This sermon was preached for Sunday, October 27, 2024 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for this sermon were: Job 42:1-6, 10-17, Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22), Hebrews 7:23-28, and Mark 10:46-52.
So I’m not a fan of the horror movie genre in general but I do love dystopian fiction. One monster that featured in both science fiction and Halloween-y stories is the zombie - the reanimated undead who go around trying to eat and/or infect people. If you watched or read any zombie stories, then you know there’s this classic trope that happens in pretty much every zombie flick. One member of the hero’s party - the friend, the mom, a survival buddy - gets bitten by a zombie but they don’t tell anyone. It’s only later, at a particularly dramatic moment, that they reveal they’ve been bitten but by then it’s way too late - now they’ve endangered everyone by hiding their wound. Maybe they even start turning into a zombie right then. I love how the trope is played out in the zombie parody movie, Shaun of the Dead. Right as the hero and friends are hemmed in by a huge horde of zombies, swarming and moaning on all sides, Shaun’s mother timidly pulls up her sleeve to reveal a zombie bite. “I didn’t want to be a bother,” she explains. “I didn’t want to say anything, I thought you’d be upset.”
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| Shaun of the Dead, 2004. |
I’d hazard a guess that a lot of us in this room have been Shaun’s mum at one point or another, keeping a deep wound or hurt to ourselves, not wanting to be a bother. Or maybe you’ve been Shaun, shocked and exasperated to discover that your loved one has been silently suffering without complaint until well past the point you could actually act to help. Thing is, a lot of us come by silent suffering honestly. Taught not to complain, or sternly ordered to keep quiet when we did. And maybe there were times that served us well, kept us in good graces with the folks who mattered, or kept our heads above water. But then there are moments when crying out - and trusting that our cries will be heard and responded to - is the truly faithful act. It’s what saves us all.
Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, doesn’t begin the story as a bother. He’s just sitting at the roadside when Jesus, his disciples, and a large crowd pass by. He only starts to shout out when he hears that it is Jesus of Nazareth on the road. And when the crowd around Jesus sternly orders Bartimaeus to be quiet, he cries out even more loudly. Jesus, hearing him, halts in his tracks. And then he does something really interesting. He tells the crowd around Bartimaeus, the same crowd that has been shushing him, to call the blind man over to him. I love their words to Bartimaeus, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”
Bartimaeus is healed, his sight restored. But did you notice that there are two healings that happen in this story? Jesus heals the crowd first, melting their hearts from callousness to compassion. They have a role to play in Bartimaeus’ healing - and what a gift that is! How wonderful it is to say to another, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” That healing came from Jesus but it was because of Bartimaeus - because Bartimaeus cried out and persisted in crying out.
American Christianity - and Anglo-American Protestantism in particular - has a tendency to prioritize the individual’s personal encounter with Jesus Christ above all else. Think of that all-important question: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? We come by this honestly, too, by the way. There are some of you in this room who would really enjoy sitting down with me some afternoon and tracing the roots of American Christian individualism back through four hundred years of influential religious movements and revivals - all the way back to the Calvinism at the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Don’t worry - I will find out who you are! But this morning, I’ll spare the rest of you. Just know that this focus on the individual conversion moment does have a good basis in scripture. So many of the Gospel stories are indeed about an individual encountering Jesus in a profound way. About personal transformation and the healing of one person. A seemingly private matter, between you and God.
With this bias, it can be easy to miss the theme of communal salvation throughout both the New and Old Testaments. We can overlook how Jesus is continually transforming communities - households, villages, nations. How Jesus heals our relationships with each other, too. How when someone who is ostracized and cast aside is restored again to belonging, the whole community is healed and blessed, too. A crowd is transformed from a rejecting, shushing group to an enthusiastic source of support. Distance is overcome, severed connection is repaired. Read back over the Gospels with a focus on the crowd as a main character and you’ll see it - our salvation is all bound up in everybody else’s. Our wounds endanger our friends, but our healing can rescue them, too. Do we dare cry out?
Who have you heard crying out lately? And whom (if you really admit it) have you been sternly ordering to be quiet - directly or in more subtle ways? A friend, your kid, a neighbor, the guy with the cardboard sign at the traffic light. That whole group of people out there in society that you just can’t stand either because you fundamentally disagree with them or simply because they’ve been crying out in some way that’s extremely annoying or just plain inappropriate. You know, things like blocking traffic, camping out on lawns, waving obnoxious flags and signs, or generally making a mess and fuss. Could it even be non-human voices that you’ve heard crying out - your garden, the biosphere? Or the small, wounded part of yourself you’ve gagged for far too long?
Some days, I am sick to death of all the crying out, the relentless urgency and desperation. All too easily, my exhaustion and my sense of powerlessness fester until they necrotize into visceral frustration at the very people who need my compassion the most. “Be quiet already!” I want to scream back. Is it because I believe there is nothing I can do? Is it because I fear there is nothing God can do? Or worse, that God doesn’t care enough to do it? But here’s Jesus, standing still, cocking his head to listen to the voices I want to block out. Here’s Jesus turning toward me and my crowd, saying, “Call him here.” Reminding us, there is always a next faithful act. There is always a way to be a part of God caring for God’s people, all of God’s people.
Have mercy, Bartimaeus shouts. And Jesus responds by summoning the crowd’s own mercy.
“I didn’t want to be a bother. I didn’t want to say anything, I thought you’d be upset.”
The act of crying out, no matter how loud and inappropriate and annoying, is both an expression of faith and an invitation offered to the hearer. An opportunity for our own heart to be opened and transformed by Christ. It is not more strength, more dominance, more stern orders that will save us. Christ’s incarnation as a tiny babe, Christ’s ministry of healing and teaching, Christ’s death on the cross, it is all to say: more compassion, more love, more selfless reaching out to the suffering will be our salvation. More saying to one another, take heart.
My invitation to you, this morning, is to ask yourself: What healing do you need - Bartimaeus’ or the crowd? Maybe you need most to be heard, to be given permission to cry out, to reach out and believe again that others will reach back. That you aren’t a bother at all, but a gift. Or maybe what you need most is to hear. To finally shift from turning away to turning toward. To get to say, to a neighbor, friend, or stranger, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” God cares. We care. I care. You are not alone.
Maybe, for each of us, it’s not an either/or. We are both Bartimaeus and the crowd.
The good news of our faith is that God’s plan of salvation for all people is both individual and collective. Each person’s healing, restoration, liberation, spills over onto the rest of us. And more than that - participating in someone else’s healing heals us. Encouraging someone else encourages us.
Take heart, dear one. He is calling you.
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