Take Heart, He is Calling You (Proper 25B)

“Take Heart, He is Calling You”

28 October 2012

Proper 25B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Jer 31:7-9; Ps 126 ; Heb 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

Jesus and his disciples 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.

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

In the Pixar movie Finding Nemo, a little clownfish named Nemo living near the Great Barrier Reef is netted by a scuba-diving dentist to adorn a tank in his Sydney office.  Nemo’s father, Marlin, is devastated, and he sets out to find his only child with no idea where to go. He meets a blue Tang, Dory, who helps him discover the address of the dentist, despite her own very limited smarts.  Overcoming multiple setbacks and dangers, they are told to find the East Australian Current, which will take them to Sydney harbor.  Gathering their courage, Marlin and Dory risk everything by swimming through a swarm of stinging jellyfish to get into the current.  Suddenly they find themselves carried along in the surge of a great parade of happy sea creatures.  Effortlessly floating in the current, they no longer have to struggle to make their way in the vast, lonely ocean.  A wise sea turtle, Crush, tells them things they need to know to continue their journey.  By the time Dory and Marlin jump out of the current in Sydney, they are very different fish.  Their bewildered fears are now joyful hope.

Transformation!  Change!  From broken to whole, or at least not-so-broken.  From confusion to purpose.  From self-loathing recrimination to confidence and hope.   At one time or another, we all want it, we all need it. 

But our experience and “common” wisdom tells us not to expect it.  So accepting the unacceptable becomes the norm in our lives, or worse, not accepting it, but having to live with it all the same.

Today’s Gospel story says that Jesus can transform the untransformable.   Bartimaeus begins the story blind, rejected, begging on the roadside, and ends up seeing, confident, and walking along with Jesus and the disciples. 

This story in Mark is the only one in the Synoptic Gospels where the name of the healed person is given.  Some take this as evidence of its link to an actual historical event.  Importantly, Mark gives the name twice:  “Bartimaeus, or son of Timaeus.”  Though Mark is writing in Greek, Aramaic was the language Jesus and his followers would have been speaking with each other.   In Aramaic, the word bar means son, and so clearly Bar-Timaeus means “son of Timaeus.”  But Timaeus was a Greek name.  It means “honored one.”  It was not an Aramaic name.  If indeed the blind man was called this, the word in Aramaic would have been bar-tame’ or “son of shame.”  It is not a real name, but an insulting nickname:  “Loser.”  People thought God had punished him for some shameful sin by striking him blind (cf. John 9:34). 

So “Mr. Loser” is not just suffering from the disability of visual impairment.  He is loathed, outcast.  He can get enough food to eat only by begging.  He either believes or suspects that what the others say about him is right.

Caught up in the excitement at news that the healer from Nazareth is passing by, Bar-tame’ begins to shout, as loud as he can, to get Jesus’ attention.  “Have mercy on me, Jesus, son of David!”  This is the most extravagant and dangerous way of talking about Jesus Bar-tame’ has heard on the street, Jesus as the ideal David of the future, the Messiah, who would be a healer.   

The disciples, concerned that their opponents may report them to the Romans’ and get them all arrested, try to shoosh the crazy beggar up.  “Jesus is ministering here!  How dare you interrupt him with your begging! Can’t you get money from any passerby? Leave us alone.” 

Their reaction is understandable.  A strategy of street begging, one I saw often in China and which one encounters occasionally even here in polite, genteel Ashland, is this:  when simple appeals to compassion fail, make yourself so disruptive or obnoxious that people will give you money just to get rid of you.  A meal’s a meal, whether you got it from stirring compassion or provoking disgust and aggravation!

But Mr. Loser just gets louder.  Jesus finally asks what’s going on.  At this, Bar-tame’ balks.  He hadn’t really thought Jesus would stop.

“Take heart! Go, Jesus is calling you!”  The disciples realize that perhaps there is more to this beggar than they thought.  Bar-tame’ casts off his cloak and goes to Jesus. 

