March 8, 2009: EVEN WHEN THE JURY IS STILL OUT When I lived in Madison, my prayer group became known as the go-to place for prayer requests because of a reputation we had for a high rate of answered prayer. It’s a heavy burden, having a more direct line to God’s answer bureau than others, but today’s healing story finds that ironic. Even Jesus has to make more than one attempt to heal the blind man. Wouldn’t you know, scholars have a technical term for the phenomenon. They call the progressive healing “the second touch,” explaining that the blind man can see after Jesus spits in his eye, but he doesn’t understand until he is enlightened by Jesus’ second touch. I love reading this story literally—that sometimes Jesus heals us by spitting in our eye and then, after we realize we don’t get it, we’re open to a deeper healing. It’s a lesson to get over shopping list prayers to adopt discernment or contemplative practices. We may be uncomfortable, we may become impatient, but if we keep at it, Jesus will touch us again and then we’ll get it. After the blind man’s healing, Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Transfiguration, and Jesus healing the boy the disciples couldn’t, Jesus takes everyone back to home base in Capernaum, telling them along the way that he’s going to be killed. Although the disciples don’t have the courage to ask Jesus what he means by saying he’s going to be killed, they are somehow able to argue about who among them is the greatest. When Jesus asks about their clandestine conversation, they’re too embarrassed to answer, so their loving teacher simply redefines their notion of greatness. He doesn’t despise them for wanting it, he just enacts a discipleship parable using a child. The word Mark uses for “child” doesn’t say if it’s a boy or girl, as most words for child do. It’s the same word used in the Septuagint for Isaiah’s “suffering servant.” Unlike other gospels, Mark’s Jesus doesn’t ask the disciples to become like a child. They are to welcome the child. The first century pecking order put children right around slaves—no rights, no voice, no property, no self-determination. The implication of the second passion prediction isn’t “become vulnerable” or “be naïve and innocent.” For anyone who wants to be a follower of Jesus, the meaning of Christ’s betrayal and death and resurrection is servanthood on behalf of the powerless. During Sunday School, our adults have been learning “How to be a Presbyterian.” Last week we looked at some of the slogans that have shaped us, including that 500-year-old classic, “The Church reformed, always being reformed, under the Word of God.” If reforming defines us, that means we’re always in a state of discernment, always in the business of figuring out who God is calling us to be in this particular time and moment and place. This time (right now) of recession and retrenchment, social and economic upheaval, is a particularly fertile time for taking a close look at our context and discerning God’s call to us in response to it. Our call is ever and always to become more who we are and who God thinks we are. That’s hard work. In Biblish we call it “discernment.” In plain English, the practice means stop, look, listen, pray, wait. And then act. This is scripture’s leadership pattern. Then act. Presbyterians are good decision-makers. Our style of decision-making is what makes our polity distinctive. Our church structures reflect the US Constitution (or vice versa) and corporate America’s management style. We make decisions thoughtfully, intelligently, as a committee, taking into account variables and available resources, and the majority’s opinion—and then we ask God to bless those decisions. That’s not discernment. When Jesus unpacks for his disciples (who did not bother to ask) the meaning of his prediction of betrayal, death, and resurrection, he tells them about servanthood and hospitality. This makes us uneasy. How will we know what we do is working, if we haven’t planned how to get there, if we don’t measure the bottom line? Wendy Wright tells the story of an annoying woman who attended a “Women of Wisdom” conference she gave. After a day of suffering this woman’s abrasive and inappropriate behavior, Wright realized the woman was making surprisingly insightful contributions. Then the woman shared that she had been asking wise people for years the question, “How do you know the will of God?” One man she asked had answered this: “If you think you sense the will of God in your life in some long-range, highly detailed plan, something you can see stretching out with clear goals and successes into the future, that is not the will of God. If, however, you have an insistent sense that the next, very hesitant step beyond which you can see nothing is in fact the step that must be taken, that is most certainly the will of God for you.” Wright goes on to wonder what we’re assuming when we ask for God’s will. “Are we imagining a God who, like a master planner, has a five-year, ten-year, or lifetime plan mapped out for us and leaves it up to us to figure out what it is? . . . Are our discernments basically concerned with ‘getting it right,’ with making the choice that, down the road we will be able clearly to see was ‘correct’ because everything came out in the end in a neatly wrapped, manageable package?” As near as I can figure, neither our individual nor our corporate life plans are like a cosmic solitaire game, in which winning means all the cards come out even. That’s corporate America’s model, assuming a win or lose component to God’s plan. In Jesus’ model, discipleship consists of servanthood, welcome and siding with the vulnerable. Discernment (both individual and corporate) is figuring out how to participate in God’s kingdom, and God’s kingdom isn’t measured in terms of success or bottom line. The question isn’t, “What does God want me to do?” God thinks in terms of relationship, so the question is, “What is God’s longing for us?” Wendy Wright says, “God’s will is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be lived into.” Mystery is not the kind of thing that can be decided in one fell swoop. Sort of like healing the blind man today. We may be able to “see,” but we do not yet have understanding of what we see. A far more faithful course of action, when faced with wondering about God’s will, is to stop long enough to look, to use every available perceptual tool we have, to see the needs, our gifts, our longings, our initial gut response. To listen to our faith community, to listen to all kinds of sources around us, to verify we aren’t misapprehending. Pray. Listen for God’s leading. Pray some more. Only then should we act. That’s not going to be comfortable. We are a culture of do-ers, we are so good at solving problems, coming to a consensus and a plan of action. But remember the story of Jesus healing the blind man. He spit in his eye! The guy could see, but he couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. Then Jesus touched him again to help him understand. When we stand with the vulnerable and powerless, we might feel like we’ve been spit in the eye. Or we might feel like we’ve been touched by Jesus. What we are perceiving may feel inconceivably wrong or confusing or not the way things oughta be. This is what Jesus means when he says he will be betrayed and killed and would rise again: that his followers will have to spend some time and energy in discernment, not in figuring out how to be successful. Stop, look, listen, pray, wait. |
| Return to Sermons |