November 9, 2003 -22nd Sunday after Pentecost
Job 42:1-6, 10-17
NRSVKJV
Mark10:46-52
“When Believing IS Seeing”
Let us pray: “O thou without whom nothing is strong and nothing is holy, may our speaking and hearing at this time be to the increase of our faith and to the quickening of our hope and love, and to the glory of thy Name. Amen.”
“Seeing is believing.” So goes the old saying. I suppose its meaning is fairly self-evident. What we see, what we experience is worthy of our belief or assent. However, I’m not so sure that saying still holds completely true anymore. Given the advances that have been made in the study of physics we now understand that there is a great deal that we can’t see that we still believe exists. And with the advent of quantum physics – well, let’s just say that philosophers and theologians and physicists get along pretty well together these days. There are many instances, including the Scripture lessons for today, that indicate there are times when believing is in itself seeing.
Let’s talk about what we mean by seeing for a moment. We can talk about physical sight – how we actually look at another person or an object. We can also talk about seeing, understanding, a point of literature or philosophy. We can also talk about seeing in a spiritual manner – and here I mean when we believe in order to see, in order to come to faith. The contemporary spiritual writer William Johnston has written about this spiritual sight in The Inner Eye of Love. He makes an important distinction between faith and belief when he says:
It is possible to distinguish between a superstructure which I shall call belief and an infrastructure which I shall call faith. The superstructure (belief) is the outer word, the outer revelation, the word spoken in history and conditioned by culture. The infrastructure (faith) on the other hand is the interior word, the word spoken to the heart, the inner revelation. [quoted in Dyckman and Carroll, Inviting the Prophet Supporting the Mystic, p. 8]
So when we talk about faith we’re not just talking about coming to a point of intellectual assent to a series of propositions or arguments about who God is and what it means “to believe.” Rather, we’re talking about coming into a central relationship that becomes the orientation point for one’s whole life. Believing is seeing when it results in that kind of relationship with God.
For us to come to what one author has called ‘faithing,’ involves our experiencing healing. Ah, I can imagine you’re wondering at what I mean by that statement. Well, let me explain myself by looking at the root meaning of the word ‘heal.’ ‘Heal’ shares a common root with the words, ‘hale,’ ‘holy,’ health, and ‘whole’ (as in complete). To talk about a healing, at least in my understanding of this, is to imply an emphasis upon wholeness. There is a difference between ‘healing’ and ‘curing’ – at least in my mind there is a difference between coming to wholeness, being restored, and being ‘fixed.’ Wholeness implies more than just simple repair, because it involves growth and growth means that we’re always developing, changing, if you will. God’s call to us is to the fullness, the wholeness of our being; a being that God intended for us in gifting us with the divine image and likeness.
What we see happening in the first reading is Job experiencing a healing, a restoration of wholeness in relationship to God. The whole book of Job is designed to get us to this point of healing, of silence being broken so that hearing can take place. Thus, the book is an exercise in confrontation with the human situation counterpoised to the divine. We see the human idea of moral symmetry – what is fair and unfair, a moral calculus if you will – ranged against the holiness and the power of the God who creates and holds everything in being.
What happens in the book is that Job – and Israel, and us too for that matter – are reminded that God is wholly Other, completely different from us and our rules and our ideas don’t apply. As Walter Brueggeman says in his Theology of the Old Testament:
This is indeed “God beyond God,” who denies to Job (and to Israel) the comfort of moral symmetry. Job (and Israel) now are required to live in a world where nothing is settled or sure or reliable except the overwhelmingness of God. Israel is dazzled in a way that endlessly mesmerizes, threatens, and destabilizes. And we are led to imagine that the God over whom Job and his friends have debated is, in the end, precisely one of the images prohibited by the terrible God of Sinai. The God of the whirlwind refuses the domestication to which Israel was intensely tempted. [p. 391]
All along Job’s believed – “I know that my redeemer lives” – but he believed to justify himself, his worldview, and his “why is this happening to me?” Now, in this encounter, he comes face-to-face with the living God, and in his encounter with the overwhelming God discovers who he is, what he is, and what he is meant to be.
The encounter itself is an exercise in coming to see, to being healed. Job comes to see that we cannot domesticate God. We cannot limit God or define God by our moral symmetry or by our situation. The healing comes to Job in his experience of the wonder of this “God beyond God” who is willing to enter into dialogue with us, willing to listen to us, and willing to care for us even though we are so totally different than God is. Job receives an insight into God by coming to an insight, a healing, about himself. As one writer has put it, “He did not know that God was able to create a creature who could function as a distinct other from God, who could then even become the object of real questioning by God, and in the end be a necessary ally to confirm God’s claim that integrity was possible in humans. For all of his allegiance to God throughout the dialogues, Job did not know this limitation of God with regard to persons of integrity, hence the questions were a surprise and a new insight into divine power.” Believing led Job to see when finally he could put aside his self-justification, then his words were true, “I know that my redeemer lives.” He sought, he questioned, he believed, and he saw through his encounter with God.
