Our Calling

 Mark 11:1-11

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As I read this text from Mark the thing that stuck out to me was the question, “Why are you doing this?”  That just happens to be the second most important question we as Jesus’ disciples must be able to answer.  The most important question we have to ask with respect to Jesus which comes out of Matthew’s version of the Triumphal Entry is “Who is this?”  Matthew has all of Jerusalem asking that question after Jesus finished his ride into town.   But with Mark, the question that we have to deal with as Jesus’ disciples and that pertains to us as we go about our lives is “why are you doing this?”  “Why are we doing what we do?”  Can we answer with beaming confidence, “the Lord has sent us to do this” as those two disciples did?  Or, are we just floating through life doing what we do and hoping the Lord will bless it?  

“Why do I do what I do?” is a question that arises throughout life particularly when it comes to the work life.  It’s really great when what we do for a living is fulfilling to us.  If you’ve ever had to work a job in which you could not find any reason at all for being there other than the paycheck that barely maybe pays the bills, that’s hard.  It’s soul destroying.  But, you know, to be quite honest, fulfilling work is a luxury that most people don’t have.  

Well, let’s complicate this even more.  Let’s throw into the mix the idea that God has a purpose in what we do with the lives he’s given us.  In the church we call this our “calling” – what is it that Jesus is summonsing me to do with this life that he’s given me.  It is easy to talk about calling if calling is simply about involvement in the ministry of a church.  Is God calling you to be a minister, or an elder, or to serve on the Board of Managers, or to teach, or to visit, or to start a foodbank in the church.  Calling is easy to figure out when you separate “Church life” from “Real life”.  It kind of goes you’re asked by the minister or one of those saint-like untouchables called an elder to do something at the church.  You give it little prayer, a little discernment by that we seem to mean a little assessment of how much time you have and how guilty you will feel if you say “No”, and then if you say “Yes” it happens that the job is yours until death does you part.  Oh, the institution of the church; how we have gotten it so wrong over the years. 

But things are changing. I think it was back in the 80’s that the focus of talk about calling shifted from what one does for the institution of the church to what God is calling you to do with your life.  People started to say I feel God is calling me to be not only a minister or missionary, but maybe a banker, a lawyer, and groundskeeper, a mother.  Suddenly, any profession became a choice for a calling.  You just had to discern what you were good at and go for it and if it’s fulfilling, then it must have been of God.  A calling took on the whole scope of one’s life.  

This line of thinking came to a head in the late 90’s to early 2,000’ s when the Christian writer and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner coined the idea that “Your calling is where your deepest passion meets the world’s deepest need.”  If you like to cycle, start a ministry involving cycling.  If you like to work on cars, start a ministry working on cars.  There’s actually a ministry out there called Grease Monkey’s for Jesus.  

Well, just as the first way I talked about calling was little off because it seemed to limit calling to the institution of the Church, so also this way of thinking about calling is a little off in the other direction.  A calling is not simply anything you enjoy doing turned into an altruistic service.  This way talking about calling is highly individualistic and it requires a certain level of affluence and elitism to follow your own pursuits.  In the end, for a society to function we can’t all just go do what makes us feel happy that appears to meet a need in the world.  There are still those filters at the sewage treatment plant that need to be changed and I don’t think there’s anybody who can say that doing that is their greatest passion.  

In my work history which has involved retail, restaurants, and even mucking out barns, the biggest discovery I have made about calling is that it’s not so much the work that we do, but rather the people we work with that makes the work meaningful.  Whether it be the co-workers or the people we serve and if we’re management, the people we lead, it’s the relationships that matter.

It's the relationships that matter.  So, when we talk about a calling from God, about our calling – for we’re all called – we are primarily talking about who we are and how we are among the people we are with.  We are talking about how we can be the ambassadors, the emissaries, the representatives of the Lord Jesus Christ and his reign of love to the people with whom we go through our daily lives.  Calling is about how we, the one’s in and among whom Jesus lives and reigns by the presence of the Holy Spirit, how we are the voice, the hands, the pokes, the prods, whom God works through to let others know that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost haven’t taken the last train for the coast, but are down here at ground zero with open arms.

As Jesus’ disciples he calls us to love others as he has loved us.  He also calls us to make disciples, which means to teach others to live the Jesus Way, first and foremost by modelling it, and inviting others to follow along in this Way as they struggle with the question that we also struggle with, the “Who are you, Jesus?” question.  So, Yes, we are called and gifted for work in and through the work of this organization we call the Church.  And, Yes, we are also called and gifted for certain types of work out in the world.  But, the calling pertains to whether we look and act like Jesus among the people we do this work with.

