CrossTalk: Blind Bartimaeus sees what the crowd misses

The Healing of the Blind of Jericho, Nicolas Poussin

“Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us, Lord, have mercy upon us.”

These simple words, called the Kyrie, must be ranked among the most politically incorrect parts of Christian worship. It’s mostly lost on us, but the first century denizen of Rome, knew immediately what it meant.

In the ancient world, that’s how you addressed a conquering king if you wanted to keep your head. They didn’t have freedom of speech. People that publicly said, “Caesar is not my emperor,” were likely to be executed.

In last Sunday’s gospel, the blind beggar used these words: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47).  Not only is he implying that Jesus is his real emperor, he even highlights Jesus’ rightful claim to the throne by calling Him “Son of David!”

The crowd knew it immediately and they were terrified. Their reaction was swift and to the point. “Many were admonishing him to hush up” (that’s a southerner’s translation of Mark 10:48). The emperor had informants and soldiers everywhere. Not only Bartimaeus, but all of Jericho could get into serious trouble.

But Bartimaeus wasn’t scared. He repeats is even louder! He deliberately wanted to make this confession of Jesus. Blind though he is, he sees better than most.

And while most are seeking to silence Bartimaeus to save their skins, Jesus does just the opposite. He adopts a totally regal posture. He does exactly what the emperor was known to do in his processions.

Standing still, He dispatches curriers. “Summon him,” He says. Then, asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” By this question, He claims all power and authority to do every good.

This is an electric moment! You can feel it in the air. The revolution is beginning in Jericho, 30 miles from the capitol city of Jerusalem. The crowd is large and growing. Soon, Jesus will be entering the city on a royal steed (donkey) and all of Jerusalem will be saying “Hosanna to the Son of David.”

When revolution is in the air, you are forced to take a side. You will either kowtow to the rulers and power-brokers of this world, or you publicly renounce their lordship and cry out, “Christ, have mercy upon us!”

To cling to Christ and his word alone is to hate the world and be hated by it. To make peace with the power-brokers of the world is to hate Christ. There is no middle ground.

The blind beggar is the first to see it clearly. He shows us the way. “Lord, have mercy upon us,” is not a whimper. It is a battle cry. To seek the mercy of Christ is an act of defiance against the world.

Early Christians were fed to the lions for saying this. Christians facing ISIS are shot and beheaded for saying this. How much social stigma are you willing to bear to say these words?

I know how much Jesus is willing to pay. By stopping and standing and acting like the Emperor He is, He set his feet on the path to the cross like nothing before. He has just made Himself public enemy number one by helping the beggar.

He is neither ashamed to do it, nor afraid to do it. Here is a cosmic clash between Christ and the devil playing out on a crowded street. And it seems that only Bartimaeus and Jesus know what’s going on.

That’s typical of the Christian life. Ordinary, everyday events have eternal and cosmic significance. Your choices either to resist sin or to cave into it are monumental battles. Your choice to be a public Christian or to blend in with the crowd is an act of defiance or of deference with implications for your children and grandchildren.

May God grant you the vision and courage of blind Bartimaeus.

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August 12, 2018: Wedding Sermon

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CrossTalk: Fight Family Strife God's Way

We live in unsettled times. Everyone, it seems, is at everyone else’s throat. It’s not just politics – although the political world has become especially ugly. We also see it in the community, at work, and in homes. It even affects the church.

One thing that happens to us is that we forget family connections. Family affection is a powerful emotion for the good. The love between mother and child, husband and wife, brothers and sisters in the home can cover over “a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

When we remember that we are family, we remember that we are deeply connected despite the frustration of the moment. It re-centers us to think long-term. Friends may come and go, but family will always be family. Familiar memories and familiar roots bind us together.

This is even true when you first meet distant relatives. The very fact that they are family automatically opens our hearts to them. Family relationships provide a built-in starting point of love and connectedness. Remembering family relationships can help us treat one another with love, respect and forgiveness.

The Bible, in fact, reminds us that we are all one big family. Each of us can trace our ancestry back to Noah. Beyond that, we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. These are more than fairy tales. It is our history, told in the Bible and proven by recent scientific studies of mitochondrial DNA.

