Mark 10: 46-52

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

Sermon Text

            The connection from one week to another of preaching is not always obvious. As a preacher, I have not often been one for sermon series – that is changing come Advent – but up till now I tend to take each week on its own. For the past three years of my ministry, I have also made use of the “Revised Common Lectionary.” This resource is a helpful tool to pull scripture from all sorts of places. The lectionary lets me pull from some scriptures which might not otherwise make it to the pulpit. The downside to this is that, from week to week, the selected scriptures can sometimes go in very different directions. To utilize a lectionary is to let some control be taken away from you. This opens up another door for the Spirit to draw connections we might not see until we open our ears to hear them.

Last week we looked at two disciples asking for Jesus to make them great. The week before we saw how Job called out to be heard and then received his audience with God. Today these two themes meet in our scripture. Here someone cries out to God, they ask to be saved, and they find their prayer answered. They do not seek glory as James and John did, not to be heard as Job had, yet in his answered prayer the deeper truth of both becomes clear. God listens to us, and God desires to give us the things we seek after for our own good. Today, as we look at scripture, we are not going to find a surefire formula for answered prayer, but we are going to see the love God has for us and the strength which we can depend on.

Our scripture opens with the briefest summary I’m aware of in scripture regarding Jesus’s ministry in any one place. We are told Jesus and his followers went into Jericho and the next we hear of them is Jesus and company leaving Jericho. What wonders happened in that town that were left unwritten? What teachings landed in the soft soil of the people’s hearts, but were never put to paper? Even if Jesus was just passing through, I find it hard to believe he did not have plenty to do. The no nonsense writing of Mark rushes us forward to a specific work of Christ. We are introduced to a blind man named Bartimaeus and the exceptional healing which changed his life.

Blindness, and more generally disability, was not treated consistently in the ancient world. As much as I would like to offer a single perspective that all people held in Jesus’s time, it is sadly never so simple. If we look to scripture, we do get several ideas for mindsets that were contemporary or that predate Jesus. The purity codes of the Torah treat some injuries or conditions in the same way sin is treated – excluding certain people from full participation in community (Deuteronomy 23:1, Leviticus 21:19-20) Jesus is asked several times if Sin produced the trouble that people faced spiritually and physically. (Luke: 13:1-4, John 9:2) Disability is sometimes even described as someone having “evil,” qualities in their limbs or organs. (Matthew 6:22-23.) These all suggest a fairly negative view of disability in the ancient world.

While other, more positive, or at least neutral perspectives exist in scripture and other ancient texts, there was an undeniable negative trend in perspective. Jesus stands out in his ministry because he was sure to separate out sin and suffering. Despite the insinuations of the crowds around him, Jesus did not blame anyone who was sick or disabled for the situations they found themselves in. Jesus extended a hand to those who needed help. There was never an interrogation of them about what they had done, how they became injured or disabled, only ever a desire to restore them to the community they lived within. Jesus listened to the cries of those in need and answered their prayers in the way they asked for them to be fulfilled. Jesus listened and loved with wisdom and mercy.

The story of Bartimaeus is the sort of story most ancient writers would skip. He was a person of no social importance who lived on the outskirts of a city. Yet, Mark tells his story and skips Jesus’s time in the city. Mark wants us to understand that Jesus does not prioritize the same things we do. Somehow the faith of one man, of a social outcast without any means of his own, is more significant than an entire narrative of teaching among “polite” society. Mark shows us Jesus again living the lessons he preaches, helping those who have nothing to offer him and releasing people from things keeping them from participating in the world around them. Jesus looses the chains of an unjust world from the hands of the downtrodden.

The cry of Bartimaeus to Jesus carried over the roar of the crowd. His shouts were condemned by those who stood around him. “Do not bother Jesus, he’s too busy for you!” “Stay quiet and accept what life has given you!” “Do you see the scene you are making right now?” Yet all these cruel words just inspired Bartimaeus to keep shouting. Jesus hears these cries and stops, standing still suddenly along the road. Jesus sends for people to bring Bartimaeus to him. The crowd that chided him now encourages him to approach Jesus. Bartimaeus has thrown aside his clothing, rendering himself completely vulnerable before Jesus. The man stands before him and asks that his vision could be restored, Jesus complies, and he sees once again.

