The following sermon was preached at the 10:30 service at St. Joseph of Arimathea on Sunday, October 28, 2018. It varies from the notes below, and slightly from the version preached at the 8 AM service. The recording includes the sequence hymn and Gospel proclamation. The sermon itself begins at 3:38.
Transcript
The Sermon as delivered
May the Holy Spirit impart grace upon us to have clarity of insight and thought, and more especially, to have clarity of heart. In Christ’s name. Amen.
I was not sure how to begin this sermon until I ripped it up and threw it out and started over last night, and worked until one o’clock to finish up a new one. I want to start by talking about what made me rip up the old one, and that was the attack at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh yesterday.
It’s a tragedy, at least that’s the word that many of us have used, and the news has often used to describe it. But I wonder if by tragedy what we mean is something unavoidable, something like a hurricane or a flood, what I think unfairly insurance companies would call an act of God. Or if what we mean is something like somebody randomly dying unexpectedly of a heart attack. I wonder if tragedy really encompasses what happened in Pittsburgh, what happened in Long Island, Louisville, what happened in Newtown, what happened in Las Vegas, what happened just down the road in Antioch.
If that is what we mean by tragedy, then I don’t think the word fits. I agree with Bishop McConnell of Pittsburgh, who wrote yesterday to his diocese: “The newscasts sickeningly are referring again and again to this horror as a tragedy. There’s no such thing. A tragedy is inevitable. This was not. It was murder, murder of a particularly vile and poisonous kind. Human beings,” he writes, “have moral agency. Someone chose to hate and chose to kill, and now we are forced to the choice as well: to do nothing, or to reject this hatred in the strongest possible words and actions, and to refute in every way and every forum the philosophical foundations of anti-Semitism wherever they have gained a foothold in our churches and our society.”
I happen to agree with Bishop McConnell. This is an appropriate response. We have a choice as to whether we will uproot this sort of hatred, or whether we allow it to take root and to grow.
But I think there’s a first step that has to occur, and we need help with that first step. We need guidance as to how to take that first step. And that first step is: how do we recognize such insidious evil before it takes on such clear and unavoidable form? How do we recognize it in our society? How do we recognize the ways in which we might contribute? And not just anti-Semitism, but many other forms of hatred that seem to be flourishing today. How do we recognize it?
And so it is that I think we are blessed today to hear a reading from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, and to have Jeremiah as an example of someone who looked squarely at evil, at disappointment in his own people, at the evils of his own people, and wondered why God would not act, and yet chose to bear witness instead of looking away or taking an easier way out. And we are blessed in this situation, as in all others, to have Jesus as our Lord, who gives us not only an example of the way we ought to act, but gives us the grace and the power to do so. And so we have our first reading from Jeremiah, we have our Gospel text, and I believe that together they will show us a way that we can go.
Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet. And why not? Because his time of ministry, his time of activity, was a tumultuous one in the life of the people of Israel. He was active at first during the time of King Josiah, which was a sort of pinnacle point for the people of Israel. Josiah was a strong king. He was instituting religious reforms. And then he went down to Egypt and got into a fight that he couldn’t win and got killed. And so Jeremiah also sees the ramifications of Israel’s attempts at fighting against the Babylonians and against the Egyptians, and eventually he witnesses not one, but two deportations of the leadership of Jerusalem to Babylon.
And in the midst of it, he offers the word that the Lord gives him, his laments. He challenges God, and he cries out that God has ravaged him at certain points, and God’s people. But he never turns away, and he never turns away from God, and he does it all because of a vast faith and hope in God.
And so when I heard the news of what had happened yesterday, these words rang in my mind: “Thus says the Lord: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children, and she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jeremiah 31:15). Of course, we know that as a quotation in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew. But it was Jeremiah who uttered these words later on in the very same chapter that we heard from today.
This passage illustrates a facet of Jeremiah’s work that is so essential. As Ellen Davis, a professor of Old Testament at Duke, put it, “The prophet speaks for God in language that is literally visceral: ‘My guts, my guts, I writhe’” (Jeremiah 4:19) as we hear in chapter four. “My guts yearn for Ephraim” (Jeremiah 31:20). “Although the visceral character of Jeremiah’s words is regrettably obscured,” she says, “in most translations, this feature of his poetry is an important indicator of his distinctive place within the prophetic canon. For Jeremiah,” she writes, “is a witness to horror who never looks away, and thus he may teach us something of what it is to speak and act on God’s behalf in the most grievous situations.”
