Roger Ray, pastor
Oct 28, 2012 Proper 25
Mark 10:46-52
46They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" 48Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" 49Jesus stood still and said, "Call him here." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; get up, he is calling you." 50So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man said to him, "My teacher, let me see again." 52Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has made you well." Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
On a recent trip to New York, I found myself stuck out in Queens in a bargain hotel for several long evenings. My hotel TV only had about a dozen channels, most of which were devoted to sports. There were only two news channels. One was CNN and the other was one I had never seen before, Russian Television. RT is apparently a sort of a Voice of America in reverse, with British and American accented reporters, covering the day's news from a distinctly Russian perspective..... sometimes gloating about being able to tell their western audience about news events that were not covered in our media.... Things like CNN accepting bribes from the royal family in Bahrain to not report on human rights abuses in Bahrain..... a story which, not too ironically, was not reported on CNN.
You may not be much inclined to believe propaganda from a Russian TV news service but I checked that one out and it is true, not that it surprised me much. Corporate owned news agencies are colossal failures when it comes to actually being reliable news sources. They are largely entertainment sources that should not be relied upon for anything beyond sports scores.
You can, however watch broadcast news to plumb the psyche of American culture because they way TV reports news is telling about how we tend to think.
There is a wonderful program called "Counter Spin" that in our area can only be heard on the internet but it is a 30 minute weekly review of how our news media creatively spins language to hide the more stark realities of life.
In a recent program they pointed out how we tend to talk about death on the battlefield. In a recent ABC report by David Murer, he said, and I quote, "Overseas now to Afghanistan and a stark reminder of the human cost of war." Whenever you hear someone on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX or other American news agencies talking about the "human cost of war" you can bet that you are going to hear about American soldiers who died. And, sure enough, Murer's report was about the 2000 American to die in Afghanistan with no mention of the Afghanis who die in the war there nearly every day.
Two weeks earlier the same network ran a story about a NATO airstrike that had killed 8 Afghan women who had been out gathering firewood. They described it as an "incident that is causing tension." The year before when ABC reported on a drone strike that killed 9 Afghan children, they mentioned the death only to introduce a story about Afghan President Hamid Karzai's harsh words in response to the "incident.
Words matter and our choice of words indicate how we unconsciously feel about things. When it comes to the news media, it is hard to tell if it is a "chicken or the egg" matter.
Are they just reflecting our indifference about the deaths of women and children in Afghanistan or are they training us to be indifferent, carefully avoiding any criticism of a war that helps to fuel corporate profits?
There is a similarly subtle wording issue in our gospel lesson this morning. I don't know if Mark intentionally worded it this way or if it was just a reflection of how the culture had preserved the story. In this pericope, Jesus encounters a blind man who is called Bartimeaus. In fact, Mark shows how little he understands Palestinian Jewish culture when he says that Jesus encountered "Bartimeaus, the son of Timeaus," because "son of Timeaus" is what "Bartimeaus" means. They did not have family names as we do but rather the were known by their first name and then the name of their father, and for good measure they may throw in the name of their father's father. In that culture, I would be called "Roger, son of Teddy, son of John." Or, in Aramaic, "Roger BarTeddy BarJohn."
The point is, whether Mark was conscious of it when he wrote this down, it appears that no one had bothered to give this blind man a name. He wasn't "Matthew son of Timeaus" he was just the blind son of Timeaus.
On several occasions, it has been my responsibility to sit with a couple who had just lost a pregnancy. There are miscarriages that happen so early that the fetal material is simply discarded. If the pregnancy was farther along, the family might want to have a funeral.
But at least once I presided over a funeral when the miscarriage occurred at a point at which the couple wanted to have a graveside service but the pregnancy was not quite far enough along to give a name to the fetus..... almost a person but not quite.
I see in this text, that sort of thing at work..... Bartimeaus, because he was not a whole person, he was not quite a person, and the neighbors, the villagers, didn't bother to call him by name. Surely his parents did give him a name.... I hope..... but you know how parents can be sometimes.... Maybe they didn't, maybe they didn't want to think about him or talk to him... maybe he wasn't of much use to them because he couldn't work.... He was reduced to being a beggar.