In the days before cardboard signs that read “Anything you can do will help,” the beggar’s tattered and filthy cloak was a chief way of appealing for aid.  Bar-tame’ throws off his cloak, and with it all his assumptions about himself, his belief that he really is a loser, all the dysfunctions and fears his disability has wrought.  He casts aside the little bit of security he might feel he has, all to meet Jesus. 

So when Jesus asks him “what do you want,” this one-time son of shame does not say “money” or “bread.”  He asks to be healed.  He asks for his sight.  He asks not to be broken any more. 

And Jesus tells him his faith has already healed him.   Sight is restored.  And Bartimaeus—now a son of honor—starts to walk the Way with Jesus and the other disciples.   

Van Morrison, in his song on hope of recovery from addiction, sings:  

Whenever God, shines his light on me
Opens up my eyes, so I can see
When I look up, in the darkest night
I know everything's gonna be alright.
In deep confusion, in great despair
I reach out for him, he is there.

When I am lonely as I can be,
I know that God shines his light on me.

 
Reach out for him, he'll be there
With him your troubles you can share.

You can use his higher power
In every day and any hour.

Jesus saves and heals the lame

Says you can do it too in Jesus’ name 

He'll lift you up and turn you around. 

He’ll put your feet back on higher ground.

When Dory and Marlin jump into that current, they have to risk all by swimming through the jellyfish.  They have to cast off fear, discouragement, and pessimism.   They have to let themselves be carried away by that stream, part of the joyous parade. 

This is what happens to Bartimaeus in this story. 

It is what happens to us. 

When we encounter Jesus, he transforms us.  If we haven’t been transformed, we just have not encountered him.  Whether sudden or gradual, transformation is a sign of having met Jesus. 

And it’s not about how we feel, whether we think we’ve been changed, or whether we can work up a psychological state that some call “belief.”  Though it’s about real risk, it’s usually not all that dramatic.  Today, we usually encounter Jesus in his body, the Church.   We encounter him in the Church’s sacraments, teaching, worship and prayer.  We meet him in our service to the stranger and one in need.

Writing about our Prayer Book tradition of faith in worship, author Vicki Black says:

“For many new Episcopalians, Marlin’s experience of the East Australian Current echoes their experience of entering the liturgical life of prayer and worship in the Church.  Many of us have searched for God on our own for years, praying by ourselves, perhaps sharing our yearnings with a few faithful friends or perhaps being completely alone.  And yet when we make the leap into the Church’s ongoing liturgical life, it is like suddenly discovering that a vibrant, powerful stream of worship and praise to God has been going on centuries upon centuries.  We are at first swept off our feet, perhaps a bit confused and uncertain.  But soon we catch the rhythm; we begin to understand what is happening at each celebration of the Eucharist, at every baptism, at each service of Morning Prayer.  We grow from the wisdom of the learned and saintly among us.  And we discover we have been welcomed into an enormous, eternal, diverse community of human beings who are likewise seeking to worship God who created all things, who’s beyond all things, and yet who lives among us.  We discover we are not alone, and that this liturgical current of worship, prayer, and praise will indeed take us where we want to go—to union with the God we seek to love”  (from Welcome to the Book of Common Prayer.) 

The worship, prayers, and sacramental life of the Church gives us the strength, the will, and empathy to reach out to others: to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the sick, stand with the downtrodden, and give shelter to the homeless.    To be sure, one can do this without the Church and without prayer.  But a great curiosity in our history has been that the more active the sacramental prayer life of a congregation is, generally the greater its corporeal acts of mercy and social justice. 

Like Bartimaeus by the wayside, do we undervalue ourselves?  Do we feel wholly constrained by our disabilities and failings?  Do we have a vague sense that there must be more to life than this?  

Jesus is passing by. He can heal and take away whatever weakness or handicap that holds us down.   

