Raise a Wee Voice

Mark 10:46-52

October 28, 2018

Bartimaeus, sitting sightless on the side of road, calls out, “Jesus, have mercy on me.”

And all of the insiders respond, “shut up, you tramp.”

So Bartimaeus, still sitting sightless on the side of the road, shouts out, “Jesus, have mercy on me!”

And so all of the insiders, those who would become the leaders of the fledgling church, respond, “shut up, you troublesome tramp.”

There is a time to keep silent; and there is a time to shout out loud. For Bartimaeus, the time for silence is past. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Then Jesus says, “bring him to me.”

There is a time for silence, and there is a time to speak – to speak the truth as you have been given to understand it, to speak it loud and clear, to speak it in love, and to speak it to power.

Now is such a time.

Clearly, we live in a time with a great deal of blindness, much of it willful, in those whose insights and foresight we have vested with great power. That is true politically, economically, and socially in many respects.

It’s the Sunday of a congregational meeting. We’ve already done a good deal of ecclesiastical work and we have a good deal left to do, so I am not going to spell out the details or shine particular light on the blind spots that threaten the commonweal.

I’d simply say, we don’t have to see each of those particulars in precisely the same way, but anyone who doesn’t see the blindness of our political, economic, education, media, and religious leaders – to list just some of those whose lack of vision threatens us all – anyone who doesn’t see their blindness shares their blindness.

“Jesus, have mercy on us all.”

In that prayer, the church begins to raise its voice and call forth the new sight that our age demands.

So, on this Sunday following a week in which one follower of the president of the United States sent pipe bombs to a dozen people associated with the opposition party and another devotee of the president’s stated ideology of nationalism shot and killed at least 11 people gathered for Shabbat services in a Pittsburg synagogue we confront an urgent call to clarity about the rot setting in at the roots of the tree of life.

We are, in this precious space, quite clearly a small band with but a wee voice to raise, but friends, if we are to be faithful to our time and to our God then raise it we must. We must dare to speak the truth of our condition if we are to find healing for what ails us and sight for our blindness.

The sermon that I wrote before heading off to Tennessee last Wednesday to celebrate my mom’s 91^st birthday focused entirely on us, on our need to dig a little deeper, and reach out a little further because our community is insufficient as currently constituted to live fully into the mission which we have discerned.

I set that aside last night when Cheryl and I got home. I’ll include it in next week’s e-blast, because I think it remains important for us to ponder.

For now, however, I want to share something I posted on Facebook while sitting on a plane waiting to head home last night. I wrote, simply,

The flight attendant asks us to be courteous and kind to one another. This is what would actually make America great again

The etymology of “kindness” roots the word in the Old English kyn from which we get notions of kindship, relatedness, family, and toward which we point when we speak of the kindom of God, the household of God, the beloved community. To be kind is to exhibit a piece of the kindom of God.

The church is, of course, far from a perfect community. We are not fully complete, and we are not yet the kindom of heaven on earth. But the more I observe the overwhelming ethical, moral, and theological blindness of our leaders, the more deeply I become convinced that the most significant offering the church has for our time rests in our striving to be an authentic, small but unmistakable instance of the beloved community, the kindom of God on earth.

It been more than a half century, now, since Dr. King so accurately observed that 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. Given that more Americans are probably at brunch now than they were on any given Sunday morning back in 1963, it’s possible that’s changed a tiny bit but I doubt it.

It’s as important now as it was then for America is as deeply divided – by race, by class, by immigration status, by sexuality, by religion – as it was in 1963. Thus the church’s primary calling, remembered by our Presbyterian forebears in the Confession of 1967, remains critical and urgent: we are called to the ministry of reconciliation. We respond to that call by raising our voices: raising them to call out racism, heterosexism, nationalism, antisemitism, and every form of tribalism that leads to irreconcilable differences, and raising them to invite those not like us into deeper relationships in this circle of reconciliation at the center of which stands the one who says, simply, “let them come to me.”

Friends, let us raise a voice of invitation that we might be a community of reconciliation for a world that stands in desperate need of drawing together before we are rent irredeemably asunder. May we have the courage of our convictions necessary for this work. Amen.