The faith of Bartimaeus has given him a name to be remembered for all time. We hear about his faith every time we read this scripture and he more than most rests in our imaginations. What exactly about him captures us? More than anything, I think we admire his boldness. Bartimaeus wanted to be near God and he would not let anything get in the way. He wanted to stand in front of Jesus and know what God’s mercy felt like. I do not know if Bartimaeus expected to see that day, but I know he expected to be heard. His cry to Jesus utilizes a voice in Greek that is meant to get a person’s attention. Like calling someone by their full name, the vocative is meant to perk up someone’s ears.

There is much we can take from this story, and we only have so many minutes this morning to talk about them, so we will try and be selective in our reading for today the key takeaway that today’s verse has for us in our daily life is what it looks like when we pray. When Bartimaeus called out to Jesus, he was offering a sincere prayer to be made whole. While we typically associate cries for “mercy,” with avoiding punishment the phrase has more to it than that. To seek mercy is to ask for God to make us whole, to restore us to somewhere or transform us into something. The lesson that should be most obvious to us from reading about this event is that we do not have to fear that our prayers go unheard. When we cry out to God, God stops, stands up straight, and brings us close to hear what it is we need. We should boldly approach the throne of our salvation.

Prayer is as simple as that and yet we cannot pretend we understand every aspect of prayer. Not unlike our look at Job, the mystery of God’s relief of our suffering is sometimes just as obscure as God’s presence in the midst of our suffering. We offer prayers here every week, some of them we see answered in immediate and obvious ways, and others – if they are answered – are not answered quickly or in any noticeable way. When we pray for disease to be healed, sometimes it is and sometimes it is not. When we pray to avoid disaster, sometimes disaster still finds its way into our life. When we pray, even just for peace, sometimes we find that we cannot escape the dread that seeps in behind our eyes.

A cynical mind could easily see something fickle about this. Why does one prayer seem to be answered, sometimes in astounding, fire from heaven kind of ways? While another seems to go unheeded? If we knew that answer, I think that we would be in possession of some of the most precious information we ever could. To know the secrets of how God pours grace on the earth would be to know how miracles fall from Heaven to earth. I’d give a lot to know that.

Yet, like so many things, we do not know how God answers our prayers, only that God does hear us. Sometimes we will try and explain prayer as being stopped by demons or blocked by sin, but to do so almost always shrinks God into someone who can only answer prayers that are worded just so or are spoken by just the right kind of person. That presentation of God is not consistent with scripture, it certainly does not look like Jesus does in this passage we read today. When it comes to the kind of work that God accomplishes through our prayer we should not idly speculate on mechanics. Instead, we need to look at what is plain to us about prayer and what God accomplishes through our prayers, even when we might feel they have not been heard.

Firstly, we cannot deny that prayer brings us closer to God. When we take time to intentionally reach out to our creator, we find our creator reaching back toward us. Every time we pray, whether we say something silently in our heart or aloud, whether we are in private or in the presence of other people of God, we are present with God. The same fire at the center of creation that put light behind the stars is the warm presence we feel within our hearts as the Spirit settles within us. The one who set the foundations of the earth is the one who holds us in a single strong hand. To pray is to be close to God and to be close to God is to be where we are meant to be.

Prayer also brings us closer to one another. When we pray for one another, the space between us dissolves. Whenever we gather together on Sunday, we are all fairly close together here in this sanctuary, but we are not the only people gathered this morning. All those worshipping at home, watching on Facebook, are here with us as we worship and pray. All the people we mail the service to every week join us in prayer, whether they wait till Sunday to read and pray alongside us or open their letter as soon as they get it and pray ahead of us. Prayer brings us together, it makes our love for one another stronger, it makes us be intentional in caring about each other.

 This is not just spiritual or sentimental in nature, but an observed neurological reality. When we make a habit of praying and when we pray for any length of time, our brain begins to reshape itself. In his book, What God does to Your Brain, Dr. Andrew Newberg explains that habitual pray can temporarily limit the use of our parietal lobes. This is, for reference, the part of your brain closest to your ears. Among its many functions, it helps us to differentiate ourselves from our environment. When it turns off, we become less aware of ourselves as individuals.[1] The reality of our identity as, “the body of Christ,” is most obvious to us when we are praying. We are not just our individual selves, we are part of something much bigger.

