Proper 25B
In the name of God: seen and unseen. Amen.
In keeping with our usual pattern of only watching television programs once they’re no longer on the air, here lately, Michael and I have been watching the sitcom, Young Sheldon. In case you’re not familiar with it, it is a prequel to another sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, which tells of the antics of a group of brilliant, but often socially awkward scientists at Cal Tech. One of them is Sheldon, a theoretical physicist specializing in string theory, who is probably the most awkward among them. Sheldon was a child genius who started college at the age of 11. Young Sheldon tells the story of his upbringing in a small town in Texas, first as a young child in high school, and eventually as a tween and teen in college.
Much humor, and occasionally a little drama, comes from the fact that Sheldon’s mother is a deeply committed evangelical Christian. Her world view doesn’t have space for any science that challenges her unquestioned and blindly-followed religious convictions. Sheldon, on the other hand, only has space for science in his world view. He cares nothing for the religious convictions of his mother (and really, pretty much everyone else in his community) because those convictions can’t be proven through the scientific method.
In an episode that we were recently watching, Sheldon and his mother are on an airplane that suddenly experiences turbulence. His mother immediately clasps her hands and looks up in prayer. Sheldon rolls his eyes and says, “Don’t tell me you’re going to use this moment to advocate for believing in a god that you can’t see!” His mother claps back, “You believe in theoretical strings you can’t see.”
One of the aphorisms we hold dear is the idea that “seeing is believing”. That’s certainly what led to Sheldon’s rejection of the Christian faith. He couldn’t see it. How could he place his faith in it. But the further he delved into the study of physics, the more his work propelled him into the realm of inference and supposition. It may have started from a “seeing is believing” place, but it certainly wasn’t anywhere near there anymore.
The truth is, all of us, including people of Christian or other religious belief systems, and people who reject religion in favor of various secular belief systems, can only take our dependence on what we can see so far. Physicists – at least as far as I understand it – study material interactions, and from that try to infer the origins of these interactions, and make predictions about the future. It may start from a quantifiable exploration, but eventually, as Sheldon discovered, it moves into theory that can’t be explicitly proven. Those who place their faith in the law may start from a place of studying the laws themselves and case history that supports various interpretations of the law, but it relies also on an unseen faith in the expectation that people will respect precedent and, at least at a general societal level, that people will agree to uphold the law together, even in the face of individual variance. When that faith can’t be trusted, the system breaks down.
“Seeing is believing” can only take us so far.
In our own faith, how many times have we heard from the Christian scriptures something along the lines of: these signs, or these miracles, have been shown to the community so that they would believe? But for the vast majority of us, we never get to see the kinds of explicit, visible miracles that we read about from Jesus in the Gospels. We can train ourselves to see evidence of God in the world. We can train ourselves to see the miracles that are all around us that often go unnoticed. We can train ourselves to see Christ in our neighbors. But we don’t see these things as explicitly as our forebearers of the faith did. We have to take it on faith. We can’t just wait for our eyes to give us undeniable evidence to believe. We have to work harder to see with our hearts – to find truth through our souls.
In the Gospel lesson that we read today, we hear the story of Bartimaeus – a man who, because of his blindness, couldn’t predicate his belief on what he could see. He had to work from a deeper place of faith than all of those who were fortunate enough to see, firsthand, the miracles of Jesus. And like so many of the stories of Jesus’ miracles, Jesus doesn’t take the credit, but instead tells them that their faith has made them well.
It's really a pretty simple story of healing – not all that different from many of the others that exist in scripture. But it takes on a different depth when we hear it in the context of the story we read last week.
You’ll remember that the disciples were traveling and James and John sneak a moment with Jesus and ask to get a favored status in the glory that is to come. Jesus responds to James’ and John’s initial request by asking them, “What do you want me to do for you?” Those are the same words that the Gospel writer tells us that Jesus first answered Bartimaeus with. “What do you want me to do for you?”
James and John said that what they wanted was a piece of the pie – some of the glory. They wanted to personally benefit from their proximity with Jesus. But Bartimaeus’ request – while still beneficial to himself, was essentially that he wanted Jesus to be Jesus. He wanted Jesus to show himself as he had to so many others, but to him, one who couldn’t see him on his own. He wanted Jesus to open his eyes.
And, for both James and John and for Bartimaeus, Jesus did open their eyes. To James and John, their eyes were opened to what their shallow request would actually come to mean. To Bartimaeus, his eyes were opened, not just to be able to physically see, but to see the truth that would inspire him to join the disciples, and to follow Jesus, even to Jerusalem. He would leave Jericho, this city where the people of Israel first crossed into God’s promised land – to go to Jerusalem, the city where we would enter into God’s new promise of life and resurrection through Christ. A new promise that would extend beyond the descendants of Abraham and be offered to all of God’s people. A new promise that would open the love of God up wider than anyone ever imagined possible. A new promise that would open all our eyes to see the world in a new way.
Still, none of us saw any of this. We have to take it on faith. A literal belief in the physical miracles of Jesus has to be taken on faith. And that’s a lot for some folks to swallow. But wherever you stand on that is not, I don’t think, critical to what it means to be a Christian. What is critical is these teachings that have been passed down through the ages. What is critical is the bigger message: embracing love over laws; embracing love over division; embracing love over religion, even.
The story of Christ is a story of opening up our understandings of God to be less exclusive. It’s the story of making God more accessible to more people. And, it’s the story of using that core belief in the nature of God as one of unbounded love to shape the ways that we interact with each other.
That’s how the story of Christ is calling us to open our eyes. Whether or not we experience physical blindness, we all have a need to open our eyes to the openness of God’s love that is taught again and again by Jesus. Whenever we catch ourselves drawing lines and building walls, we are being called again to open our eyes. How do our actions reflect the love of God in the world? How might our actions help others to open their eyes a little wider; to see the wider love of God that we know to be true?
“My teacher, let me see again.”
It could be a prayer for all of us. Let me see again. Let me see again what brought me here in the first place. Let me see again a reminder of your love so that I can show it to others. Let me see again, because seeing is believing. Let me see again, because I know it’s there.
Let me see. Amen.
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