October 25, 2009 Sermon

“Son of Dirt” Mark 10:46-52 Lawrence Jackman

Today is Reformation Sunday. We Protestants make quite a thing of it usually. Now I am not exactly here to kill the sacred cow, but…… is anyone up for hamburger? My belief is that the whole business is infinitely more complex than we make it generally.

In 1500 the world of Europe was literally in the initial pangs of labor and giving birth to change on many fronts. The Reformation was something that had to happen just as a birth does when it is time.

There was political change underway. City-states were rising to the top of the political ladder. They had evolved from an earlier system but the change was of real substance. There was social change. The Feudal definitions of who people were and what they would do had broken down. In the between space of princes and serfs there arose a middle class of entrepreneurs and manufacturers. Division of labor really began to push the old definitions.

Economic change was afoot also. It was the start of the demise of the Agricultural age when everything pivoted around crops and movement into an age of manufacturing and toward improved farming as a sort of industry, if not yet industry in the full sense.

Technological change was out there dramatically. Now, I guess we have a hard time seeing it as true technology, but it was. The movable type printing press truly was a pivot point in history. It pulled together groups of people and made the world much smaller. It was as radical as the internet. Learning, education science were all under significant pressures to change. The Muslim world kick started a lot of our Western tradition into movement forward.

So all this stuff is out there. And for every new force of change there is an equal and opposite reaction to hold onto what has been. There is a literal life and death struggle to keep the world as it is. As with all such struggles there were serious attempts to co-opt God on behalf of one side or the other.

It is into this swirl of chaotic forces stumbles a little Augustinian monk named Martin Luther. He really had little to no grasp of the cosmic issues. His was a personal issue. Luther was about extreme pathological guilt. He burned with a sense of his own unworthiness. He was so driven by his sense of guilt that he literally wore out confessors. On his way to his quarters from confession he would remember something or become remorseful that he didn’t confess more freely. He would return to confession to fess up to this new deficit in his character.

Luther, quite unwittingly became the spark which ignited a re-formation of the whole business of the Church. He was teaching the book of Romans and a verse lit up for him. The citation was one that suddenly allowed the gift of lifting of his sense of guilt. The news he had never really appreciated was that “the righteous are made so through trust”. Had he been around in our experience we would have pumped him full of Zoloft and prayed for the best. There were no pharmaceuticals, but there was this promise. You do not need to be burdened with guilt—you can be free: just trust and be made just.

The awareness unleashed in Luther a sincere desire to talk the issue in scholarly dialogue. So, he went over to the chapel door and posted his thesis statements about his thoughts on the door. It was an invitation to debate—not a manifesto.

But the forces were out there. They played themselves out with Luther, the Papacy and the rest of the players being simply that—players in theater that they only scarcely influenced. And so, history was written by forces too strong to resist and it was shaped by the deep inner need in a single person.

Jesus walked down the road one day through Jericho. It was a different world from ours and certainly from the world of Luther. In really broad brush terms here was the problem and the fix of the religious world in which Jesus was born. The problem was, according to the religious people, that humans were not clean—they were impure. Some, of course, were more impure than others. Some were dirt. The fix, according to religious people, was that you did something, if possible, to become clean. You washed yourself of the dirty reality of your own outside and made it all better.

In short that was the religious reality. Well there sat this man by the road in Jericho. It was a bit of an equivalent of say Meridian Street in Indianapolis. He was the first century’s version of a homeless beggar with HIV. He was seen as dirty. His name literally meant “Bar” the son; “Timeaus” dirt. He was the Son of Dirt. He is tolerated and generally ignored. But there are some social conventions which regard him. He is to be quiet and as invisible as possible and to graciously/silently accept whatever alms may be dropped at his feet.

So the man is sitting there in his dark silence. And he hears the commotion going on in the street. He breaks the rule of social convention and begins to call out. And the good religious folk tell him to shut up. So he decides the rule needs to be fractured instead of just broken. He cries out all the more for the mercy he intuits is present in the man he cannot see. Religion has told him the solution for his filthiness. But Jesus offers him his first opportunity to diagnose his own problem. “What do you want?” “I want to see.” “You have got it. Want to go with us to Jerusalem?”