These considerations would be acceptable to anyone. I could tell you prayer makes me feel closer to God and an atheist could agree I probably feel that way. I can show you the science of how the brain reroutes itself during prayer and even the most seasoned skeptic would at least be interested in reading that research. What makes prayer so important to us, what makes it more than just a thing we do to feel good, is the fact that it does produce results. If it did not, we would not keep doing it. People are healed by prayer, strength is given to us by prayer, God does work wonders on this earth because prayers are offered up. The story of Bartimaeus, if it ended just with everyone feeling a little bit closer together, would still be significant, but it would not be the kind of story that we tell again and again.

I can tell you myself of miracles that I have seen happen through tireless prayer. A woman I know felt that God has promised her a child, and after dozens of tests showed her that her baby was going to be stillborn, she still held onto that hope. She had her baby, and that daughter should be graduating college right about now. I know that a minister of mine growing up fought Parkinson’s for years, and through prayer he went into remission – something that is not physically possible for Parkinson’s – for five years. Even recently, when Grace’s bottle of Adderall she takes for ADHD was accidentally thrown away, I prayed that she would find it before she needed it most. The next few weeks were a struggle, but when she had her yearly DCOM interview, she found a single capsule of Adderall in her pill box that helped her go into the meeting fully able to show her brilliance.

I cannot answer why prayer does not always seem to get the result we want. I pray often for my wife’s fibromyalgia symptoms to lessen, or her migraines to be relieved, and oftentimes that does not happen. Yet, whenever a prayer does seem to be answered, I know that I can glory in what God has done. That God answers any prayer shows that God loves us and listens to us, that knowledge should tell us that even when our prayer is not answered in an obvious way, God is still beside us listening and acting to help us. Christ, dying on the cross, the most gruesome death imaginable, cried out to God, and in that moment, Christ felt well and truly alone. Yet I believe Christ, both as a member of the Trinity and as a human being, never let out a cry that God did not hear. Even in the darkest moment of his life, even when all seemed lost, God was still listening, and God still cared deeply for God’s son.

As children of God, as people saved by the work of Jesus Christ. We all must cry out to God. A few weeks ago, we spoke about letting God know about our pain, now I ask us to let God know our needs! We must have faith that God will hear us, and hope at all times to see our prayers answered. The worst that can happen is that we grow closer to God and one another. If that is the worst outcome of taking a step out and shouting my prayers to God, then I only stand to gain through offering up my prayer. So let us all, whenever we can and whenever we need it, join Bartimaeus in crying out, “Jesus! Son of David! Have mercy on me!”. – Amen.

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Luke 16:19-31

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Meditation Text

            What defines a person who is living a life worthy of God’s calling? This kind of question is entrenched in pretty churchy language. We do not understand our daily life in terms of “worthiness” or “calling,” but we cannot escape what these words mean to us. To live “worthily,” into what God would have us do is not to earn our way into Heaven – that would be impossible. Every aspect of our life, nonetheless, has something evaluative behind it. I cannot simply say that I have a job or that I am married, we naturally follow up any category of our life with, “Am I good at my this thing?” Am I good at my job? Am I contributing to a healthy marriage? Beyond the simple categorization of our life into what we are, there is the question of whether or not we are truly living into what that categorization would suggest we believe.

            The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is one of my favorites in all of the Gospels. In it we see a comically rich man eating at a table covered in every kind of good thing while a poor man sits at his gates every day, sick and tired, and starves. The two men are not described as having lived particularly holy lives, yet when death comes to call the rich man finds himself in a place of torment and Lazarus finds himself comfortably seated with Abraham. The rich man is baffled, but Abraham states the matter plainly. Because the rich man received an abundance of wealth and food and comfort in life, he now faces torment in death. The poor man, however, who knew only pain, now experiences eternal comfort. There is no complex formula here, the rich man’s desire for more and better has left his eternal destiny to be consumed in less and worse.

            As we make our way through life, we need to define how well we are living in terms that are not tied to how much money we are making or how much stuff we have. We can have all the stuff in the world and never be satisfied and after a certain point, money is no longer a means to take care of ourselves but just a way to get more that we do not need. Wealth is a dangerous thing, and possession of it quickly turns to love of it, which we all know is the root of all evil. (1 Timothy 6:10.) We must all be careful that we are not too enraptured by the wealth we have around us, it will ultimately lead us closer to Hell with every penny we acquire. Only generosity can define how much a soul has accepted Christ, because Christ is, at the end of all things, hospitable beyond measure.

