Church on Morgan
Take Heart
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings, inspired by the revised Common Lectionary, and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Well, it's good to be back with you today if we haven't met. It's because I've been out on maternity leave. My name is Sam, and it really is good to be back. I mean that. Of course, it's a bittersweet transition. But I'm so grateful. I just want to take a moment to thank you for the ways that our church has showed up for me and my family as we adjust to life as a family of four. And you should be really proud to be part of a church that takes such great care of its staff and pastors. And so thank you for the gift of this time away. As you might imagine, this stepping back into this part of my role is particularly vulnerable. As we seek to hold the text alongside the complexities of our world today, when my world has been so very small. And so I've been grateful this week for a story that reminds me how much God cares about bodies and that no one escapes the loving gaze of Jesus. So I know there'll be a gift for you in this text this morning, too. It comes to us from the book of Mark, here now the word of the Lord. They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly. Son of David, have mercy on me. Jesus stood still and said, call him here. And they called the blind man, saying to him, take heart. Get up. He is calling you. So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, what do you want me to do for you? The blind man said to him, my teacher, let me see again. Jesus said to him, go, your faith has made you well. Immediately, he regained his sight and followed him on the way. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. Well, the crowds behavior in this story is a little bit weird. Crowds are weird. We get weird in groups sometimes. My husband Will attended a Christian men's retreat on a ranch in Colorado about a year and a half ago, which is not a sentence he thought would ever appear in his autobiography until meeting me. And I failed to adequately prepare him for that experience. So he shows up and at the beginning, upon arrival, by way of introduction, about 50 men are in a circle, and they're invited to go around and say their name and something they're struggling with. That's the icebreaker. And some of you get annoyed when we do a turn and greet. We ask you, like, what's a song that made you sad lately? Like, it could be so much worse. These guys, just, bro by bro, start excavating all kinds of addictions and infidelity and grief and death and greed and trauma and abuse in their past. And it's getting so intense, and it's getting closer and closer to Will, who's kind of at the end of the line. And he's freaking out, not because he doesn't have anything wrong with him, but because he just met these people. And so it gets to him. And what comes out is he's like, well, I don't know. I guess there's been a lot of tension in my house lately because my wife and I are arguing about whether or not to have a second kid. So whoever's next and kind of passes it on. And the group is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Does anyone else feel like we need to just take a moment to kind of pray over brother? What was your name, brother Will? For real. And the group, I was like, absolutely. I was thinking the same thing. And they bring him into the middle, lay hands on him, and pray that he would discover God's intention for us to be fruitful and multiply. And Will's in the middle, all these hands on him, like 10 minutes into this experience. Like, how am I the hold your horses guy? Like, did you hear what else just got shared? But he was. And now we have Finnegan, so. But that's how it usually goes, sort of. The crowd is like pro-healing, right? We can debate what they deem an affliction. But it's usually the crowd placing that person in the path of Jesus. We see that even throughout the book of Mark, it was a crowd that lowered a paralyzed man through a roof to help him get to Jesus. In Mark 7, it's a group that begs Jesus to lay hands on a deaf man. In the first healing of a blind man, there's two of them in Mark. In the first one, it's a crowd that brings the man to Jesus. But the crowd in our story today nearly misses it. They tell the blind man to pipe down. And I didn't get it as I sat with this story this week. Like why is this crowd so mean to our guy, Barty? Why did they silence him instead of advocate for him? Don't they want to see another healing? This is what Jesus does. His followers should know that by now. I learned this week that when Bartimaeus calls him son of David, that's a pretty scandalous thing. This is the only time Mark uses that title throughout his collection of stories. It's a brazen confession claiming that Jesus is greater than Abraham, greater than Moses, and even King David. This title claims Jesus as the longed for Messiah, which means that this blind man sees something that others cannot, joining him to a great tradition of blind characters throughout antiquity that possessed the gift of prophetic sight. So was it this proclamation that made the crowd hush him up? Were they not ready to bestow that name on Jesus? Or rightly worried about the danger it would invite? And is it really such a surprise to us that this name comes from the mouth of one whom the world has literally left by the side of the road? The life and death faith that gets forged through suffering is distinct from the faith born of social convention, isn't it? Eugene Peterson says it like this, a person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice, or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment, or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility. We are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, before they, acquires an appetite for the world of grace. Bartimaeus is hungry. He's hungry for Jesus to be who they said he would be. You know, our church seeks to serve the religiously reluctant. Maybe you've heard us say that before. That's our target demographic. And many of you might fall into that category. These are folks who aren't so sure about the whole church or Jesus thing for any number of reasons. Maybe you were burned by the church in your past. Maybe you've only got one version of Christianity in your head and it doesn't square with the other things you know to be true about the world. Maybe you're turned off by what a lot of Christians look like today. Maybe you were never raised with any faith tradition at all and you find yourself kind of curious about this one at this point in your life. Or maybe the opposite's true. Maybe you grew up going to church every Sunday and now that rhythm's just kind of still in you and you're going through the motions but you don't really know why. This may be you, it may not be. All are welcome here. And boy, we learn a lot from the zealots in our midst. We're glad you're here. But the religiously reluctant, these are our people. That's who we're talking to most Sundays. People with one foot in, one foot out. People doing the splits. And I adore this crowd. These are my best friends in the world that