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Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost – October 25, 2009
It begins with a plea, a question and it ends with a life changing, lifelong answer. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” shouts blind Bartimaeus, begging by the side of the Jericho road as Jesus and his disciples get closer and closer to Jerusalem and the playing out of the passion. Despite his blindness, Bartimaeus sees what is yet hidden from everyone else, that Jesus – whom he recognizes as the Son of David - is indeed the Messiah. And despite the noise of the crowd, Jesus is able to pick up this one voice, just as he always picks up the voices of those who exist on the margins of society’s vision: the damaged, the defeated, the deformed.
“What do you want me to do for you?” he asks, just as he asked last week of James and John. The question was the same; the reply could not have been more different. James and John wanted places of honor in Jesus’ kingdom - “one at your right hand and one at your left” - places where others would be sure to notice them. Jesus quickly set them straight: “you do not know what you are asking,” he answered.
In sharp contrast, the blind man does not ask to be seen; his request is the opposite; he knows what he is asking for; he wants to see and not be seen. Throwing off his cloak – willing to give up everything he had, unlike the man who was laden with many possessions – Bartimaues springs up before Jesus. “My teacher,” - literally “rabbouni,” a term used only one other time in the New Testament, when Mary recognizes the risen Christ outside the empty tomb. “My teacher let me see again.” At one time Bartimaeus must have had sight but something happened that caused the light to fade; that caused his vision to vanish. “Let me see again.”
The same fervent wish was recently expressed by a Mrs. Kay Thornton who was without sight for nine years due to a rare condition that left her corneas terribly scarred. She was blind, her doctors said; and there was nothing that could be done about it.
But here is where children and the internet come in handy. Mrs. Thornton’s daughter began researching hospitals and ended up making an appointment for her mother at the University of Miami Medical Center, about a thousand road miles east of her home in Smithdale, Mississippi. There, after two years of failed grafts and transplants she met Dr. Victor Perez who had just joined the staff.
“Kay walked through my clinic, I saw her; I said, ‘I know exactly what we’re going to do with you,’” Dr. Perez said. What he planned to do was something first conceived by Italian doctors back in the 1960s, a technique which involved pulling out one of Kay’s teeth and transplanting it into one of her eyes to help repair the damaged cornea.
Having run out of options, Kay agreed. What followed was two years of waiting during which Dr. Perez and his associates perfected the procedure, consulting Italian specialists both in Miami and overseas until they were confident they knew what they were doing.
Dr. Perez hoped it would be the greatest accomplishment of his life and that he might help other patients like Mrs. Thornton who had severely damaged corneas, some 200 people.
“We’re trying to do a procedure that goes beyond the scope of ophthalmic surgery,” said Dr. Perez. “I had to live with the concept that if it didn’t work, people would quit on it and might not even refer patients to me any more.”
Despite its potential complications, the procedure is actually fairly simple, at least for an eye surgeon. A hole is cut in the damaged cornea and a clear acrylic tube is custom made to allow light in, kind of like cutting a hole in a wall and inserting a telescope. But without something to hold the tube in place, sight is impossible. That’s where the tooth comes in.
Tooth bone and ligament have a better chance of living around the eye than a lot of other materials. So Dr. Perez removed Mrs. Thornton’s canine tooth, also called, I swear to God, the eye tooth. They sliced the root into a tiny plank and stuck the tube through the plank, then rested the whole thing over the hole in her cornea. Instead of an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, she gets a tooth for an eye.
Three years after Mrs. Thornton first met Dr. Perez, the bandages came off and she could see him. Dr. Perez said that the vision in Mrs. Thornton’s eye is about 20/70 right now; with a magnifying glass she can read a newspaper. But he expects that over time, and with glasses, her vision will be almost normal again.
At the news conference sponsored by the Medical School last month, Mrs. Thornton, who had been blind through the births of seven grandchildren, said, “If you could keep your eyes closed for a week; just walk around your house and pretend you’re blind for one week. It’s amazing when you open your eyes again.”
It’s amazing, yes; to once be blind but now to see. And God bless Dr. Perez and his team for accomplishing this; I’m sure Mrs. Thornton gives thanks for him and for her sight every day.
Now, travel east from Miami, Florida to Accra, Ghana, a distance of just about 5,500 miles as the crow flies. According to the Ghana Eye Foundation, of the 20 million people living in that country, some 200,000 are blind. Of the causes of blindness, they say, over 75% are treatable or avoidable.
