FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Sermon by Rev. Craig N. Goodrich

October 29, 2006

Scripture: Psalm 40, Mark 10:35-52

THE GIFT OF SIGHT

A year ago my parents moved from the home of my childhood in Bethesda, Maryland where they had lived for 51 years. They are alive and well in a retirement community in Charlottesville and I am grateful. But the other day when I was thinking of my parents and that old house on Corbin Road, a memory of Friday and Saturday nights, the weekend nights, when I was in high school came back to me. Invariably, as I would set out with my buddies, or if I were fortunate enough to have a date, my mother would come to the front door as I departed and lean after me calling, “Remember who you are!” It was both a question and an exhortation. She meant I believe, “carry with you what you have learned here, at the family table, about love and respect, integrity and compassion” and, of course, she also meant “stay out of trouble!”

It is important isn’t it, that we remember who we are? And on Reformation Sunday we are reminded of our heritage of faith. It goes back to the Reformation of the 16^th century in Europe, ignited by a German monk Martin Luther and advanced by John Knox among others in Scotland and John Calvin in Switzerland. It is Calvin in particular whose theology has greatly influenced the Presbyterian Church and does still to this day.

Of course, if you really want to know what it means to be a Presbyterian you should read our Book of Order and our Book of Confessions which together comprise our Constitution. But let’s get to the point. What was the Reformation all about? Our Book of Order says this: “In its confessions, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) identifies with the affirmations of the Protestant Reformation. The focus of these affirmations is the rediscovery of God’s grace in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures.” (Book of Order G-2.0400).

The rediscovery of God’s grace in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. This was precisely Martin Luther’s own experience in reading Paul’s letter to the Romans.

“Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punished sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God…”

Luther goes on to describe how he came, by God’s mercy, to understand that God’s righteousness that Paul speaks about comes as a gift of faith and that grace which comes through Jesus Christ cannot be earned. Rather it is “merciful God [who] justifies us by faith.” Luther says that upon realizing this, “I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally new face of Scripture showed itself to me.” (Justo Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought, Volume III at page 33).

Luther’s revelation, his experience of explosive grace, eventually led him to his posting of 95 theses on Cathedral door in Wittenberg challenging many of the practices and doctrines of the Church of Rome and the rest is history. But it all started with Luther’s rediscovery of the grace of Jesus Christ.

Barbara Brown Taylor has written “God’s grace is not simply the infinite supply of divine forgiveness upon which hopeless sinners depend. Grace is also the mysterious strength God lends human beings who commit themselves to the work of transformation. To repent is both to act from that grace and to ask for more of it, in order to follow Christ into the startling freedom of new life.” (Speaking of Sin at 85-86).

You see, there is enormous power in the experience of grace.

John Calvin, in his preface to his commentary on the Psalms writes of his own “sudden conversion” as a young man: “I was so inspired by a taste of true religion and I burned with such desire to carry my study further...” Says one writer of Calvin, “the depth of his inner personal gratitude at the undeserved mercy of God found poignant expression in his so-called crest or seal. Picturing a heart upon an open, outstretched hand, the motto read, “My heart I give Thee, Lord, eagerly and earnestly.” (Conversions, edited by Hugh Kerr and John Mulder at p.24).

Grace, mercy, gratitude: They all go together, don’t they? The Reformation - a rediscovery of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Grace. It is no accident that the first line of our own Statement of Purpose on the cover of the bulletin calls us to be a “community of grace.” And it is no accident that we baptize infants as a sign of God’s grace which reaches out to us in love and mercy before we can even respond.

It is all about the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

In the Scripture this morning from Mark’s gospel, Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem with his disciples. He has just told them that he must suffer and die. James and John then ask him for a seat on his right and left in glory to which Jesus responds that those who would be great must be the servant or slave of all for Jesus himself, the Son of Man, came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.

A little later as they leave Jericho, from the roadside, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is passing by and cries out “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.” Those with Jesus try to silence him, but he cries all the louder, “Son of David have mercy on me.” Jesus hearing the cry stops and asks his followers to call the beggar to him. When told that Jesus will see him, Bartimaeus leaps up, so fast that he leaves his cloak behind. Jesus asks him “What do you want me to do for you? (The same question he had asked James and John) to which Bartimaeus exclaims “Master, let me receive my sight.” Jesus says “Go your way; your faith has made you well. And the text says “And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.”

What are we to make of Jesus here? And where do you find yourself in this story?

First, note that the disciples never quite “get it.” Looking for positions of prestige and privilege, Jesus tells them that to follow him requires servant hood, or as Henri Nouwen has said “downward mobility.” But aren’t we a lot like James and John? So often we just want God to bless our plans, don’t we? We have it all wrong. The question to ask is not what do I want God to do for me, but rather who is God calling me to be and what is it God calling me to do?

Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner writes about the necessity of keeping our lives open to God for as he says “Even your own life is not your business. It is also God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought... Go where your best prayers take you…” (Telling Secrets at p.92)

What about you? Where is God calling you to be a servant? Where will your best prayers take you?

Maybe it is to be like Jesus. To hear the cry of those in despair and distress, to come alongside the disabled or the shunned of our day, to respond with compassion and to attend to their needs.

But how are we to get there? Sometimes, it must begin with our own cry for mercy.

Annie Lamott says somewhere that there really are only two prayers. The first is “Help me. Help me. Help me!” The second is “Thank you. Thank You. Thank You!” a prayer of gratitude.

The cry, the prayer “Help me, help me, help me!” or “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, have you ever prayed that prayer? Or the prayer of the psalmist, whose heart has failed and cries: “I am poor and needy but the Lord takes thought for me.” Like Bartimaeus the beggar, we long to see again, to be healed, to receive mercy and grace.

“Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.” Do you recognize it.? It is the prayer we pray every Sunday – actually we sing it --after we have confessed our sins, or in other words, after we have told the truth about who we really are. Did you miss it this morning?

“Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

Halloween is coming up on Tuesday. I don’t know about you but it seems to me that each year now it becomes a bigger deal, with decorations rivaling Christmas.

My wife Andie and I were reminiscing recently, something we have taken to doing a lot since this year we have become “empty nesters”, and were talking about our childhood Halloween experiences, the excitement of it all, being scared when we were very little. Some of the rules: no crossing the big street, don’t go too far from home, stick together. The graduation from the paper grocery bag to the pillow case for the loot, the disappointment of getting an apple rather than a Clark bar. And then the costumes, the cheap plastic masks through which it was almost impossible to breathe. Do you remember those?

Andie recalled two of her favorite costumes: She was a nurse and an Austrian girl (she was a big Sound of Music fan). I recalled that I had been at various times, a soldier, football player and skeleton. Both of us it turns out were “hobos” an easy costume – just use a crayon or make up to draw whiskers, rough up your hair, wear old clothes and tie a kerchief bundled at the end of a mop handle or stick?

Do you remember, people would ask, “Who are you?” and you were never quite sure whether they meant who you were in costume or who you really were, underneath the mask? And do you remember the relief at the end of the evening coming home, taking off the costume and being in a place where you could be you, just you, a little boy or a little girl, and, of course, with all that candy!

Halloween, a night devoted to pretending to be something or someone other than we really are.

Life is a lot like that, isn’t it? It’s not just the children who are pretending. We all wear masks. We can name them, can’t we?

There is the mask of self sufficiency, the mask of importance and busyness; the mask of power, the mask of perfection, the mask of style, the mask of do-gooding; mask of pretence and indifference, the mask of success, however we might define it; the mask of “I’ve got it all together” and everything’s under control. That’s my personal favorite. I am sure can name others.

And when people ask us who are we? How do we respond? Deep inside, behind the masks we are weary. We long to be known and loved for who we are. We long for God’s grace. And we wish we could cry for mercy like Bartimaeus.

John Claypool, who was so loved by this Congregation, in his lectures entitled The Preaching Event tells about an invitation that came to him one day in his early years ministry. It was from a Presbyterian minister who was struggling, like Claypool with overwhelming demands and needs.

“I am calling five of you whom I trust with this request. Would you agree to meeting with me in my study once a week for six times? The only contract will be that we will try to be honest and hear each other. Perhaps we can develop enough trust so that we can take off our masks and show each other where we really hurt. And maybe we can become a band of brothers who can bequeath healing and encouragement to each other. I do not know if this will work, but if it does not, I’ll go under for sure!”

Claypool then describes his feeling of foreboding at the invitation, his fear of making his own wounds and inadequacies visible, his desire that others see him as a “winner”.

He writes, “It was not at all easy for me to decide what to do, but I suppose if one is hurting badly enough, he or she will do almost anything.”

So he went… “I was absolutely astonished by what began to unfold before my eyes. For one thing I discovered that every one of us around the table was struggling with much the same problems... We were all so much more alike than I had realized, and I was amazed to see how in the context, honesty evoked compassion”.

“Thus it was one morning, with all the courage that I could muster, I did something that I had never done before. I took off my mask. I related the story...about that old and deep sense of nobodiness, about how hard I had tried to make a name for myself and how weary and lonely and frustrated I had become. ….”

“When I had pretty much emptied myself, the man in the group for whom I felt the least natural affinity–an Episcopal rector who was well-born and had all the graces of Kentucky aristocracy—was the first to speak”.

“I hear you John, he said, I hear you. And I know what you are talking about, because I am walking that road myself.’ Then he said, ‘Do you know what we need…We need to hear the gospel down in our guts. ”In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Ye are the light of the world.’ He does not say, ‘You have got to be number one in order to get light or you must out -achieve everybody else in order to earn light.’ He says simply, ‘You are light.’ If you and I,’ he went on, “could ever really experience that and believe it, then we could do what Jesus said. We could let our light shine and people could see the good thing God has created, and give glory to the Father in heaven.”

Claypool continues… “I cannot explain why I had never before responded to that word of the gospel for I had read it many times… All I can report is that, in that moment, something like fire moved from the top of my head to the bottom of my heart. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of grace. All of a sudden it dawned on me that I had been mistaken from the earliest moment of self definition. The truth was – I did have worth in me from the beginning, and it was worth that resulted not from what I had to make of myself, but rather from what God had made of me when he called me out of nothing into being...”

“That morning something akin to what happened to Luther in his Tower experience and to John Wesley at Aldersgate happened to me in the study of a Presbyterian minister. My consciousness was altered irrevocably that day. I began to sense that grace is the foundation of all things.”

Claypool goes on to call it “primal grace.”

Well, what about you on this morning?

Do you need to rediscover of the grace of God in Jesus Christ? Or experience it for the first time?

Listen, there is nothing more important than that you know this:

God loves you. You are a beloved child of God. You are not alone.

Here in this place we all cry for mercy. Here in this place- in this community of grace - it is safe. Safe to take our masks off.

For here we receive mercy. Here we receive sight. Here we receive grace and the mysterious strength to follow Jesus.

And here by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we discover who we really are.

Let us pray: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Lord for your mercy and your grace. Amen.

Benediction: As you go from this place, remember who you are. And may the love of God the Father, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the fellowship and power of the Holy Spirit be with you all now and forever. Amen.