Proper 25b.06                                                  October 29, 2006

Many of us first come to Christ only when
        we have nowhere else to turn.
Faith is a desperate leap.
So it was for the beggar, Bartimaeus.
Blind and impoverished, he sat beside the road,
        and shouted, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”

Sight came as gift, as grace, as mercy
        just because he asked.
When we come to faith in desperation,
        and faith saves us as it saved Bartimaeus,
        we are apt to cling to it like a drowning person
        clutching the rescue rope thrown to us in the water.
The very insecurity that impelled us into faith
        makes us uneasy if anything about the faith
                 shifts or varies.

We want the same people, the same hymns, the same prayers,
        the same architecture, the same theology, the same everything.
We want to sit always in that moment of salvation,
        because that was the moment when we first felt safe.

But our Gospel lesson shows Jesus perpetually on the road.
Verse 1. “Jesus . . . came to Jericho.”
Verse 2. “As (Jesus) . . . was leaving Jericho. . . .”
Jesus was always on the move.
So Bartimaeus could stay in Jericho
        and nostalgically remember the day Jesus restored his sight.
He could tell stories about it, sing songs about,
        and even hope Jesus might pass that way again.

Or he could do what he did.
Our lesson concludes “(Bartimaeus) followed him on the way.”
All Bartimaeus knew about Jesus then was that he was a healer.

He hadn’t heard the Sermon on the Mount,
        the mind-blowing parables,
                or the promise of the Kingdom.
He didn’t know Jesus was on his way to die.
And the Resurrection wasn’t on his radar screen.
Bartimaeus had not arrived at home base.
His journey had just begun.

The Epistle to the Hebrews was written to folks
        inclined to stay in Jericho – not follow Jesus on the way.
They had taken the course in Gospel 101

        – “God loves you. You are saved by grace.”
They got that. It was nice.
They liked Gospel 101 so much
        they wanted to repeat the course over and over.
They wanted to get together every Sunday
        to sing Amazing Grace and Just As I Am.
They wanted to keep hearing the same sermon.
“God loves you. You are saved by grace.”

But their apostle wanted more for them.
He said, “Let us go on toward perfection,
                leaving behind the basic teachings about Christ,
                not laying again the foundation:
                repentance from dead works and faith toward God . . . .
         We are confident of better things for you. . . .”

So what comes next?
He writes about “the work and the love you have showed
        for his sake in serving the saints . . . .”
Faith begins in knowing that our well-being is already secure
        in God’s love.
But it moves on from there.
Since we don’t have to spend our lives securing ourselves,
        we can spend our lives serving others.

Loving and serving others is part and parcel
        of our own redemption.
It isn’t that we have to put in so many hours of community service
        to be eligible for graduation.
We don’t earn anything by loving and serving others.
We don’t win God’s favor by being good.

The link between service and salvation
        isn’t like work and wages. It is this:
The basic malignancy in the human heart is self-obsession.
Self-obsession can take many forms.
We may be caught up in pride or greed

        – but it can just as easily be shame or fear or guilt.
Self-obsession can even take the form of trying to hide

        – trying to be invisible – Oh pay no attention to me –
        even this is a backhanded version of self-obsession.

The prison of self is pretty uncomfortable.
That’s what Augustine meant when he said,

        “I have become a great problem to myself.”

The discovery of grace, the discovery
        that our destiny is already safe in God’s hands,
                sets us free.
Self-obsession blinds us like thick cataracts.
At the discovery of grace,
        those cataracts fall away and for the first time
                we can see the world around us.
We can see the beauty of other people,
        and we can see their suffering, see their need.

Grace sets us free to love and serve,
        and a life of loving service is a life that counts.
A deep joy runs through it.
It’s a whole life.

When Hebrews says, “Let us go on toward perfection,”

        “perfection” doesn’t mean life without faults, flaws, or blemishes.
It means complete – all there, full.
A life of loving service is so full it overflows.

That’s why at St. Francis,
        we invite people to lives of service.
We serve each other within the congregation
        and we serve others in need, locally and globally.

Our Pastoral Care Team invites all of us
        to help others in our own special ways.
Someone may make a dish of food. Someone else may deliver it.
We need 20 shepherds to make 10 phone calls once a quarter
        just to ask folks if they need anything.
Service doesn’t have to be a big burden.
It can be a small and simple act of caring.

Beyond the congregation,
        we are committed to the Millennium Development Goals
                of eradicating poverty, disease, illiteracy, gender inequality,
                        and environmental degradation around the world.
Part of our budget, your pledge dollars, goes to this mission
        through Episcopal Relief and Development.

And this year we became public advocates for the goals.
Today is Bread For The World Sunday when churches
        recommit to the Millennium Development Goals.
2,500 churches are covenant congregations with Bread For The World.
A year ago, there was not a single covenant congregation in Middle Georgia.
In May, 2006 we became the first.
In September, another church joined us. It’s a start.

Locally, our Vestry has committed to expand our mission
        by building a Habitat House in Lynmore Estates.

Since our Vestry adopted our Mission Priorities for 2007,
        some have said that we cannot take on this mission.
Other churches might do such things – but not us.
We are too small, too weak, too poor.
We need to stick with doing what we have done before.

I understand that. I agree.
If we start by counting our resources
        and deciding how best to use them,
                we should do only a few things,
                serve only a few people,
                do only so much for each other.

We should in fact do fewer things
       for fewer people and do less for each other.
Because what we have been doing for years
       has been impossible.

But suppose we go at it the other way.
Suppose we ask what God is calling us to do,
      and then find the resources.
What if we ask who God is calling us to become,
      as individuals and as a community,
              and pray for the grace to become that.
Suppose we turned our hearts from fear to faith,
      and considered less the paucity of our resources
              and considered more the abundance of God’s grace.

This year we undertook to provide school lunches in Haiti.
We can’t afford that.
I know we can’t afford that.
But someone in Kansas who visited here the Sunday
       of our Haiti presentation just sent us $1,000 for those lunches.
That’s the kind of thing that happen
       when you step out in faith
                instead of cringing in fear.

This matters in ways beyond measure,
       because of the mutual influence of our community life
                and each of our individual lives.
If we as a community live in fear,
       it will feed the fear that constricts each of our individual lives.
But if we as a community live in faith,
       it will feed the faith that encourages and empowers
               each of our individual lives.

Suppose we follow the teaching of Hebrews

       “go on toward perfection” – go on toward wholeness,
               toward fullness of life.
The author of Hebrews said to his congregation,

       “We are confident of better things for you.”//

We have already done good things at St. Francis

       –many things pleasing to God.
But I am confident of better things for us.
We are not a congregation to stay in Jericho.
We are like Bartimaeus.
Blessed with a vision,
       we throw off our cloak as he did,
       spring up as he did,
                and follow Jesus on the way.

                                                       Amen.