What Do You Want Me to Do for You?

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

October 24, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Prelude

 

Greeting and Announcements

 

Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

 

Call to Worship

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, "The LORD has done great things for them."

The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoice.

Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses in the Negeb.

May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

 

Hymn 57: O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing

 

Prayer of Confession:

O Holy One, we call to you and name you as eternal, ever-present, and boundless in love. Yet there are times, O God, when we fail to recognize you in the dailyness of our lives. Sometimes shame clenches tightly around our hearts, and we hide our true feelings. Sometimes fear makes us small, and we miss the chance to speak from our strength. Sometimes doubt invades our hopefulness, and we degrade our own wisdom.

Holy God, in the daily round from sunrise to sunset, remind us again of your holy presence hovering near us and in us. Free us from shame and self-doubt. Help us to see you in the moment-by-moment possibilities to live honestly, to act courageously, and to speak from our wisdom.

 Amen.

 

Assurance

 

Hear the good news: Jesus came into this world not to condemn us, but to save us. In Christ we are forgiven. Amen.

 

Anthem

 

Mark 10: 46-52

10:46 They 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.

10:47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

10:48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"

10:49 Jesus stood still and said, "Call him here." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; get up, he is calling you."

10:50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.

10:51 Then 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."

10:52 Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has made you well." Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

A Message

“What Do You Want Me to Do for You?”

 

Good morning, friends! So, we’re finding ourselves in a middle ground today following the end of “Stump of the Preacher 2021” and getting deeper into the fall, so today I’m doing something I haven’t done in quite a while and taking you guys into the Revised Common Lectionary! Some ministers preach the lectionary-appointed Gospel reading every single Sunday and so it shall always be, and some never even look at the lectionary and pick what they’re going to preach on Sunday morning on a whim about an hour before the service starts. I’m personally in the middle, though I lean closer and closer to the latter as the years pass; there are many strong advantages to using the lectionary in terms of worship planning and consistency across churches, and if you guys chat with friends who go to different churches this afternoon there’s a good chance they will have also heard a sermon this morning about Bartimaeus. I like to break away from the lectionary periodically so that I can take you into parts of the Bible that the lectionary never features, and so that I can preach on texts that the Spirit calls me to. Today we have a happy place between courses of action: a lectionary appointed Gospel passage that I would love to break down for you, and the Spirit calling me to it.

 

So here we have it: this short chunk of Markan text about a dude named Bartimaeus. When we take a close read of scripture, like we are with this passage this morning, the first factor we need to consider is the book the passage in question is coming out of. We’re in the Second Testament, in the Gospels, looking at Mark. We’re reading a story that has historical people and places in it—like the town of Jericho—but that is ultimately intended to tell us the Good News about Jesus above all else. Further, since we’re in Mark, what we really need to appreciate is that this is the oldest canonical Gospel, one we believe the author wrote in haste as Rome conquered the Southern Kingdom of Israel in 66 CE. Mark gets straight to the point. He doesn’t bother with a symbol-laden prologue about Jesus’ origins like John, nor does he attempt to pen a birth story like Luke and Matthew. Mark doesn’t care. Nobody’s got time for that. His earliest version of the Resurrection story ends so abruptly that we don’t even find out if the women at Jesus’ tomb told anyone they saw him. Mark doesn’t waste a drop of ink on extra detail, even details that we might find very meaningful. That means that when we’re reading from him every single word has a vital detail in it.

 

So let’s get into it: Jesus and his disciples have come and gone through Jericho, accompanied by their entourage of Jesus followers. As they are about to leave town, there—close enough to a major city to find things, but relegated to the curb—is a blind man. His position and activity there tell us quite a bit about his social standing: he begs, meaning he has no home, no family who will care for him, and he is not only disabled but very poor. We also need to understand, even if lifting up this particular detail gets repetitive, that in his day people didn’t believe that a person living with a disability simply had a medical condition and could live a good life with some support. People believed that either the person in question, or their parents, angered a god and were cursed with an affliction as a consequence. We don’t know, but this particular man may have been abandoned by parents who also believed that. Either way, though he doesn’t have his family around right now, they clearly aren’t so far removed from him that no one remembers who this man is. His name is Bartimaeus, and his father’s name is Timaues. Mark wasn’t like Matthew, he didn’t give careful genealogical details, not even for Jesus, so him bothering to name both Bartimaeus and Timaeus signals that both of these men might have been important at some point.

 

But not anymore. Bartimaeus is so far relegated to the sideline that he didn’t know Jesus, the dude with the huge fan club, was in town until he was leaving. He managed to catch something in passing, though, and as Jesus was walking away we learn, based on Bartimaeus’ cry to Jesus as the Son of David, that Bartimaeus is also Jewish.

 

We also learn Bartimaeus isn’t super popular. As soon as he starts calling to Jesus, the other people in the area yell back for him to shut his pie hole. But either his faith in Jesus, or his lack of caring about what others think of him, and likely both, save him. Jesus tells the haters to shush and invites Bartimaeus into his presence. We know how this story ends—Bartimaeus gets his sight back and starts following Jesus. But Bartimaeus’ strong reaction to hearing that Jesus wanted to talk to him is something we shouldn’t blow past.

 

Mark tells us that Bartimaeus “threw off his cloak”, and to our modern sensibilities this sounds like he had some bulky winter coat on and he took it off so he could run faster. So, we need to understand how clothes worked back then. Men in this time and place typically wore two layers—a heavier outer layer called a cloak, and a lighter tunic under it called a coat. Most poor people couldn’t afford much clothing, so they didn’t own a coat, that inner layer. They just wore the cloak, the outer layer, and they only had one. So, upon learning that Jesus was willing to talk to him, Bartimaeus was so filled with rapture that he threw off the only clothing he had and ran to Jesus in his birthday suit. And bear in mind, he might not have any idea what his body looks like these days.