            While we live in a country that demands a great deal of money from us in order to have even basic necessities, we cannot deny that simply living above the poverty line in the United States makes us incredibly rich in global terms. It can be difficult, in the midst of paying bills and repaying loans (especially student loans in my case,) to remember the great amount of wealth that regularly passes us by. We know more plenty today than anyone in history has ever known. How do we use it? Do we spend money to get more things? How often do we ever use our money to help people in this world? Especially those who live all around us.

            The fact is that we all love money more than we ought. Returning to our opening question, we are usually more concerned with living a life worthy of money, of Mammon, than we ever are worried about living a life worthy of the Gospel. We collect money to buy more clothes, or electronics, or entertainment. When we come to our final rest, what will our bank account show we loved? God and God’s people, or consumption and leisure? We have to connect our financial habits to our moral disposition, not for any other reason than Jesus clearly does. I do not pretend to be sinless in this matter, but even as I write this out I feel conviction seeping from my wallet. The sting of every dollar meant for the poor I spend on myself, and every check I could write to help the needy I use to feed my own desires.

            Let us all strive to love God and one another more, much more than we love money.

Job 23:1-9

Then Job answered:

“Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.

“If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I

Sermon Text

 The book of Job is a tragic masterpiece. Though often overlooked or relegated to specific times in our life, it is a wonder of poetic and rhetorical composition. Few books contain such raw emotional force or as decadent of meditations upon pain as what we see in Job. The story of a man who loses everything, of someone doomed to suffer seemingly in spite of his goodness – captivates us beyond any feel-good story we might otherwise be drawn to. The protagonist of our story is someone we can relate to throughout our lives, a good man who suffers, a good man who seeks answers, a good man who can ultimately only shrug at the enormity of his own question.

This book is often said to be the first canonical book of scripture to be written. Before Moses composed the law or the Chronicler wrote the history of Judah, someone wrote the story of Job. This is partially true. The plot of Job takes place in the Patriarchal period. We are meant to read Job as being alive at the same time as Abraham. Similar stories to Job were written as far back as 3,000 BCE, predating the oldest parts of the Torah by nearly 2,000 years. However, the present version of Job we have today was written after Babylon conquered Judah. Likely, the book as we know it today was still being edited and finalized when Jesus walked the shores of Galilee.

Job, it should also be said, is only a story. Unlike most of scripture, it is not a recounting of historical events. Like the book of Esther or the Song of Songs, Job is a narrative written to teach a lesson, but not a record of history. This is why we see images of a divine court in Job that resemble ancient throne rooms, why Satan and God can bet one another about what Job will do. We are not meant to read Job and receive literal accounts of how God and Satan interact or how a man named Job suffered, we read Job to understand how we as human beings respond to grief, and through the Spirit of God how we can push on through even the hardest times.

To refresh our memory about what has happened to Job up to this point, we go to the very beginning. Job was a man who was blameless before God and humanity. If Job ever did wrong, he begged forgiveness and paid restitutions. Job was rich, but also generous, he had money and family and cattle a plenty. Satan, God’s prosecuting attorney, turns his attention to Job after God brags about his righteousness. Satan scoffs and assures God that if Job did not have all his riches, God would immediately see a different side of Job. God allows Satan to kill Job’s family, his livestock, and to even steal away his health after all else was gone. Job loses everything, keeping only his life, his heartbroken wife, and three friends.

 After sitting in total silence for days, Job speaks. He does not thank his friends or offer any wisdom. Instead, he begs to die. More than this he asks God to wipe out his entire existence. Job asks that God would reach back in time and uncreate the day he was born, letting it sink into the “shadow of Death,” that existed before creation. Where Job’s friends had hoped that healing would have come out of Job’s silence, they were now faced with the reality that a few days was not enough. Job did not cry out hallelujah, he just let out a cry. Weeping, the broken man asked God again and again – “Why me? Why me? Why?”

Job’s friends stepped in and offered numerous answers. They blamed Job, saying he must have sinned, or else God would have spared him this pain. They looked at God and said, “God is good, so this much actually be a good thing that is happening to you.” The friends took their own understandings of God and applied it to this moment, refusing to budge an inch. They believed, not that they might not understand God, but that they knew everything about God. They look at their friend and, counter to everything they know about him, decide he must secretly be a villain, rather than allow themselves to question whether or not there might be more to suffering than crime and punishment. Still Job, now having to defend himself, returns to his question, “Why?”

