"Beyond Being Naive," October 28, 2012

Job 42 Mark 10:46-52 This week, one of the Board Members responsible for building the Clinic in Sudan, described that in retrospect what we had done was “Beyond naïve.” For our pastor, to volunteer to go into a war-zone, was beyond naïve. To have recognized there were no ATMs or Banks or Stores of any kind, so to carry packs of hundred dollar bills hidden in his shoes and taped to his own chest, was beyond naive. For us to think, that we could load everything and anything necessary, not only to build a clinic but to operate as one, into cargo containers in Arkansas to be shipped around the world, then trucked across open Savannah where there are no roads. To receive word one of the containers was stolen and to believe the other was lost, and still to send volunteers after them to build it was beyond naïve. To be at the Equator, needing water for survival, and to make concrete, let alone to provide health care, only to discover after arrival that the only existing well had run dry, all of that was beyond being naïve. And yet only when we venture into circumstances which are completely impossible can we allow our egos and intellects and desire for control to get out of the way, for us to witness miracles. Faith cannot be planned for, or orchestrated, or made to happen, if circumstances necessitate, then what we believe in is not faith, is not the act of God, but our own deceptions. These last four weeks we have been recounting the story of Job. Reading this together, I cannot fathom a passage any better fashioned for our time. For here is an adult man, who like many of us has always believed in God, always worshipped and trusted, and life had been good. 90% of Job's early success was simply in showing up. Naïvely, Job believed that good things happen to good people, so do what is expected, get an education, get a job, get married, work hard and you will live happily ever after. That is how the Fairy Tales we told our children end, is it not? Yet, suddenly both the Stock Market and the Housing Market collapsed, and the climates changed, there were Wars in multiple places, and catastrophic chronic illnesses attacking our bodies and in depression attacking our minds. Job lost his employment and his reputation; he lost his children and their home, their marriage and friends all turned away. Job's own life seemed to attack his body. Yet, where Job's spouse and friends all told him that God was not real, either give up on God, or just go through the motions of repentance regardless of what you believe, still Job held fast to the conviction that God is real, but Job came to recognize that perhaps his faith and life had been naïve. Beyond naïvely going through the motions of life, the seasons change time evolves and a different faith, different practices may be called for as life's circumstance change, not necessarily in a straight line of progression. Struggling with God, arguing with God, lamenting the circumstance of life, all were very real. We have been carefully acculturated to not lament. Lamentation is not wallowing in self-pity, but instead claiming what was, reflecting upon how important different relationships and circumstances were to us, is an essential stage of grieving so as to be able to move on. Without lamentation we would keep making the same mistakes over and over, without considering whether to change and why. Responding to God as real and living, in the end, regardless of what he had come to, Job would be blessed by God for having been faithful to believing in a living God, which Job's friends did not. The story of Job is a very real and appropriate book of faith for us and for our circumstances. Our times and place and culture are vastly different, yet the loss of jobs and foreclosure of homes, the eroding of marriages, the illness and death of children, attacks upon our reputation, shame, the loss of identity, and everything we thought we knew, ALL are very human realities and very similar occasions where some lose their faith in God. The great challenge to the church today, is not over the music we sing, not over the traditions we follow, not over the many and various socio-political issues that have divided the church, faith has survived all these. The great challenge to faith, today as in every time, is over whether we continue to believe in a living faith in a living God or whether we give up. Uniquely different, from the time of Job, is that the Messiah has come. God did not leave us in our circumstance, but like Pygmalian, the Creator so believed in and loved the Creation, that the Creator stepped into and became one with Creation. Even more, that the Creator so loved Creation, that the Creator sacrificed the Creator's own life to change Creation from a naïve faith, to something far beyond naïve. As we read this passage from Mark's Gospel, we recognize that this is the final miracle Jesus is requested before going into Jerusalem and to the Cross. We recognize also, that Jesus has healed many unnamed people along the way, those possessed with demons, those who are deaf and lame and unable to speak, children who have died, and adults with incurable diseases, the very first of which had also been a man who was blind. Reading of this second healing of a blind man, we have to wonder what is different, what has changed, we no longer naïvely doubt if Jesus can heal blindness we have seen it, so why describe the restoration of sight as a second miracle? Three things immediately are visible. In the first healing, Jesus must heal the man twice. The first time, the man opens his eyes, suddenly for the first time he can see, but people appear as if trees walking. The things of reality, the circumstances are indistinct and undefined, requiring Jesus healing his blindness a second time. Having followed Jesus through these last two chapters, this second blind-man is healed because Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants Jesus to do for him. Second, that Jesus had just posed that exact same question to two his disciples. James and John had come to Jesus as if Trick or Treating, asking him to give them whatever they want. Jesus responded to his own disciples “What do you want me to do for you?” and they had asked for power, to first among equals, that when he came into power that they would sit for eternity at his right and left hand. Having heard two of his favorite disciples' request, Jesus asks the exact same question of a blind beggar, who does not ask for power, but only for healing. Third, of all the people that Jesus heals in the Gospel according to Mark, Bartimaeus the blind beggar, is the only person who is named. Why, Who is he? We need to remember the context, the circumstance of when and how the Word of God has come to us. After the Egyptian Pharaohs, after the rise of Israel with King Saul, King David and King Solomon, came the Babylonians, then the Persian Empire, then the Empire of Medes, then advanced Alexander the Great and the Greeks with the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and these gave way to the Roman Empire of the Caesars. Different from earlier transitions, the Romans preserved the teaching and philosophy of the Greeks. Anyone who was learned, anyone who had been taught to read and write had read Homer and Plato's Republic, and another discourse by Plato named after the principle philosopher in the piece “Timaeus.” Plato was in awe of the reasoned orderly intelligent design of the universe. According to Plato in Timaeus, in the beginning there were three forces, Chaos, Intelligence and Necessity. The eternal Craftsman of life, applied intelligence and necessity to the chaos that was, and from that point forward necessity and intelligent response have evolved all that is. Now according to Plato, these three are perpetually in tension, so when creatures do not behave intelligently or respond to necessity, they can also devolve toward chaos. According to Timaeus, Plato reasoned that if people have been “airheads” in this life they would be reincarnated next as birds. And according to Plato, remember this is Plato not me, when a man was weak or cowardly, they would be reincarnated as a woman. But, this theory being put forward by the philosopher Plato, the highest achievement of a man would be to be a philosopher, one who devoted their life to intellectual pursuit of what is necessary and how to build success upon success, achievement upon achievement, so as to become as powerful and wealthy and unconcerned about this life as a god. More than this, according to the Greeks there was physical sight and blindness, and also in philosophy, in understanding what is not perceived by the senses but only by the mind a true visionary would be blind in this life. We read this second story of healing a man, a blind beggar, not naïvely as the healing of blindness, but undercutting Plato, this son of Timaeus, Bartimaeus, has come to recognize that despite all his achievements, all his philosophy and understanding still he is blind and the only way to truly see is to come to Jesus, to ask for healing from God. Before leaving Job, we need to name, that in order for Job's friends to be healed, in order for the blessings to be conferred upon Job and his daughters, first his friends needed to lament their own failings and hardships and faith struggle. Then Job needed to make an offering for them. What we do as the church is more often than not, for others in the community, in the world and in future generations, and not for our benefit. Our responsibility as the people of faith, as the sons of Timaeus and the daughters of Job, is to accept and embrace what is beyond naïve, to struggle with the realities of life and to struggle with God believing in miracles beyond our understanding, but miracles we have seen.