When I did retail and restaurants, I was gifted for the customer service side of things.  This was particularly so after I felt the calling to the ministry.  In fact, it prepared me for the people side of pastoral ministry.  In the hardware store that I worked in between university and seminary, I was the one who would be summonsed to deal with the grumpy old lady whose feet hurt so bad she couldn’t stand but for a moment and she was rude about it, but I looked past all that and she would leave happier than we she came in.  Calling is about relationship and who and how we are in relationship with others – are we Christ-like or just opinionated rumps?

  There’s another thing about calling to bring up.  There will be times when we will find ourselves being the right person at the right time to do something very personal and necessary in the life of another and we will know God has orchestrated it all and it’s awesome.  It’s like that old TV show “Touched by an Angel” when God sends an angel in human form to do his work, but in our case it’s like we’re the angels.   We may get the sense that God wants me to do this right now.  Just like Jesus told those two men to go steal – sorry, borrow some man’s donkey, we will get promptings, inclinations to go do and do something specific for a reason we don’t know other than we sense God wants us to do it.

Lastly, there’s another rule of thumb.  In the restaurant, we had the expectation that if you saw something that needed doing, do it.  Even if it’s somebody else’s job responsibility, just do it.  So it is that if we see someone in need of help, help them.  That just makes the world a better place and we never know when we might be making the “Jesus Difference” in somebody’s life where we find ourselves standing at somebody’s ground zero in the image of Christ with arms open. 

Oh, one other thing. Pray.  Always be praying.  As you go about your day, look around and pray for the people you see, “Lord, bless him.”  “Lord, heal her.”  “Lord, provide for them.”  That just changes the way you see things, how you see people, how you feel about life.  You just might start seeing the world as Jesus does, and that there’s the heart of “the call”.  Amen.

 

Living in Beauty

 Mark 14:3-9

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Not long after we moved to Owen Sound Dana took William and Alice down to Caledon to visit the grandparents.  Coming hope late in the day they had a good view of the sunset coming up Highway 10.  William, who was at the time six or seven, said to Dana, “Look Mommy, isn’t it beautiful?”  She was so impressed by that observation that it was the first thing she told me when they got home.  I also was impressed, impressed that a child that young could see and express a sense of beauty and awe with respect to that beauty.  I was very well-pleased that “my boy” could see the beauty of a sunset.  

Beauty is there to be seen but it is hard to define it.  We could all agree that there is beauty in a sunrise and sunset; beauty in the way that the colours, the shapes of the clouds, and the shadows all come together in a way that gives a sense of pleasure and awe.  But what is it?  More often than not beauty is something that we associate with the feminine.  If we saw a buck, a doe, and a fawn out in a field at sunset, we would call the whole scene beautiful.  We would call the deer family beautiful.  We would call the doe and fawn together beautiful.  But we typically wouldn’t refer the buck as beautiful.  We would call him majestic or handsome or just say “Get my gun.”  Mother Nature is beautiful but Father Time…?  It’s like Duck Dynasty.  The women are sexualized in the image of Barbie dolls and the men are…well, we can’t say what the men look like due to the Father Time beards.  

A problematic side of beauty is that they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder which means everybody must have their own idea of beauty.  I’ve heard people say something as strange as the moment of the death of a loved one was beautiful, peaceful; and it can be.  People go and fill their faces and lips and even their butts up with Botox thinking it makes them look young and beautiful when in fact they look like a lumpy sea cumber with eyes.  Beauty is something readily found in nature, but because of this “eye of the beholder” thing and the “association with the feminine” thing and “greed” there is a huge industry associated with beauty that really warps this innate sense of Beauty that we have from a young age.  

Looking here at Mark, we find Jesus entering into the discussion of what beauty is.  Jesus calls what this woman did to him with the perfume not just a “good work” as it so often gets translated, but rather a “beautiful work”.  It’s better to translate it as a beautiful work.  This woman was likely named Mary.  The Mary we would identify as Mary the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, depending on which Gospel you read.  Luke would have us to think that this woman was Mary Magdalene, a prostitute from whom Jesus cast out many demons.  Regardless, I’ll just call her Mary.

Jesus calls what Mary did a beautiful work not because a woman who had strong affections for him did an almost erotic thing to him.  In Luke and John, she washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair and then pours the perfume over them.  In that day, that would have been TV-MA.  But here in Mark, Mary simply pours it on is head. Something everybody else in the room indignantly saw as a waste of an expensive resource that could have been sold to give money to the poor.  Incidentally, selling the perfume for money to give to the poor, in the world of Judaism would have been considered a “good work”.  But what Mary did was something more than just doing ‘good”.  Jesus calls it beautiful.

