Lenten Sermon

March 17, 1991

Tarrytown United Methodist Church

Austin, Texas

FOLLOWING CHRIST

By Wayne Danielson

Mark 10:46-52.  They reached Jericho; and as he left Jericho with his disciples and a large crowd, Bartimaeus (that is, the son of Timaeus), a blind beggar, was sitting at the side of the road.  When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout and say, "Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me."  And many of them scolded him and told him to keep quiet, but he only shouted all the louder, "Son of David, have pity on me."  Jesus stopped and said, "Call him here."  So they called the blind man.  "Courage," they said, "get up; he is calling you."  So throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus.  Then Jesus spoke, "What do you want me to do for you?"  "Rabbuni," the blind man said to him, "Master, let me see again."  Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has saved you." And immediately his sight returned and he followed him along the road.

Following after someone is a very human thing to do.

You can see this even in babies.

Last weekend my son Paul and his wife Judy visited with their six-month-old daughter Lauren.

Lauren is a fine granddaughter.

But she has a serious fault.  She doesn't appreciate me nearly so much as she appreciates her dad.  When Paul comes into the room, Lauren's eyes lock onto him like radar.  If he comes close to her, she gurgles and coos and laughs.  It's kind of disgusting the way she carries on.  When I come close, she just looks at me and yawns politely and turns her head away.

What a dumb kid, I think.  I could really give her a lot of good grandfatherly stuff -- toys, teddy bears, rattles, anything she wants.  I'm a big spender when it comes to grandchildren.  But all she really wants right now is her father's attention.  She follows his every move.  She can't get enough of him, although, in my opinion, he's really not all that interesting.  Let's face it, grandfathers are second best with baby girls, compared with their fathers. 

Little girls follow their parents -- their fathers and their mothers.  It's the human thing to do.  As they follow, they change and grow.  But growth is difficult and uncertain.  As infants, we don't understand what's happening.  We dont see what's going on.

I came along at the tail end of my family up in Iowa.  I had two brothers and two sisters, but they were older.  The brother who was closest in age to me was eight when I was born.   As I grew older, I tagged along after him.  I looked up to him.  I wanted to be like him.  I followed him around as much as he would let me.

It was in the summer of my eighth year, I remember, when I realized that my brother and his teenage friends were using new words -- words I had never heard before -- words that they did not use in front of grownups.  I tagged along more closely than ever that summer, listening as hard as I could.  In my head I was making a dictionary of new terms.

Sometimes the boys would get really tired of my hanging around, and they would turn on me and let me have it. I didn't mind.  It meant that I could add eight or ten new words to my dictionary all at once.

In the evening, when the day's work was done, I would sit by myself on the curb of Oakdale Street and talk to the little brown butterflies that gathered there to enjoy the last warmth of the cooling pavement.

"You blankety-blank butterfly," I would say.  "You are nothing but a blankety-blank.  Your father is a blankety-blank too.  And your mother is a blankety-blank, blank, blank."

By the end of my eighth summer I could curse for a minute and a half without repeating a single word. 

I wasn't the same little boy I had been.  I was more devious.  I had learned about sin and guilt and deception.  When September came,  I entered the fourth grade.  One day my teacher, Miss Holstein, got after me for not doing my homework.   I smiled sweetly at her.  But i÷nside I was giving her her ninety seconds worth of  butterfly words.

Following after someone is very human, isn't it?  We make lots of mistakes along the way.  And some mistakes stick with us for a long time. As children, we don't understand what is happening to us.  We don't see our lives in perspective.

This question is addressed to the older members of the congregation:  Do you remember the first time you fell seriously in love?

I do. 

It was in high school and the girl in question looked just like Cybil Shepherd, the woman who does the Loreal commercials.  At least that's the way I remember her forty-four years later, and whose memory is this anyway?  At any rate, it seemed to me that Cybil was terrific.

I followed after her.

In English class, if she got up to sharpen her pencil, I got up and sharpened mine.  In geometry, if she bisected an angle on the blackboard, I bisected one in my notebook, exactly the same way.  If I knew she was going to wear a gree¨n sweater to the St. Patrick's Day dance, I tore through my meager wardrobe looking for something green, anything green.