And that’s the key thought there. Jeremiah is a witness to horror who never looks away, and so he may teach us something of what it is to speak and to act as agents of God, on God’s behalf, in the most grievous situations.
So the first step is for us to see. But in order for us to see what is wicked and hateful in our own society, and even in ourselves, I believe, as human beings, we have to have some sort of support, some sort of assurance. And Jeremiah had that, and we hear that in our reading today. Jeremiah had hope and faith in God, and we hear that in the words that he uttered prior to Rachel weeping for her children, and what we heard earlier this morning:
“Thus says the Lord: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations. Proclaim, give praise, and say, ‘Save, O Lord, your people, the remnant of Israel. See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor together’” (Jeremiah 31:7-8).
In other words, the weakest, most vulnerable people. I’m going to gather them up. The Lord promises to gather them up from wherever they are and to bring them home, to give them home and safety again.
“Together a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back. I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble, for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn” (Jeremiah 31:8-9).
So this is the promise that upholds and undergirds Jeremiah’s laments. He has hope that God will act. He has hope, in fact, that God has not abandoned God’s people. He has hope in the midst of the evil that he sees that there is goodness, and that God is active. And this is the hope that we have to hold onto and be certain of in order to be willing to look at the evil and the sin in our society and in ourselves. But that’s the first step, to be able to take that step and to see. Because God is faithful to us, we are free to be faithful, and to let go of the fears that prevent us from taking on this work.
The day before he launched his attack on Tree of Life, the man responsible wrote on social media, “HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” I’m going to paraphrase, because I don’t want to say this word in church: “Forget your optics. I’m going in.” Earlier, a few days before, while posting a screencap of this refugee resettlement agency’s website, he had written, “Why, hello there, HIAS. You like to bring in hostile invaders who dwell among us. We appreciate the list of friends you have provided,” ominously referring to the list of organizations that supported that ministry.
So yes, this man was driven by a virulent form of anti-Semitism, which at its most basic form is ascribing a sort of puppeteering role to the Jewish community, power and influence to them, and nefarious intent. So he was certainly doing that, but in this instance, that gave direction to his anger that was driven by hatred as well for refugees and immigrants.
And it struck home for me in both instances. I have Jewish friends. I have a friend from college who’s an Orthodox rabbi in Connecticut. And I know how politically without a home he feels today, because he feels alienated from both our right and our left in America’s political context. And I also have friends who work in refugee resettlement, and I know how difficult that has been over the past few years for them.
So here’s the thing. Some folks may say about this man, “Well, he’s obviously insane.” Might say the same thing about the guy who was building those things that he was putting in the mail last week. Obviously insane. Someone said to me, “Did you even see his van? You know somebody driving something like that is lost.”
Well, I can see where that idea comes from. And if by insane or crazy we mean that somebody has gone off the rails and left the norm, then sure, we can use that term. But if we mean somebody who’s actually diagnosably mentally ill and therefore different than us in a way that is significant enough to separate us from their acts, some of the folks who’ve done things like this have been mentally ill, but far fewer than are not diagnosably mentally ill. There are other forces at work in this sort of thing.
Well, first let me say, not only in this instance, but also you can see this at work. He had constructed this paradigm in which the Jewish community was nefariously working as a cabal, that immigrants were part of this and refugees were part of this, to somehow disrupt and overthrow America as he thought it ought to be. And while his is an extreme case, is that rhetoric all that foreign?
When I read particularly the first part of his first post about this refugee resettlement ministry, and saying that they’re bringing people in to kill our people and disrupt our nation, I’ve heard a lot of that from a lot of different places. It is not extreme if by extreme we mean uncommon. It is a thought that is out there. I’ve heard it, and I know if I’ve heard it, and people rein themselves in around clergy, then I expect that some of you have heard it as well.
So that is something that’s going on. His version of this hatred incorporated the longstanding demon of anti-Semitism. But there are other ways in which people can go off the rails in constructing this enemy for themselves that is unassailable, that is in the shadows, that is impossible to confront except through means of violence. And so on the one hand, maybe a step along the road is the sort of rhetoric that says that all immigrants or refugees are violent or criminals. Or maybe one step along the road is saying that George Soros is paying everybody to do whatever they’re doing politically.