fall into this category. And if you hang out in this neighborhood long enough, you start to kind of learn the language, like the stuff that takes the edge off. You might prefer the name love to the divine and the divine to God and probably God to Jesus. We often invoke the mystery of it all, right? If we do still pray and worship, we don't get weird about it. We sort of handle the whole thing with oven mitts. From, I think, really, a genuine, responsible, good-hearted posture that seeks not to exclude but to include and to make sure no one gets burned. Yeah, I moved into the Brooklyn of Christianity a while back. This is where you can wear whatever you want. The coolest stuff goes unlabeled, but the rent sometimes costs you the dream you moved here to follow. That's the rub. I don't think reluctance is where Jesus invites us to stay. And one of the things all throughout scripture and in our experience of the world today, one of the things that God uses to move us off the bench is bearing witness to the faith of those who circumstances, whose zip code or race or biology or sexuality or diagnosis have not afforded them the luxury of a Messiah who may or may not save. This week I was struck by the profound privilege of being religiously reluctant, of having an optional savior. Bartimaeus needs Jesus to be Jesus. He addresses him this way. Son of David, he cries out, without apology, without putting any pillows around it. He has nothing to lose and nothing to protect. So he calls out to him again, unfazed by the crowd's rebuke. And that's when Jesus does his first miracle. Notice this, instead of calling Bartimaeus directly to himself, which he could have easily done, he says to the crowd, call him to me. And then the crowd changes. On a dime, it seems. And they tell Bartimaeus the good news, take heart, get up, he is calling you. They sound wondrous, curious, they stand corrected. It seems like Jesus heals the crowd before he heals Bartimaeus. He stops and in that pause they learn that Bartimaeus is not a distraction or an embarrassment or too loud or too direct or too expectant, he is who Jesus came for. And then in the first extravagant display of his mercy that day, Jesus lets the crowd be the ones to deliver the good news, take heart, get up. He is calling you. Preacher Debbie Thomas says he heals the crowd first so they can participate in Bartimaeus's healing. Some say the crowd is healed of their spiritual blindness. You might say they are healed of their reluctance. And they are healed through attending to the others call for mercy. One of the best things I watched on my maternity leave was this documentary on HBO called The Boy Who Lived. Don't you wanna see this? It's about Harry Potter's stuntman and he goes from being this like incredibly gifted athlete to having a tragic accident on set while filming one of the final films that leaves him paralyzed from the chest down. And it's an amazing movie, partly large part because you get to watch this guy's face. You watch David, this is his name, find a renewed sense of purpose and zeal and zest for life on the other side of an accident that would have left many of us unsure about how to move on. He becomes an advocate for disability awareness and he describes this new sense of purpose from his life before that he says was all about being cool, being good at what I did and making money. But I was particularly moved by his caretaker, this guy Tommy. So this is the guy who helps him use the bathroom and get in and out of bed and helps him bathe. And when this accident happened and David needed someone to move in with him and fulfill this role, the guy who raised his hand was one of his friends from when he was a teenager. That's amazing to me. Like young male friendship isn't exactly lauded for its nurturing nature and capacity to hold hard things unless you're on a ranch in Colorado and you're never gonna see the people again. But Tommy is the one who answers David's call and in doing so, he too finds his own zeal. There's this scene where Tommy talks about what this job means to him. An off camera the interviewer says like, this sounds like such a huge responsibility. And Tommy corrects me, says no, it's not a responsibility. I come at 8 p.m. and hang out with my best mates. They're all British. This makes the movie even better. We do some fun things, we do some horrible things. We do some upsetting things. And when he wants to go on a safari or fly in a tiny aircraft, I get to be the one to tell him and figure out, here's how we're gonna do this. He even compares it to David's work as a stuntman, his role as a caretaker. Tommy now gets to bring creativity to helping David in a wheelchair still take the physical risks that have always brought him to life. And there are these amazing clips of him being catapulted into a swimming pool and flying in a tiny jet over the savannah. Take heart, get up. This is what Tommy gets to be to his friend. When we get close to those whose faith has been forged through suffering, when we attend to another's call for mercy, we too discover that this is not a responsibility. It's actually one of the greatest gifts in this life. It's a taste of what's to come. If I were God, I never would have thought to let each other be part of one another's healing. That sounds about as helpful as letting my toddler help me cook, which Instagram keeps suggesting I do. Seems very unproductive. But we know this, don't we? We keep remembering this. We are saved on both sides of giving and receiving help. This is why so many organizations are rebranding mission trips with an awareness that it's those who will witness faith forged by suffering that will be saved from their own spiritual poverty. It's why our local, Finn, you don't like what I got to say? It's why our own local partner, neighbor to neighbor, is now deploying their teens to help mentor the younger kids in their program. And in doing so, they're seeing the highest engagement from high schoolers that they've ever seen as they're discovering the joy of not just receiving help, but giving it. It's why I'm not sure who is most changed in an encounter I heard about recently. We're a couple from our church who drove by the same guy every day in an either neighborhood who was on the street corner begging, finally stopped to get to know his name and then eventually his story and took him out to dinner and helped him reconnect with his sister and eventually offered her a few months of room and board to help get him off the streets. And they can't tell that story without being moved to tears as they talk about how their judgment turned to compassion and what it meant to them to get to say the words, take heart, get up, he is calling you. It'll change your life to hear these words, but it'll also change your life to say them. May you be graced with opportunities to do so in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. - Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. 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The good news about how Jesus heals. A sermon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost on Mark 10:46-52 by Rev. Samantha Beach Kiley.