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November 15, 2009 Sermon
The Pilgrimage to See: Fierce Conversations (Job 42: 1-5; Mark 10: 46-52)
Rev. Sally Harris
O God, there is a dark and lonesome gulf in worship,
a cavern of the awesome into which we rarely go.
Enable us in this time to venture into the depth of your love
which can never be found totally as individuals but which opens slowly
before the shared pain, struggle and hope of Your people on the way. Amen
Recently I picked up a book called: Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott. She defines fierce as robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, unbridled. Her opening line in the book is: When you think fierce conversations, think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration. Think cultural transformation. In her book Susan Scott explores seven principles of Fierce Conversation. On the first principle, master the courage to interrogate reality, she writes:
“The traditional practice of annual strategic planning sessions is a thing of the past. It no longer works for a company’s executive team to spend two days on a retreat, determine their goals, roll out an action plan, and call it a year. The team members must reconvene quarterly to address the question: ‘What has changed since last we met?’” As a company president recently admitted, ‘I’d like to get a firm grasp on reality, but somebody keeps moving it.’ The best we can hope for, to quote business consultant Robert Bridges, is ‘the masterful administration of the unforeseen.’”
It’s been a week of fierce conversations. It all began with a call about 10 days ago asking Trinity to consider offering sanctuary. Calls were made, emails sent and a meeting was organized for last Wednesday where three diverse groups met for the first time around the table with the courage to interrogate reality. Was it only a month ago that we gathered after service to talk about the various outreach projects we could undertake? And now today we will gather again to get a firm grasp on a reality that keeps moving – masterful administration of the unforeseen indeed!!
As I prepared my reflection for this day I couldn’t help but consider these texts as way ahead of their time. Each tells a story of a fierce conversation. Each story speaks of the courage to interrogate reality. Each offers cultural transformation. Job and Bartimaeus: two people experiencing suffering, two people waiting for God. Each having an idea of who God is. Each wanting to be heard. Each silenced by those around them. And each surrounded by voices that judge them. "Your suffering/your blindness is due to your sin" "You haven't prayed hard enough” Voices that nullify and deny the real pain and brokenness in our lives and world. Job and Bartimaeus, unlikely heroes, find their names written on the pages of our sacred story, for each tells a story of passion and authenticity.
Bartimaeus, a blind beggar sat day in and day out beside the road outside the gates of Jericho. Though he couldn't see, he could hear the feet and voices of the many travelers, either coming from Jerusalem or going to Jerusalem. One day he heard the excited voices of a large crowd of people approaching him and heading toward Jerusalem. He felt the vibrations of their footsteps, smelled the dust they scuffed up and tasted the grit between his teeth. He felt the coolness of their shadows as they passed between him and the sun. They jostled him, and he pulled back, drawing up his knees, afraid they would trample him. He felt rejected, frightened and left out - on the margins of life. And then he heard that Jesus was the center of this large crowd. Suddenly Bartimaeus realized that this was the one who promised abundant life and so he desperately reached out to the light. He cried out in his misery, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" Those close to him told him to "Shut up!" after all he was a mere beggar and most likely unclean. But he persisted in his cry against the darkness, "You, with God’s favor, have mercy on me!" And when all those around him would silence his cry and when the noise of the crowd drown out his voice, Jesus stopped. He heard Bartimaeus' cry. And Jesus said: "Call him." With the enthusiasm of someone who has finally been heard, Bartimaeus threw off all that would hinder him from Jesus and with readiness of heart he drew close to Jesus. And Jesus asked: What do you want me to do for you?
A seemingly uncaring question. Wasn't it obvious that Bartimaeus was blind and would want to see? But maybe Jesus knew that to have one's eyes open is not always an easy thing. Jesus had the courage to interrogate reality. The reality was that if he was healed Bartimaeus could no longer claim blindness as his reason for begging. He would have to make radical changes in his life and become responsible for his choices.