Jesus says that opportunities to do good will always be available because we will always have poor people.  Mary, on the other hand, was doing something else.  Jesus said she had anointed him ahead of time for his burial.  You see, tending to the bodies of deceased people that otherwise would not have been tended to, in the Jewish world was was and still is a beautiful thing.  It’s an act of Chesed.  That’s the Hebrew word for unconditional love.  It’s the steadfast love of God.  The type of love that God shows and is.  The Greek equivalent is agape.  

Jesus knew he was soon to die and likely to be crucified.  Roman crucifixion was the most dehumanizing way a person could die.  You were stripped down to your undergarment or even naked and made to carry the beam you would be nailed to through town while people yelled insults and spit at and even assaulted you.  The place of execution was always prominently public.  You died slowly and painfully on display while people continued to insult you.  When you finally died, they threw your body in heap to be burned or dropped in a mass grave.  The point of crucifixion was to dehumanize a person.  

 Jesus knew crucifixion would be his end.  He would die in Jerusalem, far from his Galilean home.  So there, would be no family plot to bury him in.  He knew his disciples would desert him for fear of being accused of following a blasphemous leader of a revolutionary movement, so no one was likely to come collect his body and dispose of it properly, with respect.  Jesus’ death would be difficult and dehumanizing.  Jesus was the Son of God become human.  It is profound that his death would be in such a dehumanizing way, ugly way.  

So, Mary did something beautiful.  She tended to his body that evening as she would have after he had died because she knew she would likely not get to pay him this act of loving kindness afterwards.  Wasting this bottle of expensive perfume on Jesus as she did was a beautiful way of restoring the humanity, the human dignity, to Jesus that Roman crucifixion would soon strip from him.  Wasting this perfume on Jesus was her way of saying despite how worthless Roman crucifixion would make his life appear, Jesus’ life still had worth.  

Mary’s beautiful act strikes a chord with me.  I’ve lost family members to terminal illness.  As a minister I have walked with people and families through terminal illnesses.  A terminal illness is dehumanizing.  Its progression strips a person of their dignity.  This is why I have the utmost appreciation for Hospice.  They do everything they can to do the beautiful work of helping people leave this side of things surrounded in love with their dignity intact. 

I served as interim chaplain for Chapman house for a couple of months in pre-Coop days while their chaplain finished some education stuff.  My first day there, I walked in the door, the nurses were very busy, and there was a woman who was in her last hours.  It was very important to them that no one die alone and yet they were unable to go and sit with her.  So the asked me to go sit with here.  I was honoured to do so.  I went in, sat down, listened to her laboured breathing.  I told her who I was.  I prayed with her.  Said a couple of Psalms.  Hummed a little.  Within a half an hour she drew her last breath.  She died with dignity, a valued person.  Her life was not in vain.  Hospice is a beautiful work.

Back to that question of what makes something beautiful.  Looking at this passage here, it would appear that something is beautiful when it reflects the nature and glory of God.  We can look at “big things” like vistas and sunrises and sunsets and it strikes us as beautiful because they show us the infinite beauty and love of the one who made them.  Even if we look in the other direction, to the very tiny, we see beauty there as well.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen magnified images of bugs, of feathers, of the inner workings of a cell.  If you think a flower itself is beautiful, you should see the microscopic details of a flower petal.  Even in the microscopic details of something as vulgar as of those green flies that eat manure there is beauty.  God has made beauty every evident.  

So, since beauty is everywhere present, Jesus calls us to live in beauty.  Not the artificial beauty of lust, greed, Botox, and a fake oddly orange tan from a can applied in an effort to look young and full of life.  But rather, he calls us to live in the wasteful, lavish, selfless way of unconditional love that looks like him.  He calls us to do things that uphold a person’s basic human dignity regardless of who they are and what they have done.  Living a life that respects and even gives worth to others, that’s beauty.  Even when we know they have tragically wasted their own lives, we must regard them with beauty.  Even when we know our efforts will be wasted on that person, we must still regard them with beauty.

To live in this Beauty is to bring forth into this world, into the lives of people, the healing beauty of the beautiful work that Jesus as the Son of God did by dying for humanity.  In Mark’s Gospel, the only thing Jesus has to say with respect to the meaning of his own death is “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  What he means by ransom there isn’t something that gets paid to a kidnapper.  He’s not saying what we so often hear bad TV preachers say; that Jesus gave his life to the devil as a ransom because the devil has kidnapped us and holds us captive in sin.  He is referring to something in the Book of Leviticus called the “life price”.  The life price was an amount of money paid to a victim’s family by somebody who accidentally took the life of another.  The idea was that the inherent worth of the victim’s life can in no way be determined or equalled with money, but simply that paying this “life price” recognized that the person whose life was wasted by negligence had worth.  They tried to recognize the created worth of a person. 