But another step along the road on the other side might be a listserv where people complain all about the Koch brothers and say they’re behind everything, and then they go and they shoot up a congressional baseball practice and shoot a congressman, which has also happened. So the issue is this sort of rhetoric and narrative that allows us to justify the sort of violence and hatred that can be in our hearts. And it really shouldn’t surprise us that if this is the sort of rhetoric that’s out there, that there are people who could act on it.
After all, we live in a society in which people might shoot somebody at a gas station for their music being too loud, or somebody in a movie theater because they’re texting before the movie starts. There are lots of people who are on edge. It shouldn’t surprise us that for some folks, this sort of rhetoric is all it takes to set them on a path to this sort of thing.
In 2011, there was a man named Anders Breivik who attacked some communities in Norway. And at his trial, it was very interesting: the prosecution started out by saying he’s insane. But during the trial, the court eventually found, no, he is sane. And in addition to lifting a restriction on the amount of time he could serve, it highlighted a problem.
And there was a commentator, a Norwegian commentator, who published an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2012, sharing what I think are some incisive thoughts. They wrote, “This verdict is also the end of a long trial process far too focused on Breivik’s persona and too little on the social and political climate that created him. By prosecuting on insanity, the state asked, ‘Who is Anders Behring Breivik?’ And to answer that question, every little piece of his personal history became important. But in a political and social context, this is an indifferent question. People such as Breivik have always existed, but the actions they take and the way they are formed differs from society to society.”
The author goes on to say that it’s not who Breivik is, but who he became, that is important. And then they write, “If Breivik had been from Afghanistan, Iraq, or Nigeria, we wouldn’t have asked what it was within these countries and cultures that made him a terrorist.”
Now, I think you could insert in Breivik’s place names like Roof, for example, in Charleston, perhaps a man in Louisville. Take your pick. I’ve written before in other places about the lengths that we’ll go to to separate ourselves from being implicated in these sorts of evil acts, because they are so extreme, and yet there is a clear step, there is a clear path from what is common to what is horrendous.
I well recall going every year, one or more times, to the Gun and Knife Show in Nashville when it would come, growing up. And not only did I commonly see sellers selling AR-15s and pitching them to folks by saying, “Well, all you gotta do is get a little kit and you can turn it to full auto, or as close as you might want to get it. Take this spring out, put this here, do that.” I recall the rack of literature there that was there without fail in some corner of the convention hall with little pamphlets that the author had seemingly done a sort of control-replace thing with, where he had taken the pamphlets that talked about the Jewish banking conspiracy and published one about the Catholic banking conspiracy, or the Masonic banking conspiracy, or the Illuminati banking conspiracy.
This sort of stuff is out there. And when we think that evil is sort of this book of magic that requires special knowledge to open up and decipher, it’s just wrong. It’s not something that is alien to us. It is a random email forward from a friend or family member that’s just taken one step too far. That’s what we’re seeing.
So it pays for us to look at ourselves and our communities. It pays for us to think about how we as a society have contributed to the things that these people have done or may do, and what we can do as individuals and as a church to combat it.
So this brings me back to 2012. Some of you who have children in Sumner County Schools will recall 2012 as the year that there was a postponement to the beginning of the year. It had to do with a conflict between the county commission and the school board about funding. Now, after that, there was a meeting that I was invited to as part of the Pastors Association. It was held nearby. And the person who invited us was a person that worked for World Vision, which is an evangelical refugee resettlement agency.
Now, if you look at a map of Nashville today and you think about the immigrant communities that are here, the Karen down at All Saints in Smyrna, if you think about the Sudanese down in Nashville and up in Gallatin, if you think about the Kurds from Iraq, all these communities came, brought here by World Vision partnering with churches and by Catholic Charities. That’s how many of them made it to our state.
So World Vision contacted the Hendersonville pastors, and the person was thinking, he said, “You know,” (this was in 2012, maybe into 2013) “We have a huge global refugee crisis. We need to find new places to resettle refugees. Nashville and Davidson County public schools are inundated. We think Hendersonville would be a good spot, and it’s because there’s a good economy, good schools in Sumner County Schools, and a lot of churches.”
And so the pastors talked about it. We spoke about it. And you might notice that you never heard anything about this. And it’s because when we talked about it, the consensus amongst the pastors was, “We can’t do that.” We can’t do that because we saw the fight over funding in our schools, and the rhetoric about people moving in here who are American citizens, and why should we pay for that, because we don’t have kids in schools. And we said, “We can’t do that because the minute we move a refugee family in here, they’ll have a target on them.”
