Mark 10:46-52 | Bartimaeus

*Preached at Grace North Church April 9th, 2000*

I'm doing fine now, but I must say that last Monday, I was nothing short of a basket case. Allow me to describe my situation. Last Sunday night I arrived home after a week in Chicago at the Religious Communicators Conference. So Monday morning I was faced with a week's worth of phone calls and emails to return (my email program literally downloaded over 300 email messages--I nearly fainted when I saw those coming in). But that's not all, of course. That is a small thing, that is manageable. On top of that I have exactly two and a half weeks to prepare for the annual Spiritual Directors International Conference, which includes public speaking, teaching writers' workshops, and getting everything together for a meeting with my editorial board members, who are all flying to Connecticut for this meeting. There is a LOT to prepare for for this kind of venture, and there always seems to be something I forgot to add to the to do list. But, in fact, preparing for the conference was really just icing on the cake, for Monday morning was really dedicated, both in my mind and on my calendar, to beginning the full production cycle of Presence, the journal I edit. This normally means everything else goes out the window for three weeks, but unfortunately this time, I did not have that option.

So, I was sitting at my desk Monday morning, trying to juggle all of these things in my head, watching my 300 email messages download when I remembered, "Oh, yeah, and I have to write a sermon for Sunday." And suddenly, I had to grip the edge of my desk until the vertigo subsided.

At this point, I did something rather uncharacteristic of me. I prayed. For help.

Now, you might be thinking, "you're a priest, it's can't be unusual for you to pray." And, of course, you are right. I have no trouble with contemplative, or mystical prayer, where I commune with God, and realized my oneness with all of being. I consider myself a mystic, and this kind of prayer comes very naturally to me.

But asking God for help on such mundane matters as my to-do list, however voluminous, no, I'm afraid I have a bit of a mental block, here. You see, all of these years of saying the Lord's Prayer have done their job. God is my father in heaven, and like many self-determined Gen Xers, this guy does NOT call home every other month because I've run out of money or need help out of a jam. I am an adult, and I can take care of myself. I do not lightly ask God for the miraculous. I do not typically ask God to suspend the laws of the universe just because I'm having a bad day.

In fact, I have a great deal of philosophical difficulty with such a thing. First of all, I think there is something to self-determination. I feel that seeing God as a "father in the sky" who is poised and ready to spring into action whenever one of his little children needs help is repugnant. This kind of imagery keeps us neotenous, or child-like, in our relationship to God. How can I meet God as my equal, and co-creator, if I'm always running to him every time I stub my toe?

Second, who am I to ask God to suspend the laws of creation on my behalf? If none of this stuff gets done, and I lose my job, what grand designs of the universe are going to be foiled? None. The planets will continue in their orbits, babies will continue to be born, Wall Street will be bargaining again tomorrow, whether I have written my sermon or not. How selfish of ME to ask God to reach out and stop the sun, just because I need 26 hours in my day today.

And finally, as a process-oriented theologian, I'm not sure that there's anything God can even do. In Process Theology, God has the power to whisper to beings, to persuade them, but God does NOT have the power to coerce them, and this includes inanimate objects such as the sun and earth. God does not have the power to reach out and stop the sun for me. God is not capable of suspending the laws which God as set in motion. I can ask until I'm blue in the face, but that will not change what God can or cannot do.

I know all of these things, and it is for reasons such as these that I do not typically ask much of God. In fact, I think it takes a lot of nerve to ask God for a miracle.

In our Gospel reading today, Bartimaeus is a man with a lot of nerve. This guy is a blind beggar, sitting by the side of the road, collecting alms. When he hears that Jesus of Nazareth is coming through, he just starts shouting, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Of course, everyone around him wants to see Jesus, who was quite a celebrity by that time, and wants to hear whatever he has to say, so they're yelling a Bartimaeus to shut up. But Bartimaeus is having none of it. He just yells louder than they, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

And not only does Jesus hear him, but when Bartimaeus approaches him, he says, "What do you want me to do for you?"

Naturally, Bartimaeus says, "I want to see again!"

To which Jesus replied, "Go; your faith has made you well." And the man could see.

Who was this Bartimaeus, that Jesus would listen to him? A nobody, a beggar, a streetperson, as we might say today. And yet Jesus helped him, and why? Because he asked.

The Epistle of James tells us that " You do not have, because you do not ask." And why don't we ask? Well, I don't know about you, but as I've just said, I have my own short list of reasons. I'm sure, if you are someone who typically does not ask, either, you have your own set of reasons.

But Bartimaeus' story is instructive for us, because while on the surface it is about a man with a physical malady, the point of the story is very spiritual indeed. This is a story about spiritual blindness, not physical blindness. Bartimaeus is all of us when we have reached the gutter, when we have hit bottom, when we have gone about as far as we can go into despair. We have all known this blindness. We have all lived in that gutter. And some few, lucky ones among us reach the point of desperation where we let go of our pride, where we let go of our self-determinacy, where we can even let go of our skepticism and unbelief, and say to Jesus, "Help me."

Two words. Two simple, monosyllabic, words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Help me.

For most of us this is the very point we must reach in order to be helped. We must reach the end point of hopelessness and flail out blindly into the universe before we are capable of receiving any help.

It seems almost too easy, doesn't it? But perhaps you have been there enough times to know that getting to that point of desperation is never easy. Letting go of pride, or reason, or our own two bootstraps is sometimes the greatest act of courage God can ask of us. It's hard for us post-moderns to accept the idea of the miraculous, or of divine intervention. Yet, amazingly, when we ask, we are answered.

"Go," Jesus said to Bartimaeus, "Your faith has saved you."

On Monday, when I was swimming in my own shark pool of despair, I didn't have any faith. Yet, I had just enough faith to ask for help, even though I felt silly doing it. And do you know what happened?

By the end of Tuesday afternoon, I had typeset the entire issue of Presence. By the end of my workday Wednesday, I had completed most of my preparation for the Conference. On Thursday I completed the research necessary to wrap up everything I would need to accomplish this month, and as it turns out, 200 of those 300 email messages were only a single message repeated over and over again due to a server error.

You can balk at calling this a miracle, but hey, it seems miraculous to me. God may not have reached out and stopped the sun, but he certainly reached out and touched something within me that allowed me to focus, to accomplish much more than I deemed possible. When I looked over the readings for this week, it seemed to me that Jesus was saying to me, "Go, your faith has saved you."

Not enough faith to move a mountain. Not enough faith to rescue a people from slavery. Not enough faith to go happily to my death in certain hope of salvation. But instead just enough faith to say, "Help me, please." It doesn't take much.

But it can be hard to do. I ask you, as you go into the world this week, to remember the words of James, Jesus' brother: "You do not have, because you do not ask." I know that asking is hard, but when you start to feel like Bartimaeus, you should give it a try. Jesus is always there, saying, "What do you want me to do for you." The small amount of faith it takes could save you. Let us pray.

Liberating God, you make the blind see, the lame run, and the stubborn pray. We like to think that we are too self-reliant, too unimportant, or too modern to ask you for help. And yet, over and over again in scripture you remind us that we have not because we ask not. Help us to get past the mental road blocks we erect between ourselves and you. Help us to ask you for help. For we ask this in the name of the one who extends his hand to us forever, saying, "What do you want me to