiding implies a close, intimate, intertwining, a close identification one with the other which, according to the mystics, we have lost the ability to access, to enjoy, even.  But not Jesus, not from his perspective.  He is acutely aware of all our sorrows, all our pain because, in a real sense, they are his as well.  He shares our anguish, shares our misery, shares our suffering, just as he did on that long-ago Palestine day.

Pam and I had a pastor, before we went to seminary, who hadn’t been on the job all that long, and we had a wrenching death, of a beloved teenager, and the pastor didn’t know what to do, what to say.  So she went to the local episcopal minister—Father Dave—and asked him.  And he told her to always remember that Jesus Christ was weeping right along with the teen’s parents, right along with her sisters, friends and relatives, just as he did with Martha and Mary and all who loved their brother.

And as they walk to the grave, the air is eerie with howling, as the hired mourners join the friends and family in the keening throb and swell of middle-eastern grief, and the sisters’ steps grow heavier and heavier the closer they get, because they know in their hearts that the spirit of their brother has long flown, tired of brooding over the sepulcher, tired of hovering in the air.

And as they reach the tomb, the wailing reaches a fever pitch, and they can almost see the atmosphere rippling and heaving, and it is at the same time close and oppressive, and dust mixes with tears running down their faces so they appear smudged and grimy, and Jesus marches up to the mouth and says “Take away the stone,” but Mary remonstrates with him once again, telling him that the stench will already be strong, but he just looks at her: “did I not say that if you believe you’ll see God’s glory?”  So they take away the stone, lo!  There was no stench, and Jesus’ faith is so strong that he knows what he’ll find, he knew it all along, and so he thanks God in advance and bellows: “Lazarus!  Come out!”

And from the black maw of the tomb there comes a rustling sound, faint at first, but getting stronger, and all but Jesus take a step back, and fear is on their faces, and in their hearts, because they don’t know what is coming toward them out of the darkness, and every folk story about the underworld flashed before their eyes.  Would it be a rafah, the shade of Lazarus, his revenant somehow delayed on its journey to Sheol?  Or an ifrit, one of the spirits that roam the Palestinian countryside, inhabiting tombs, clay jars and even people?  The shuffling gets closer and closer, and now they can see a gray shape, materializing out of the dark, getting clearer with every shambling step, until it stands swaying in the tomb’s mouth—a dusty figure, wrapped and bandaged like a mummy, and the sisters gasp, and take another step back, but Jesus is all business: “Unbind him and let him go.”

And though John isn’t concerned with what happens after—it’s the resurrection that interests him—I like to imagine that Lazarus blinks in the sun—it was dark there in the tomb—and the sisters edge forward like frightened deer, until at last they are sure, and rush forward smothering him in kisses.  And the ululating cry of the mourners abruptly cuts off, only to be replaced by a clamor of joy, because it’s all the same to them, and they get paid either way.  And everyone is weeping, Mary and Martha and aunts and uncles, and Jesus stands there, a little apart, and lo! he is weeping as well, with salty tears of joy.

And of course this resurrection foreshadows another resurrection, doesn’t it, and the funny thing is, this resurrection causes the next.  John says that many folks believe because of Lazarus’ resurrection, but the religious authorities, not so much . . . they wring their hands—what to do, what to do—saying everyone’s going to believe in him if this keeps up, and high-priest Caiaphas puts it this way: it’s better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”  And from that moment on, they plot to make it come true: they plot to sacrifice Jesus for the good of the nation.

But today, on All Saints Sunday, we look toward another event that the raising of Lazarus portends . . . and that’s a resurrection of our own.  As we read the names, and toll the bell, let’s remember that . . . let’s remember that when a child dies, Jesus weeps.  When an aunt or uncle passes, Jesus mourns with us.  When our mother or father or sister or brother dies, Jesus grieves with sighs too deep for words.  And let us take the resurrection of Lazarus—and Christ himself—for what it is: a promise and hope that somewhere, somehow, we will encounter our loved ones again.  Amen.

Second Sight (Mark 10:46-52)

      This is a deceptively complex episode—not because the action is complicated, because it isn’t. An unsighted person, Bartimaeus by name, cries out to Jesus as he and his entourage pass on their way out of Jericho, the city where the walls came-a-tumbling down, and he cries out to Jesus to have mercy. When Jesus asks him what he wants, he says he wants to see again, and Jesus restores his sight, and the man follows him “on the way.” That’s it, a rather “unremarkable” healing story, if any of Jesus’ healing stories can be called “unremarkable.”

But like a lot of episodes in Jesus’ ministry, it’s deceptive in its depth, because of its symbolism and its resonance with other passages of Scripture, and perhaps even other literature of the day. Take the name Bartimaeus: in Aramaic, Jesus’ mother tongue, it means “son of Timaeus,” a fact which Mark emphasizes by repeating it in Greek: saying “Bartimaeus son of Timaeus” is like saying “son of Timaeus son of Timaeus,” so it’s a safe bet that Mark wants us to get it . . . and there are several possibilities. First, Timaeus is the title character in one of Plato’s dialogs, written several hundred years before, in which Timaeus gives a impassioned ode to the faculty of sight: he says that sight “is the source of the greatest benefit to us” and that God gives us sight so that we might “behold he courses of intelligence in the heaven”—in other words, so we might see the signs of God’s intelligence written his creation. And thus, Bartimaeus is cut off from this aspect of the almighty, cut off in a sense from God.