God’s kingdom is here, in our midst.  Things once cast down are being raised up; things once old are being made new; all things are being brought to their perfection by Jesus.  Take heart, child of shame, Jesus is calling you.

Don’t heed those who think you are a loser, unable to change, who say you are daydreaming if you think Jesus is calling you.   Don’t listen even to Jesus’ disciples when they tell you, like they told Bar-tame’, to shut up, be quiet, and don’t approach him.   

Jesus is here to heal our blindness.  We often are unable to see things clearly because we are so beaten down by experience.  Fear immobilizes us, and hardens our hearts. Jesus is here to turn our hearts of stone to flesh again, to empower and transform us from passive bystanders to his active and compassionate fellows, ministering and healing, and bringing interest and flavor to the lives of others.  He wants us to be yeast to leaven the whole loaf around us.  Salt, to give flavor to the pitiful bland fare we see offered right and left.   

Let him in.  Let worship, prayer, and the sacraments wash over you and carry you away in that great stream driven by the beauty of God’s holiness.  Say the prayers and sing the psalms.  Eat the bread, drink the wine; feed on Jesus.   Then feed others, and give them what they want and need.  Don’t just come to Church.  BE the Church.   Go forth and heal others.  Go forth and feed them.   

 In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Bread from Heaven (Proper 12B)

Bread from Heaven

Proper 12B
22 July 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

2 Kings 4:42-44; Psalm 145; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The film A River Runs Through It tells the story of Norman Maclean, who grows up in 1920s Montana living with his Scots Presbyterian minister father and brother.  The film opens with the deceivingly simple line, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” 

How possibly can fly fishing and religion be connected?  Most people, I think, find it difficult to see any connection between religion and everyday life.  We generally are conditioned to see faith, holiness, and religion over here—special, sacred, and separate, and everyday life over here, ordinary, profane, and common.  The very word “sacred” means “dedicated or set apart for worship of a deity.”  If something is set apart, that means it isn’t ordinary, it isn’t everyday. 

But what the character Robert Maclean means by this becomes clearer as he tells the story of his family.  Fly fishing on the Blackfoot River is part of the rhythms of the family’s life, where the sons struggle in the shadow of their minister father to find their way of being human, of making something beautiful of their life.  “As for my father,” Maclean says at one point, “I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician, but he certainly believed God could count and that it was only in picking up God’s rhythm were we able to regain power and beauty.  Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word ‘beautiful.’” 

Today’s reading from the Gospel of John tells us a story where the holy and truly unusual intersects with everyday life.  In it, Jesus shows us that God not only can count, but knows also how to multiply.  The “multiplication of the loaves,” where five barley breads and two fish, once blessed by Jesus, feed over 5,000 people, is a story that occurs in all four Gospels.   In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the story demonstrates the power of Jesus and his role as Messiah.   In John, it forms part of that Gospel’s Book of Signs, a recounting of marvelous deeds by Jesus that point beyond themselves to inner, hidden truths about Jesus: turning water into wine shows he is the true Vine, multiplying the loaves shows he is the Bread of Life, curing the man born blind shows he is the Light of the World, and raising Lazarus from the dead shows he is the Life of the world.  The point is that Jesus gives us joy, changes us, nourishes us and sustains us, makes things clear for us, and makes us truly, fully alive. 

Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 here is a sign pointing to and embodying the truth that Jesus is both nourisher and nourishment.    Right after this story, Jesus gives the sermon of the Bread of Life, where he expands of what this sign shows:  “I am the bread of life.  The one who comes to me shall not hunger.  The one who believes in me shall never thirst.  … I am the living bread come down from heaven.  Anyone who eats this bread shall live forever.  The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.  … Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up at the last day” (John 6: 35-54). 

Where the Synoptics say Jesus took the loaves and fish and “blessed them and gave them” to the people, John alone uses the language, “he gave thanks (eucharistesas) and distributed (diedoken)” them.   Those words link this story to early Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, which, after all, means “Thanksgiving”.

