"Losing Our Sight" | Nathan LeRud | October 27, 2024

On Friday, I went to the eye doctor for my yearly checkup. That is a fraught experience for me. When I was eight years old, when my parents caught me squinting at books and took me in to see the eye doctor for the first time to get my eyes checked, that was a harrowing experience for an 8-year-old. Dr. Hill, the new eye doctor who I saw on Friday, was lovely and kind. She took a look at my my glasses– you can, I mean you can see, those of you who can tell, like, how thick these things are. She's like, oh, you have a very strong prescription for someone your age. I said, yes, how much of the story would you like?

Um, when I was eight, I threw up in the eye doctor's chair, and I haven't done that in 30 years, doctor, but you might want to have that trash can ready, cuz as soon as those lenses start going up and down– is 1 better, 2 better, 1 better, 2 better, 1– it's like, woo. So I've learned some some coping skills to deal with the pit in my stomach every time I sit down in an office with an eye chart– my body just goes into fight or flight mode. It's like, get out of here. And I can feel whatever I ate for lunch start to roil its way. So I've learned deep breathing, right, imagine a beautiful beach scene or rolling waves or something like that, and the panic is still there, although, the adult knows how to cope with it a little bit better.

Part of the trauma that I experiened when I was 8 years old is that my eye doctor was alarmed at how quickly my sight was deteriorating. I remember hushed conversations between the eye doctor and my parents. So they tried to put me in contacts, which I don't recommend for an 8-year-old– that was a– that was a traumatic experience– but the the doctor was worried that I would lose my sight entirely if he didn't intervene.

What happened instead was that when I was 17, I started noticing this little dark spot in the corner of my left eye. I didn't really think anything about it– I was also terrified of the eye doctor. But when I was there for my yearly exam, I said, "Hey, I've been kind of noticing this weird thing." He's like, "Oh, I'm sorry, tell me more about that please." Did a check, left the room, came in and said, "Okay, I've scheduled you for emergency retinal reattachment surgery up at OHSU in an hour. Get up there right now." And he sat me down and he said, "Nathan, you could go blind if we don't catch this in time. This is how it starts. You could– you are very much in danger of losing your sight. I think we can fix it this time, you're in good hands, but if you notice anything like that ever again– dark spots, floaters, whatever– please come and talk to me. Your eyesight is very very poor."

Dr. Andrea Tongue operated on me that day. She may be sitting out here, she's a member of this congregation, she and her husband. I've never had the opportunity to thank Dr. Tongue for kind of saving my life when I was 17 years old and enabling me to have the life that I now have. But I'm very I'm very grateful to her and to all of the other medical professionals who restored my ability to see when I was 17.

That was 25 years ago, and it has taught me never to take my abilities as a sighted person in the world for granted, because in any other culture in any other pre-corrective lenses culture, a kid like me would have ended up on the side of the road– like Bartimaeus, this blind beggar who stands by the road as we meet him today in Mark's Gospel.

Bartimaeus, we think, grew up sighted. He grew up being able to see. He has a dim memory, maybe, of color and movement and light. We don't know how old he was when his sight first began to deteriorate. I like to imagine he may have been around my age, maybe eight or nine or ten, when his parents began to notice him squinting and straining to see clearly.

Probably Bartimaeus was not literate, most people weren't in the first century, but the daily activities of his world– hunting, gathering, crafting, weaving, playing games with balls and sticks– all of that required a reasonably sharp sense of sight. And so when it became clear that Bartimaeus, little Bartimaeus, was losing his ability to see clearly, his economic and vocational options would have been pretty severely curtailed.

He becomes in that moment, he becomes one of the anawim, the ones that Jesus sometimes refers to as "the little ones."

It's a term of affection, right, when Jesus uses it, but this is a technical term in Hebrew. It's the ones who are largely marginalized by society, often rejected by their families, tossed into back alleys and roadsides. Those who are immediately dependent for their daily bread on those who pass them by every day.

They live among us still, although these days poor eyesight is not generally the the the predominant occasion for their marginalization. These days, it's likely to be mental health or substance abuse issues, emotional and physical trauma, one bad workplace accident.

I mean, how many of us are one step or two steps away from Bartimaeus's situation as we encounter it this morning? We put on a pretty good show of normalcy, but if I've learned anything in my decade or so as your Dean, it's that the psychological and physiological issues that our guests in the food pantry face are not not really all that different from what goes on among the Mac Club set. Food pantry folks are usually a little more frank about it than some of us are. We've learned some more skillful ways to mask.

The polite people who are following Jesus that day try to shut Bartimaeus up when he begins to shout at the top of his lungs, "Son of David, have mercy on me! Son of David, have mercy on me!" He is insistent. He will not stop. He refuses to be silent. And that makes the crowd uncomfortable. Some of you will resonate with this; we've been in this room when someone has had their prayer to Jesus and has been unwilling to be quiet about it. And we've figured out better and worse ways to try to accommodate that situation.