So then, Jesus gave his life so that our lives could have back the worth God created us with, the lives which we all have tragically wasted on our own selfish pursuits and on hurting others for our own gain and pride whether intentionally or unintentionally and made to be worthless in comparison to the beauty in which God created us and the good for which he created us.  Jesus gave his life unto death in order to pour the perfume of the Holy Spirit upon us and into us in order to restore our worth and dignity as being created in the image of God.  Now that there’s some theology for you to ponder on.  

To close, Jesus said that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed the story of this beautiful deed that Mary did of wasting that jar of nard on him to pre-prepare his body for burial would be told.  I am pretty sure that Jesus commanded this story to be told because what Mary did is the best example there is of what it is to be his disciples.  We must waste our lives in acts of sacrificial love for others no matter who they are or what they have done in order to let them know they have worth and dignity and life in Christ and do so expecting nothing in return.  Living in beauty is how racism is cured, how poverty is cured, how sexism is cured, literally, this is how everything wrong in this world that dehumanizes humanity is cured.  Amen.

 

It Pays to Be Annoying

 Mark 10:46-52

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I remember the day I got glasses.  I was ten years old, in the fourth grade, and not all that excited about becoming a “four eyes”.  I didn’t know I needed them.  I walked out of the eye doctors and I could see the details of clouds in the sky, leaves on trees, the trees on the mountains.  I could see.  I did not know before that moment what it was to see these things that clearly.  I had no memory of ever being able to see details in things far away.   The world became new to me that day and it though happened 45 years ago, I remember it. 

It might tell you something about the age of the people I hang with, but in the last year and a half three good friends of mine have had cataracts removed.  They were all rather exuberant about the change in their sight: the clarity of vision, the vividness of colour, the restoration of a full life.  To my friends this surgery was nothing short of a miracle.  I remember when having cataracts meant being blind the rest of your life, but now.  Now, when they do the surgery, they can also put little corrective lenses in your eyes so you don’t even need glasses anymore.  It’s a miracle.

My appreciation for sight makes this story of the healing of Bartimaeus one of my favourites.  Apparently, it was one of Mark’s favourites too; of all the people Jesus heals in Mark’s Gospel, Bartimaeus, the Blind Beggar is the only one Mark names.  I didn’t go and look to make sure, but I think Bartimaeus may even be the only person in all four Gospels that Jesus healed who was named. 

Oh, I might also want to mention that healing Bartimaeus was Jesus’ last miracle.   If we consider that in the Gospels miracles are more than just miracles, they mean something bigger, then this miracle is quite significant.  To heal a blind man’s eyes is more than just giving him sight because “seeing” in Mark’s Gospel means to truly understand who Jesus is.  For example, the last time Jesus healed a blind person in Mark it coincided with Peter making his bold confession that Jesus is the Messiah but then Jesus had to rebuke Peter because Peter didn’t understand that the Messiah must suffer at the hands of the religious authorities and die and then be raised.  You may remember having heard the story of that healing.  Jesus had to make two attempts because after the first attempt the man couldn’t see clearly.  People looked like trees walking around so Jesus had to try again.  Peter’s incomplete understanding of Jesus being the Messiah coincided with the blind man’s sight not being fully restored.  So, the healing of Bartimaeus and its culmination in his seeing again and following Jesus and this being Jesus’ last miracle all come together to say what true faith/faithfulness to Jesus is: healing and following.

Well, I could end this bit of pontification there and you all could breathe a sigh of relief and say, “That was painless”, but this story is just too rich in the depth of the meaning of its’ details to just leave it.  So, let’s poke the sleeping dog here a bit.  

When I read these Gospel stories I often try to imagine being there and I put myself in the place of the characters.  Here I try to imagine being Bartimaeus.  He was a blind beggar.  He had nothing to his name but the cloak he had wrapped around himself.  That cloak was more than just a security blanket, as if he were Linus in the Peanuts cartoons.  That cloak was his home, his shade from the sun, his shelter from the rain, his warmth at night.  Back then blind people were seen as cursed by God, so people didn’t give them shelter.  All he could do to live was sit on the side of the road and hope people would throw scraps of food at him or maybe a coin.  I can’t imagine what shape his skin and fingernails and toenails and hair were in; and his teeth.  I don’t even want to imagine what he smelled like.  But, there he sat, a shame-filled eye-and-nose-sore, with hand out probably barely audibly mumbling to everybody who passed by saying “Have mercy on me.  Have mercy on me.  Have mercy on me.” And the most of them, just walked on by.  If that was the sum total of my life, I might find stumbling off a cliff to be preferrable.

