Pentecost 22 Sermon

This September I took Henry, our firstborn, off to university. He’s going to school in Canada, which meant crossing an international border during a pandemic, which was fraught with confusion and complexity – including the need to get some expensive, specialized Covid testing to prove we weren’t spreading the virus. But good ol’ Henry. He got the appointments all figured out online, we were tested, and everything was fine. But then, once we were in Canada and I was preparing to return home, I realized I had to get the same kind of test to return to the States. And I didn’t know where to go, or how to do it. All I had was my little cell phone, trying to navigate this system, and I couldn’t get it to work and my frustration and anxiety were blossoming. I felt like a child on the verge of a tantrum. But I was determined not to ask Henry for help. Because, here’s the thing, I’ve become quite dependent on having Henry as our in-house I.T. support technician. Whenever something went wrong with technology – the router or the printer or my cell phone – all I had to do was yell, “Henry…” and he’d take care of everything. I was totally spoiled. But now, Henry’s gone. I’ve got to be able to figure this stuff out on my own. And I hate it. I don’t like technology. I don’t like how stupid and vulnerable I feel when I can’t make it work. But I’ve got to if I’m going to survive in this world that’s changing so rapidly around me. And you know, I feel fabulous whenever I actually succeed now. I send him little text messages, crowing with each accomplishment. And he texts me back. “I’m very proud of you, Dad.” (It’s a little condescending, but I’m fine with that.) But it’s fascinating, isn’t it? how much we resist change, but how necessary it is for our growth and survival. We prefer things to remain as they are. Which isn’t necessarily to say we like things as they are. But it’s what we know. It’s what we’re familiar with. And that makes us feel secure. And not just us alone, but society as a whole. To function as a society means we’ve reached some degree of consensus of how we should behave and how to interpret the world around us. And, naturally, we want to keep it that way. Change is disruptive. It’s disorienting. And it requires a lot of energy and time to reestablish what’s normal. But here we encounter one of life’s greatest paradoxes: that as much as we cling to stability, it quickly leads to stagnation. And dullness. And a spirit that’s brittle and rigid. We need change if we want to remain healthy. And alert. And of a supple spirit. We’ll always resist change. And we’ll always need it. This is the tension of all creation. And in thinking about these things, I’m suddenly quite grateful for the witness of that “large crowd” of disciples in today’s gospel who were surrounding Jesus when he visited Jericho. They were following Jesus, enthusiastic about whatever it was he was doing or saying at the moment, when suddenly this guy who’s blind starts crying out for Jesus’ attention. So what do they do? They try to shut him up. Now, in retrospect, it’s obvious this was fairly cruel behavior. But that’s not how they understood themselves or their motivation. They were trying to be loyal to Jesus. They didn’t want anyone interrupting what Jesus was doing. But (and this is what inspires me), when they see that Jesus is calling him, they make a complete 180: “Oh! You want him? Okay. Bartimaeus! Bartimaeus! C’mon. He’s asking for you.” Once they understood that Jesus wanted to show mercy to Bartimaeus, they no longer understood him as a disruption to what God was doing through Jesus, but rather, as the one in whom God’s glory was being made manifest. And this is such a welcome testimony for us today. Just like every generation, we’re living in a society that keeps changing. And whenever these changes come up, our kneejerk reaction is to see them as threats. They’re disruptive. They’re confusing and destabilizing. And, for us in the church, our immediate impulse can easily be to keep those voices at bay so we can keep things the way they are. And, in its way, it feels like loyalty to Jesus because we’re preserving the religious systems we’ve inherited as right and true. Most notably for us, we’re dealing with a couple prominent issues that are the responsibility of our generation to engage. The first is the whole big topic of gender identity and sexual orientation. For many, we feel suddenly overwhelmed by a whole barrage of letters – LGBTQ – and we’re not sure what letter’s coming next, and we’re not we’re not really sure what each of these letters actually means, and it’s all just so confusing. And the second prominent issue in our era also comes with its own collection of letters, and that’s the whole discussion around race and racism: BLM and CRT. And again, it can be so confusing and unsettling. And sometimes the voices sound shrill and demanding, and it all feels very disruptive and uncomfortable. And we just want things to stay the