I want to think that we are better about it now but a person with a serious disability could be cut off from society.... They couldn't work in the fields, couldn't build a house, couldn't make furniture .... So they couldn't get married, have kids, nor could they lead in the religious community.
Whether he had a name or not, he somehow didn't count, wasn't quite a person..... he needed, somehow to be saved.
I hope you don't mind me using that word because it is the word used in the Bible. Modern English translations usually render it, "go, your faith has made you well," but what it actually says in Greek is, "go, your faith has saved you." But the people who translate the Bible assume that Jesus didn't mean save here since he didn't tell the man that he was going to heaven, he just cured his blindness.
When the same Greek word appears when Jesus tells the sinful woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee that her "faith had saved" her, they don't mind translating it as saved because they assume that she was a bad person who was being forgiven of sins.
But a more honest understanding of salvation means to be made whole..... however you are broken, what ever makes you less than a whole human being. So a woman with a bad reputation is cut off from family, the religious community.... She can't get married, have a family.... She is cut off, buried.... Nameless.... Known only as a sinful person.
Blindness, in the Bible, often represents something other than literally not being able to see. Blindness often represents what we mean by the proverb, "none are so blind as those who refuse to see."
We use gossip and slander to tear a person down so that we can justify doing them great personal harm. We dehumanize gay people so that we can deny them the right to marry, inherit, have health care, adopt within their families the same way straight families do. We scream about deporting illegal aliens from their own ancestral land because we successfully stole it from them a century ago.
Yes, it is horrible that 2000 American soldiers have lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan in the past 11 years. By the way, do you have any idea how many people have died in the drug wars in Mexico.... A war funded by the American market for illegal drugs and armed by weapons purchased in the more than 6000 gun stores along the Mexican-American border?
Do you know? Because it is hardly mentioned in the news. In less than half of the time we have been in Afghanistan, between 50,000 and 60,000 Mexicans have died in a war in which we are silent instigators, participants and gun dealers.
Why do you suppose our corporate media never talks about it? And yet we know that Jessica Simpson is on a diet, that Twilight star, Kristen Stewart, had an affair. We can give network time for Donald Trump to make a complete fool of himself and devote hours to hand wringing over whether Lance Armstrong might have used steroids to overcome cancer and become the world's fastest cyclist for seven consecutive years.....but 50,000 deaths on our doorstep.... Not a word. You are more likely to hear about Lindsay Lohan getting another DUI than you are about the deaths of 10's of thousands citizens within a day's drive of Brownsville, TX .... Now tell me please why that is.
There has recently been an exception to the rule of media silence and anonymity and that exception has a name that I hardly feel worthy to say aloud: Malala Yousufza.
The 14 year old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by a Taliban assassin while on her way home from school has become a familiar image in the news though she was known to many before this horrible attempt on her life. She has been a spokesperson advocating for access to education for girls in her native Pakistan but more than that, she has demanded full rights to be able to go to the market, to sing, to speak her mind in public.
She was asked by a reporter last year, "But what do you say to a young girl who is not as brave as you are who doesn't want to risk going to school or the market but who wants to remain safe in her room?"
Malala said, "I would tell her, you cannot just stay in your room because on the day of judgment, God will ask you, 'Where were you when your people were calling on you, when they were being blown up, when they were being killed? Where were you when your people needed you?'"
You know me. I'm not much on the day of judgment thing.... Not because I eschew the notion of a great final judgment but because my own beliefs are more immanent. I think the day of judgment comes every day. So where were you when Malala was shot? Where were you when we refused to restrict the sale of military weapons, even along the border of Mexico while a civil war is raging there? Where were you when Missouri passed an amendment to the constitution forbidding same sex marriage?
Where were you when the church told you to stay out of politics and just worry about making sure your soul went to heaven while your neighbors were being evicted from their homes, refused medical care, losing their unemployment assistance or being trapped in payday loans with 1000% interest rates?
There are no partial people. There are no disposable people. The deaths of innocents is never just an incident. You will not often know their names but you should never doubt their humanity.
I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. Guilt is the most useless emotion in the world. I'm just saying that we don't have any business standing idly by. I'm not worried about God judging me at the end of my life.... I just want to live in a way that if she ever heard about us, that Malala would be proud of us and, when I do die, I hope that I have lived in a way that Westboro Baptist Church will come and protest at the funeral.