Well, this particular day, Blind Bartimaeus was sitting on the side of the road and he can’t see anything.  He can’t see anything!  But they say if you loose one sense the others will compensate.  So, he probably had a sharpened sense of hearing.  He hears a large crowd coming up the road.  He hears the sound of footsteps, too disorderly to be Roman soldiers marching and there’s no clippity-clop of horse hooves.  He hears the loud din of the voices of people nattering on about this and that.  But in the midst of the din, he hears that Jesus of Nazareth is somewhere in that crowd.  That gets his attention.  

Let me take a little aside here on the sense of hearing.  In the Old Testament hearing is the most important of the senses.  To hear doesn’t mean to just hear words.  To hear means to do what you have been asked or told to do and to understand why you’re doing it.  To hear the commandments of God is to understand and do them.  Hearing is faithfulness.  The only creed of faith in ancient Israel involved hearing.  It was “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”  For Bartimaeus to hear that Jesus is in the crowd means that he somehow recognizes that the LORD his God, his only God, whom he is to love with all his heart, soul, and strength, is in that crowd somehow with and as Jesus and he must respond if he wants to be healed.  He is hearing the Word of the LORD amidst the din.

Well, Bartimaeus stops mumbling to the passersby saying, “Have mercy on me” and begins to shout loudly and repeatedly, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”  You’d think you were at a Pentecostal revival.  It’s like Bartimaeus has transformed from just an unobtrusive eye-and-nose-sore sitting on the side of the road mumbling into a particularly gruesome annoyance.  He starts to seem like one of those demon-possessed people in whom the demon knows who Jesus is and shouts it out and Jesus has to tell it to shut up.  So, the people begin to shout back at Bartimaeus saying, “Shut up.”  But not Jesus.  You see, Jesus had heard his prayer.  That loud, annoying, ceaseless “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” was prayer.

There is a prayer in the Eastern Orthodox tradition called the Jesus Prayer.  It’s a one sentence prayer that they pray similarly to how Roman Catholics will pray the rosary.  It goes: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  They pray that prayer over and over to themselves so that in time, in their inner thoughts they always have the sound, the rhythm, the cadence of that prayer going.  Instead of the 8-track tape of worries that constantly play the same songs of trouble in our minds, they’ve disciplined themselves to pray this prayer without ceasing, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  I have tried several times throughout my life to take this discipline upon myself.  It’s work.  It requires focus and simply remembering to keep at it.  But, of all the spiritual disciples I have attempted to undertake in my life, attempting to pray the Jesus Prayer has been and still is the one I keep coming back to, particularly in times of trouble.  It changes you.  It helps you to be aware of God’s presence with you.  It’s worth the effort.  

A word about mercy here as well (and your Greek lesson for the day), the word for “mercy’ in Greek is the same as the word for olive oil.  Olive oil wasn’t something they simply cooked with.  It can sustain you when you’ve got nothing to eat.  It can soothe skin conditions and heal wounds.  Yes, there was a balm in Gilead.  It was olive oil…with some spices.  To talk of God’s mercy is to frame it within the healing uses of olive oil.  To ask for mercy is to ask for sustenance and for healing.  We have been conditioned by centuries of bad theology rooted in Medieval Roman Catholicism to think of mercy as a courtroom acquittal for our immoral, God offending, Hell-worthy sinning when, in fact, God’s mercy is God’s soul-healing restoration of life poured upon us like a balm of olive oil.  It is the presence of the Holy Spirit who heals us of the disease of sin, it’s compulsions and shames.

Jesus heard Bartimaeus’ prayer for mercy; Bartimaeus’ loud, repetitive, annoying prayer for mercy, for the healing and restoration of his diseased life.  And, Jesus responded by welcoming Bartimaeus into his presence and granting his request.  Jesus didn’t shut him up or call him annoying or worse, point out that Bartimaeus was unworthy.  It strikes me here just how courageously desperate Bartimaeus was, and considering the “repulsiveness” of what he had become he apparently had not lost a sense of his self-worth.   It was still buried within in him hoping for the day. 

Let’s step back and consider his name.  Bartimaeus literally means son of Timaeus.  The Hebrew word for son is “bar”.  I have to think Mark’s redundancy in saying that Bartimaeus was also the son of a man named Timaeus is quite intentional on his part.  The name Timaeus means “priceless one”.  Bartimaeus is the Son of the “priceless one” and is thus invaluable too.  Because he is a blind beggar does not mean he or his family is cursed.  They are priceless to God.  

It just goes to show that if we have a need that only God can meet or even if we’ve got a beef with God because it seems God has been unfair, praying repeatedly and annoyingly to God about it might be a welcome thing to do.  Let us not get into this “I’m too worthless for God to value” line of thinking or “I’m too small of a speck on this little blue dot circling an ordinary star that’s just one of billions of stars in this galaxy that’s just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in this universe which may be one of an infinite number of universes for God to care about me” stuff or thinking we’ve not lived good enough for God to show any favour with us.”  When it comes to God and prayer, get into the game, step up to the plate and start swinging.  Don’t sit the bench because you don’t think you’re good enough to play or don’t think you know how to play.  Pray!