St. Paul, writing about 25 years after the death of Jesus, described the origin of this sacrament in this way:  “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.   So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.  (1 Corinthians 11:23-27) 

Though Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell this same basic story, John, for his part, does not tell of a Eucharistic prayer at the Last Supper.  But that is because the Fourth Gospel removes literal references to sacraments in stories about Jesus and instead talks about their meaning.   Jesus never receives baptism by John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel; instead he works a sign by telling the Samaritan woman her background and offering her the “Living Water,”  mentions birth “by water and by the spirit” to Nicodemus, and has water flow from his pierced side on the Cross. 

Similarly, for John, there is no Eucharistic prayer at the Last Supper, but rather the feeding of the 5,000 points to and embodies the fact that Jesus is the Bread from Heaven, and the bread for which he gives thanks id Jesus made present to us.

The Bread of Life Sermon in John and the Last Supper narratives in Paul and the Synoptics brought the Church early on to recognize the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist celebration and in the Eucharistic elements themselves.   The bread and the wine were thus seen as holy things for people seeking holiness. 

An early Christian hymn by Ephrem of Edessa, writing in a form of Aramaic in the fourth century expresses the wonder and reverence of this belief well: 

Lord, your robe’s the well from which our healing flows.
Just behind this outer layer hides your power.
Spittle from your mouth creates a miracle of light within its clay.

In your bread there blows what no mouth can devour.
In your wine there smoulders what no lips can drink.
Gale and Blaze in bread and wine: unparalleled the miracle we taste.

Coming down to earth, where human beings die,
God created these anew, like Wide-eyed Ones,
mingling Blaze and Gale and making these the mystic content of their dust.

Did the Seraph’s fingers touch the white-hot coal?
Did the Prophet’s mouth do more than touch the same?
No, they grasped it not and he consumed it not. To us are granted both.

Abram offered body-food to spirit-guests.
Angels swallowed meat. The newest proof of power
is that bodies eat and drink the Fire and Wind provided by our Lord.
                                          (tr. Geoffrey Rowell) 

We live today in an age where much of the wonder, awe, and reverence has been removed from life, a world where the realm of the sacred and holy is getting smaller and smaller.  That’s one of the reasons we have difficulty understanding a statement like “in our family, there was not a clear line between religion and fly fishing.” 

But if we are to be fully human, and true to our nature, we must not lose our sense of the holy, our sense of reverence, and our ability to see the holy, to see divinity, in ordinary things of daily life, like bread and wine.

When I hear people mock belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as superstitious “cookie worship,” I question their capacity to wonder or hold anything in awe or reverence.  Part of the problem, of course, is that some people do indeed have superstitious and magical ways of seeing the Eucharist.  “Hocus-pocus” as a way to mock superstition is a corruption of the Latin translation of Jesus’ words when he instituted the Eucharist, “Hoc est corpus meum (This is my body).”   

But some peoples’ bad opinions or misuse of doctrine should not lead us to the opposite error of rejecting true doctrine.  We need to follow here the example of the young Elizabeth I, who affirmed her faith the Real Presence while declining to over-define the matter.  When queried under threat of possible torture or death as a heretic by Queen Mary’s inquisitors about her belief regarding the Eucharistic elements, Elizabeth referred to Jesus’ words “this is my body, this is my blood,” and replied with this quatrain: 

Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.
 

Key in experiencing and honoring the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is having a general idea about what a sacrament is.  It is, just as in our Gospel story today, a sign, a symbol, an outward and visible expression of inward, hidden reality.  A symbol does not just point beyond itself to something else; it participates in and embodies the reality to which it points.  It makes the reality it indicates available to us by the very fact that it is there.   It is for this reason that any understanding of the Eucharist that does not encompass a belief in the real presence of Christ is to my mind flawed.  

