Seeing Treasure in Heaven
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: Mark 10:46-52
Series: Treasure in Heaven Stewardship Campaign
From a literary perspective, the beginning of this story from Mark is borderline absurd. The fact of the matter is, our boy Mark was no Dickens or Faulkner or Maya Angelou.
The Greek goes like this: “And he came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho…” Now our translation has tried to smooth it out a little bit, putting part about the disciples and large crowd before the leaving Jericho bit, but Mark didn’t write it that way. They came to Jericho; they left Jericho. It’s like children’s book.
Now, in our Bible study this week, Tim had an interesting suggestion about why Mark writes it that way, with the coming to Jericho and the leaving Jericho right next to each other. He said, “That’s because what happens in Jericho stays in Jericho.”
Tim was wrong.
I actually take this line as evidence of the truth of the gospel stories. Mark is not writing some work of literary genius, he’s trying to tell us what happened. Jericho is like a cognitive waypoint; a physical place to anchor progression of the story. These are the mental handholds that organize Mark’s thought. It’s as if you or I were telling someone a story and said, “Ok, next we stopped at Buccees, and then we were leaving Buccees, and that’s when Bartimaeus called.”
As long as we’re talking about Bartimaeus, that’s another place where you can feel Mark just trying to tell us what happened. Bartimaeus is not even a real name. It’s Bar + Timaeus. Bar means “son of”; Timaeus is his dad’s name. Which, is exactly what Mark says next, “Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus.” He really says the same thing all over again. William’s son Williamson.
It’s another place, in the same verse, where you have to realize Mark cannot be pulling one over on us. Literary polish isn’t hiding anything here. We’re getting this story pretty much exactly as it appeared in Mark’s brain.
That’s good. I point this out about verse 46 because the rawness of the text I take as evidence of it’s truth. Fiction would be better written. And the truth of this story is important, since the rest of the passage is about the healing of a blind man.
As far as healing stories go, this one is not too complicated. Rather than repeat the whole story, I just want to point out two things.
First, Bartimaeus can’t see. He’s blind. Everybody else, of course, can see him. But they’d rather not. They really wish he would just be quiet and stop talking so that they can go back to ignoring him. Surely Mark’s phrase, “many sternly ordered him to be quiet” is diplomatically put. I’ll say this much, when I “sternly order” my kids to be quiet, I do not do it by calmly saying, “I hereby sternly order you to stop your vocalizations.”
The want him to be quiet so they go back to not seeing him. He can’t see them; they don’t want to see him.
But Jesus sees him. Jesus not only sees the one who can’t see, he sees the one no one else wants to see.
When we seek to be the hands and feet of Jesus, then, we also must stop and love those who are unseen. There are so many in our society that are unseen, or who are seen but only in terms of their job not in terms of their need.
You probably don’t see, for example, that the backup mail carrier, the one who works on Fridays, the one who ran inside the office here to drop off a package, covered in sweat from the afternoon summer heat, stopped on his way out of the parking lot at the Little Free Pantry because he needed food for his family.
You also might not see the single special ed teacher’s aide, who works full-time but whose take-home pay amounts to less than $15,000 a year. To try to make it all work, she gets her snack from the Little Free Pantry on her way to work.
It’s be great if there was no need for the McKinney Little Free Pantry, but at least by having it here, by bringing food to help fill it, by trying to keep it from being a mud pit, we see that there are people who need it.
You know where else there are people who deserve to be seen? In our elementary schools, particularly our Title I elementary schools, like our partner school, Burks Elementary.
I show you this because Connect Four is of the ways our mentors, who spend time each and every week with elementary students in need of support, guidance and encouragement, begin to break down the barriers between themselves in their mentees.
Connect Four is a great game to play as a mentor. It’s simple, it’s quick. Also, elementary students, particularly young ones, are really easy to beat, so you get to win a lot. I’m joking. Ok, I’m not really joking. All my mentees learned about losing at Connect Four.
But really, it’s just one small concrete example the way our mentors go into a building most people never cast a shadow in, sit down across a table in a library with a kid most of us never see, and say, “How are you? What do you need?” Or as Jesus said, “What do you want me to do for you?”
Now look, we at St. Andrew’s haven’t solved education, the working poor, or hunger. I am not claiming fixing all that as our treasure in heaven. I just call these treasures in heaven because they’re little places where we’re trying to see as Jesus sees; to see the person rather than to look past the problem.
Now Jesus not only sees Bartimaeus the man who cannot see and no one wants to see. Jesus then calls him, asks him what he wants, and then heals him.
Ok, I’ll be honest, I don’t have a treasure in here today that is exactly the same as instantaneously giving a blind man his sight. But, Jesus does still heal. And those story may be closer than you think.
This is a steering wheel. I actually have lots of good steering wheel heavenly treasure stories. I guess that’s maybe that’s not too surprising; we live in suburbia. Cars permeate our life the way sheep and goats did lives of people in Jesus’ day.
This story begins before she ever climbed behind the wheel.
It’s probably best to begin it with the maelstrom of hormones, emotional and physical exhaustion, and enormous demands of holding it all together faced by new mothers. Postpartum depression is the proper name for it; but the clinical words fail to capture the feeling of being pushed to the very brink – pushed to the point of telling off the spouse, pushed to the point of yelling at the kids, pushed to the point of leaving the house, pushed to the point of getting in the car, jamming the key in the ignition, and slamming on the gas.
At this point, it’s not a depression. It’s a sinkhole…and she has a deep and terrifying longing to get out. Anyway out. As the transmission jumps from gear to gear, with hands on the wheel, the question becomes, “What would happen if I turn this way into say, that tree? Or that barrier? Could I find the place where my body won’t hurt? Where no one will need anything from me? Where God will be?”
“Could I just drive straight to my eternal home?”
At this point Jesus speaks to her. Jesus speaks from the passenger seat, which is empty. But his voice definitely comes from the passenger seat. And Jesus says “Call her. She is home.”
“I can’t call her. I can solve this right now. I can drive into that truck.”
Jesus says again, “No, call her. And also, turn left.”
With big, heaving sobs she calls this other woman from St. Andrew’s. And she turns left.
And twenty minutes later she is on the living room floor. Still weeping, still tired, she still hurts so bad. But she’s alive.
The healing isn’t quite as fast as Bartimaeus, but she is still here, because Jesus spoke to her and used his Church to work his miracle. This story, this life still being lived today, this precious woman, is one of God’s heavenly treasures.
Sure, a lot of the work around here involves stuffing Logan into blow up dragon costumes, writing sock puppet jokes, and cutting cardstock for the woman’s retreat. But sometimes God takes the relationships, and prayers, and knowledge that is built along the way and, you know, saves a life.
We do much more around here any one person can see. I hope, in pulling some things out of this box over the past few weeks, you’ve found something of your sight restored, and like Bartimaeus at the end of our passage, now that you can see you’re ready to leap up and follow Jesus on the way.