 

The outcome of this story, of a blind man being able to see, has long been lifted up as the big miracle in this story, and people who hold that interpretation are in no way incorrect. But I think the bigger miracle happened just before that, and had nothing to do with Bartimaeus’ eyes. Far greater than Bartimaeus’ transformation from a blind man to a man with sight is this transformation from a lonely man to a man with a friend. He goes from this very sad state of isolation and alienation to belonging. Now he has a family again, in Christ. Now he has many friends in Jesus’ followers. And the Good News that he’ll never be alone again is such a blessing to him that he’s willing to walk the streets naked from now on. Jesus sees him for who he is, and loves him for it. And y’all, I have to tell you, I really think of myself as a faithful person, but I know I don’t have running-down-a busy-street-in-the-buff faith. We all learn something from Bartimaeus’ faith, because it is healing in its own right, and a rare thing to find.

 

The biggest detail that I want to lift up in this passage is the question that Jesus asks Bartimaeus. It strikes me that Jesus asks a question at all, he doesn’t just cut to the chase and make his eyes work, since to most onlookers that was what Bartimaeus needed the most. But Jesus doesn’t assume that. Instead he asks Bartimaeus a really open-ended question: What do you want me to do for you? And then he waits for Bartimaeus to judge for himself what he wants the most in the world.

 

How would you answer that question? If Jesus was walking down the street and you managed to get a minute of his undivided attention, and a world of possibilities hinged on your answer to this question, what would you say? Would you even know what to say? Do you know yourself well enough to know what you want the most?

 

And, maybe more than that, would you trust Jesus enough to be willing to tell him the thing you want the very most? This is a very vulnerable question. This is running-down-the-street-nekkid-level vulnerable. That’s why Bartimaeus excelled in answering it. Are you willing to let Jesus see you for exactly who you are?

 

If one of you asked me right now, “Natalie, what do you want?” my answers would be really different depending on who’s asking, why you’re asking, and how much I want to tell you. I could go surface-level on you and just say, “Hey, ya got any chocolate?” We deflect vulnerability by making jokes. I could go a level deeper and say, “Aw, man, if you’ve got an extra 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep lying around, I’ll take them.” I could go another level deeper and say, “Well, I hope we have a joyous worship service this morning.” That’s as deep as my job, and a core task within it. But that’s still something you could just guess because you know I’m a pastor. What could I tell you I want that you wouldn’t be able to just guess?

 

I could go deeper, and tell you, “I want my husband and kids to be happy.” In telling you that, I’m giving you that I care more about my family than myself. I could go deeper still, and say “I want my oldest son to face the world as a neurodivergent person with strength and confidence.” I could say “I want my daughter to live into that mind she’s been blessed with”, and “I want my baby to know joy.”

 

I could do better than that, but, frankly, not in public. I’m not as brave as Bartimaeus. He didn’t care who could see and hear. But I do.

 

How well are you willing to let Jesus know you, in public or in private? Vulnerability and faith don’t always go together as seamlessly as they should. Unlike Bartimaeus, we think about how other people will perceive us, and we think about what our faith identity means to our public reputation. We also care deeply about how we present to our friends right here in our churches. In order to tell someone what you want, you first have to be willing to reveal what you don’t have, and a lot of us just don’t want to show that much of our hand. It’s hard for us to reveal that we have any weaknesses, or problems. That we need help. Even when we know perfectly well that the people around us love us, and would do anything for us, still so often we’d rather hide behind a veil of “normal”. A contemporary Christian group called Casting Crowns describes how they experience that like this:

 

Is there anyone that fails
Is there anyone that falls
Am I the only one in church today feelin' so small

Cause when I take a look around
Everybody seems so strong
I know they'll soon discover
That I don't belong

So I tuck it all away, like everything's okay
If I make them all believe it, maybe I'll believe it too
So with a painted grin, I play the part again
So everyone will see me the way that I see them

Are we happy plastic people
Under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness
And smiles to hide our pain
But if the invitation's open
To every heart that has been broken
Maybe then we close the curtain
On our stained glass masquerade

 

It’s a huge leap of faith to risk exposing what you want, and what you need. But the alternative, pretending you want nothing and everything is fine, makes you a lot like Bartimaeus before he meets Jesus—perhaps not blind, poor, or begging for money, but awfully lonely. When we’re willing to shed the veil that covers what Jesus could do to help us, we joyously leap from the sidelines of our own faith and into the arms of a companion who will make sure that even if we go without a lot of other things, we’ll never be alone again.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

Hymn 454: Open My Eyes, That I May See

 

Offering, doxology, and prayer of dedication

 

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

 

In the midst of all that occupies our time and energy, we need sacred time with you, O God, to reorient ourselves. It is easy to get so caught up in what others are doing that we forget that you are our Center, our Rock, our True Home. Nudge us back towards you, Holy One, because there is much to distract us. We want to focus on you. We need to focus on you. For a few moments, let us sit in silence together while we turn ourselves to you, God, and listen for your still small voice.

Thank you, Gracious God, for never giving up on us-for forgiving us countless times and for welcoming us back because we are prone to wander. We pray that others may know your grace and your forgiveness. If there are ways we can show your love to others, open our eyes to the opportunities. Help us to see you in those we meet.

God, we are so aware of many needs in this world. We ask your spirit of wholeness and hope to rest on those on our prayer list, those we know who are in need, and your children around the world who desperately need you today. (By SusannaTB)

 

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

 

Hymn 557: Blest Be the Tie That Binds

 

Benediction

Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all God’s people we say together, Amen.

 

Postlude

 

All scripture comes from the New Revised Standard Version