Mark 10:46-52
Let my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord. Amen.
I’m delighted to be part of your journey of thinking about becoming an inclusive church, part of an inclusive church network.
And I want to talk today about Bartimaeus, the man of great faith, and what kind of God he had faith in. But let me start with the story of a different blind person. Hazel is a blind woman who goes to a Pentecostal church in London, and she has heard the story of Bartimaeus many times.
I met Hazel when I was doing research with disabled Christians for a book about our access to churches and our inclusion in churches. And Hazel told me about the recent sermon she'd heard about this Gospel reading we just heard about Bartimaeus. And she said, I have to laugh, because the vicar said, you've got to remember this man was blind.
And what trust he had when he threw down his cloak, he was never going to find it again. And there's me sitting there, and I thought, I wonder what he's thinking about me. I just sort of laughed and said, well you'd be surprised.
Hazel always knows where her coat is when she's put it down, unless somebody's moved it without her permission. She's not helpless. But she's used to hearing Bartimaeus' story told as though he is helpless.
She hears about blind Bartimaeus, who gave up everything he had, and Jesus saw his faith and healed him, and the crowd welcomed him, and we should be just as kind and welcoming to people in need. That's not a bad interpretation of the story. Our church has a wonderful history of reaching out to people in need.
But this is a way of telling the story that makes it about the crowd, and about mostly non- disabled people. There were definitely a few other disabled people in that crowd. But we're mostly thinking about how attitudes are changed, and the disabled person is sort of the object of the story, who's there for something to happen to him.
And we talk about how our attitudes should change, but not how we should think about the disabled person, or how the disabled person might want to be brought about. So I find the Gospel healing stories really challenging. I'm speaking to you today as a wheelchair user, which you can probably see, and as a neurodivergent person, which you can't see, I'm autistic.
And my struggle with stories like this one is not because of what's in the stories, when you read them in a slightly different way, they're really wonderful stories, but because of the way these stories have traditionally been told, and how they make me feel like an object for someone else's faith to be reinforced, rather than a personal agency. And I sit here preaching about how Jesus healed someone, and like Hazel I think, I wonder what people think when they do this. Because we all read our own prejudices and assumptions into stories like this, whether we're disabled or not, and what our lived experience is.
So today I want to tell the story in a slightly different way. And I want you to imagine you're in a story, not as a member of the crowd following Jesus, but as Bartimaeus. And I want to think about the injustices in Bartimaeus' life, and how he responded to them actively.
Because when we meet Bartimaeus, he's sitting at the very edge of the road, maybe. He lived in a society where a lot of people like him would have been outcasts. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
And it's quite possible that he and many other disabled people weren't allowed into the temple, where the Jewish people went to pray. And he was kept from meeting with God. And some of those attitudes would have descended into his wider life, and he might have been seen as unholy.
And people would have avoided him, and shoved him, and pushed him to the margins of society, and to a life of begging on the roadside. So you're Bartimaeus, sitting on the side of the road. And maybe your float is laid out in front of you so that people can drop coins into it.
Or maybe it's wrapped around you because you haven't eaten for a few days, and you're cold. And now you hear, not see, but hear a huge crowd coming past you on the road. And you ask them what all the emotion is about.
And you're told that Jesus is in this crowd. And you've heard about Jesus. He treats the outcasts differently.
You've never been allowed into the temple, but here is your chance to meet with God in the flesh. But here's the thing about crowds. They are very loud.
And you're blind, and your world is based around sound and hearing. And you don't know where Jesus is in this crowd. You can't catch his eye like a sighted person might be able to.
If you're ever going to reach Jesus, Jesus is going to have to join you in your world. He's going to have to get quiet and listen, like he did. So you call out to Jesus.
But that crowd travelling with Jesus, a lot of them have the same attitudes towards you that you're very used to in your society. And they start repeating you. They say, be quiet, be quiet, you're a homeless man, you're making us uncomfortable.
Jesus is here for some important people, he's not here for you. And this is not a surprise to you, you're familiar with these attitudes. But this is Jesus, the Messiah, and you know he's come to save the lost sheep of Israel.
And you're hoping for better attitudes from him. Except that the first time you call out to Jesus, he keeps walking. And we're not told whether that's because the crowd is so loud you can't hear, or maybe because he's ignoring you on the side of the road like a lot of other people don't.
But you ignore the crowd telling you to be quiet, and you keep calling out. You've been excluded from the temple, you've been pushed to the edge of society, you are not going to listen to a crowd who tells you to shut up. You are going to take your chance.