When Bartimaeus prayed for mercy he had a specific need in mind.  He wanted to see again.  At one point in his life Bartimaeus could see, but something happened and it took his sight away and his life along with it.  He wants his life back.  He wants to be a whole, valued person in the eyes of the community.  He probably had a feeling that God had dealt unfairly with him and he wants the relationship with God restored.  He wants God to be God, fair and just, not God aloof and uncaring.  If you look at the history of prayer in the Bible, study the conversations that the major characters of the Bible have with God, you will find that reminding God to be God, fair and just, occupies a good many of those conversations.  You will also find that God listened and stepped up and started being God, fair and just, rather than God, aloof and uncaring.  So, pray, pray and remind God that it is time to be God, fair and just, time to wake up and get off the pillow in the back of the boat and calm the stormy sea.  Pray loudly, repeatedly, and annoyingly.

Winding it down, Bartimaeus stood as representative of the people of God, of Israel.  There was a day when Israel could see.  When it had faith and was faithful and perceived the presence of God in her midst.  But they were blinded by the Roman occupation and the unfairness thereof so much so that they couldn’t see what God was up to in their midst as Jesus.  Having lost their sight, they needed to tune their ears to Jesus, to listen to him and follow.  Calling out to Jesus and following him was where their healing and restoration awaited.  They were still priceless in God’s eyes.

This makes me think of our little Cooperative, our four small, small town/rural congregations.  Have we become blind with discouragement?  We seem just to sit on the side of the road wishing not to offend, mumbling to the community around us “Have mercy on us.  Have mercy on us.  Have mercy.”  Yet, the crowds pass us by really not caring, really not valuing the invaluable role our communities of faith have played in the lives of the generations that preceded them…and it’s unfair.  We four congregations are not worthless, even though our surrounding communities can’t seem to see our worth.  And, there are those in our midst who say we are too old to really do anything about our situation, that it’s up to the younger folks to figure this out.  Well, yes, the younger folks in our midst really do need to step up to the plate.  When we come out of COVID, the vision of our younger church is going to be invaluable.  Though you may feel like you are intruding into the stomping grounds of your parents and grandparents and think you are not worthy to carry the torch, you are priceless too.  You are Bar-Timaeus, the children of the priceless ones.  The Lord needs you.  Come. The church is yours.

Anyway, young or old, we still have one thing we know for sure that we must do.  Pray.  Pray continuously, and loudly “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.”  We need to remind God that it is time to be God and start calling people to himself through us the Body of Christ where rests the Holy Spirit who will heal them.  I know our predicament seems an impossible thing…But so was Bartimaeus’ blindness…and God healed him.  Amen.

 

A Healing House of Prayer

Mark 11:15-19

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One of my first exposures to Islam was during seminary on a study tour of the Middle East.  We were in Damascus, Syria visiting the Umayyad Mosque or Grand Mosque.  It is one of the oldest and largest mosques in the world and one of the three places that the head of John the Baptist is supposed to be buried.  Inside the mosque there is a huge place for prayer in which all are welcome but you must take off your shoes and if you’re a woman, cover your head.  There are no pews for sitting just very beautiful oriental rugs on the floor for you to sit or kneel or bow down.  But no reclining; you don’t want to appear as if you are asleep.  There is a man with a cane called a tapper who comes around and loudly taps the ground beside those who look like they are sleeping.  He will also tap at you, if you are talking or whispering too loudly.

The Prayer Hall of the Umayyad Mosque was obviously a place for prayer.  Open to all who wish a quiet, sacred place to pray.  As tourists, we seemed a bit out of place but it is the way of Islamic culture to show hospitality, to let others see how they pray and worship, to see that a mosque is a place of Salaam, peace where all people can come to pray.  One thing we did not see there were people selling souvenirs.  No one was selling commemorative slippers or flip-flops for you to wear when you took your shoes off.  Those were freely available.  There was no scarf vender for women who had no head covering.  Those also were freely available.  There were no people, loaded down with bags, just passing through because it was shorter to go through the mosque rather than around the mosque.  This was a place of prayer.

Well, let’s turn to the Jerusalem Temple back in Jesus’ day.  Our reading this morning of Jesus cleansing the Temple is set in the part of the Jerusalem Temple complex that would have been similar to the Prayer Hall at the Umayyad Mosque.  This was the Courtyard of the Gentiles, the only part of the Temple complex accessible to non-Jews.  There, in the Courtyard of Gentiles, where non-Jewish people were supposed to find a place to seek the God of Israel and pray, Jesus did not find people praying.  Rather, he found that the priests had turned the religious practice of sacrifice into a lucrative business.  