There’s a path toward this sort of hate, and it can begin in places you don’t expect. And it should sadden us, I think, that the consensus of our pastors in 2012 was not that people might disagree with the refugee resettlement program, not that people might disagree or have policy differences about funding school, but that it could actually be dangerous, that there could be enough hate directed at refugee families that we wouldn’t want to put anybody in that situation at that time.
Lest you think that the pastors were misguided in that, in June of 2016, I went to visit my mom. She lives in the other Hendersonville, by the way, Hendersonville, North Carolina. And I was visiting her, and in the news I kept seeing St. James Episcopal Church, which is where I go when I’m there. I said, “Why is St. James in the news for?”
Well, it turns out that St. James’s vestry had invited somebody from Episcopal Migration Ministries to come and present to them about their ministry. Just an informative presentation. Happens all the time. We bring people into the vestry in our churches at different times to talk about all sorts of things when we’re thinking about what we might do in the future.
Well, word got out, and suddenly, rather than it being an informative session for the vestry, according to some people in the community, St. James was going to bring in all sorts of Syrian terrorists and settle them in Hendersonville, North Carolina. There were people sending threats. There were people protesting. And eventually, the county commission of Henderson County, North Carolina, passed a resolution to say, “We don’t want any refugees resettled in Henderson County, North Carolina, and we’re going to send this resolution to our statewide county meeting so that other counties can do the same.”
Now, of course, it’s not legally binding. The county government can’t stop that. But it shows what was going on.
And so if in 2012 we had started in Hendersonville a ministry to resettle refugees, and at some point in the intervening period St. Joseph’s vestry had invited somebody from Episcopal Migration Ministries to talk about it, it very well could have been our senior warden having to write letters to the newspaper to try to calm the frustrations and keep people from picketing on a Sunday morning or from sending nasty emails and letters, all because they say something very similar to what that man wrote before he went to that synagogue.
It’s hard to look, but we have to look. We can’t look away. And it’s not just looking at other people. It’s not just looking at other communities. We have to look at ourselves.
So if we hope to do that, as I said, Jeremiah shows us the only way. The only way we can do that is through faith in God. The only way we can do that is through the presence of Christ.
So we have this example of blind Bartimaeus, whose name, by the way, means son of honor. Bartimaeus is there on the street, begging. That’s all he can do. He hears Jesus is coming, and he cries out, “Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47), using the messianic title. When people try to get him to shush, he yells out even louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:48).
Jesus invites him over, and Bartimaeus, when he hears he’s been invited, casts off his cloak, which may very well have been the only possession he had, and he runs to Jesus. And Jesus asks him, “What would you have me do for you?” (Mark 10:51). He says, “Lord, let me see again. Let me see again” (Mark 10:51). Jesus tells him, “Your faith has made you well” (Mark 10:52).
So the first step is to see. But in order to see, sometimes we have to ask for Jesus’ help. In order to really see, in order to see the things that we can’t see just by looking, in order to have the sort of sight that we don’t just have through our eyes, in order to have the sort of vision that isn’t just physical, we need to ask Jesus to give us our sight.
So Jesus tells Bartimaeus, “Your faith has made you well. Go on your way” (Mark 10:52). And so Bartimaeus, who’s the first person in Mark’s Gospel who addresses Jesus by a messianic title and isn’t corrected, the first person who’s healed and isn’t told to keep it quiet, because, by the way, Jesus is transitioning. In Mark’s Gospel there is a transition coming, and he’s going to the cross. No need to keep it quiet now.
Bartimaeus decides that his way is following Jesus on the way. So if we pray that God would give us sight, and if we pray that Jesus would give us strength, then we know that Jesus will walk with us on the way. And that is the only way that will allow us to rid ourselves and our communities of the sort of hate and rhetoric that is all some folks need to flip a switch and go out and do something evil.
Amen.
Sermon Notes:
The notes written before hand
It was difficult to know where to begin this sermon. I suppose I’ll just begin with what made me throw out what I’d written earlier in the week and start over. Yesterday a tragedy occurred in Pittsburgh at Tree of Life Synagogue. At least, many of us instinctively call it a tragedy. But that may not be the best or most accurate word. Hurricanes are tragedies. Floods and other natural disasters are tragedies. A sudden death from a heart attack is a tragedy. These are forces of nature out of our control, or even if influenced by our actions, several steps removed from them.