The leading cause of blindness in Ghana is cataracts, affecting some 105,000 people living there with about 21,000 new cases occurring every year. Cataracts are typically treated by removing the damaged lens and replacing it with an implant, an operation which can take between 15 to 45 minutes, depending on its complexity, and is carried out in Ghana some 10,000 times a year, meaning that almost half the new cases go untreated.
Doctors from England’s Moorfields Eye Hospital along with the West African College of Surgeons are working to rectify this matter by opening up a surgical training center in Accra which, the hospital’s web site says, “will enable eye specialists from across west Africa to be trained…in safe and high volume surgery which is desperately needed to help eliminate cataract blindness or to deliver sight saving treatments for people with glaucoma and trachoma.”
(Trachoma is an infection caused by a particularly nasty micro-organism, one that affects some 84 million people world wide and is the leading cause of preventable blindness; a disease directly related to flies, lack of water, poor hygiene and crowded households.
Apparently a two week course is enough for physicians to learn how to address treatable or preventable blindness in West Africa, helping to restore sight to tens of thousands of people; high volume healing indeed. Compare that with the two years it took for Dr. Perez and his team in south Florida to restore the sight of one person and potentially help 200. Yet each result is a cause for celebration, a cause for proclaiming the greatness of the Lord, especially for the one whose sight is restored.
“Let me see again,” the cry is heard from one, from hundreds and from thousands. Jesus sees and hears and heals the one, and because he does we can see and hear and heal the hundreds and the thousands. Today he hears Bartimaeus’s cries and opens Bartimaeus’s eyes; using only words, notice; no spitting, not touching, certainly no teeth. Today he brings this formerly blind man more than what he had before; he offers him a new way of seeing, a new vision. How do we know this? Mark tells us: “Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.” He became a disciple, a follower of the way.
Jesus’ words, “your faith has made you well” are the same ones he used when he healed the woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. That makes sense, too, because like Bartimaeus, this unnamed woman was considered an outcast, unclean physically and spiritually. (Blindness, like disease, was perceived as punishment from God.)
Two desperate people, individually, appeal to Jesus and he stops in his tracks to tend to them. The woman comes up to him from behind and touches his cloak. Mark says, “Immediately…Jesus turned about in the crowd and said ‘Who touched my clothes?’” Today, when the blind man persists in yelling, “Have mercy on me,” Mark says, “Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here.’” He stops what he is doing among the crowds to meet an individual need.
In virtually every instance recorded in the New Testament, when Jesus offers healing this is how he does it, on an individual, case by case basis; salvation on the retail level it has been called. “Go, your faith has made you well,” literally “healed you” or “saved you.”
And that need is still there for each of us; that need for healing, for saving, for a new way of seeing into the unsearchable riches of Christ and the kingdom he has ushered in; a kingdom in which, as he told John’s followers, “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them.”
We claim citizenship in this kingdom, one with wholesale needs in which we, who have been touched by God individually and have chosen to follow in his way are called to serve. Our service includes our contribution to the United Thank Offering which last year awarded four different grants in Africa totaling $212,000.
We claim citizenship in this kingdom, one which calls us to look at the world anew.
Kay Thornton said we should try keeping our eyes closed for a week and then opening them. We’d be amazed at what we see, she said. Well, try having your eyes closed for 26 years, as happened to Joyce Urch of Coventry, England who was blinded by a hereditary illness, resigned to a life of blackness. That is until she was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, having suffered a heart attack and kidney failure. When she woke up after a life saving operation, she opened her eyes. She could see. “I shouted, I did,” Urch told ABC news three yeas ago. “I said, ‘I’m back, I’m back.’”
Her daughter called the rest of the family, including Erich, Joyce’s husband of nearly 50 years. He looked a little different than Joyce remembered. “I thought to myself, he was so lovely at one time,” Joyce said, “Now he’s getting old and gray.”
“She leaned forward,” Erich said describing the scene in the hospital, “and she just looked at me and said, ‘Haven’t you got old.’ And I said, ‘Wait ‘til you have a look in the mirror.’”
No one really knows why Joyce can see again – different theories have been offered including cataracts dislocated through resuscitation – but Joyce’s family does not care how it happened, only that it happened. “There’s no other answer than a miracle, to us,” said her daughter. “We really do find it a miracle…to have our mum and to have her seeing is wonderful, it really is.”
Let us pray that such miracles and such wonders may spread, from Miami to Accra to England, that all may look upon God and upon one another and be radiant.