But Bartimaeus has been waiting for this moment. There is something deep inside him that recognizes who Jesus really is, and this title that he uses for Jesus, it's a title that Jesus himself has has been telling the disciples not to talk about, right, because Jesus knows the political stakes behind this title that Bartimaeus is giving him: Son of David, have mercy on me. "Son of David" is a political title, and everybody in that crowd knows it. "Son of David" means the one who is coming to restore the Kingdom of Israel back to the Jewish people, to overthrow the Roman overlords. to give power back to the anawim, we might say, the poor in spirit, the dispossessed, and impoverished. Calling Jesus "Son of David," "Son of Man," "Son of the Most High God," these are the titles that are going to get Jesus executed, and Jesus knows that he's in danger as soon as the crowd starts using those titles for him.

Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem. The next thing that happens immediately following this story is that he rides into Jerusalem on the back of the donkey, and it begins the last week of his life. This story marks a turning point in Mark's Gospel. It is the beginning of the end.

Bartimaeus is the one who recognizes Jesus for who he truly is, the blind beggar who is really a prophet. One who has lost his physical but not his interior sight.

Bartimaeus is really the first character in Mark's gospel who sees Jesus clearly. "Son of David, have mercy on me." He will not be silent.

In Luke's gospel, Jesus will say to his detractors, "Truly I tell you, if my followers were silent, the very stones would cry out my name."

I want to be careful here. There is a tendency when we hear these miracle stories about healings in the Bible, there's a tendency among sighted preachers like me to romanticize blindness and poverty. Every time I've preached on this story, I have preached to a mixed room full of mostly sighted people, but not exclusively.

I remember preaching this 12 years ago, 13 years ago and John T---- many of you remember John and Jeanne T----. John T---- was sitting in the front row right there. John had lost his sight. He was kind of adjusting to a new reality. And so at the end of the sermon, after preaching all about blindness, I walked over to John. I was like, "You should have been preaching the sermon, John, not me." And he's like, "Yeah it's been really hard." He said, "What I'll tell you is that I've learned to use my hands and feet in ways that I would never have thought. I depend on Jean." And Jean kind of smiled a little bit. And he said, "Nathan, it's really hard. It's really hard."

At the same time, I know that if we read this story of Bartimaeus as a story about a problem that Jesus solves, we are missing the most important part of the story.

There's a Methodist theologian and a pastor, John Hull– he died in 2015– but John Hull, like me, had a retinal detachment issue and lost his sight completely at the age of 45.

And he wrote about that experience in this way. He said, "I do not interpret my blindness as an affliction, but as a strange, dark, and mysterious gift from God. Indeed," he says, "in many ways it is a gift I would rather not have been given, and one that I would not wish my friends or children to have. Nevertheless it is a kind of gift I have learned that since I have passed beyond light and darkness, the image of God rests upon my blindness." He says, "No sighted person can say that they are beyond light and darkness, and yet we are told in the Psalms that God is beyond light and darkness. So in that respect," John Hull says, "it seems to me that it is blind people who are in the image of God rather than sighted people, because of sighted people's dependence on outward appearances, their confidence in being superior. It is often sighted people who are needy. And many of them," Hull writes, "could do with a good dose of blindness, like Tobit or Saint Paul in the Bible, to bring them a kind of humility and an insight which has not come to them through their physical sight."

Bartimaeus recognizes who Jesus really is, even though Bartimaeus can't see Jesus with his eyes.

And so I wonder sometimes how much of the world I'm missing by putting on these glasses every day. That's the first thing I do in the morning, it's the last thing I take off at night, They've become a a part of me, this flimsy little contraption of plastic and glass. When I take them off, I don't know who I am. I feel so vulnerable. I can't see my text. I can't see your faces. I can see some light, I can see some shapes. I'm going to put them back on.

This is technology that was not imaginable more than about 200 years ago, so in any other age in any other place, we functionally blind ones who are unable to see clearly without contemporary technology, in any other age, we would find ourselves among the anawim, the poor and the dispossessed, the ones who depend upon the goodwill and kindness of strangers for our daily bread.

By the grace of God, through the miracle of modern medicine and incredible doctors like Andrea Tongue, a different life is possible for some of us. And still, I think many of us understand ourselves deep down to be just a step or two away from the situation of Bartimaeus, standing by the road.

Born sighted, somewhere along the way, we we began to lose something. Something changed.

I mean, when was it for you? First grade, second grade, third grade? When did your parents take you to the eye doctor for the first time, put you in corrective lenses?

When did somebody give you a picture of God as a man, an authority figure who punishes his children if they step out of line– a kind of theological corrective lens that is designed to make sure you see things the way the adults in your life want to make sure you see them.

When did you lose your ability to enter into the world of the anawim, the ones who are able to see Jesus as Jesus truly is? What miracle would it take to have that sight, that vision, restored to you again?

"Son of David, have mercy on me."

And Jesus's response is so simple. He makes no assumptions, he waves no magic wands, he solves no problems, because as far as Jesus is concerned, there is no problem, there's no disability here to be solved. He simply asks Bartimaeus, "What do you want me to do for you?" It's all he asks.

He asks the prophet, the only one in the crowd who can see him clearly, see him clearly enough to call the master by his real name, the name that will get him killed:

"What do you want me to do for you?"

"My teacher, let me see again."