The event at Tree of Life (and I’m using a circumlocution for the benefit of the younger ears among us), the earlier events in Louisville, in Los Vegas, In Charleston, in New Town, in Antioch just down the road–these were not tragedies, if by that we mean something that just happens. These events did not happen on their own. As Dorsey McConnell, the Bishop of Pittsburgh wrote yesterday, in response,
“The newscasts, sickeningly, are referring again and again to this horror as a “tragedy.” It is no such thing. A tragedy is inevitable. This was not. It was murder, murder of a particularly vile and poisonous kind. Human beings have moral agency. Someone chose to hate, and chose to kill. And now we are faced with a choice as well— to do nothing, or to reject this hatred in the strongest possible words and actions, and to refute in every way, in every forum, the philosophical foundations of anti-Semitism wherever they have gained a foothold in our churches and our society.
The Rt. Rev. Dorsey McConnell, Bishop of Pittsburgh
I agree with Bishop McConnell, but I think there’s a major step that we have to take in order to properly reject this particular hatred, and so many others: we have to see them, recognize them for what they are, and refuse to accept easy explanations or soothing platitudes that remove any hint of our own culpability–as individuals or as a society–in allowing or even fomenting hate and evil.
If this is what we need to do, then we could have no better example than the prophet Jeremiah, and as usual, no greater Lord than Jesus. Jeremiah teaches us what it is to look at what is, Jesus shows us how to live once we’ve seen it. In saving us by grace, Jesus frees us from the repetitive cycle justified by the logic of a world turned inward that fuels hatred and discord, and makes us citizens of the kingdom of God, meant for all people, which is always turned outward (you should know from the biblical descriptions, the gates of heaven are always open, it is the gates of hell that are closed, which cannot withstand the assaults of the church).
After the I read the news reports yesterday, these words came to mind:
“Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more” (Jeremiah 21:15).
This passage illustrates a facet of Jeremiah’s work that is essential. As Professor Ellen Davis puts it: “The prophet speaks for God in language that is literally visceral: ‘My guts, my guts; I writhe!’ (Jer. 4:19); ‘My guts yearn for [Ephraim/Israel]” (31:20). Although the visceral character of Jeremiah’s words is (regrettably) obscured by most translations, this feature of his poetry is an important indicator of his distinctive place within the prophetic canon. For Jeremiah is a witness to horror who never looks away, and thus he may teach us something of what it is to speak and act on God’s behalf in the most grievous situations” (Davis, 144).
It is that last bit that is so significant for us. It is so easy to look away. To turn the channel, literally or figuratively (caveat lector: ok, if your little kids are watching the news and see something come on that they shouldn’t watch, turn the channel or turn it off, “shield the joyous” as the prayer says). The point is not to do what is comfortable at the expense of facing the truth or doing what is right.
Jeremiah could shoulder this burden because he was faithful and followed God, delivering the word of God to the people in a time of military defeat and literal and figurative captivity, receiving God’s words of faithfulness and love, even as he railed against the evils and injustice he observed. The Prophet did not hesitate to challenge God or to lament his situation, or that of his people, but he did so in the midst of proclaiming hope based on God’s fidelity. Jeremiah was able to unflinchingly look at what was happening to his people, and to record the word of their trials and even their destruction, because he did so in the context of God’s ultimate faithfulness. So it is that the lament of Rachel losing her children–a poetic way to talk about actual death and destruction–takes place within the context of the earlier passage we heard this morning:
Thus says the Lord:
Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O Lord, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and
those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble;
for I have become a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is my firstborn (Jeremiah 31:7-9).
Because God is faithful to us, we can be freed from the anxieties and fears that prevent us from looking at ourselves and our society with clear eyes, and from responding to our neighbors with love. When set them aside and look at ourselves, we might be surprised what we see.
The day before he launched his attack on Tree of Life Synagogue, the perpetrator wrote on social media “HIAS (The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Earlier he had written, while posting a screen cap of their web site, “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided…” ominously thanking the organization for sharing a list of their supporters.
But here’s the thing. Some folks will want to say about him, as with the recent bomb maker, that they’re crazy, and shouldn’t be taken as indicative of any greater trend. But let’s be honest: how many of you have heard family, neighbors, friends, say similar things about the work of World Vision or Catholic Charities around Middle Tennessee? How many of you can point out similar phrases used to describe the Islamic center in Murfreesboro? I know I can. And if I’ve heard it given the way people often hold back around clergy, I know some of you have heard it.
