"Beyond Survival: The Way of Bartimeaus"
A Sermon Preached by Bruce Sanguin
October 25th, 2009
Mark 10: 46-52
Bartimaeus was a blind beggar. You would have thought that by now he would have learned to quietly accept his condition, along with whatever crumbs the passersby might offer. You would have thought that he might have given up hope for another chance at life. So everybody is surprised, perhaps even Bartimaeus, when he starts hollering at Jesus for that second chance. Dignity and decorum are the least of his concern. The crowds tried to silence him. But screw the crowds is how Bartimaeus is thinking about it. The crowds had no idea what it was like to be him and if this Jesus of Nazareth was offering new life, he was going for it.
This is a story of call and response, and if you have any doubt about that, check out verse 49 again. Three times, the word “call” is used. “Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here’. And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; get up, he is calling you" (Mark 10:49). In my book, I point out that there are four basic narratives or stories in the Bible that are repeated throughout. One of them is call and response. Abraham and Sarah were called to load up the U-Haul and hit the road. Joseph was called in a dream. Moses was called from a burning bush. The prophet Samuel was called while he was asleep. The prophet Elijah heard the still, small voice of God in a cave. Each one of the disciples was called by Jesus to follow him. The risen Jesus called out to Paul on the road to Damascus. And whether we’re aware of it or not, in one-way or another, you are sitting here this morning because you have responded to the call of God. The highest exercise of human freedom involves the choice of whether we say “yes” to this call or not.
It’s never simple figuring out which comes first – our calling out to the divine with Bartimaeus, or the divine call to us. On the surface it seems as though Bartimaeus called out to Jesus, and then Jesus called him. But these things are subtle, and you have to wonder if Bartimaeus’ cry for mercy wasn’t in response to a quiet, pervasive intuition that life had more to offer – and where do these intuitions come from in the first place?
The soul you see was meant for God, and has this irrepressible energy that rises up when it senses an opportunity. Bartimaeus’ “springs up” and flies to Jesus. He throws off his cloak, which you can think of as whatever it is that is getting in the way of you getting to God. Bartimaeus was ready to shed an old identity that he’d been wearing for too long. His soul springs to life in the presence of Jesus. Nothing is going to stop him – no crowd, no social norms, no inner resistance. He’s going for it!
You won’t be surprised that I’m going to invite you to think about Bartimaeus’ condition as metaphorical. As a beggar, he is accustomed to living off the crumbs that fall from other people’s table. Perhaps it’s not such a huge stretch to see the ways in which our own lives are passively determined by externalities – the passersby whose crumbs we depend on. We wait for someone to toss us a scrap of appreciation. We crave in our loneliness to be noticed by somebody, anybody! We tell ourselves stories about the nature of reality – about how awful the world is because how nobody cares for anybody else, and then we scour reality for evidence that supports our assumptions. Other people are to blame for the quality of our lives and therefore only they can make it better. We sit on the side of the road of life, waiting to be proven wrong, but secretly gathering evidence that supports our hypothesis. It’s a beggar’s existence when we are just getting by on the meager handouts of others.
Bartimaeus is tired of begging. Instead, he flies to the divine when he sees his opportunity. All of our inner longing to be loved, to be seen, to be validated - all of these yearnings are reflections of the soul’s yearning for God. If we imagine that there exists another human being out there who is going to be able to satisfy all of our desires and needs, if that is what we’re looking for, God help that person if we ever find him or her. To live from the needs, wants, fears, and desires of our personal selves is to be condemned to a lifetime of begging and to condemn those who try to meet our needs to inadequacy and frustration.
The spiritual life consists of flying to the heart of the holy at the first opportunity we get, there to discover that we are not our needs, wants, fears, and desires. These comprise just a part of what it means to be human, and they cause us to compose a life story based on them. But we do possess soul – the deepest part of us that has a distinct identity – and we are always in Spirit. We are always one with God and all that is. Bartimaeus flew to Jesus, but in truth Jesus was simply the occasion of Bartimaeus meeting his true self and his divine potential. Don’t get me wrong. We need the likes of Jesus, who are living from soul and spirit. Often, it’s someone outside of us who is transparent to their own deeper identity to evoke a recognition that we’ve been living like beggars, when our inheritance is to live like sons and daughters of the living God.
