23 Pentecost

 

October 27, 2024

 

Mark 10.46-53

 

+ You have heard me preach again and again about this, but I firmly believe that, without a solid foundation of personal prayer, all that we do in church on Sundays is without a solid base.

 

As I said last week in my sermon, those of us who are ordained are not the only ones who are “ministers” in the Church.

 

All of us who have been baptized are actual ministers of the Church.

 

And for our ministry to be effective, we need to have a strong and very solid prayer life to support that ministry.

 

I, of course, highly encouraged people to pray the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer every day as the first foundation.

 

From the offices and from the Mass, our prayer life as followers of Jesus flourish.

 

Now for many of us, the Daily Offices are not something we can fit into our busy lives.

 

But, no matter how busy our lives are, we must always have a strong foundation of prayer. 

 

Regular prayer.

 

 And that prayer life can be very simple.

 

This morning, in our Gospel, we find a very little, but it seems, very effective prayer, very much in the spirit of Centering Prayer. 

It is a story that at first seems to be leading us in one direction, then something else happens.

 

We find Jesus at Jericho, which reminds us, of course, of the story from Joshua and the crumbling walls.

 

We then find this strangely detailed story of Barthemaeus.

 

It’s detailed in the sense that we not only have his name, but also the fact that he was the son of Timaeus.

 

That’s an interesting little tidbit.

 

And we also find of course that he is blind.

 

Now, it’s not a big mystery what’s going to happen.

 

We know where this story is going.

 

We know Bartimaeus is going to be healed.

 

We know he is going to see.

 

But the real gem of this story doesn’t have to do with Jericho, or the fact that we will never again hear about Bartimeus son of Timaeus.

 

The real gem of this story is that little prayer Bartimaeus prays.

 

There it is, huddled down within the Gospel, like a wonderful little treasure.

 

“Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!”

 

Now that designation of Jesus as the “Son of David” is interesting in and of its self.

 

By identifying Jesus as the Son of the David, Bartimaeus is essentially identifying Jesus as the Messiah, the anointed one sent by God.

 

So this man, Bartimaeus, is praying to the Jewish Messiah, to the One God sent, to have mercy on him.

 

And what does the Son of David do?

 

He has mercy on Bartimaeus. 

 

It’s beautiful!

 

It’s perfect!

 

And in that simple prayer, we find the kernel of all prayer to some extent.

 

At first, it doesn’t seem like much.

 

It’s so deceptively simple.

 

But, obviously, according to our Gospel for today, the prayer is important.

 

Jesus does what he is asked.

 

He has mercy on this man and heals him.

 

So why is this prayer so important?

 

Well, for one thing, we get a glimpse of how to pray in this wonderfully simple little prayer.

 

Jesus occasionally gives us advice in the Gospels on how we should pray.

 

The first one that probably comes to mind probably is the Lord’s prayer.

 

But today we find a prayer very different than the Lord’s prayer.

 

The Lord’s prayer is very structured.

 

It covers all the bases.

 

We acknowledge and adore God, we acknowledge and ask forgiveness not only for our sins, but for the sins committed against us by others.

 

And so on.

 

You know the prayer.

 

The prayer we hear this morning cuts right to the very heart not only of the Lord’s prayer but to every prayer we pray.

 

It is a prayer that rises from within—from our very core.

 

From our heart of hearts.

 

It is truly the Prayer of the Heart.

 

The words of this prayer are the words of all those nameless, formless prayers we pray all the time—those prayers that we find ourselves longing to pray.

 

Here it is, summed up for us.

 

More often than not, our prayers really are simple, one word prayers.

 

And the one word prayer we probably pray more than anything—I do it anyway—is:

 

 “please.”

 

“Please!” I pray so often.

 

Or sometimes it’s: “please, please, please!”

 

Poor God! Having to listen to that all day!

 

The one word prayer I should be praying more than anything is: “thanks.”

 

Meister Ekhart once wrote:

 

“If the only prayer we ever say in our life is ‘thank you’—that will be enough.”

 

Here are the words we long to use in those prayers without words.

 

“Have mercy on me!”

 

But if we were to pare it down, if we were to go to the heart of the prayer, what word from that prayer would be the heart of the whole prayer?

 

It would, of course, be “mercy.”

 

Mercy.

 

Mercy.

 

And, for many of us, this is the heart of our prayer.

 

This is what we desire from God.

 

Mercy.

 

Please, God, we pray. Have mercy on us. 

 

Using words like this, praying like this, simply sitting quietly and just being in the presence of God is a kind of “prayer of the heart.”

 

That’s a perfect description of the prayer we heard in today’s Gospel.

 

“Mercy.”

 

Like Bartimeaus, we can simply bring what we have before God in prayer, release it, and then walk away healed.

 

There is no room for haughtiness when praying this prayer.

 

The person we are when we pray it is who we really are.

 

When all our masks and all our defenses are gone, that is when prayer like this comes in and takes over for us.

 

This is the prayer we pray when, echoing Thomas Merton, we “present ourselves naked before our God.”

 

And this prayer does not even have to be about us.

 

We can use this prayer when praying for others.

 

How easy it is to simply pray:

 

Mercy.

 

God, have mercy on her, or him, or them.

 

It’s wonderful isn’t it? how those simple words can pack such a wallop.

 

We don’t have to be profound or eloquent in the words we address to God.

 

We don’t need to go on and on beseeching and petitioning God.

 

We simply need to open our hearts to God and the words will come.

 

“Mercy.”

 

So, like Bartimaeus, let us pray what is in our heart.

 

Let us open ourselves completely and humbly to God.

 

And when we do we will find the blindness’s of our own lives healed.

 

We will find taken from us that spiritual blindness that causes us to grope about aimlessly, to ignore those in need around us, to not see the beauty of this world that God shows us all the time.

 

Like Bartimaeus, we too will be healed of whatever blinds us to the Light of God breaking through into our lives.

 

And when that blindness is taken from us, with a clear spiritual vision granted to us, we too will focus our eyes, square our shoulders and follow Jesus on the way.