The section of Job we read today captures a moment when Eliphaz, the first to accuse Job of wrongdoing, has just finished laying another laundry list of possible sin at Job’s feet. Job takes a deep breath and refuses to budge. He looks to Heaven and asks for an audience with God. The courtroom we saw at the opening of the book is the place Job longs for above all others. Job wants to see God, to tell God all he has suffered, to voice his pain even just a little. “If I could only do that,” Job says, “Then God would at least listen to me.” Job does not want to fight God, he just wants God to acknowledge his pain, to have God admit his suffering is unprovoked, to be healed simply by knowing he is not acting irrationally.

Yet, Job is sure that wherever he goes, he will not find God. Job knows God is real, he dreams of an audience with him, but he feels he will never get that chance. The knowledge of God is not enough for Job, he craves more, he seeks to understand why his is suffering, but more than that he just wants to know that he is not alone. Where he had three strong friends at the outset of the book, he now seems to only have three bullies in front of him now. Instead of peace, he finds more reason to cry as they speak to him. Job just needs a single person to stand up for him, even if it is after he is dead, he wants one person to tell the truth about his life.

The book goes on back and forth with Job testifying his innocence and his friends arguing falsely about both Job and God. Finally, God decided to show up. Job received his audience and is told all about the things God does daily. God fights sea monsters and giant personifications of chaos. God makes the stars to sing and feeds every animal and person. God lifts up the enormity of creation and Job responds simply by saying, “I’ve seen enough!” Job’s final words are him refusing to speak again. This does not mean that Job is saying God has answered his question fully, but that Job has now accepted that his question has no real answer. God chastises Job’s friends but commends Job for standing up for himself and for God.

There are times where we, like Job, have to stare suffering in the face. We lose someone we love, we are diagnosed with a dangerous condition, or we fall into a run of plain bad luck. The response we have in those moments says a lot about how we have oriented our lives. Sometimes grief tears us apart, leaving us trapped in its darkness. Other times it can cause us to lash out, seeking to take control through violence. Still, another response might be to simply stop feeling at all, to let the trouble stand on its own and seek peace some other way. I do not believe anyone should be held too closely accountable for their first, instinctual response to trouble. Job took days to even be able to speak, perhaps because his first responses to suffering were too raw to share with others just yet.

Yet, when Job does speak, he gives us a model for how to talk to God when we are in pain. Job does not sugar coat his feelings, he begs for death and demands that the unfairness of his suffering be made known. Job does this while constantly affirming God’s goodness. Job is not upset that bad things happened to him, he is upset that a good God has allowed for them to happen. Job asks to speak to God face to face because he trusts God, he loves God, and his experience of God is currently in conflict with what he knows to be true about God. God looks at Job at the close of this book and affirms his feelings of hurt and confusion, because God knows that Job is justified in feeling that way – it proves Job’s trust in God.

When we experience hurt, we in the Church often rush to explain why we are not really all that sad. Our loss is seen in light of Heaven, our pain is written off as part of God’s plan, our sadness as just a hiccup in a life of joy. None of that is wrong in itself, but when our piety prevents us from truly feeling our grief, we harm ourselves and those around us. When we feel life is unfair, we should let God know. When we cannot see a light at the end of the road, we are on we need to shout our for a lantern. We are called by Paul not to “grieve as those without hope,” But we are never told not to grieve. (1 Thes. 4:13) Life is hard and life can really hurt sometimes. We, like Job, should raise up our bitter complaint to God whenever it is needed. We cannot silence our weeping when it is our tears which bring us healing.

The dangers we face as a Church when we do not know how to mourn is that we become like Job’s friends. Standing in the ash pile with people who have lost everything, we offer up platitudes in place of support. The book of Job is dangerous to read because four out of the six speakers in it are actively lying throughout it. Job’s friends – Bildad, Eliphaz, Zohar, and the elusive Elihu, all offer up really religious answers to explain Job’s trouble. “Job, this is just what happens to sinners, you need to repent!” “Job, God works in mysterious ways.” “Job, you deserve worse, be glad you had anything good to begin with!” The chorus of Sunday school answers to life’s biggest question drowns out the central truth of Job – we just do not know why good people suffer.

The question, “How can a good God allow for evil to exist?” is answered in many ways. This line of questioning is called, “Theodicy,” and usually assumes God is three things – all good, all powerful, and all knowing. The problem with answering why bad things happen is that in order to reach an answer, we usually have to remove or limit one of God’s “all,” attributes. We say God limits knowledge of the future, or allows free choice, or has concepts of “good,” we cannot understand. The problem with making any of these arguments is that, if we imagine God as a three-legged table, then shortening one leg of the table makes the whole thing wobble. To attempt to answer why suffering happens is to immediately reach an unsatisfactory answer.

