Remove Our Fear, and Love Can Flourish - Audio

Father Snort

The Rev. Brad Sullivan Emmanuel Episcopal Church October 24, 2021 Proper 25, B Mark 10:46-52 Remove our fear and our love can flourish So, Jesus met a man on the outskirts of Jericho who was blind and lived his life begging on the streets. Who was this guy? Did he have any family? If so, why wouldn’t they care for him? He wasn’t crazy. Had no demon. He wasn’t dangerous. He was, however, obviously a pretty terrible sinner, otherwise he wouldn’t have been blind. That was often the thinking. Rich? Successful? God had blessed you because you were so deserving. Poor and downtrodden? Well, I don’t know what you did to anger, God, but maybe stay over there because I don’t want any part of it. Never mind that God clearly states in the Book of Job that prosperity and adversity don’t come to people because God has chosen to bless them or curse them. Unlike us, God doesn’t play favorites. Unlike us, God doesn’t share with those he likes and shun the ones he doesn’t. The man’s blindness was not due to divine retribution for anything, and yet people of Jericho probably saw the blind man as cursed by God. That tended to be the thinking. Perhaps that’s why no one would take him in. Thinking he was cursed, people let him beg on the street. They even shushed him when he tried to talk to Jesus to ask to be healed. “Oh be quiet, he shouldn’t heal the likes of you.” Or maybe, “We don’t want him to know you’re here; he’ll think badly of us.” In any case, Jesus heard the man crying out to him, and Jesus cared about the man, calling him to come to him. What Jesus didn’t do was ask for any sign of repentance. He didn’t ask the man to stop sinning. He didn’t tell him to forgo his wicked ways, he just asked him what he wanted. “I’d really like to see,” the guy said. “Cool, I can take care of that;” Jesus replied, “your faith has made you well.” With that, Jesus healed him, and the man followed Jesus as a disciple. By Jesus’ response to the man, we know that his blindness was not any sort of divine punishment. No repentance required. The fear and disdain which the people of Jericho had for this blind man was not necessary. God hadn’t cursed him, and God wasn’t going to curse them if they were near to him or kind to him. Perhaps then, in healing the blind man, Jesus healed not only him, but also the people of Jericho. Consider the message given to the people of Jericho by the fact of Jesus healing this man. “You needn’t be so fearful, isolating and shunning those who are downtrodden. You needn’t be so afraid of God that you shun those you think are being punished by God. That’s not how God works. See, you have great love inside of you; that’s how God works, and if you remove your fear, your love can flourish. You can love and care for the downtrodden. You needn’t shun them. You can love them.” There are people who often get shunned nowadays by a good number of Christians. Those who get shunned include our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer siblings, shunned because they are seen as sinners, quite possibly cursed by God. They aren’t, of course, and there is no reason for them to be shunned. We see more and more of our LGBTQ+ siblings coming to meet Jesus in the Episcopal Church because by and large, they aren’t shunned here, and like the blind man, they follow Jesus as disciples and apostles. Of course there are other groups of people who get shunned by various Christian groups. Those who welcome our LGBTQ+ siblings often end up shunning those who had shunned our LGBTQ+ siblings. The shunner becomes the shunned. Fear, hurt, even compassion for a group of people are all reasons why we end up shunning others, but having compassion on one group of people doesn’t mean we have to shun another group of people. We have great love inside of us; that’s how God works, and if we remove our fear, our love can flourish. We needn’t fear giving compassion to fearful, angry people. Folks get angry because they are fearful. I daresay we all know what that feels like. Right now, we’ve got folks who are afraid of COVID and so they are taking precautions against it. We’ve also got folks who are afraid of losing their jobs due to the precautions against COVID harming the economy. We can have compassion on both groups. Even as we get terribly afraid and the other group causes us even greater fear, we can still have compassion for fearful people. Jesus’ healing of the blind man shows us that. People are afraid, and we don’t need to be against one group of frightened people in order to be for another group of frightened people. God was not cursing the blind man, and Jesus’ compassion on him showed that compassion on one another is God’s desire for us. God doesn’t desire our contempt for those we fear. Of course, we’re going to feel contempt for those we fear, and that’s what we get to give to God, rather than to them. God can handle our contempt of others, as we give it over to God and ask his healing to remove our fear and contempt so that love can flourish. That’s how God works, through the great love inside of us. We never need fear showing compassion. We needn’t fear showing compassion and love for the wrong sorts of people. The blind man was seen as the wrong sort of person by the people of Jericho. We’ve got lots of wrong sorts of people in our world. Vaxers, anti-vaxers. Maskers, anti-maskers. Believers in climate change and climate change deniers. Those sinful groups of people whose morals and views of the world are utterly at odds with God’s ways, and those pointing out those sinful groups of people who believe that their own morals and views of the world are in step with God’s ways. All of these groups of people are doing their best in the world to do the right thing. All of these groups of people have great fear and end up behaving out of that fear. All of these groups of people get to have compassion shown to them. All of them, and all of us have great love inside; that’s how God works, and if we remove our fear, our love can flourish.