Then there is the familiar story of Job; a man, devastated by senseless tragedies; bombarded by the conventional wisdom of his day that claimed it was his fault that tragedy had struck. Yet Job had the courage to rage at God. To demand justice of the just God he believed in. By taking the risk to have a fierce conversation with God; to honestly confront God; to curse the darkness, to interrogate reality, Job's story deepens our experience of God. Job tells us that God can tolerate our anger and invites our honesty. In allowing himself to cry out against the injustice of his suffering and the inhumanity of his condition, Job said NO to the realities of evil and injustice. If we deny our suffering, if we deny the suffering of others, we desensitize ourselves to the injustice all around us. And we deny the vision of what could be. For a vision of wholeness grows out of the recognition and acknowledgment of the brokenness of our lives and the world. Job had heard of God through the traditions, the stories, the ideas about God "BUT NOW [Job cries] MY EYES SEE YOU. I have been heard and I have heard the voice of God and now I see. Now I know God not just about God.
Yes, the stories of Job and Bartimaeus offer us something personal as we seek to discern God’s way in our own lives and in our church. Their stories describe a real encounter with something, someone who knows the way to healing and wholeness and of course we want it for our own… to encounter Jesus, to be called by name, to find the words to tell him what we want and to be healed, illumined, made whole. That is what we want, isn’t it? To trade in whatever blindness each of us has, to trade it in on sight, so that we can see – see our church, see our world, see ourselves, see our God clearly. That is what we want, isn’t it?
It is a metaphorical question, of course, and a good one, I think, but real blindness is something else. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in a chapter titled “Seeing,” Anne Dillard quotes at length from a book called Space and Sight by Marius von Senden. It is about the first people in the world to undergo successful cataract surgery. All blind from birth, they suddenly received their sight and then were interviewed about what they saw. One girl was so stunned by the radiance of the world that she kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When she finally opened them she saw only a field of light against which everything seemed to be in motion. She could not distinguish objects, but gazed at everything around her, saying over and over again, “Oh God! How beautiful!”
But not everything was beautiful. Unable to judge distances these newly seeing people would reach out for things a mile away, or would crack their shins on pieces of furniture they only perceived as patches of color. The world turned out to be much bigger than they had thought, bigger and infinitely more complex. Unable to control it, many fell into depression. The distressed father of one young woman wrote her doctor that his daughter had taken to shutting her eyes when she walked around the house, and that she never seemed happier than when she pretended to be blind again. A fifteen-year old boy finally demanded to be taken back to the local home for the blind, where he had left his girlfriend behind. “No, really I can’t stand it anymore,” he said. “If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eyes out.” Tear your eyes out? After being rescued from a life in the dark, after being hauled into the light and presented with a world full of color, depth, movement, space, sights? Tear your eyes out? For God’s sake, why? It’s just too much. Too much what? Too much to see, do, be. It was better before. Better! How? Smaller. Quieter. Safer. But this is what you were made for – you were meant to see. I would rather not. Besides, the sun hurts my eyes. If you will excuse me I think I will go lie down now. Lie down? Take heart! Get up, he is calling you! What will you do? What do you want? What do We want? Yes we can stay in our familiar darkness, where all the edges are rounded off so that we will not hurt ourselves, where we need only concern ourselves with what is within our reach. No sense getting one’s hopes up, no sense thinking one could actually be a person who could see. Yes let’s stay with what we know… Or we can cry out, spring up and ask for our heart’s desire. Get up! Take heart! Someone is calling your name! Are we willing to see or not? And if we are willing, are we willing to see everything there is, the good along with the awful, the lovely along with the monstrous – in ourselves, in everyone we meet, in our church, our world? Are we willing to bruise our shins, to learn our way around the obstacles and through it all find ourselves facing the mystery… we name God. A pilgrimage to see, indeed!
There is a wonderful song by Carol Etzler:
Sometimes I wish my eyes hadn't been opened
Sometimes I wish I could no longer see
All of the pain and the hurt and the longing
of my world as we try to be free
But now that I've seen with my eyes I can't close them
because deep inside me, somewhere I still know
the road that my friends and I have to travel,
my heart would say "Yes" and my feet would say "go"
(resource: Barbara Brown Taylor)
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