It’s understandable that we confuse our survival or instinctual self with our true self. In evolutionary terms that instinctual self delivered us to this moment. We are the progeny of the survivors of evolutionary history over billions of years. Our ancestors delivered to us a survivor brain custom-made the sole purpose of surviving in an unsafe world. This is no small feat and not to be scoffed at. It’s good to know that when we do find ourselves sitting at the side of the road feeling like we’ve reached a dead end, that we possess the adaptive, survival instincts of every earth-born creature that ever preceded us.
But friends, that’s just a part of who we are. It’s just a part of who Bartimaeus was, and when he got the chance to awaken to a higher dimension, he literally jumped at it according to the story. Around Canadian Memorial we’re talking about this higher dimension of our self as the divine creative principle, or the evolutionary impulse. To awaken to this dimension is to literally have our eyes opened to a power we didn’t know existed when we were caught up in the survival self. We don’t have the time this morning to go into all the dimensions of this higher self, but let’s go back to the story to get at one characteristic – the capacity to assume deep responsibility for our lives.
Let’s recap. This is a call story. As the embodiment of the divine creative principle (or the evolutionary impulse) Jesus elicits a recognition in a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. His soul flies Godward, metaphorically dropping his previous identity, (his cloak), as he springs to meet Jesus. Now, notice what Jesus does and doesn’t do.
First off, he doesn’t make any assumptions that he knows why Bartimaeus cried out for him. He cried for mercy, but as far as Jesus knows he might have simply wanted a really big handout. So Jesus asks: “What do you want me to do for you?” This is the beginning of Bart’s new life and it begins with a requirement that he assume responsibility for what he most deeply wants. He must ask for what he wants. He must be crystal clear about his intention and be willing to accept responsibility for it. This clarity is the beginning of new life that is lived from soul. The clearer we are about our intention, the deeper and faster will be our transformation. How would you answer that question if the likes of Jesus put it to you? What do you most deeply want?
“I want to see again!” cries Bartimaeus. Blindness, as we know, takes many forms – not just physical. When we exist exclusively in the survival mode we are living in darkness. When all we can see are our own unmet needs, our own fears and worries, our own desire for more of just about everything, we are blind to the vision of the world that is made possible by realizing our higher self. From the perspective of this identity – this evolutionary impulse – we receive new eyes. We are able to see that our life, by and large, is maintained in its present form by our own decisions. True, we aren’t absolutely responsible for it getting this way, but when we do open our eyes, we can see the multiple ways that we cloak ourselves in this survival identity. Now our eyes are opened and we can see that it’s possible to remove the cloak and create a new story for ourselves. We can be free to determine the quality of our own life.
This shift, as I was saying, is a movement from lesser to greater responsibility for our current circumstances and even more importantly for the future we wish to create. Notice that when Jesus declares Bartimaeus to be healed of blindness, Jesus doesn’t take responsibility for the healing. He knows that he was just the occasion, the alluring presence of the possible, in the situation. Jesus says to Bartimaeus:
“Your faith has made you well. Go your way.” Your faith? And, please, let’s not make the assumption that it was Bartimaeus’ faith in Jesus, per se, that made him well. Jesus meant that it was clear Bart had awakened to his higher, divine self, and was ready now to see from its vantage point. And in this passage, Jesus doesn’t even give Bart any direction, except what? “Go your way.” Whose way? Your way, Bart. Your way.
Contrary to other places in the New Testament, Jesus doesn’t say “follow me”. This may make Bartimaeus Jesus’ most enlightened disciple. Bartimaeus’ eyes are opened and he’s perfectly capable of going his own way. He chooses – chooses for himself his path. Yes, he does go with Jesus. But it’s really important that the story ends with Bartimaeus following Jesus “on the way”. This is neither the way of the old Bart, before he threw off the cloak of his survival self, and it’s not even the way of Jesus. It’s the Way. That was code in the early church for discipleship. It is the way taught by Jesus absolutely. But it’s not about Jesus. And if Jesus were here this morning, he’d tell you the same thing. It’s not Jesus worship. It’s not the way of a personality cult. It’s the way of the higher self – the way of sacred evolutionary impulse to follow the call of God wherever that might lead.
Canadian Memorial is becoming a community of people who walk together on The Way of the soul, the way of radical responsibility for the quality of our own lives and the quality of life for others, the Way of being profoundly present to God in each and every moment, and it is the Way of responsibility for co-creating our future, personally and for our planet. As you come to the table of the Christ this morning, please realize that these pieces of bread are not crumbs tossed our way to satisfy our survival self. They are manna from heaven, meant to awaken our soul. The bread and the cup are intended to remove our blindness so that we might throw off our old identities and spring back to the life Christ offers and which is our sacred inheritance. For this, we give thanks.