same. And, in its way, we regard this as being faithful and loyal to Jesus. Until suddenly we perceive that the cry behind all these voices and all these letters is simply this: “Have mercy on me.” Have mercy on me. And again and again, what we discover – to our alarm and our delight – is that in showing mercy, God’s work through Jesus is made most manifest. And for us in the church, the heirs of those disciple so long ago, our call is to join them – that wherever we see Jesus showing mercy – we would do the same. For these voices are not disrupting the work of God. They are, in fact, the very place where we can see God’s mercy at work today. During my sabbatical, I made it a habit to visit a lot of churches. I like church architecture and design. It’s kind of a nerdy little thing for me, but it is also (legitimately) a context for my own spirituality. And we’d just been through our big building project here at St. John’s and I was excited to feel the impact of other significant liturgical spaces. So one of the churches I visited was St. John the Divine in Manhattan. If you’re not familiar with this church, it’s an Episcopal church and the fourth largest church in the world. It’s enormous. Hands down, it’s the largest church building in the United States. And surrounding the whole perimeter of the nave is a series of bays, distinct spaces that are each dedicated to a particular theme – some value for our country or of the Kingdom of God. Each bay had a historical theme that was assigned when the church was first built. But it was often overlaid with a more contemporary take on it. And one of these bays was dedicated to St. Luke, the physician, and the whole theme of medicine and bodily healing. But the contemporary focus of that bay was on the AIDS epidemic. And you’ll remember in the 80s the stigma being hurled at the gay community. There was so little known about the disease at that point, but society was so quick to dismiss it as the gay-disease. So many Christians and churches were certain that it was God’s judgment against homosexuality. There was so little mercy. Except at St. John the Divine. Early in the crisis, they responded with action and with compassion, reaching out and caring for these folks as their lives withered away. And for many decades now, they’ve maintained a book filled with the names of thousands of people who have died from AIDS. And there it is, on display in Jesus’ church, dignifying every life lost. And as I stood there, reading and looking at the art, I began to weep. They were tears of sorrow and gratitude and conviction that, in this, I was bearing witness to the heart of God in Christ. That, for whatever else the Episcopal Church may be getting wrong, in this is the Kingdom of God made manifest: the outcast is embraced and shown mercy, the first becomes last and the last becomes first. That is the gospel Jesus proclaimed and I wish to follow. On another day, I visited – not a church – but a secular temple (you might call it). It was the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan – one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic works. The main building is simply a big spiral ramp that gets wider and wider the higher you climb. And this summer, that enormous gallery was focused on just a single commissioned work. Suspended from the ceiling was a massive drape that hung all the way to the gallery floor. And projected upon it was a video of a vocal artist who was singing. It was extraordinary. The artist was not distinctly male or female. You couldn’t tell. Likewise, you couldn’t quite determine the race. Certainly, there was African heritage, but there was more than that. And the music, it sounded partially negro spiritual, but only in a suggestive way. It was so much more – no language of this earth – but deep, melodic, elemental, unscripted sounds rising from the soul. And it was more than singing. It was the whole body expressing itself with movement. I stood there transfixed. This artist became as God to me – their hands waving like some essential and necessary benediction over me and all in that space. And central to this godlike being in my experience was the complexity of race and gender and voice that was everything, yet still just one thing. This modern expression of Trinity. I became convinced in a fresh way just how much all these disruptive voices about gender and race are not be fought against, nor merely accommodated, but to be received as a gift to society and to the church, because they are helping us to grow and to understand our own human complexity, as well as the complexity of God in whose image we are made. It is natural to be shocked and reactive to anything that disrupts the stability of our lives and culture. Fair enough. But if I am sincere in wanting to be like Jesus, I must then ask, “Jesus, how are you responding?” And, time and again, the answer will be, “You don’t need to protect yourself. And you don’t need to protect me. I am showing mercy. And all will be well.”