These Eyes
Mark 10:46-52

October 29, 2006


It’s nearly half a millennium since this all got started. The Protestant Reformation is old enough now to be a piece of ancient history, so distant that what happened no longer matters, that it no longer has any residual effect on what happens today. But, we are still here, a piece of the Reformed church that is clearly different and distinctive from its sister churches in the way we think, the way we worship and the way we live together as the church. Apple Computers came out a little while back with a slogan, “Think Different!” - and that’s exactly what Protestants continue to do. And the more we keep in mind what the original Reformers were about, we continue to do the most unusual different thing - we think we have to keep on reforming.

Protestants, however, did not invent Christianity. The trouble is that there are way too many Protestant theological colleges and seminaries that virtually begin the study of Christian history only at the Reformation of the 16th century. When that’s all they can see about history, I can assure you that they do not get their own history right. What Protestants did was protest that our Christianity had lost its Christ. Protestants still need to be protesting whenever the Church drifts away from its Gospel and starts believing that its methods and rules are the message.

The original Reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and Ulrich Zwingli had a lot of different ideas that are still with us, but let me single out one. It is most famously called “the Priesthood of All Believers,” the understanding that every Christian has a vocation, a calling - not just the priests, monks and nuns. Even more fundamental is that every Christian has the right and responsibility to encounter God directly, not through any intermediary person - neither a priest nor a blessed saint. It’s one on One, you and God, not just as a preference, but as the only way it really happens.

But just wait a minute and come back to this new idea of vocation. Our dilemma is not so much that only a few select people are able to answer the call, but that only too few people are hearing the call at all. There are lots of factors involved, but clearly one factor is that we in the church have stopped talking about vocation to Christian ministry. There is little talk about the call to all sorts of ministry within the local church, and we have normally been silent about inviting our own members to consider the call to the traditional pastoral ministry. I want to make some noise about vocation on this Protestant and Protesting Sunday. It is our tradition.

Park Manor Christian Church, a black Disciples of Christ congregation in Chicago, makes it their business to make noise about each and every member’s vocation to ministry. No one is exempt, the Church insists, every person has the possibility and opportunity. In recent years, seven members have gone into the pastoral ministry and one of them, Donald Gillett, asks his the members of his church, “What gifts and talents do you have for ministry that are going unclaimed in your life and work?” Unclaimed gifts and talents are the kind we are obliged to make noise about - and often the most intriguing.

Today it makes a difference which direction you are heading. Jesus and company came to Jericho, and then without making any mention of what they did there, they were leaving Jericho, accompanied now by a huge multitude all wanting to be close to Jesus, no secret society, this. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but Mark made certain to tell us that they had come and they were now leaving.

But you know that you can’t get out of there without something happening. This, after all, is the Bible and what happened was a blind beggar Bartimaeus. Just hearing a name makes you sit up and take notice, “Shouldn’t I know this guy?” Yet in the Gospels one seldom hear names, especially names of the people Jesus encounters and heals. All right, there was Lazarus, but usually such beneficiaries of Jesus’ grace and power are nameless, without any family history or way to connect with a living human being who inhabits a specific personality.

I don’t doubt Bartimaeus had awfully good hearing and picked up from the throng filing past him that this Jesus was in the centre. So he used another really good sense and started shouting, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy upon me!” You’ve been in that kind of crowd before; all the people in the vicinity of Bartimaeus told him to shush and to shut up. But our man had a name of his own and he kept shouting until Jesus stopped.

Jesus has been marching towards Jerusalem the last several weeks. He knew where he was going and why, and he wasn’t going to be held back and stopped, yet here he stopped. No one was able to ignore the shouting of Bartimaeus, though some tried their hardest. “Call him,” Jesus simply said. Then the tone of the crowd instantly changed - you’ve experienced that too - “Take heart, rise, he is calling you,” they now condescendingly urged him on. You can see it, the shushers now patting him on the back, nudging him towards the rabbi.

It does matter where you are coming from, and right here it is not only geographical, but in ideas as well you are always coming from somewhere, standing upon the shoulders of your ancestors. What city are they so hastily leaving, no sooner coming, but going? (Jericho) And you have to assume that Jesus and crowd are now on the outside of Jericho, and what is this blind beggar with a name doing? Shouting? What happened the last time some people shouted from outside Jericho? The walls came a-tumblin’ down, and Joshua - better take notice of that name! - wiped out the city of all its inhabitants. This poor blind man, full of his own brand of dignity, a name Bartimaeus that tells us he had a father who loved him, is shouting down the walls of that prejudice against the poor and disadvantaged by the privileged and self-centered. This Joshua had something other in mind from destroying his enemies. He wanted to build, not a wall, but a new person. So Jesus said, “Call him!”

He could have said, “Bring him over here” or “Ask him to come talk to me,” but it was “Call him!” I know this is playing with language, but this is the Word of God and words for all the Peoples of the Book have power to change the universe. The Son of David was extending a call to Bartimaeus to discover his vocation.

Bartimaeus threw off his mantle, his cloak, that piece of most likely not very good clothing under which he hunkered to keep warm in his blindness and in his begging. But he knew that he didn’t want any hunkering down to hinder him, so he got rid of it and sprang up to his feet and came over to Jesus. “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabbi, let me receive my sight.”

Jesus heals in a whole bunch of ways. Sometimes he touches the person, even spits and puts his fingers in the afflicted one’s ears. But this is not the first time he simply declares, “Your faith has made you well.” And immediately he received his sight.

Actually, Jesus first said, “Go your way.” You can see now. You are a free man and can choose a new way of life. Immediately, Bartimaeus received his sight, and followed Jesus on his way. He knew he had no better choice: he had been called. So he followed Jesus, and he had no idea where Jesus was going, just that he knew he had to be walking where Jesus was walking, following. That’s what a call to ministry, a vocation, is. You don’t know where you will end up; all you know is what you are called to do now, to walk with Jesus.

This is not one of these parable-type stories in which you can say, “Well, if a blind man like Bartimaeus can up and follow Jesus, I guess I can too.” No, because you and I are Bartimaeus, “I was blind, but now I see.” Bartimaeus could see better than we usually do, and he knew that you don’t have to have it all figured out, you don’t have to see exactly where you are going to go on his way. Somebody here is looking to see again with new set of eyes, waiting to hear the call with ears to hear. I invite you to listen hard.

A ministerial colleague of mine and I were talking awhile back about the idea of the call to the ministry. She remembered that there were two sermons that got her to listen differently. One, actually, wasn’t a good sermon at all. In fact, it was a terrible sermon. “One of those ‘I can do better than that’ sermons?” I jested. Yes, that was definitely the case. Yet the other was awfully good. Annoyingly good, to be precise. “And I could not get out of my head what he had been talking about for years until I finally got up and did it.”

Bartimaeus was shouting outside the walls of Jericho, and a new Joshua was calling him. What was Bartimaeus shouting? “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Kyrie Eleison! A couple millennia of Christians have sung that beautiful plaintive phrase in liturgies Catholic and Orthodox and, yes, even Protestant. And even a very popular rock song by Mark Schultz sang the words, Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy on me! Not sung, by the way, in a somber tone, but in a uplifting, a springing up off the ground and throwing off your hunkering down cloak air that does not let you go. It’s a good song to shout and sing as we hear God’s call for our unclaimed gifts and talents and follow where Jesus goes.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan