Christopher Thomas
Sermon for Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 25 – 10/24/21
Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52
Draw us in the Spirit’s tether; for when humbly, in thy name,
Two or three are met together, Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluya! Alleluya! Touch we now thy garment’s hem.
How do you define sin?
“Well, I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know sin when I it when I see it…”[1]
Seriously, as a Christian, a confessed follower of Jesus Christ, you really ought to have a good, working definition of what you think sin is. What constitutes sin, for you? Is it a standard of abiding by rules and laws, maybe the Ten Commandments, or some other frame-worked ideology? Is sin for you stepping outside of The Golden Rule, treating others the way you want to be treated? What constitutes sin, the things that you murmur in the quietness of your heart, when we, all of us, week in and week out, “confess” our sins unto almighty God, the thing we do before we commune?
What does sin look like, feel like, taste like, smell like, sound like, to you?
We really shouldn’t be afraid to look at it, sin. It is, after all, an existential part of our human, sin-sick and sorrow-worn condition, right? Excepting our sinless role-model Jesus Christ, it is something we all harbor in the deepest, darkest nights of our souls. Sin.
Wrestling with definitions of things like sin and suffering “re-present,” present again and again and again, the wrestling I, you and me, we do with the angels, to gain inklings, shards of images that bridge the gulf between me and the God who created me. For me, it is in that gulf that sin, “I know it when I see it,” resides. Sin is sunk somewhere in that separateness, the separateness that ebbs and flows between God and me, the space between you and me that God aches and longs and desires with all of God’s heart to fill.
So, for me (only for me), sin is/are all those things that make greater the spaces between you and me that for whatever reason, we don’t allow God to fill in. The space between you and me should be God-space. That space becomes full of the things that separate us, things that could very well be on the Ten Commandment list, or the Golden Rule, or whatever ideological “top-ten” you happen to follow. The bottom line is, sin separates. Sin blinds us to our separateness.
Sin blinds us to what sin is.
Here’s the paradigm that Job and his friends are working under:
Job’s friends don’t know what Job has done, but they are sure of one thing – (I don’t know what it is, but I’ll know it when I see it!), he’s sinned. He’s done something to drive God away, into the deepest, darkest recesses of unforgiveness. God is not listening to Job and his cries. Because, that’s the way it works in a retributive system of justice, cause and effect. You do something good, and you’re rewarded. You do something bad (sin), and you are punished. It stands to reason, therefore, that if you have a “just” life, health, success, a little cash in the bank, family, friends, you are doing pretty well on the sin-scale.
However, if, like Job, you are being shunned, injustice has befallen you, or someone you love, because remember, in this paradigm, these things can be inherited, they reside at the DNA level, if you’re living in injustice, the subtext is that it’s because of something you have done. And that is why we don’t want to associate with you, because we don’t want to get too close, because we don’t want to risk the very same fate!
Sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, blind dudes, queers, homos, blacks, Mexicans, we send all of the sin-sick out to the margins, beyond the city gates, to South Dallas or wherever it is we need to send them, to separate ourselves, to get them away from us, so that we can radiate in God’s great light of blessing! Whatever you did, I don’t know what it is, but God, I don’t want to be close to it!
And guess what? I get it. If we are honest, really honest, we all get this. We live in a world that supports and ratifies this paradigm of sin and retributive justice. We all participate in the “you get what you deserve” mentality.
Lung cancer. Did she smoke?
HIV/AIDS. Must’ve slept around.
Homeless. Wow, no initiative.
Those people. Something about their choices. They made choices that put them where they are. Life is a series of choices, choices that either agree with, align with God’s purposes or they do not. And the way you know that you’ve made the right choices are by the fruits your life bears. If you are experiencing injustice, if you aren’t succeeding, it must be because of something you’ve done.
Job’s own indignities over his injustice blind him, deafen him, mute all of his senses to the ever-, always present God. And the chasm, the sin between them grows deeper, and wider, and even more chaotic. I am forever fascinated, enchanted by that split moment in time, the miracle of the turn, and when that turn occurs, when we realize that the cavern, the chasm between us and God, between us and other, between you and me, has grown so unacceptably wide, that we have no other option than to confess, to cry out,
“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
“Joe, Son of Julius and Betty, have mercy on me!”
“Virginia, Daughter of Bradley and Mary Virginia, have mercy on me!”
“Andy, Son of Jane and Dick, have mercy on me!”
“Steven, Son of Hazel and Thedford, have mercy on me!”
“Ruth, Daughter of Randolph and Katy, have mercy on me!”
“Stephen, Son of Elizabeth and Howard, have mercy on me!”
Blind Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, this beggar, knows. Bartimaeus sees in a way that they, that we cannot. He sees as clearly as day what it takes to bridge the gap, to close the gulf that separates him from them.
Was it a gulf of his creating? Did he do something that caused his blindness? He’s blind, he must have done something. Separate him. Get him away from us. Did they, the disciples, do something that caused their blindness?
For me, the sinfulness resides in that which separates us, whatever that may be, some action or some inaction, things done and left undone, from God, and from each other. It stands to reason, therefore, then, that what draws us together, back into the spirit’s tether, what heals that which ales us, is confession.
There is a reason why we confess, each and every Sunday, here, before God and before each other, before we can participate in the “re-membering,” the putting back together, in this time, and in this place, and in this space, of the body of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. All that separates us gets offered up at the foot of the cross, it goes on the altar, and it becomes part and parcel of the Eucharistic feast for which we so thankfully, gratefully participate.
Everything that we are, everything that we have, everything that we celebrate and everything that we mourn, our hopes and our dreams, our goals and our aspirations, our feebleness and our frailties, our mistakes and our blunders, our humanity all goes up onto that altar to become a beautiful, succulent, sacramental part of the banquet feast that Christ prepares for us, the feast that draws us back together again.
We cannot do that without confession, without bridging that which separates us. We simply cannot.
And so, my question to you today is, who is waiting to hear you say, “Jesus, Son of David, I am so very sorry for what I did! Please forgive me.”
Who?
Amen.
[1] United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, definition for “obscenity” in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964