Some people who perpetrate attacks are clinically mentally ill. Most aren’t. Paranoia and conspiracy theories are popular because they have explanatory power that is attractive to rational people given certain prior convictions and commitment to fear-laden worldviews, fostering different sorts of confirmation bias. Was every Nazi clinically insane? Every Soviet citizen who transported former comrades to the Gulag? As philosopher Hannah Arendt convincingly argues, evil is much simpler and more frightening than that. It’s most frightening because it is banal, ordinary to the point of being boring. It’s not a magical text that takes a special tool to decode. It’s a random off-color email forward from an eccentric relative taken a step too far.
If people can shoot folks in a gas station parking lot for their music being loud, or for texting in a movie theater before a movie starts, or pull guns on each other on the interstate, is it really that surprising that there are folks on the fringes–we hope they’re fringes–who only need the slightest permission to act on hate founded on fear and often willful ignorance?
In 2011 Anders Breivik, as self-styled Christian Nationalist from Norway carried out an attack in that country. Initially, prosecutors treated him as insane. But eventually he was found fit to stand trial and the time limit on his incarceration was lifted as a result. A Norwegian author writing in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2012 shared these incisive thoughts:
This verdict is also the end of a long trial process far too focused on Breivik’s persona, and to little on the social and political climate that created him. By prosecuting on insanity, the state asked “Who is Anders Behring Breivik”, and to answer that question every little piece of his personal history became important. But in a political and social context, this is an indifferent question. People such as Breivik have always existed.. But the actions they take and the way they are formed differs from society to society.
The author goes on to say that the is not who Breivik is, but why he became who he became that is important:
If Breivik had been from Afghanistan, Iraq or Nigeria, we would have asked what it was within these countries and cultures that made him a terrorist.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/24/anders-breivik-verdict-norway
I have written before about the lengths we will go to to distance ourselves from the perpetrators of these attacks, but the reality is, for the most part, they aren’t that removed. Growing up I used to go to Gun and knife shows a few times every year. I heard the pitch of folks selling AR-15s by talking to buyers about how easily you could convert one to full-auto. I saw the pamphlets that were inevitably at at least one literature rack where the same author seemingly published the same booklet over and over, only swapping out the word Jewish/Catholic/Masonic/Illuminati banking conspiracy. I recognize the similarity of those well-worn bits of rhetoric to claims that church-based refugee resettlement agencies are just in it for the money and are doing it all–willingly or as dupes–at the behest of the UN or the Vatican in order to weaken the United States.
Which brings me back to 2012. Some of you who had children in school that year, or who worked in Sumner County Schools that year. If you were around and remember, we had some difficulty starting school that year. There was a conflict between the School Board and the County Commission over funding. Eventually schools were started and there was a political shift in the county so that we haven’t had another issue like that.
About a year after that, a representative from World Vision asked if they could present to the Hendersonville Pastors Association. It turned out that they were looking for new communities in which to resettle refugees, and they thought Hendersonville met the criteria: good local economy, available housing, lots of churches. You never heard anything about this initiative from me, because the pastors collectively decided it wasn’t a good idea given the politics in the county at the time. You see, the rhetoric had gotten so heated about the cost of education, and how the children of people “moving in here” were driving up costs and possibly property taxes, that, as we put it to World Vision: we wouldn’t want refugee families to come into a situation where they’d immediately have a target on their back.
Another way in which this cuts close to home. As you know, there’s another Hendersonville. Hendersonville, North Carolina. In the summer of 2016 we were visiting my mom who lives there, and heard some rumblings in local politics.
What do we do once we’ve faced up to the wickedness abroad in the world, and the wickedness within? When we’ve looked squarely at the suffering and injustice in the world, and the wounds inside ourselves? That’s where Bartimaeus comes in. Mark includes his story in our gospel text as an exemplar–and a more direct exemplar would be difficult to find.
“For Mark, giving sight to the blind is the beginning and the end of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem” (Bryan, 104) but the stories are not exact echos of one another–for one thing, Bartimaeus addresses Jesus two times by the clearly Messianic title “Son of David” and is not corrected for it. Nor does Jesus tell him to remain silent. Jesus knows where he’s headed and there’s no point in encouraging silence now–the time approaches. And in the midst of this, Bartimaeus has his blindness–often a metaphor for idolatry–lifted, receiving his sight, a metaphor for faith, and not incidentally having left everything behind when he threw his cloak aside, begins to follow Jesus on the way, that is, the path of discipleship.
When we have faced the truth about the world in its specific sins, in which we and our society are implicated, will we turn away? When we have discovered that we have been blind.