I was completely devoted to her. I followed her everywhere.  Looking back, I can see that I must have been really annoying.  But Cybil had her faults too.

My first love ended in a cruel way.  I was working late on the school paper one night when I thought I saw a familiar figure climbing the fire escape to the roof of the building.  After a few minutes I decided to check it out.  Quietly, I climbed the fire escape.  It was pretty dark up there, but there was light enough for me to see that Cybil had a new boyfriend.  He was a varsity football player.  He owned lots of green sweaters.  And on weekends his dad was teaching him to fly the family airplane.  Well, I just knew right then that I was out of the running.  In my mind, I said farewell to Cybil with a few well-chosen butterfly words.  Then I went bacÊk down the fire escape to my typewriter.

Looking back, I can see that following after the inconstant Cybil taught me a mixture of things good and bad.  I  learned how to love another person completely and utterly and without reservation.  That was probably valuable.  I learned a good deal about betrayal and separation and grief.  That was hard and difficult.  As time passed, I also learned the agonizing  truth that life goes on no matter how we feel.  On a spring morning, seven or eight years later, I actually began to feel better.  I understood what the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne meant when he wrote:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

  And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

  The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

  And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

  Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Following after someone is a very human experience.  Sometimes it leaves us confused and bitter and hollow.  As teenagers and young adults it takes a long time for us to understand our lives, to see them in perspective.  Sometimes we never do.

And so we come to Jesus on the road 2,000 years ago.

It was springtime then, too.  The roads Rome had built in the eastern provinces were crowded.  It was the time of year when all good Jews went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  Jesus was going, too.  The scriptures tell us he had "set his face to go to Jerusalem."  He felt compelled to go, in spite of all the dangers.  Jesus was a young man from the North, from Nazareth.  He was at the peak of his intellectual and spiritual power.  He was a prophet.  The spirit of God was upon him -- was within him.   The light of God was in his eyes and the passion of God was in his voice.   Everyone thought he was going to Jerusalem to announce the coming of the KÇingdom of Heaven.  Instead, he was going there to die on the cross.   And he knew it.

The farther he went along the road, the more people followed after him.  They could sense the drama and the danger of his journey.  They could see how his closest friends, his disciples, tried to protect him.  They wanted to be with him when he came into the mysterious kingdom he talked about so eloquently.  The closer they got to Jerusalem, the larger the crowd grew.  More and more people crowded around him.  They didn't understand what was going on,  but they wanted to be close to him, to touch him -- just touch his robe.  Mark tells us what happened next:

They reached Jericho; and as he left Jericho with his disciples and a large crowd, Bartimaeus (that is, the son of Timaeus), a blind beggar, was sitting at the side of the road.  When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout and say, "Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me."  And many of them scolded him and told him to keep quiet, but he only shouted all the louder, "Son of David, have pity on me."  Jesus stopped and said, "Call him here."  So they called the blind man.  "Courage," they said, "get up; he is calling you."  So throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus.  Then Jesus spoke, "What do you want me to do for you?"  "Rabbuni," the blind man said to him, "Master, let me see again."  Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has saved you." And immediately his sight returned and he followed him along the road.

What do you think of that story?

As a young person, I thought it didn't amount to much.  It was too simple.  It was a miracle story, but surely it wasn't about a major miracle like water turning to wine, or a multitude being fed, or Lazarus being raised from the dead.   As a young person, I didn't pay much attention to this story.

As I grew older, howe÷ver, I began to suspect that somehow I was mistaken.

I discovered that the same story, in slightly variant forms, appears in all the synoptic gospels; that is, in Matthew and Luke as well as in Mark.   That's usually a sign that something important is going on.  In elaborated form it may even be the basis for the entire ninth chapter of the Book of John.

The story was obviously of great significance to the writers of the New Testament.  But why?  What was I missing?  A chance meeting between Jesus and a blind beggar on the road to Jerusalem  -- what was vital about that?

What was vital, I decided, is not that a miracle occurred.  The point of the story is not that a blind beggar received his physical sight, although this certainly happened.  The point of the story, somehow, has to do with relationships -- with relationships between ordinary people and Jesus and God -- and the power to change lives that flows as a result of those relationships.