The false claims that we evolved from primates have made many forget our family connectedness. When we forget our common genealogy, we forget to treat one another as family. That’s a tragedy.

But we can do something about it. We can teach our children the truth that every person they have ever met is a relative. We can also remind ourselves of this fact every day.

Before you act out in anger, before you bad-mouth your boss, before you write a rude comment, before you dismiss someone as a Neanderthal, remember that he or she is family.

Here’s another pro tip to fight against the seething anger of our world: Repent.

That’s right, repent! Anger and hostility toward others is always felt in proportion to our own unrepentant sins. When Cain killed Abel, it wasn’t about anything Abel did, it arose from Cain’s own sins against God. “So, Cain was very angry, and his face fell” (Gen. 4:5 ESV).

If you look honestly at your own anger, you will find that the more you confess your own sins to God and receive His forgiveness in Christ, the more peaceful and calm you can be in the face of family that sins against you.

The flipside is also true. The more unconfessed sin you are harboring within, the more easily you lash out at the littlest thing that happens to you. I am convinced that the reason our world is so filled with seething anger is because there is so much unconfessed sin.

Every day we are told by Satan not to confess sins. In arguing we are told “never admit you’re wrong.” In living we are told, “if it feels good it’s not sin.” When we follow Satan’s advice, we do not confess our sins. That makes our own anger seethe like Cain’s.

So fight back against anger in both ways: 1) Remember that everyone you meet is a member of your own family. 2) Spend a lot more time confessing your own sins than dwelling on the sins of your relatives.

The forgiveness that comes from Jesus’ cross is forgiveness that rebuilds the human family.

Marriage, Life and Family: Reflecting the Holy Trinity

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Summer 2018 full PDF

CrossTalk: Where Is the Creator of the Universe?

Have you ever wondered why God doesn’t make Himself more visible? After all, if He is truly interested in saving the whole world, you might think He could do a better job of it by making His presence a bit more obvious.

This is a thought that most, if not all people, entertain. So, let’s think it through together. Never mind the fact that it is rather blasphemous to suggest that you know better than God how to save the world.

God is gracious enough to set that aside for a moment, because He knows that we don’t really mean it. He knows that our minds are just too puny to figure out a better way to phrase the question.

Of course, if He was the kind of God to use His almighty power to destroy anyone who glanced sideways at Him, we would already be dead by now. So, I guess that rules out one mistaken notion.

But as long as we’re still alive to think about it, let’s thank God for His mercy and ask permission to go a little farther. We can adopt the posture of Abraham who said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27).

So, here’s a hypothetical. If you were the Creator of the universe and you wanted to prove it, what exactly would you do? It’s a simple question. But when you seriously try to answer it, strange things happen.

The true Creator of the universe made it because He wanted to--not in order to prove His existence to the things that He made. So, if you were a God who really liked making the things that you made, wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world to just keep on making them?

After all, we all do what we like to do. If you like playing baseball, you take every opportunity to play ball. If you like cooking, you cook whenever you can. If you like hunting, you live to hunt.

So, it would be perfectly natural for the Creator of the universe to keep on creating. He would do things at the subatomic level that boggle the mind. He would miraculously cause plants to grow in the most unlikely places. He would make so many different kinds of life that it would be impossible to count them all—much less to know all their secrets.

Like a master magician, He would do all of this out in the open, right in front of your eyes, and yet you still wouldn’t be able to say how He does it. At the end of the day, if the Creator of the universe wanted to be more impressively visible, I can’t think of a single thing He should do differently.

If anyone wants Him to act differently than this, they are not wanting a sign from the universe’s Creator, but from an imposter. They’re not wanting God to show Himself, they’re wanting a god who will submit himself to their whims.

No. It’s not that God is not making Himself visible. It’s that His creatures have become blind. We can’t see what’s right in front of our eyes.

If I were the God who created the universe and My creatures became so stupefied that they could no longer recognize me, I would do everything I could to save them from such a terrible blindness.

That’s why “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

Where’s the Creator of the universe? He’s the Man on the cross, dying to create all things anew.