December 14, 2008:  REVEALING:  STAKING EVERYTHING
Mark 10:46-52; Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Luke 1:47-55
Eileen Parfrey -- Springwater Presbyterian Church

Reading Isaiah:  all salvation, all the time (promise that acknowledges the present need)
Reading Mark:  Bart must have been known to the early church, since he’s the only roadside healing named.
Children’s Time:  friend Susie’s experience learning for the first time that candle chimes make a sound (the Christmas decoration, which is angels that spin and ding against bells, because the heat from burning candles moves the rotor); cochlear implants = surgically implanted “hearing aids;” the joy or perceiving something one didn’t know had existed, and the insight that sometimes there is more to perceive than we had first imagined

            The mechanics of how humans perceive is fascinating.  My friend Susie’s experience with the rotating Christmas candle chimes—realizing there were sounds she had never perceived before and didn’t know she had missed—reminded me of her experience adjusting to her cochlear implants.  Born with a condition that caused progressive hearing loss, her hearing was limited even as a child.  Her cochlear implants were accomplished one at a time, and how she re-learned hearing perception was different with each ear.  What she discovered was that “hearing” wasn’t just about processing and assigning meaning to the sound vibrations that hit her eardrums.  The perception of hearing involved learning which sounds to filter out and which ones to be conscious of.  Although the candle chimes had been part of her childhood Christmases, her joy at hearing them wasn’t about nostalgia.  She had never heard the sound.  As a child, the spinning of the little angels was the only attraction.  She was like a child at discovering the sound for the first time.

            Like the joy blind Bartimaeus must have felt at seeing again.  When Bartimaeus heard Jesus was calling him, he staked everything on responding to that call.  He threw away his cloak to leap at the chance to see, staking everything on the chance to become something other than “blind” and “beggar.”  Of course he followed Jesus after that.  Jesus was the one to help him process and give meaning all his new sight sensations, the one to teach him perception.  The gospel of John’s story of Jesus healing a blind man includes Jesus’ interpretation of that event by saying just “seeing” isn’t enough.  Sometimes the ones who are blind can see better what’s important, can perceive more clearly than those who claim to be able to see.  It’s about the perception filters—what is a distraction, what is worthy of focus.

            That’s critical—filtering.  Psychologists tell us that most babies are able to develop that filter. If, for instance, you are always aware of the sensation of your clothing on your skin, that sensation is as important as the tender touch of your lover.  Or worse—the tender touch of your lover is about as important as how your socks and sweater feel on your skin.  One of my colleagues was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. Going on medication included the shocking discovery that everything is not equally important.  With untreated ADHD, he was always as aware of the parked cars as he was of the moving ones.  And he was aware of every single detail of every single car—the make, color, condition of the finish, license numbers, drivers—as well as the sounds everything made, from the car radio to the birds to the wailing siren behind him.  It took an immense amount of brain activity to take all of this in and process it in search of something of meaning.  Medication gave him what the rest of us take for granted:  the ability to focus on one thing.  The distractions no longer had control of his perceptions.

            Which is why I tell you today that joy is a decision.  When faith opens our eyes to perceive, the distractions in our lives can be sorted out.  Isaiah names those distractions—broken hearts, captivity and imprisonment to failure and grief, the ways we have been robbed of life, the wrongdoing we ourselves have committed.  The perception faith gives us puts these distractions into perspective.  Our own sinfulness, the miserable things others have done to us—what Isaiah calls oppression—these are real.  No doubt about that.  But if they are the focus of our lives, we’re still blind.  We still do not see.  This is not what life is about. 
         
            Both Richard Caemmerer, my art mentor last summer, and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr talk about spiritual maturity as discovering that the answer to most of our problems is “me.”  I’m unhappy because of me.  It’s my life, my addictions (alcohol, eating, smoking, television) that are out of control.  The issue is me, my life, and I am the only person who can change my perceptions or actions or strategies.  Turn around.  Repent.  Lucy Van Pelt (Peanuts cartoon character) used to say that her cold was worse than anyone else’s—because it was her cold.  That’s the Shadow side (the negative) of the “me” answer to life’s problems.  That’s not spiritual maturity, that’s narcissism.  “Me” is not the center of the universe.  The blessing side of the “me” answer is to take responsibility, to stop thinking other people are the cause of your problems or you are a victim.  In other words, to decide for joy.  When we stop blaming others, own our pain, name it for what it is, let it go, acknowledge that we treasure it and inflict it on others, then our decision is for joy.

            It is irrational, counter-intuitive, hare-brained, given the state of the world.  It makes about as much sense to “decide for joy” as it did for Isaiah to preach today’s passage, “all salvation, all the time.”  As the Israelite captives return after exile to a land in chaos and devastation, Isaiah urges them to joy.  Richard Rohr hypothesizes that they must have gone far beyond happy feelings in order to hear Isaiah’s message.  He uses the metaphor of “a bottomless well where joy is drawn and received in obedience.”  Theirs is a decision for joy, not blaming or finding fault, passively waiting for on someone to hand them happiness.  As people of faith, they knew (and we ought to as well), they knew that joy is only possible as we enter into love itself.  We associate that love with a Person, an “objective Presence” we call God.  Rohr sums it up:  Joy is the Lord.  There is freedom in this shift in perception.  When joy doesn’t depend on “falling in love,” when we can love more than “just ourselves, our own adequacy and our own personal responses,” we not only see that joy is God’s command, but we are able to “to trust it and believe it [to stake our lives on it].  We are daringly commanded to love God and thereby assured of an unfailing reservoir of true and profound joy in the Other” (God).  Because the commandment is to love God with all our heart, mind, body and soul, we can stake everything on God’s commitment to joy.  Rohr says there are those in every age and circumstance who can “recognize joy and . . . its possibility everywhere.”  He assures us that “those who make space for joy, those who prefer nothing to joy, those who desire the utter reality, will most assuredly have it.”

            Given the state of the world, it does not make any sense to decide for joy.  But if we want to change the world—and that is the Christian portfolio, that’s our charge, to change the world by living as if God’s Kingdom has come—if we want to change the world, we have to be joy.  No one enjoys hanging around a sourpuss.  Recent political history shows that.  The empty condition of congregations of the Frozen Chosen denominations shows that.  If we want to work for good, if we want vital lives of meaning, if we want the gospel to mean anything in the world, we must decide for joy. 
            Bartimaeus decides for joy, just because Jesus calls him.  Responding to that call is worth staking everything he has.  Perhaps it is true that we can only accept grace when we know our need.  Bart knew his need.  Maybe you have no need.  But unless you know joy, you are needy.  It doesn’t matter what the day-to-day circumstances of your life are, Isaiah says.  It’s all salvation, all the time.  It is the call to decide for joy.  And God means that so absolutely that God staked everything on it.  God became human.  For the sake of our joy.

            I recently found a faith affirmation I wrote for myself in 2006.  Listen:  “Longing for us and yet respectful of our freedom, God risks all of creation for our sake.  God impinges on the world we can perceive, through us and our relationships, through creation, through ordinary things:  water, bread, wine, oil, yeast, milk.  We are nourished and sent out (for God’s sake!), for the sake of each other.”  Decide for joy, for God’s sake!  For this, for you, God is risking everything.