Mark 10:46-53

“Take Heart, Get Up, He’s Calling You”

October 25, 2009

Pentecost 21

Prayer: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Give us the sight of faith and with your words of invitation and healing, turn our lives toward following you. Amen.

If you had to give up one of your five senses, which one would you be most willing to give up?

This was a question asked in a Bible Study with high schoolers a couple of weeks ago. As the youth wrestled aloud with one another about the challenges of the loss of each sense, one thing was clear. No one was willing to give up their sight. The thought never crossed the minds or the lips of anyone around the table. “It would just be too hard”, they said and “we’d have to depend on others to help us get around,” another one said.

For the vast majority of people who are sighted, it is difficult to imagine life without sight. I have a hard enough time dealing with the fact that my eye doctor tells me that I could use bifocals. Yet, even for those of us who have our sight (even if we are aided by corrective lenses), it is probably safe to say that we’ve all had blind spots in our lives before. Perhaps you are blind to something that you’ve done or not done that has caused a friend has stopped talking to you or you are blind to news that everyone else seems to know about but that you haven’t picked up on or perhaps there is change happening in your life right now and you are blind to how it will impact you in the future.

In Jesus’ last leg of his journey into Jerusalem, he is confronted one more time with an outcast, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. He was seeking salvation from his blindness and mercy and restoration of his life. In Jesus’ day, someone who lost their sight was thought to have sinned against God and therefore it was punishment for what the person had done; whether they knew of their sin or not. The result was a life not only in literal darkness, but it was a life of isolated darkness away from family and friends because of the sin that he was perceived to have carried. He was unclean, outside of the law and undesired by anyone in his community. Bartimaeus was as concerned, if not more about being a part of society again as he was in regaining his sight.

Though Bartimaeus was blind to many things, he clearly saw who Jesus was. Perhaps more than anyone else in the crowd, he was sure that Jesus had the will to make him whole again, and that Jesus had the ability to restore him to the community that he loved, but that had not loved him for so many years.

Bartimaeus was right too. With three short words from Jesus, “Call him here.” The transformation from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, and from isolation to community was starting to take shape. And not only was Bartimaeus going to be transformed by Jesus word, but the whole crowd would be too.

The same people who had been trying to silence Bartimaeus, and take his voice from him as well, were now the one’s who were extending an invitation to him. “Take heart, get up, he is calling you.”

I was a Bible camp counselor for two summers outside of Alexandria, MN. I saw kids come to camp that were sometimes blind to the love of God in their lives; they felt isolated and appeared angry or withdrawn. Sometimes kids came like Bartimaeus, yearning for God’s attention. You could see their hunger for love and attention in their faces and hear it in their voices. One of the boys that came to camp was an 8^th grader named Danny.

I could tell it was going to be a rough start and perhaps a very trying week when Danny came to camp. I had already had to take away firecrackers and a knife from one kid, and the week had literally just begun. As I stood near the registration shack waiting for my cabin group to form, four boys came over toward me, apparently all from the same church and all equally perturbed that they had to be there.

I soon found out that all seven of the guys in my cabin were here for a mandatory week of confirmation camp. Danny was one of the four who had come from one church and he was the leader of the disgruntled campers. Literally, the first words he said to me were, “This week is going to be the worst! I can’t believe the pastor makes us come to stupid places like this.”

Soon we gathered on the lawn outside the chapel to talk about the week and some basic ground rules for how we would live together for the next 5 days. As I talked, I could tell no one was listening. It would have been as effective for me to go talk to the squirrels that were chasing each other across the lawn. Finally, one of the boys chimed in, “I really don’t care what we do this week it’s going to be dumb anyway.” And then another boy complained and finally Danny chimed in again. “I don’t care about any of this; none of it’s going to be fun.”

I realized now that Danny was starving for attention and the only way he could get any was to go with the flow of the rest of the boys. I responded to their complaints by saying, “I didn’t care if they had a good time, but that I fully intended to have fun this week and that they were welcome to join me in having fun too. The best way I know how to do that is to get involved in everything this week and make the most of it all.”

Slowly but surely, the mood and the attitude started to change as the week progressed. Danny started to see that Bible camp wasn’t so bad and God was more interesting than he thought. Danny was taking heart in this new experience. By Tuesday afternoon we were all having a little more fun and our Bible studies started to really speak to the group. Danny was now volunteering to read passages of Scripture and be the first one to do some of the activities. Jesus was at work again giving faith to the blind and reconnecting those who were feeling lost and isolated with a community that gives life.

When Friday morning came around and it was time to say goodbye, Danny’s mom arrived to pick him up. She could tell that he had been changed by his encounter with Jesus at camp. She told me that Danny had never easily made friends and that she couldn’t believe all the people he was saying goodbye to. Then Danny came over, gave me a big hug and said, “This was the best week of my life. I can’t wait to go home and tell my friends about Bible camp.” In the course of a week, Danny had new eyes to see with and heard Jesus voice echoing in his life.

“Take heart, get up, he’s calling you.” It’s your invitation to wonder and wander in the love of God. It is an invitation to be part of a community that is filled with life, even when you are experiencing blind spots. Blind spots of every kind inevitably come. Faith fades to doubt, hope to fear, excitement to exhaustion, yet Jesus does not give up. He reaches out and changes our perspective, gives us new lenses to see him beside us joining us to each other as his body called to follow him because he has given us eyes of faith to see the wonderful works of God in the middle of the uncertainties and challenges in life. Amen.