The world of Luther had the problem diagnosed for him, too. The problem, the good religious people said, was eternal salvation. Luther redefined the problem and when he did the forces waiting to play restructured and re formulated the Christian faith. Bar Timeaus was a spark among many in Jesus’ ministry. The forces present in the world of the first Century redefined religious reality.

Here is the most radical thing about the faith that Jesus brought to us. Jesus’ delivery on promise is this, “bring your problem; I am the way”. Jesus says clearly, that he can fix the problem that we define. Bar Timeaus’ issue was not dirty. It was that he could not see. Luther’s issue was not that he was in danger of hell, it was that he was tormented by the devils of guilt.

Now, lets think about that. I define my problem and I go in faith to Jesus. That is the story. Not, of course, that someone else defines it. And, of course, the problems may change from person to person and time to time. It may well be that we have a problem of an age.

It is true that, just like in the first century, there are forces at play that we do not even understand. The world is more than ripe for a new spark which explodes into a newly reformulated Church. The question is not whether this will happen, it will. The question is two fold—what will our response to newness be and where is the spark?

We are politically changing. In our country from Nixon to Clinton, diplomacy has emerged as the way to solve differences rather than war. That alone is enough political change to do heaven knows what.

There is social change and it is radical. Take, if you will, only the change around issues of gender in our society. In someplace between the age of “Rosie the Riveter” and now we have experienced a massive change that will continue.

There is economic change that is powerful. I always make it a point, when talking to a tech support person, of asking where they are from. You know the story—I am apt to be talking to someone in Texas, Colorado, India, Malaysia, or any point around the world. We live in a world economy and it gets more profound each day. When I get up in the morning and wonder what will happen on Wall Street today, I check Hong Kong where they have already closed trading.

Technological change is absolutely incredible. The internet is the printing press of our new world and it will reformulate us like nothing else. I have one internet site for Bible study that probably replaces 10,000 pages of books.

Our religious world, however, “ain’t doing so well”. Want this in down home terms? Bartholomew County, Indiana, counting nominal Christians, has more non-Christians than Christians. And we are the buckle on the Bible belt, for heaven’s sakes. Now it is really close to 50/50. There are 135 more non Christians than Christians in this county. And, as you may guess, the largest group of non Christians—matter of fact—the largest group of anything are folks who just do not relate to religion at all. They are not un-churched—they are simply areligious.

Here is what I think. I think we are promoting (again) an answer for which there is no longer a question. I think there is a desperate need for us to begin to listen for the real question in each individual and in the society as a whole. It isn’t that Jesus couldn’t fix dirty for Bar Timeaus, it isn’t that he couldn’t fix damnation for Martin Luther, it isn’t that he can’t fix sin for a person in this age. It is that the diagnosis belongs to the potential believer.
What is going to happen is this. Somebody in the majority portions of our world is going to begin to define the problem from their point of view. And I am hoping that they discover, buried in the debris of forgotten church messages, the answer to their question.

I think the diagnosis will be and the statement of need will sound like, “we need to belong”. The world is already saying in a myriad of ways that the deepest and profound need that is going unmet is the need to belong to others and to whatever gives order to this universe.

Someone is going to studying forgotten religious thoughts and is going to happen upon a biblical phrase (just as Luther did with justification by faith). And the new phrase is going to carry the impact, “I will be your God and you will be my people”.

And some Halloween soon we are going to look at our church doors and find the invitation to discussion about belonging and the faith.

Some tortured Luther like character, some incessant Son of Dirt, is going to clamor for a solution to THEIR issue. And when we start to pay attention, the volatile atmosphere that we have now—the world in labor for a new birth—will explode around us and emerge into a reformulated Christianity.

Get ready for the ride, because this is all going to happen.

We are going to hear the self diagnosed needs of the majority of our world. We are going to listen to the potential answer they have discovered. We are going to figure out whether we want to move with the spirit or fight the current of true reformation.

I think we are going to rise up on the wings of eagles and soar with the spirit.

Amen