You see, only unblemished livestock could be offered to God and the only way one could be absolutely sure your livestock offering was unblemished was to buy your lamb, goat, bull or whatever from the priests at the temple.  Therefore, the Courtyard of the Gentiles was looking a bit like a crowded livestock market.  Also, one did not venture to Jerusalem and not go to the Temple and make at least a Thank Offering which could have been a handful of grain or a dove.  So, there were rows upon rows of doves in cages behind a row of tables where the vendors sat to keep people from just going and taking one.  There were also the moneychangers.  Most people had only Roman currency which had an image of Caesar on it.  In the opinion of the priests that was idolatry and so they only allowed Jewish currency in the temple.  And so, you had to exchange currency at a cost to buy your sacrifice.  The priests had turned the Courtyard of the Gentiles into a big, business crowded livestock market.  To add insult to injury, there were lots of people just passing through the Courtyard loaded down with stuff because going through the courtyard with its many gates was a much quicker way to go from point A to point B in Jerusalem.  There wasn’t much room for someone just to sit and pray.

So, here it was the day after Jesus’ Triumphal donkey ride into Jerusalem amidst a crowd of people proclaiming him to be the Messiah, the King of Israel.  Surprisingly, Jesus didn’t go to the King’s Palace to dethrone the king and take over.  Rather, he burst into the Temple, into the Courtyard of the Gentiles, and started disrupting the money making and he began to teach, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations?  But you have turned it into a den of thieves.”  

Just to let you know, this is one of those rare moments in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus lets slip who he is.  His house isn’t the King’s Palace.  His house is the Temple where God is supposed to be.  Therefore, he’s claiming to be God and his house is not supposed to be this big business thing that it had become.  His house was supposed to be a house of prayer for all peoples and the place where our sin-broken relationship with God gets cleaned up.  

If you will allow me to play Bible Geek for a moment, Jesus was quoting from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.  The house of prayer part comes from In Isaiah 56 where God says the day will come when he will welcome to his house the likes of eunuchs, foreigners, and outcasts – people elsewhere excluded from God’s presence – and give them a place in God’s presence.  Then, immediately after God says that, he goes on to invite the wild animals into the fold because the shepherds of the people have no understanding and have turned away to their own gain.  If the priest know their Isaiah, they know Jesus is jabbing at them.

The den of thieves quote comes from Jeremiah 7 where God is addressing the idolatry of the people and the resultant immoral and unethical behaviour.  He points out that they are idolatrous, worshipping other gods, but still they come to worship at the temple and act as if they are saints all the while looking at his priesthood who are just doing their work in the same way that people today will say ministers and churches are corrupt and only after your money when we truly are just trying to do God’s work.  Well, here in this quote Jesus puts the shoes on the other feet: the people, instead of being corrupted by idolatry, are sincerely coming to the Temple to do what God has asked them do but it’s the priests, the shepherds, who have turned to seeking their own gain and really only want their money.  The people wanted the Messiah to come and bring the Kingdom of God but the Temple establishment was doing nothing to prepare them for it.  They are instead robbing the people.

There’s some more interesting Bible Geek stuff here, if you will allow me.  All four of the Gospels recount the Temple cleansing very similarly, but Mark is the only one to include the “of the nations” from the quote from Isaiah.  Mark seems to want to note that the big business practices of the Temple establishment had made it so that the Courtyard of the Gentiles, where people from other nations could come seek the God of Israel, was so crowded with the vendors and livestock that people couldn’t come there to pray.  I think of how churches today in their efforts to attract and market the faith to outsiders have made their foyers into mini-malls with coffee shops and trinket stores and have turned their sanctuaries into concert venues so that there’s no space that seems sacred or welcoming to those just needing to pray.

Also, Mark is the only one of the Gospeler’s to note that Jesus would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.  Now you really have to be a Bible Geek to catch this.  This sentence is loaded with the language and concept of forgiveness.  In both the Hebrew and Greek languages the words for “forgiveness” and “to forgive” are rooted in the idea of picking up and carrying the burdens or sins of another.  Forgiveness not this “Be remorseful and say you’re sorry, and then I’ll forgive you” transaction thing we understand forgiveness to be.  In the Day of Atonement Sacrifices and the Sin Offerings the sin of the people is in essence transferred to the sacrificial animal who then bears it away to death thus cleansing, freeing, healing the person of it so they can walk away from it and leave it behind.  Jesus became the sacrificial animal when at his baptism he took the sin of the people upon himself and he bore sin away unto death on the cross.  That’s the Good Friday sermon so I won’t go into that here.  

