Reading: Mark 10:46-52
A NOTE about the sermon series for Lent, of which this is the first:
Lent is a season of self-examination, focused on how we are following Christ in living the life and love of God in the world. It can be personal or communal, and this year we focus on how we as a church are living the life and love of Christ.
In a book called Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Robert Shnase -- a bishop of the United Methodist Church, outlines five practices, and we will look at our own church life through the lens of each:
March 5 -- radical hospitality
March 12 -- passionate worship
March 19 -- intentional faith-development
March 26 -- risk-taking mission and service
April 2 -- extravagant generosity
We will look at these practices and our commitment to them with the help of one Gospel story all five Sundays -- the story in Mark 10:46-52, of Jesus healing Bartimaeus, a poor beggar of Jericho, of blindness. This story is the last public incident in the life of Jesus just before he begins -- in fact, just as he begins his final journey to Jerusalem and the triumphal entry (Mark 11:1-11) which we will read the following Sunday -- Palm Sunday, April 9.
In the Bartimaeus story all five practices are acted out in some way, and each Sunday we will explore how we act them out in our life as a church and as a body of Christ today.
Why are we doing this? Why are
Elgin and Wes McEneny, Dave Furry, Lillian Klemp, Jane Franks, Mike Fennema, the
Trustees and the Property Committee and the Council giving so much time and
energy, and committing so much of the church’s money to installing a lift and
making sure it’s done right?
Is it because of the law – that in 5 or 10 or whatever years our building
will be illegal without one?
Is it because we need it – because some of our most active members find
it increasingly hard to get up and down the stairs to the Lower Hall and the
Upper Room, and they can’t take part – get excluded from things the rest are
able to do?
Is it also because we care about the needs of others beyond us? That we’re sensitive to the needs of people
not here yet, and who we’d love to invite in?
Who we’d like to be able to invite to use our building for events of
their own? Who we wish would feel
comfortable enough here, and welcomed enough here, to join us in something that
may be of interest or help to them?
The story we’ve read this morning – and that we’re going to read for the
next four Sundays, takes place in the city of Jericho – just on the edge of it,
actually.
Did you ever learn that old Sunday school song about Jericho – the one with
the chorus:
Joshua fought the battle of
Jericho, Jericho, Jericho.
Joshua
fought the battle of Jericho.
And
the walls came a-tumbling down.
It’s a song about the time way back in the beginning of Israel when the
people have escaped from slavery in Egypt, have travelled in stages across the desert
of Sinai, and after a 40-years’ journey are at long last coming into the
Promised Land, the land of Canaan.
Behind Joshua as leader – Moses has already died, they cross the Jordan
and begin to take over parts of the land.
A lot of battles are fought and heavy losses are suffered as they attack
and overcome the defences of a number of cities. Except for the city of Jericho, where
something really different happens.
Here at God’s command instead of attacking the walls and the people
behind them with swords, spears and bows and arrows, and having to win by
violent conquest, the people march seven times around the city, blow their trumpets
and rams’ horns as loud as they can at the completion of each circuit, and on
the completion of the seventh circuit and the seventh blowing of the horns, the
walls … yes, the walls came a-tumblin’ down.
The walls separating them from the people inside, and from where they
want to be as well, just come tumbling down.
What a wonderful image of the kingdom of God coming to be in the
world!
Walls just a-tumblin’ down. Walls
that people put up around themselves, disappearing. Walls to defend ourselves and to keep what we
have for ourselves, no longer working.
Walls that keep others locked out and us locked in, no longer being
there. Walls that divide and separate
humanity into insiders and outsiders, no longer being part of the world we
share.
Is it still possible for walls to come a-tumblin’ down? Without battles, without having to fight,
without one side having to beat the other, without terrible losses of so many
kinds on both sides of the wall?
In the time of Jesus there were walls still in Jericho. The people of Israel themselves rebuilt the
walls as soon as they moved in. They
were as concerned and obsessed with protecting themselves against others as the
original people of the land had been before them.
And it wasn’t just physical walls that they built and maintained. It never just is.
In the time of Jesus the city of Jericho was a city of many segments and
many different populations. So close to
Jerusalem, it was a bedroom community with neighbourhoods of up 12,000 Jewish
priests and Levites who worked at the Great temple in Jerusalem. There were poorer, more common Jews who came
in from the countryside to find a better life, who ended up in poorer parts of
the town separate from the Temple class.
Jericho was a Roman provincial capital with Roman and Gentile
bureaucrats and officials – like Zaccheus the tax collector, who were generally
hated by the Jews and would have had their own part of town to live in – probably
the more affluent and comfortable. And
then there were the really poor, the lame and the blind, the lepers and the
outcasts, who lived on the charity of others, but in their own ghettos and
conclaves apart from the people who gave them alms.
All kinds of walls, with communities defined and divided by race and
religion, by class and culture, by occupation, employment, disease and disability. And those walls were – and still are, as hard
to breach as any physical wall. Did you
notice, for instance, how when poor and blind Bartimaeus starts calling out for
help – for healing of his disability and loneliness, a lot of people around him
and around Jesus tell him right away, and quite angrily, to be quiet and not
make a ruckus about his blindness and his need.
He is out of place. To the people
who are there to see and be with Jesus it seems he doesn’t belong with them. He isn’t acting appropriately, and doesn’t
fit in. Jesus, as far as they could see,
has something else on his mind. He is
starting on his way to Jerusalem, the holy city, and to their mind, this man just
hasn’t got the memo. Wrong time and
wrong place. There is – or at least
there should be, a wall to protect them from having to deal with him, and to keep
people and problems like him away from who they are and where they are going.
Does that ever happen – do we ever fall prey to that easy human impulse
to exclude, to push away, or to not open up as much as we think we do, in our
life as a church?
We have all kinds of ways of welcoming others, of opening ourselves and
our building to people around us, of inviting people in to be fed, to be cared
for, and to be included. We also go out
to where others are, and we really do extend the circle of our care out into
the community in so many ways. We
remembered and celebrated a lot of these things at the start of our worship,
and no doubt there even more. This is a
great church to be part of, for that very reason.
But is there still – is there always some room to grow in what we do and
how we do it? Maybe in addition to what
we already do? Are there some doors yet that
could be opened a little bit more? Some
circle that could be made even wider?
Some wall that still stands, that with a little circling and a timely
few trumpet blasts we could make come a-tumblin’ down?
Jesus, when he hears the faintest cry for help
that everyone else around him is
more than happy
to try to keep quiet and make go
away,
is the One who right away stops,
stands still to hear the cry even
better,
and says, “Call him here. Let her come.
Bring them to me.”
Are there times,
are there ways,
are there ministries and groups
and activities of our church
by which we can say to those around us
even more than we already do,
“Take heart, get up, he is
calling you”?
