Sunday
October 27
Faith Has Made You Well
By Marsh Chapel
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Faith Has Made You Well
Mark 10: 46-52
October 27 2024
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
God brings good out of evil. God brings good from evil, life from death, hope from cynicism, new from old. God brings good out of evil.
In faith, we shall need to rely upon the goodness of God, as we face an uncertain future. For the outlook for this country, the land of the free and the home of the brave, our beloved land, home, country, our shared national heritage, is pretty grim today. In a personal, pastoral and proclamatory word, we bring you this morning the Gospel of Mark 10. In a word, a word of Faith. Faith makes you well. God brings good out of evil. And no matter the outcome of this or any particular election, it is the reliance upon that faith, the trust in that faith, the faithful memory that in a miraculous brilliance the Lord Christ gave astonishing sight to Bartimaeus, that faith in the goodness of God, the faith that over long time God brings good even out of evil, it is faith that will see us through.
You have lived your faith. You have encouraged voter registration. You have gathered fellowship groups for October luncheons and prayerful discussion. You have given of self and substance to a finer future. Some of you have done all three—recruited and entertained and given. I happen to be living with someone who has done so, done all three, as have many others, many of you. So, now: plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest. Into the future, we are learning the hard way, across the land, in small towns without colleges, in rural spaces without wealth, we have work to do. We need many more excellent self-giving historians, philosophers, theologians, poets, ministers, teachers, willing to go out and go forth into red America, even when humanities majors are down by 30%, at just the wrong time. We may need an American version of the Chinese cultural revolution, an investment of intelligence and morality in redder, smaller, poorer places, if ever we are to return home to truth, goodness and beauty…learning, virtue and piety…knowing, doing and being…curiosity, challenge and care.
Over 11 years, once a year, in our former assignment, I spent a week with other ministers from the nation’s large churches, and saw and savored the vital goodness, truth and beauty across this great land, red and blue alike, across difference. What a privilege. Pheonix, San Diego, Dallas, Minneapolis, Ft Lauderdale, Rochester, Colorado Springs, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Baltimore, Atlanta. This is such a wonderful, varied, exciting, promising country. How could we possibly allow ourselves to be discovered in this current baleful political situation, late autumn 2024?
That some 48% of the citizenry of this great land could be intent on affirming as President, a person of such pronounced mendacity, such pronounced predatory and vituperative mendacity, such utter lack of character, as the current Republican candidate for the office not only exhibits but celebrates, not only exemplifies but recommends, when not more than 5% should be willing to do and say so, at a high end, is itself a full and dire judgement upon us, and a window into a heritage that is pretty grim today, even apart from the election outcome. The level of closeness in the predictive counts are more than enough, more than judgment enough. Those who helped elect him in 2016, the time when the door should have been firmly and fully shut, bear a serious, major and lasting responsibility for our current, grim, predicament. The horse got of the barn, then. Further, those of stature and leadership in his own party, who are mute today, do as well: George W Bush, Chris Sununu, Nicki Haley, Mike Dewine, Mitch McConnell…It is a sad, tragic, long list. It was not always this way.
With very few exceptions, I did not meet a Democrat until I went to college. The Republicans, Rockefeller and Goldwater, moderate and less moderate, with whom we were raised, must be rolling over in their graves to view their party of Lincoln in such tatters, such lack of morality, such lack of civility, such lack of circumspection, such lack of humility and order, such lack of courage.
In the spring of 2017, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, I returned to my homeland, along the banks of the Erie Canal, and stood on a lawn by a tributary of that canal, awaiting the onset of a wedding dinner. I greeted a dear friend, what we would call or have called ‘a rock-ribbed republican’. A graduate of Wittenberg, in 1963, where he met his wife, he then enlisted in the Marines, and served two tours in Vietnam. Unlike another friend, he did not lose his legs, and unlike yet another, he did not lose his life. He returned alive, and gave his life over to family, business, church, neighborhood and service. Without a hello or even a greeting, and without needing any preface to the remark, he walked toward me and simply said, ‘I am so ashamed of my party’.
Going forward, we shall need to rely on faith. Faith is not faith until it is really all you have left. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Hence, Sunday, here, worship. Faith grows through gifts of spirit: like imagination, like civility, like endurance.
Imagination
We were driving along the river bed that became that just mentioned canal, a blue highway, Route 20. Conversation paused. The rolling hillsides, sprouting corn, alfalfa, beans, wheat, and hay, are like their own tidal waves, their own sea scape, in green not blue.
An idea arrives. Two books by our MIT neighbor Sherry Turkle, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, have guided some of our thought over time. We hope to meet her in person sometime. Her voice is a crucial one in this conversation about conversation, and she is only the span of the river away. A thought: why not invite her, Dr. Turkle, to come to Marsh Chapel. Our work on conversation in 2024 should include a pconversation with perhaps the current intellectual leader in thought about conversation. An idea, maybe a good idea, has arrived, as the green sea fields of young corn roll by.