The book of Job is a template for us in our response to pain because it is honest about what grief feels like. It hurts to lose those we love; it isn’t fair that the wicked succeed and the good suffer, there is something fundamentally wrong about this world we live in. This can cause us to doubt God, to question our faith, but it does not have to lead us to despair. Job shows us that we can trust God is good, we can know in our hearts that there is an all-loving advocate for us who oversees all of the universe, and still feel things are unfair. The cry of Job to be seen and heard by God is answered by the end of this book and I believe we all will receive an answer to our own cries we let out to God. If and only if we are unafraid to voice them. We have to trust God is big enough to take on our worry and disappointment alongside our praise.

God, throughout all of scripture, is willing to suffer alongside us. God does not stand up in Heaven and watch as we all go through the hard things of life. We are constantly given examples of God bending down to interact with us, to lift us out of the trouble we are in and into something more. The ultimate manifestation of this comes in the incarnation. God could not tolerate any separation between humanity and divinity any longer. God took on our flesh so that God could feel all our pain, know all our fear, see all our suffering. God knows what it is to lose a parent, a friend, to suffer illness and pain – Jesus felt it all. There are days we would rather weep than praise, and we can feel confident doing so because Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb. There are time we have questions for God, and we have to remember Jesus’s frantic question on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We can look to the hope of the resurrection because Christ did his time in the grave.

The lesson for today, if we may take one way, is that God is willing to hear us cry out when we cannot make sense of our pain. The question of “Why?” is never going to have an answer we can accept, but God wants us to ask it anyway. When we cry out, when we let loose our fear and worry and sorry, we allow God the chance – if not to answer it – then to come close to us. We trust God because when we asked God to show God truly cared, God stepped down from Heaven and suffered beside us. The story of scripture is a story of a world that is broken, of God calling people to come together to fix it, and when that project does not work out, of God sitting with us in the ash heap. We await joy and resurrection, but if that is not where your heart is today, then let God know it!  God waits for us to voice our bitter complaint. God hears you. God sees you. – Amen.

Ephesians 4:1-6

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Sermon Text

The celebration of communion is something we have discussed together at length. Once a month this ritual gives us a chance to think deeply about what it means to come together and this Sunday in particular calls us to look beyond even our usual definitions of community. Today, as we celebrate “World Communion Sunday,” a formerly Presbyterian tradition, we look at how the entirety of the world comes together at God’s invitation. We are asked to be intentional about our thoughts, to see beyond life in this town, in this nation, and see instead the life we share with all believers. As we pray we are able to hear, distant and remote, the prayers of all the Church – in every language and style, in all places and at all times.

The Church began, almost 2,000 years ago, as a small group of believers who came together to form their own distinct branch of Judean faith. Amidst the apocalyptic fervor of the first century, under the oppressive thumb of Roman occupation, light burst out into the darkness of this world. Out of the ancient scriptures of Israel, a young teacher out of a backwater town began to preach. Just thirty-odd years-old, yet all who heard him knew he taught in a special way. He made scripture come alive, he healed the sick and freed the demon oppressed. Jesus of Nazareth, God given flesh, worked his wonders.

Jesus would be executed by the Roman government in order to keep the peace after his opponents painted him as a dissident. The followers of Christ, once numerous, were scattered across Judea and shrank away. When Jesus reappeared, resurrected into a new life in line with his eternity, it took weeks for the Church to reunite. Soon there were just over one hundred believers, waiting and praying for God to send the Spirit to them. When the Spirit did come, pushing them into the world like a strong wind, they began to preach in every language and mode of speech they could. The Gospel was going out into the nations, and nothing could trap it.

Yet, there was an instant concern in the Church. You see, with the Roman occupation, and the Seleucid before it, there was not a single “Judean,” identity anymore. Some Jews spoke Greek, others Aramaic, and only some used Hebrew scriptures – others using Greek or other local languages. Samaritans, the remnant of post-Assyrian Israelites, were shunned from mainstream society even as they worshipped the same God as the Judeans. Still more confounding was the introduction of Gentiles into Jewish worship spaces. Since Judaism had spread across Roman territories, non-Jews had become interested in this ancient faith. While conversion to Judaism was not yet possible, these Gentile “God-fearers,” were allowed partial participation in the community.