And you advocate for yourself, like many disabled people have always had to do, including today. And Bartimaeus says something really interesting, he calls Jesus the son of David. Son of David, have mercy on me.
That's a title that's used for Jesus by marginalised people, by beggars and disabled people, and outsiders, foreign women asking Jesus for help. And when they say son of David, they are reminding Jesus who he is. He's the son of David because of Mary, who became an outcast herself before Mary did, to give birth to God.
If Joseph hadn't trusted God and accepted Jesus as his adopted son, Jesus would be the child of a single mother, living on the edge of society, sitting on the roadside with Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is reminding Jesus that you have come to break our chains and restore us from exile. You haven't just come for all these privileged people around you in the crowd, you've come for the outcasts.
And he's calling Jesus for the kind of justice that we heard about in the Old Testament reading today, where God commands us to seek justice and to defend the oppressed, to stand with them in solidarity. And it's when Jesus hears that title, son of David, for the second time that he stops. And he gets very quiet and he enters into Bartimaeus' world, the world of a blind man.
And he listens and he says, call him here and let him meet with me. And Bartimaeus is so excited to meet with Jesus that he throws away his cloak, he's not acting for a second. But I'm pretty sure he knows what he's left in.
And of course the attitude of the crowd changes at that point. They've been rebuking this guy and now Jesus says, bring him to me. And they say, cheer up, he's including you.
Isn't it exciting? Isn't Jesus charitable? But it's inclusion on their terms. They're still telling the blind man what he's able to do and what they think he deserves. And marginalised people from lots of groups in society are used to being told what we deserve.
We're used to becoming someone else's cause, someone's act of charity. And we're used to churching that appetite with big signs, we are inclusive, we are welcoming. And they really mean it.
They really want to welcome disabled people and other people from the margins of society. But then we go inside, if we can get inside. And we find that a lot of these churches are not as good at listening to us and changing what they're used to doing.
It's sort of a case of you can come this far but no further. And people don't tend to ask the question that Jesus asked Bartimaeus, what do you want me to do for you? How do we need to change to become more like the kingdom of God that Jesus embodies? But Jesus never assumes what Bartimaeus wants. Jesus listens.
And in that relationship between Jesus and Bartimaeus when they meet, I believe they are both changed. Both transformed. Disabled Christian leader Fiona Macmillan writes this about churches of disabled people.
“The church of the 21st century frequently fails disabled people. We are spoken about rather than listened to. Regarded as difficult or demanding, costly or time consuming.
And it's not surprising that many disabled people are put off going to church. An experience that I've had. In churches disabled people are more likely to be known by our needs than celebrated for our gifts.”
And in 2011 when Fiona Macmillan's church began their ministry with disabled people, it was a time when disabled people were at the sharp end of cuts to services and benefits just as we are again today. We were facing real injustice. And the church of England had responded by cutting its own ministry to disabled people as well.
Cutting the funding for that. And at Fiona's church they knew they had to do something about this. Fiona said, at a time of rising fear and anxiety in government policy and rising disability hate crime, there was a sense that disabled people were even further excluded from the church, the one place you'd hope would speak up and act against injustice.
And this became a catalyst for our work at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Because if not us, then who? And they had great role models for work with justice for disabled people. Like Bartimaeus.
Because when people in the Bible who are disabled face injustice, a lot of the time they keep on speaking out even when they are told to shut up. And at St Martin-in-the-Fields today they run an annual conference led by disabled people in partnership with Inclusive Church, where we disabled people have a ministry of reaching out to the rest of the church when the tradition is that it's always been the other way around. And that's an image of justice.
The church learning from marginalised people about what needs to change in the world and in the church. And all of us together realising a vision of the kingdom of God. We have a God of justice.
We have a God who says in the book of Micah, I will gather together those who are oppressed and I will bring them into my presence, into my temple, into churches like this. Justice flips power upside down. And our Messiah is the son of David who brings justice to people like Bartimaeus who have been pushed to the margins of society.
And I think our Messiah is waiting for the church to join him in that mission. So Bartimaeus was a man of great faith in the good of justice. And like many of the people in the book of Hebrews, he believed in a better country, a better way.
He's an advocate, like many disabled people are today, in the face of ableism from the crowd around him, reminding Jesus that he has come for the oppressed. It's quite a ministry. And for me, he still represents all those disabled people today who are calling us to be transformed into a church that seeks justice together with us.
And as a church, I wonder if we're able to say, we're ready to listen to those who are speaking out. Amen.
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