IT’S LIKE THE BLIND LEADING … THE SIGHTED

Mark 10: 46-52

The Duvall Home for Children and Adults is just up the road in Glenwood, Florida north of Deland, a home in covenant relationship with the Presbyterian Church (USA). It has people of all ages, lovingly cared for in what has become their home, in spite of physical and mental challenges. Some there are severely retarded in what they can learn and how they can get around. But a staff of people stays on, who take on more work for the same money because state funding for such children keeps getting cut. Through poor pay and long hours and sometimes no thanks from the outside world, these people epitomize love and dedication. Others can learn from them. The staff says that the—what shall we call them?—disabled people in the Duvall Home continue to love them, inspire them, and make them feel appreciated. Of course some of them are severely retarded—the term that they use—and can show little response. But many of them play with abandon, love unconditionally, sing from their toes, and are grateful for everything from a meal to a crayon. They are bright enough to have learned wonderful manners but not to have developed the attitudes that often accompany children of higher intelligence in a home with a mom, a dad, or both. The new President of Duvall stayed on because he saw the needs and believed he could help; he has. The new Development Officer came out of retirement to invest himself in getting churches recommitted to this amazing home. He spoke to our Men’s group this month, and the men are planning a day trip to visit the home one day soon. There is much that mentally challenged children can teach us; they can lead us to live out the joys of recreation, unconditional love, praising God, and gratitude.

I have grown to understand obstacles in our world when I have walked with someone in a wheelchair. A step becomes an obstacle, as does entering a car or finding the right rest room. Perhaps all should have broken legs just once in our lives, to experience how hard it is to do what we often take for granted. (That broken leg remark is not a wish, just a musing!) Perhaps those who have pain would like to trade places with lepers in Biblical times, some of whom, because they had no pain, burnt and cut themselves into disfigurement without realizing it. Perhaps those who have good hearing should, just once, experience the world of no or little hearing and see how easily one gets left out of conversations and presentations. Even as I use every bit of my voice training to be heard and understood, some do not have the ears to hear. And when it comes to eyesight, just this week the lenses of my glasses got ground-in scratches on them so that I feel like I should clean them but I can’t. That’s nothing like blindness, but I have grown accustomed to my corrected 20/20 vision. Here I am, inconvenienced by scratched glasses when some live in a sightless world daily. How I learn from others.

A long time ago, fifteen miles northeast of Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples came to Jericho. It is likely that Jesus spent the day teaching in that city, connecting with others, and was preparing to leave that afternoon. In those days most cities had walls around them to prevent surprise attacks. (Remember “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came a tumblin’ down? Well by Jesus’ day the walls were likely built back.) The gates of a city would be closed at night for protection. Outside of the gates, beggars and panhandlers would gather as they sometimes do at the end of highway exit ramps or outside of public buildings around here. People got used to seeing them but turned deaf ears to their constant cries. The news of Jesus’ presence may have traveled through the city: “A prophet and healer is here!” people said to one another. And one man, who had sat outside of that gate for perhaps much of his adult life, was blind. Bartimaeus the beggar. He couldn’t ask for a seeing-eye dog, or for his government to provide him with Braille or with Talking Books or with transportation. He was solely dependent on others. The old spiritual says “When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun, O Lord have mercy on me.” When was the last time you did that? When was the last time you fell to your knees and cried to Jesus for help as Bartimaeus did? Was it at the death of a loved one; or when a utility company turned off your power or a towing company repossessed your car? Have you never actually gone to your knees in prayer? It takes a lot to bring most people to their knees. They are taught self-reliance, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it. Some find it shameful to beg so they “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and are admired by their neighbors because they do. But you know what? The times I have connected most with my neighbors is not in my days of independence in the hours when disaster makes me dependent. How about you? A natural disaster like a hurricane, a man made disaster like a broken water line, and a human disaster like falling off a ladder, has brought my neighbors and has brought me to a clear realization that we need one another. And I need God. God is not looking for bootstrap independence, nor is God looking for whiny people who refuse to be all they can be. God wants our dependence in prayer and our independence in connecting with and lifting up one another. In the midst of other exasperating questions, just after Jesus affirmed that people should love God and neighbor, a lawyer tested Jesus with the question “Who is my neighbor?” Do you give Jesus just such a test? Is it not obvious that if a child is in need it is that child, if a woman has a crisis it is the woman, if a man has resorted to begging it is the man? This commandment is not an endorsement of handouts, but of a leg up; not an entanglement of dependence but a momentary bit of help. It is the viral man who hospitalization has disabled; it is the able bodied mother digging under the seats of her broken car for coins to feed her children; it is the child who finds himself or herself suddenly afraid or confused. And I, in my days of spiritual blindness, or deafness, or apathy, say to you right now that I need the help of Jesus every day as much as a blind beggar does, and if you are honest with yourself, you may find you need him that much too! A blind beggar might seem to be on the other end of the spectrum from my needs, but my cries, and I suspect yours, should sound the same as his: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And as he cries out from a voice box that is raspy from begging and parched from desert air, I sympathetically clutch my own throat. He doesn’t give up, but cries out with the persistence of a child. He addresses Jesus by name, he uses a title of great faith and respect, and he admits that he can’t go on without him. Hmmm. Couldn’t that be my prayer … or your prayer? No! I have a car and a home, I have reasonable health, and I have sight. Why would I need Jesus? Indeed. Why do YOU need Jesus? Why did John Newton need Jesus when he wrote these words: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me? I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” There was nothing physically blind about Newton. There was nothing poor about Newton physically. Yet this is what he insisted by written on his tombstone: “John Newton—clerk, once an infidel and Libertine, a servant of slavers in Africa—was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had so long labored to destroy.” After years as a hardened slave trader and as a man of means and self-reliance, one day John Newton met his Lord in a vision when a horrendous storm at sea in 1748 terrified him. Aren’t there other such times that have broken a man or a woman’s artificial belief in self-reliance and have led them to utter dependence on God? In our times when sight or hearing or defenses or intelligence fails us, we too may fall down, and pray for strong carpenter arms of Jesus to catch us. This is what people like Bartimaeus have led me to believe: There are plenty of sighted people around who are blind, and, at times, I have been one of them; haven’t you? I think back to what it took for my gratitude quotient to peg the positive needle; or the times when I have needed to lose the arrogance of anger; and times I needed to topple my “me first” attitude. Today I remember Bartimaeus, a man who could not properly clean himself, or feed himself, or provide for himself, or do anything that the world calls productive, and I realize how much he has taught me. Why, it’s like the blind leading … the sighted.

Let us pray: Dear Lord, today we have had a brush with blindness; we realize that even with sight we, at times, cannot see; even with ears we, at times, cannot hear; even with a heart, we, at times, don’t connect it to our minds when we make choices. We yield ourselves to you this hour, perhaps concerned for our own salvation; or perhaps flooded with gratitude and ashamed of our false sense of self-reliance. Hear our prayers, Lord Jesus, for even you fell to your knees in daily prayer. Amen.

Jeffrey A. Sumner October 29, 2006