The Church was then forming amidst a diverse group of people. This naturally produced challenges. Are Greek Jews equal in dignity to native Judeans? Can God-fearers join Christian Community? If so, do they need to adopt Jewish practices? Beyond these general questions, bigotry set in between all groups and prevented equitable solutions to be found. Judeans saw Hellenists as inferior, relegating them to their own synagogues. Hellenists were more diverse in their attitudes than Judeans, but were often extremist in their adherence to the Law, pushing back on accusations they were not “Jewish enough.” God-fearers and other Gentiles often, upon joining the Church, seemed to think they were better than Jews because they had Christ alone to save them.

This diverse and problematic jumble is where the Church was born. Stranger still, it is where the Church flourished! How could that be possible? On one hand we can point to the Spirit which worked within the Church, but the Spirit did not magic the Church into being. God called people to lead the Church that contributed important perspectives on the problems they faced. With the diversity of believers being what it was, diverse leadership was necessary to bring the people together.

The first conflict of the Church related to the identity of its members is recorded in Acts 6-7. Here, Greek widows are not receiving the same amount of food and resources as Judean ones. It is never stated if this is an intentional act of discrimination or a supervisory oversight, but either way the disciples are quick to respond when this racial inequality is brought before them. Rather than claiming innocence, the disciples accept that they have not been leading properly in this regard and appoint seven deacons to oversee the giving of food. They appoint these Deacons out of the body of Greek believers, doing ministry with the affected group, rather than imposing their ideas of how it should be upon them. They built a bridge alongside those they were building the bridge to.

Despite this action, there was still a wedge between Greek and Judean believers, and still nothing being done for Gentiles. God responded to this by raising up an unlikely apostle. Saul, as he was known in Judea, was born to a Greek-Jewish family in Tarsus, a port town in modern Turkey. Saul was raised in Jerusalem and rejected his identity as a Greek. He wanted to be a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” and actively fought against the Church and its syncretic tendencies. (Phil. 3:5) The story of Acts is, in part, about how Saul grows to accept, not only his place in the Church, but his own ethnic identity. After his conversion, he returns home to Tarsus and reconnects with his roots, soon referring to himself exclusively as “Paul.” While this is often taught as a name change on Paul’s part, it is more likely that “Paul,” is his birth name, something he gave up when he came to Judea.

Paul would go beyond reconciling Greek and Judean believers and began the first major ministry efforts the Church launched to the Gentiles. Only two other apostles had undertaken such initiatives up to this point, Philip and Thomas. These two founded, indirectly in Philip’s case and directly in Thomas’s, two communities that would become the oldest surviving Christian populations of our modern era. Any guesses where they are? They are the Ethiopian Coptic Church, which traces itself back to the Eunuch baptized by Philip in Acts 8, and the Thomistic Christians of India. My brother-in-law, incidentally, is part of this community of Indian Orthodox Christians.

Keeping in mind the cultural potpourri which the Church began in, I hope that we can begin to remove the rose-colored glasses we often apply to Scripture. When we read the Epistles or the book of Acts, the people described are far from perfect. They are bigoted, they are mean, they are prone to fighting over anything they can get their hands on. The letters of Paul are as intense as they sometimes are because the Church has always been a broken group of people, even at its most Spirit-filled moments. We of the Church love to fracture ourselves on social and ideological bases. We in the United Methodist Church are poised to split at our next general conference because we cannot abide the idea of coming together beyond our differences. We are proud to shatter the Church because we see conflict and rejoice in our “righteousness.”

The Church is, however, definitionally non-homogenous. It was founded by native Judeans, brought in Greek speaking Jews, then Ethiopian God-fearers, and then people of all tongues and nations. There were Roman citizens, the enslaved, freedmen, and people of all social strata. If we think that there were not divisions among these first believers, we would be deceiving ourselves. Yet, the Church moved from more divided to more united over time, not the other way around – at least in those early days. Scripture is a story of people coming together, not of people pushing one another out.

The first step to achieving an awareness of one another sufficient to overcome our problems is to remove ourselves from the center of the story. Beyond the fact that the Church only has one “protagonist,” that is Jesus Christ, we must not see Christianity as a single block of people with no differences between them. Even just in North View, we have multiple Churches with different styles, ideas, and beliefs – but all worshipping the same God and hopefully working to do that God’s work in the world. Globally, the picture of Christianity is much different than the people gathered in this room.

