Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
This is an interactive manuscript. To follow links, click the highlighted words below.
After I graduated from college, I had a pretty rough time. The job market was so bad that I could only find a job as a barista, and although I applied for just about ever AmeriCorps program I could find in order to try and make a difference in the world, I kept getting rejected. To make matters worse, I didn’t have very supportive roommates or a very great landlord. When the winter hit, second in my time in Maryland only to the “snowpoclypse” of the year before, our heater went out and our landlord was out of the country and unable to fix it. We were freezing most of the time in our place. I wanted to do something, to at least get our landlord to with-go charging rent until things were fixed. Even though we would have been well within the law to do so, my roommates were unwilling to back me up. One was scared and the other seemed strangely unconcerned about everything. I felt alone without support.
At the time I was taking Education for Ministry, a program from The School of Theology at the University of the South that takes people through a four year study of Scripture and Church History. During the check-in for one of our sessions, I laid out everything that was going on for me. Everyone there wanted to help. Just about everyone there offered to help. I didn’t feel alone anymore. I felt supported, and the strange thing was that receiving that support led to everything slowly starting to get better. Eventually I even got into City Year’s AmeriCorps program.
When I was in the midst of this time in my life, it seemed like it would never end. It seemed crushing. It would take years later to look back and see that this time was one of only two really bad moments in my life (not including the Pandemic). But I couldn’t see that at the time because it seemed like there was no way out. Yet that awful time ended, as all awful times eventually do.
We all run into periods in our lives where nothing seems to be going right and when the bad will never end. But it does. We see that in our own lives. We see it with the story of the Israelites as well.
For a time, the Israelites were exiled from the home land. As we see throughout the Tanakh, the Old Testament, this exile occurred due to Israel’s own fault. They failed to trust in the Lord. They leaned towards the ways of the world, and they thought this would make them strong. Instead, it made them weak. It made them so weak that they fell prey to the empires outside of them.
In Jeremiah and our Psalm this morning, however, we hear the message of hope. This hardship will not last forever. The Israelites will return to their homeland. In truth, that is exactly what happened. The Israelites did return from exile. They did gain their home back in the end.
The same is true for Bartimaeus. He was a blind beggar with no hope in his life. For him, it must have seemed like there was no way out of his situation. Given his place, we might feel the same. Yet Jesus happens to be traveling near him. He is able to shout out, ask for the return of his sight, and see again. His situation was not permanent. He was able to get out of it.
There are times for all of us where everything seems so overwhelming and that we are stuck in the awfulness of it all. This pandemic has been one of those times for all of us. Yet what we see in our Scripture passages today is that these bad times won’t be forever. There is hope that they will come to an end. We often see that truth in our own lives too.
In all these stories we see God reaching out, at times literally as in Jesus’ case, to help and comfort us in our crises. My church community with EfM was one of the ways I saw God reaching out to me. We can be that kind of church community too. We can be a group that reaches out to give hope that the bad times will end. We can give hope that things will, one day, be better. If we can do that, then we will be God’s hope-bearing arms in this world.