Bartimaeus also enters into an encounter. Like Job he calls out, only to be shushed by the crowd almost as Job was shushed by his so-called comforters. As God finally breaks the silence and speaks to Job, so Jesus breaks the silence of Mark’s “messianic secret” – the “don’t tell anyone” that is the constant refrain of this Gospel – and reaches out to Bartimaeus, bidding him to enter into the conversation. This “son of honor” – the literal meaning of Bartimaeus – is approached by the “Son of David” and asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” What we see in this action is that God, as Julian of Norwich would say, “is most courteous.” The Lord approaches us where we are and invites us into the encounter. John Chrysostom, the great preacher of the early church, commented:
“He will save assuredly; yet he will do so just in the way he has promised. But in what way has he promised? On our willing it; and on our hearing him. For he does not make a promise to blocks of wood.”
The overwhelming God, the God who speaks out of the whirlwind and silences Job, speaks to each heart – just as Jesus spoke to Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus willed it, he wanted to be healed and wasn’t afraid to enter into the encounter that would make it possible. He wanted to see . . . and he did! God wants to enter into conversation with us, but not if we don’t will it. And the same goes for our healing, our restoration – it comes only with our being willing to have it happen. We can only be what God intends, hopes, desires, longs for us to become by conforming our will to God’s will. That is the great gift of freedom, the love that God has bestowed on each of us made in God’s image and likeness.
Like Job and Bartimaeus we have to believe – and here believing/faithing is the entrance into relationship and dialogue with the living God through the person of the living Christ. That relationship leads us to see beyond self and enter into the very life of God, which is the goal of all Christian life. I like what John Mabry, one of the ministers at Grace North Congregational Church in Berkeley, preached on this:
Bartimaeus’ story is instructive for us. . . .It is a story about spiritual blindness, not physical blindness. . . .We have all known this blindness. . . .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.” It seems almost too easy, doesn’t it?. . .Yet, amazingly, when we ask, we are answered. . . . “Go,” Jesus said to Bartimaeus, “Your faith has saved you.” [Reprinted in The Clergy Journal, 74-7, p. 49]
Our faith leads us to sight and sight to salvation. Bartimaeus believed, was healed, and saw in ways that were far different than he ever expected to see. I get the deep feeling that it’s that way for all of us when God touches and heals our spiritual sight – we see ourselves, the world around us, and God in ways we never thought possible.
So here we’ve explored two cases where believing is seeing – so what? Well, Job “died old and full of years” – in those full years I’m sure that he lived as a witness to the overwhelming greatness of God. Bartimaeus – unlike the disciples – immediately followed Jesus and walked with him the way to the cross. He wanted to learn from the teacher who had given him sight at multiple levels and he did learn from him the way of self-giving, the way of unconditional love, and the way of unselfish service. Both saw that God’s love calls us beyond always looking-in on ourselves and toward looking to God and to others. They discovered that believing IS seeing.
When we come to see in this new way our approach to worship will change. Part of our problem is that our eyes do not behold the One who is among us, so we want to entertain ourselves rather than to be in the presence of the living God. No one has said this better than Annie Dillard, the naturalist and spiritual writer. She’s written that, outside of the catacombs, she hasn’t found Christians “sufficiently aware” of the power that they so blindly invoke. Our liturgies, she has said, are set-pieces, things we’ve managed to say to this overwhelming God without getting ourselves killed. I agree with her – she’s right on the mark. We are what she’s described; we’re like a bunch of kids who sit around with their chemistry sets mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.
You see, dear ones, we invite God here – and God comes. We invoke God’s Name and the maker of heaven and earth and all that is in them is here. The God who holds all of reality in the palm of the hand is here and, what is more, WANTS to be here. Bored? Get NOTHING out of worship? Well, get your spiritual sight healed and then, as Dillard says, you’ll realize that instead of your “Sunday best” you’ll come to worship with a crash helmet on! We come here and walk into the midst of God’s power unleashed – do you see it?
Whatever blindness we’re facing God is waiting to offer healing. The one who spoke out of the whirlwind is still speaking to us and overwhelming us with the beauty and wonder of creation. The one who asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” is standing by each one of us and asking that very same question. And the essence of it all is that when we hear the voice, when believing leads us to see who it is we’ve been talking with; we have to do something about it. Job went about the business of living for God. Bartimaeus followed Jesus on the way to the cross. When believing is seeing it leads us not to sit, but to do something. Believing IS seeing…..and seeing leads to service of God and others and that is as it should be. “Go, your faith has saved you.” Let us pray:
“Grant, O Lord, that our ears, which have heard the voice of thy songs, may be closed to the voice of all unworthy clamor and dispute; that our eyes which have looked upon the symbols of thy love, may ever look to thee for light and guidance; that our tongues, which have sung thy praise, may ever speak the truth in love; that our feet, which have walked in thy courts, may walk ever in the way of righteousness and in the paths that lead unto peace, and grant that our hearts, which have waited before thee; may be ever open to thy coming; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
[Prayers from A Book of Worship for Free Churches – 1948]