Who was Bartimaeus?   He was a nobody.   He was a kind of drag worm, like one of those people who stand on Austin streetcorners with signs saying, "I'm homeless.  Help me."  He was the kind of person people tell to get lost.

"Don't bother the Master now old man," people said to him.  "Can't you see he's on the road to Jerusalem?"

But Bartimaeus didn't care.  From his years of despair, from his pain, from his soul's anguish and confusion, he shouted out, "Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me."

They tried to shut him up.  But he shouted louder, "Son of David, have pity on me."

And Jesus heard him.  He asked his disciples to bring the man to him, through the pressing crowd.

How do we come to Jesus?  How do we become his followers?

We come to Jesus just as we are.  We come with all the good things and all the bad things we have learned by following others.  We come with all our shallowness and incompleteness.  In humility, we ask for his help.  We tell him exactly what we want, what we need, wõhat only he can give.

Jesus spoke, "What do you want me to do for you?" 

"Rabbuni," the blind man said to him. "Master, let me see again."

Bartimaeus believed -- no, he knew -- that Jesus could fulfill his deepest need.  He didn't approach him the way most of us do when we pray: "Dear Lord, I kind of wish you would help me change my life, but I'm not sure that even you can really do it, but if you can, and if you're listening this morning, then I would really appreciate it if you would at least try to help me, but I don't know whether you can or not."

That's not prayer, is it?  It's not prayer because it has no faith in it.  Yet that's how many of us pray.

Bartimaeus approached Jesus in faith.  "Master, let me see again," he said.  And Jesus said,  "Go;  your faith has saved you."

The story ends with these words:

"And immediately his sight returned and he followed him along the road."

What does it m˙ean to have sight returned? What does it mean to be saved by faith?

To Bartimaeus, it meant the return of his physical sight, certainly.  But, it also meant the return of his spiritual sight.  It meant the enlargement of his vision of who he was and who Jesus was and who God is and what they could do together.  The power of God had entered his life.  Being saved by faith meant he was a man who could see.  He was a man who could see Christ and follow him along the road.  He had been transformed by faith from a nothing -- a less than nothing -- into a whole person.

This simple story of a happening on the road to Jerusalem is not so simple after all, is it?

No, it tells a profoundly important story of how to follow Christ and what following Christ can mean for our lives.  The story tells us that if we call out to Jesus with all our hearts, as Bartimaeus did, he will hear us.  He will help us see again.  He will give us not just physical sight -- but insight -- the spiritual power that enables us to put Ÿour lives in perspective, to understand them.  If we follow him, he will give us life -- life so rich and rewarding, so sweet and poignant that we call it abundant.  We call it eternal.

Following after people is the quintessential human experience.

It is the primary way we learn.  By following after people -- our parents, our brothers and sisters, our friends, our teachers, the ones we love --  we change and we grow.  But we grow slowly, and with great difficulty, don't we?  Baby girls take a long time to understand who their grandfathers are.  Sometimes we grow crooked and bent and blind.  We spend whole summers on childish projects that do little to enlarge our souls.   We can be shaped in strange ways by some of the people we choose to follow.  Loved ones can injure us.  We can be twisted by remorse over things we have done and not done.  And even if we choose only the best of human models to follow, we never completely make it.  We fall short.  We never become all t|hat God wants us to be.  If we follow only other people in our lives, we remain, as the New Testament so starkly puts it, the blind leading the blind.

It seems to me that it is only when in our blindness and despair we hear the noisy crowd leaving Jericho for Jerusalem that we have the chance to really change.  It is only when we cry out in faith from the side of the road, "Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me" that we have the chance to really grow.  It is only when we come to Jesus and ask, "Master,  let me see again" that the scales drop from our eyes.   It is only when we decide to follow Christ that we begin to see our lives in perspective.  We begin to see what it means to be truly human-- whole and complete and balanced.  We begin to see life as it can be -- radiant and eternal.  We begin to see ourselves as people created in the image of God.

______________

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

Our Heavenly Father, help us draw ever nearer to Christ in this Lenten Season.  We are incomplete.  We are broken.  We are blind.  Heal us.  Make us whole.  Let us see again.  Help us follow Christ along the road that leads to Jerusalem.  We ask these things in the name of your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.