Another possibility is that in Aramaic it sounds like a play on words for “unclean,” and that is certainly what Bartimaeus is. He is squatting beside the road, covered against the dust by his robe, when Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd—shades of the time Jesus healed the hemorrhaging woman in a large crowd—and when he hears who it is, that it’s Jesus of Nazareth, he begins to shout and carry on, saying “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And many in the crowd try to shut him up, because what he has said is very political, and it could get them in a whole lot of trouble. Calling him “son of David” in those days was tantamount to calling him a revolutionary, an usurper of religious and civil authority, because a descendent of David was supposed to rise up and restore Israel to its God-given place as a great and powerful nation, throwing out the Romans and their puppets, who just happened to reside in Jerusalem, just 20 miles away.

So this is one politically-charged scene, and you can’t really blame folks for trying to shut him up . . . you can just hear them saying “Shhhh . . . don’t say that, don’t you know there are spies all around?” But this makes Bartimaeus shout out even more loudly: “Son of David, have mercy on me!” And in the midst of the crowd Jesus stops and stands still, just like he did when the hemorrhaging woman touched him, and in fact Bartimaeus’ shout is very much like her touching of his robe: it is a sign of faith, a sign of confidence in the power of Jesus Christ, Son of Man, and it stops him in his tracks. And what does this faith look like? It’s bold, it’s forward, it doesn’t care what how it looks. “Son of David, have mercy on me” . . . again, it’s like a hyper-version of the hemorrhaging woman, who showed remarkable chutz-pah just by touching Jesus’ cloak.

And speaking of cloaks, Bartimaeus flings his off as he springs up, providing another, verbal link to the earlier episode, after Jesus tells his followers to call him . . . and they say “Take heart; get up, he’s calling you.” And the double repetition of the verb “to call” emphasizes that this is more than a healing, more than a miracle, this is Jesus calling the beggar, every bit as much as when he called bis first disciples. And by jumping up and throwing off his cloak, throwing off his possessions, Bartimaeus answers that call, giving up his worldly goods and following Jesus, which is something that the rich guy from an earlier episode is unwilling to do.

And if you’re getting the impression that this episode is kind of a summing up of themes from his ministry, a symbolic greatest hits, if you will, you’re right. The restoration of Bartimaeus’ sight, thereby making him ritually clean, is the final episode in the central section of Mark, the section that describes his ministry. And it comes right before his triumphal entrance to Jerusalem, when his identity will be out of the Messianic closet. And in fact, unlike many of the earlier healings, he doesn’t warn Bartimaeus not to tell anyone. It’s like the cat is out of the bag, already—he’s hiding his identity no more.

So, in this summary or hinge episode, we see a lot of his ministry themes hinted at: the boldness and necessity of faith: check. The giving-up of worldly goods: check. The necessity of following him: check. And one more episode is echoed: instead of healing the man right away, Jesus asks him: “What do you want me to do for you?” And it’s the same, exact words he uses when he asks James and John, in the episode right before this one, “What do you want me to do for you?” Only in this case, Bartimaeus doesn’t ask for power and control like they do, he asks to see.

And I think the “seeing” he asks for is a lot more than just physical sight; I know that Mark means it that way. Sight is a metaphor for a certain species of knowing, a certain kind of perception. We call a person with pre-cognitive abilities a seer, or we say she has “the sight.” When mystics are enlightened, it is said that they see the same world we see, only differently, with greater clarity, or with deeper insight. To the great Jesuit scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin it was all about how and what one sees. “One could say,” he wrote, “that the whole of life lies in seeing.” And by that, of course, he meant more than just photons hitting our eyeballs.

And is that the same for Bartimaeus? I think so . . . in fact, I think his “seeing,” his enlightenment, began well before Jesus healed his physical sight. As he often does, Jesus says it at the end: “your faith has made you well.” But Bartimaeus had faith before his physical sight was restored. Where did it come from? Was it, as John Calvin thought, a gift from the Holy Spirit? Did he come by it from hard experience, did he have some reason to have faith? In Mark, we’re never told how he got his faith, just that he has it, and it has made him well.

And that’s the way it is in the kingdom of God . . . faith is a mysterious thing, at least as far as the gospels are concerned. As in Mark, in Matthew and Luke Jesus either commends people for having it—“Your faith has made you well”—or chastises them for not having it—“O ye of little faith.” In John, the word “faith” is not even found, but Jesus does give a hint as to where it might come from. He says “Nobody can come to me unless drawn by God.” And so the most we can say is that Bartimaeus was drawn, or led, to approach Jesus by God’s own self. And in a way, an outcast beggar without the sense of sight nevertheless sees more than the rich young ruler, more than James and John, more even than James and John’s mother.

And I wonder: where does our faith come from? Do you remember how it was for you? Was there a time when you didn’t have it, and the next moment did? I can’t remember such a moment . . . like many of us, I think, my parents took me to church from when I was little. I grew up in the faith, as the saying goes. But where did my parents get their’s? Through other folks as well . . . and you can go back and back, the faith being passed down through families, or “sideways” by friends, and sometimes the media. It’s like the tale of the student who asks a sage what holds up the world, and the sage replies “My son, it rests on the back of a great tiger.” And the student asks “But master: what holds the tiger up?” And the sage says “My son, it stands on the back of a massive turtle,” and when once again the student asks “But master: what holds the turtle up?” the sage looks at him and says: “my son, it is turtles all the way down.”

It’s turtles all the way down: no matter how far you go back, how you trace your faith development, it ends up with a mystery, and we call that mystery “God.” Our capacity for faith, and the faith to fill it, come from the same source: the all encompassing, indwelling spirit of God. And when we realize that faith, when it becomes evident in us, it’s like Jesus saying to us that our faith has made us well, and like the formerly-blind Bartimaeus, throw off our cloaks and follow. Amen.