There’s also the word “allow”; Jesus would not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple.  The Greek word for forgive is the one we translate here as “allow”.  This doesn’t mean that to forgive is to allow someone to keep doing bad, terrible, hurtful stuff.  It is to allow it in the sense of bearing with that person in their sin rather than casting them out.  Once again, we come back to forgiveness being about bearing the sins of another until they are freed and healed of it.  Remember the four men who carried a paralytic on his mat to Jesus to be healed.  Jesus looked at what the four men were doing and saw their faith and then said to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  Forgiveness is bearing people in there brokenness to Jesus for healing.  Forgiveness is a complicated subject for another sermon.  

Mark’s noting here that Jesus would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple is Mark’s way of pointing out that the temple being the place where sin was dealt with, where sins were born or carried away in sacrifice was no longer the way it works.  Jesus, the Messiah, had arrived, God the Son, God incarnate and Jesus will be the once and for all sacrifice who bears away the sin of the world.

And while I’m unloading the truckload of Bible Geek stuff here, it is interesting to note that when the priests and scribes heard that Jesus was putting a stop to their livestock trading and money changing in the Courtyard of the Gentiles, they began to seek a way to kill him.  “Seek” is a word that comes up often in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah pertaining to our relationship with God.  Isaiah 55:6-7 says: “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts, let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”  The Chief Priests and Scribes, the spiritual leadership of Israel, instead of seeking their LORD while he was near and could be found – standing right there in their midst – they began to seek a way to kill him.  Instead of having a healthy reverence of him – The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom – they are flat out afraid of Jesus because he will take away their empire of spiritual abuse from them and give the people what they truly hunger and thirst for, Himself.

Anyway, I need to quit playing Bible Geek now and try to say something relevant.  Back to my visit to the Umayyad mosque.  It struck me as being a house of prayer open at all times to all people.  I visited there back in the mid-1990’s when I was yet a couple of years away from going into the pastorate.  At that time, the mega-church movement was really starting to take hold in North America while the main street church and the rural church were really starting to decline.  A huge and influential business practice was taking hold in the church, marketing they called it.  How to market your church to make it an attractive product that people will come and take part in.  Almost overnight churches began to change from houses of prayer into “worship venues” with campuses and malls where you can buy sacred reading stuff and trinkets.  Sanctuaries became more like concert venues, sermons became like the motivational talks you would hear at a business convention.  The church became like entertainment.  With a charismatic leader and a good board any church could grow and become a mega-church.  In my opinion, church became religious big business and that ain’t what the church is.

Since then, in my nearly 25 years now of ministry, I have been perplexed by the constant question of how do we turn this dying church around.  Today, even the mega-churches, which grew so fast mostly because people were leaving the “dud church” for the “super flash in the pan” church, even they are in decline.  Our land is no longer a Christian land.  We are working on generation three of people not knowing what “church” is about, not realizing their hunger for God.  On top of that, most of what they have heard about the church has been negative.  In this pandemic, there has been no reporting on the churches and the Christians who have compassionately abided by the protocols and found new ways to support one another and help the elderly.  But rather, the media has certainly loved pointing out those churches who called it faith in God to flaunt the pandemic protocols and, in turn, became super-spreaders of COVID-19.  

At present, there is a fear among churches as to whether this pandemic will be the final straw that will close the doors.  It will likely be another year before we can open our doors and congregate the way we used to and only then will we know what we’ve got to work with.  Meanwhile, this pandemic has certainly made us think about what the role of the church is in our lives and communities.  Online is not the same.  We have greatly missed the fellowship our congregations provide and we have also learned new ways to look after and care for each other and our neighbours.  The question now isn’t so much how do we turn around.  It is what will we be when we are finally able to gear it up again.  At the moment, “What are we here for, as a church, as a body of Christ?” is a good question to be pondering because when we get back it’s not going to be the same.

There are some parameters here in our passage today that we should consider.  The house of prayer matter is important.  We need to make sure that we communicate clearly that our church buildings are houses of prayer, sacred spaces, that are open to all.  We also need to make sure that we the followers of Jesus don’t come across as those who judge the sins of the world, but rather as those who bear with people in their brokenness helping them to find cleansing, freedom, and healing.  This year of mostly isolation has been tough on people couped up together.  There have been things said and done that people will need cleansing from, freedom from, healing from.   We need to make it clear that our gatherings are places and times when people can seek the LORD and…find him…and be found…because he is near, in our midst and he can take their burden from them and carry it away.  We don’t have to turn church into a time to entertain in the hopes that people will stick around.  We just have to be sincere about the fact the Jesus is among us to be sought and found and he will carry our burdens away and restore us with his Spirit.  Amen.