Close your eyes and picture what you think the average Christian looks like in the world. Picture their clothing, their skin-color, the language they speak, the particular denomination they are a part of. What kind of music do they sing in worship? Are they Protestant or Catholic? What are their political ideas? Now open your eyes. While I cannot give a definitive answer to what the average Christian looks like and believes globally like I might for American Christians alone, the Pew Research Center conducted research to give us a rough idea. The average Christian in the world is Catholic, they live South of the Equator, and they speak one of three languages – Spanish, French, or Portuguese. While I cannot tell you which nation they come from specifically, or what politics they hold, we can assume that they are far more diverse than we can imagine.

The point of me drawing this sketch of the average Christian is not to centralize any specific identity in the Church. Instead, I hope we can decentralize our own images. The Church is not white, it is not Protestant, it is not American, and it is not any one political or ideological strain of thought. It is the people of God called together to go out and live into the Kingdom which God has made for us to be a part of. The differences between us are real, the cultures we have are important and worth celebrating, but they are not the primary identity a Christian should hold.

We are a continuation of the same Church that Paul worked to spread across all the world. Yet, we are not even willing to work out our differences with our neighbors, between pews, with those who look, and act like us. How can we ever grow beyond where we are, when we cannot even be of one body together? We saw a call to racial reconciliation last year that was bigger than anything we had seen since the Civil Rights era. Yet, little has changed since then because we have let the differences between races and cultures overcome even the most basic aspects of our common human identity. We were told to acknowledge other people matter and all we could do was list the people we would rather prioritize than the people who were crying out.

The greatest threat to the Church is always division, it has never been differences. I will say it again, the greatest threat to the church is division and not difference. Country folks are different than city folk, they can still be a Church together. White folks are culturally different than people of color, but these differences are superficial and not definitional. Liberals and conservatives are different, but until recently they could come together in pursuit of the common good in society, in their home, in their church.

Difference is the consequence of being individuals. I think differently than all kinds of people but those I relate to I come together with me to form communities. Cultures are born out from the unity of the past and present, they can be particular to a space as small as a Church and as large as language group. When cultures meet, there can be conflict, but there can also be untold beauty that comes from their union. Difference brings contrast into the world; it allows for life to flourish in a way that monochrome existences never could.

Division is not a consequence of difference, but a tool of evil to drive different people apart. Division segregates differing voices that are in conversation and sets them at odds. Division is a Spirit that grows angry at the mention of this group or that group, of this idea or that one. Division disguises itself as discernment, as a wisdom that separates good from bad, when really it simply seeks to keep the body of Christ from coming together to do God’s will. It should also be said, briefly, that acknowledging and asking for problems to be dealt with is not “being divisive,” but that is a conversation for another time.

Our scripture today asks us to identify our faith with something beyond our race or politics or nation, to see it within Christ and Christ alone. We are not brought together to be one thing or another, but to be identified with an unassailable unity. We are one body, in one Spirit, called by one Lord, through one baptism, and brought to worship one God who is Father of all, who rests upon us all, and who is in us all. This uniting identity asks us to look at others firstly as people called to serve God, or if they have not answered that call, to see them as beloved of God. Our primary identity is never white or American or Republican or Democrat, it is only ever Christian.

What this means is that we cannot let our own identity become the axis on which the world turns. Christianity cannot be defined as people who are “like us.” It does not matter that people worship like me or vote like me or look like me, it matters that we together seek the good of one another and the will of God. It means that we should not see a need to make people more like us, but that we should see a need for all people to be more like Christ. Christ the first century Jew, Christ the homeless preacher, Christ the pacifist killed as a rebel. We all are far from what Christ was like, if we wish to be more like him, it will take all people of all nations.

Yet, to gather in that way takes work and time. What can we do today? I recommend reading a book by someone from a different country or of a different race. Watch a news channel you wouldn’t normally watch. Give a chance to those who are different than yourself. Still be a discerning consumer of information, listening only to people acting in good faith and telling only the truth, but we must begin the hard work of understanding those who are unlike ourselves. We must come together as people who are different, because this table we will soon eat at has been set for more people who are unlike us than those who are like us.

Will we greet them as friends in the one Christ who moves through us? Or as strangers we never knew? That choice is ours alone. Choose to understand and choose to bridge gaps rather than tear down roads. – Amen.