But here, the point, hear the point. Where did that imaginative possibility come from? Whence such an idea? How does a new prospect—here, the possibility of a cross river invitation—come to life? The leisure to drive and be bathed in silence, along with the occasional personal conversation, certainly allows space and time for such a thought to land in the mind. The further distance from daily, office or campus routine and rhythm, so important to the work of sermon development and any other composition, adds a further support. Perhaps the familiarity of the route, the drive itself—a road the car could meander on its own, so regular are the trips—gave a lulling quietude that became the womb of gestation for thought. ‘My best sermon ideas come while I am shaving’ once said James Forbes. Yet the moment of insight, of new thought, the arrival of an idea comes on its own without a well-manicured airport, runway or landing strip. Whence an idea? What is going on when we think? Or when we think we are thinking? Or when we think about our thinking? Whence an idea?
If you expect an answer this morning, prepare for disappointment. Today, perhaps, we simply want to pause before the mystery, one of life’s great mysteries, the birth of an idea, in this case quite a modest one, but an idea nonetheless. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength—and mind. And you love your neighbor as yourself. We shall need some imagination, some new ideas, going forward.
Faith involves imagination.
Civility
Dr. Virginia Sapiro, Political Scientist, spoke to a luncheon last weekend. Some years ago she spoke to us on Civil Conversation. Former Dean of the College of Arts and Scientists, a scholar of renown, she keeps before us the need for civility, civility, civility.
The more outrageous others becomes, the more shocked the opposing public is at the number of people who seem not only unfazed by outrageousness, but even attracted to it. Attacking others for being uncivil, does not work. If we are going to prize and affirm civility, regardless of what others say and do, and the way they do so, we are called to a higher standard.
’Civility’ is not easy to achieve, not because people get hot-tempered in politics (which they do) or because they haven’t learned all the rules ‘properly’ (which they haven’t). Civility is, in fact, difficult to achieve in any setting in which people have differences of status, history, culture, or interests. In other words, civility is difficult to achieve when we most need political deliberation. Civility is itself something that needs to be sought, deliberated, and negotiated. The call for ‘civility’ is often reminiscent of calls for ‘management’ rather than ‘politics’: a method of decision-making that can transcend clashes of interests and those other aspects of decision-making that give politics a bad name, even among those who prize it as the means for a people to achieve a sustainable and just collective existence. Achieving civility, for better or worse, requires engaging in political processes of deliberation. Unfortunately, in real life, there is no meta-language for politics. Civility is of politics, not above it.
Faith gives birth to civility
Endurance
The Bible is largely about failure and defeat.
Its stories and letters and teachings record ways people have lived with defeat. This makes the Bible difficult for us to understand. For we as a people have run and swatted and laughed our way past learning the language of failure. We don’t admit to it. We won’t accept it. We do not countenance it. So, sermons, this one and others, which are fumbling footnotes to the Scripture, hit us from the side if they hit us at all.
But by grace, it is the resurrected Christ who addresses us in the preaching of the church, in the announcement of the gospel. The passages of the Gospel allow us safe passage to the Gospel–because Jesus is present to us. “In all the sayings of Jesus which were reported, he speaks who is recognized in faith and worship as Messiah and Lord, and who, as the proclamation makes known his works and hands on his sayings, is actually present for the church.” (Bultmann, HST, 348).
Our blind beggar, ‘Bar Timeaus’, shouts out an unexpected nametag for Jesus. ‘Son of David’. To call Jesus such is to remember…failure…to remember…difficulty…to remember warnings unheeded from long ago…to remember David you have to remember Saul and to remember Saul you have to remember Samuel.
Bartimaeus calls Jesus by the name of David—David the personification of hope, of millennial portent, of national pride, of the chance to get things right. Son of David! He throws off his garment—maybe a sign of baptism—and comes naked to see if there is another chance for him. Here is another in Mark’s ‘book of secret epiphanies’ (Dibelius\Bultmann). His ‘faith has made him well’, a saying and a truth most precious to Martin Luther, whose Reformation we remember today, Luther who forever splintered the unity of the church into pieces, fragments, for the sake of the Gospel: faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. (M Luther, introduction to Romans).
Our Gospel seldom uses the title, ‘Son of David’, in order that Jesus not be mistaken for the hoped-for national Messiah, the hoped-for political conqueror, the hoped-for restorer of Israel. Jesus is known by failure and defeat. But the name of David also carries the reminder, with Samuel, of surprise, of a second chance, of another chance, of new beginnings…of endurance, endurance, endurance in the teeth of adversity.
The sermons in series from 2016, Presidential Election, and 2020, Liberal Gospel (available on our website) ultimately failed in their mission, and some of its facets named today. I despair in that already I have preached through this self-same national political imbroglio twice before, 2016 and 2020, with limited fruitfulness, limited success, limited hearing. And what to do? As my grandmother said, If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
So, we need the good news, especially when the trail is hard and long. God brings good out of evil. God brings good from evil, life from death, hope from cynicism, new from old. God brings good out of evil.
In faith, we shall need to rely upon the goodness of God, as we face an uncertain future. For the outlook for this country, the land of the free and the home of the brave, our beloved land, home, country, our shared national heritage, is pretty grim. In a personal, pastoral and proclamatory word, we bring you this morning the Gospel of Mark 10. Faith. Faith makes you well.
Faith creates endurance.
Sursum Corda! Hear the good news of faith and her handmaidens, imagination, civility and endurance. God brings good out of evil. And no matter the outcome of this or any particular election, it is the reliance upon that faith, the trust in that faith, the faith that in a miraculous brilliance the Lord Christ gave astonishing sight to Bartimaeus, that faith in the goodness of God, the faith that over long time God brings good even out of evil, it is faith that will see us through.