It is hard to express the reverence and awe I feel at the presence of Christ in the sacrament.  But hymns, like the one of Efrem the Syrian I quoted earlier, manage at times to capture elements of this awe. 
Today’s introit hymn:

“Here our humblest homage pay we,
Here in loving reference bow;
Here for faith’s discernment pray we,
Lest we fail to know You now.
You are here, we ask not how.”

“Life imparting heavenly Manna,
Smitten Rock with streaming side,
Heaven and earth with loud hosanna
Worship You, the Lamb Who died.
Risen, ascended, glorified!”

Another hymn we sing today speaks of how our worship in the sacrament of the Eucharist must fit into a larger sacrament of life for us:  

Draw us in the Spirit’s tether;
For when humbly, in thy name,
Two or three are met together,
Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluya! Alleluya! Touch we now thy garment’s hem.

As the faithful used to gather
In the name of Christ to sup,
Then with thanks to God the Father
Break the bread and bless the cup,
Alleluya! Alleluya! So knit thou our friendship up.

All our meals and all our living
Make as sacraments of thee,
That by caring, helping, giving,
We may true disciples be.
Alleluya! Alleluya! We will serve thee faithfully.

And simply, in the hymn, “Lord you give the great commission”:  “Lord, you make the common holy, this my body, this my blood.  Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward.” 

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask “give us this day our daily bread.”  But this is not simply a prayer for basic physical sustenance.   The words translated by “our daily bread” actually mean something more like “our bread for the morrow,” the bread of the great feast on the Day of the Lord, or “the bread beyond what you meant when you said, ‘man shall not live by bread alone.’”  It is for this reason that the Lord’s Prayer has always been recited as part of the Great Thanksgiving, just before the breaking of the bread. 

Friends, in the coming week, please remember to say the Lord’s Prayer at least once a day.  And when you say the words, “give us this day our daily bread,” think of the Bread of Life, come down from heaven. Think of Christ made present to us in God’s gifts of bread and the wine, at his table of plenty.  And then in your silent time, your private prayers, feed on him in your hearts by faith, and be thankful.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Liturgy (Mid-week Reflection)

Liturgy

Many of you have heard that the Episcopal Church, like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Lutheranism, is a liturgical church.  Many tend to think that this means simply that we use prepared scripts for our worship (in our case, texts primarily from the Book of Common Prayer), with congregational responses and set written prayers.  But the word liturgy itself means much more than working from a written script.   It comes from the Greek word leitourgia, which originally meant the duty or work one performed for the community at one’s own expense and then among Christians came to mean the duty or work of proper community worship.  It implies the worship through ritual (an established usage or form) and sacrament (an outward symbol that makes present inward realities).   

The great Benedictine liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanaugh was a key force in the New Liturgical Movement that brought about the renewal and updating of Roman Catholic and ecumenical worship forms in the mid- and late-20^th century.   Before his death in 2006, he compared good liturgy to a well-prepared and presented social function or meal with these words:   “The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common [shared] activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.”   

Good liturgy should free our emotions, and trigger our imagination, and thereby produce insight.  The liturgical imagination is different from and in some ways broader than narrative or visual imagination.  It uses a broad variety of tools: the spoken word and story, repeated phrase, music, light, color, taste, movement and smell.  A simple part of all of this is posture.  The old rule for explaining all the ups and downs in Anglican worship runs this way:  we stand to praise (including singing), we sit to listen, and we kneel to pray.  And while old knees and constrained space may mean that at Trinity we stand at times when other Anglicans kneel, the rule generally holds true.  Through all these varied means, liturgy works on us, plays on our sense of identity and community, our reason and our emotions, and our sense of awe and beauty.  In so doing, it allows us to connect with the unseen world, and with those who have gone on before us. 

Liturgy is profoundly countercultural, and wonderfully transformative.  It is the reason, quite simply, that I love to “play Church.”     

--Father Tony+