Proper 23B: Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15
Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
October 13, 2024
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. It was so much fun and so moving to welcome and bless our animals companions here last Sunday, to bless dogs in Upper Douglas Dog Park, and to offer consolation here in the afternoon for our Animal Companion Memorial.[1] It was such a blessing to connect with one another and with people I had never before met in the midst of it all. It was such a moving expression of this season of Creation that we have been journeying through, and will continue in for three more Sundays including today, before we turn to All Saints, followed by our extended observance of Advent. Time is flowing: the time of the world around us, roaring ahead; and God’s time that we seek to hallow, reaching toward the divine dream through the lens of the Church year week by week, day by day.[2] In this morning’s readings that year presents us with several angles on the God who truly and deeply sees us, holding us in infinite love and calling us to follow Christ more truly and fully.
The God who sees. This phrase comes to me from our readings from the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark, but the actual phrase comes from a reading we were not assigned today: the story of Hagar, told in the book of Genesis. Hagar was an Egyptian woman enslaved to Sarah (or then Sarai), the wife of Abraham. Sarah allowed Abraham and Hagar to have a child, before Sarah and Abram were later able to conceive. Hagar was both caught and in many ways lost in the midst of this saga, especially as Sarah turned on Hagar in contempt when she became pregnant. In the wilderness, where Hagar ran more than once to escape this toxic stew, an angel of God reassured her, declaring that God was giving “heed to [Hagar’s] affliction” by giving her a son whom she was to name Ishmael. In response Hagar declared God “El-roi,” that is, the God who sees, asking, “‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” (Genesis 16:13). Hagar names God as the one who sees us in our despair, who sees us at depth and at length. I thought of Hagar’s divine naming as I read the words assigned to us this morning from Job: “If I go forward, [God] is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left [s]he hides, and I cannot behold her; I turn to the right, but I cannot see [them]” (Job 23:8-9). So often we cannot see God. We wander in despair or frustration, feeling forsaken, as the psalmist cries out in language we hear on Good Friday, “My God, my God… why are you so far from my cry and from the words of my distress?” (Psalm 22:1) Hagar’s wilderness experience expresses how even as we cannot see, when we despair in abandonment, God is present. God is the God whom we can name, together with her, as El-roi, the One who truly sees us through the thick darkness of any circumstance.
That divine perception is on sharp display in our passage from the letter to the Hebrews. I love the texture of this description: “The word [the λόγος] of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). The living activity of this Word can remind us not only of scripture but of the divine wisdom at the heart of Creation, “through whom all things were made,” incarnate in Jesus the Christ.[3] The description of this living wisdom as sharp is striking. Ever since I read the His Dark Materials series some twenty years ago (stopping short of the end, I admit), this description of the sharpness of the living Word of God has reminded me of the subtle knife, a magical instrument in the book that can open up seams between this world and others.[4] There is a fearsomeness to this Word, the author of Hebrews wants us to see. Before God “no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account” (Hebrews 4:13). Surely this passage informed the familiar collect that begins, “Almighty God to whom all hearts are open, all desires, known, and from whom know secrets are hid…”[5] As overwhelming as this description could be, I have always found it so deeply comforting. In periods of my life when I have felt so lost, so unseen, that particular prayer and the living wisdom that it expresses in all its depth and challenge, has offered such consolation. Our passage from Hebrews goes on to do this as well, turning from the sharp edge of the sword-like Word to the high priest whose fundamental quality is compassion. This is the God who in Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, “sympathize[s] with our weakness” (Hebrews 4:15). God in the life of Jesus who struggled deeply, experienced challenge, and in the words of our Psalm expressed despair. All this he brought into the very heart of God. The God who sees.
This sight is movingly expressed in our gospel passage as Jesus takes in the exuberant declarations of a young man who had diligently kept all the commandments since his early days. In response to this exuberance, we hear, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mark 10:21). It’s such a small description, a small interlude amid the wider challenge Jesus goes on to issue. Yet it is the heart of the matter. Jesus saw this person in all his humanity: his heart, his determination, and his shortcomings, particularly his attachment to possessions. The challenge that grieves this man, the truth of the “one thing he lacked,” is issued to us as people with and of various possessions (Mark 10:21-22). The call to let them go, to not be possessed by them but in fact to share them as part of our participation in God’s dream in which the first become last and the last first, rests on the foundation of a love that sees us truly and at depth. Trusting in the truth of that sight, perceiving what we cannot, we can be opened to the truth of how our possessions, rooted in earthly treasure signify, paradoxically, lack. True treasure is not to be found in monetary wealth, or in powerful status, qualities of life that impede our progress towards God and God’s reign. Instead, letting these things go, unclenching our hands and allowing them flow out and away from us, stepping to the edges so that those are the margins can step into the center, we collaborate in God’s dream.[6]
Jesus specifically references relationships as bound up with this process, naming siblings, parents, and children, as well as possessions (Mark 10:29-30). We are freed to dwell in newness and authenticity of relationship with God, with one another, with ourselves. We are freed and called to experience and construct family in ways that cannot be contained by the structures of our world, whether family is biological, logical (as we say in queer circles, a few days removed from Coming Out Day) or some combination of the two. And this process unfolds “now, in this age” – even one hundredfold – as well as in the age to come, whatever that vision may look like in all its mystery and splendor (Mark 10:30). Here and now, we are called to participate in the unfolding of that dream, even as we affirm that its reality rests in the God for whom all things are possible.
In our Friday movie night, my family recently watched a thow-back to Kateri’s and my childhood: The Goonies, a 1985 Steven Spielberg film featuring a group of friends and frenemies who resist the predatory acquisition of their neighborhood by a wealthy country club owner. They resist by searching for a legendary, local, long-hidden pirate’s treasure. In plenty of ways, the movie did not age well – its problematic dimensions are multiple. But this time through – in fact, the first time I had seen it all the way through – I was struck by a particular moment in the action. The renegade kids were being pursued through an underground tunnel by a rather pirate-like modern-day crime family whom they had crossed along the way. At a key moment as the crime family bore down upon them, obnoxious teen representatives of the world above, the same world that was poised to turn their neighborhood into a gold course, had an opportunity to literally hoist the kids out of their trap, one by one, using a well that turned out to connect the two domains. Just as one of their number stepped into the well’s bucket, Mikey, the child leader of their unlikely treasure-seeking effort, urged them to wait. “It’s their time up there,” he said, the time of ravenous property-grabbers and parental overwhelm, giving in and giving up. “But down here it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.”[7] Their below-time, the ethic of their efforts, was about resisting toxic greed. It was about safeguarding relationships. It also turned out to include a striking respect for the long-dead pirate whose hidden treasure could free them from the predatory country club. They didn’t go after that pirate’s own gold when they found it, weighed on a scale on the table before him, taking other surrounding items instead. Of course, this turns out to be a smart move because the scale turns out to be rigged Indiana Jones style, in a way that would later snag the pursuing crime family. What gold the kids do go on to take, they lose as they escape from the malcontents who finally caught up to them. But in a twist that couldn’t help remind me of today’s and Markan gospel passage (and several we have heard in recent weeks), their loss ends up being reversed in a final scene when they discover that the marble bag of one of the kids now turns out to have jewels from the pirate’s booty. They are able to prevent the country club from taking over their neighborhood, after all. If this is not quite an example of the last becoming first, it does mark an economic overturning at the hands of kids who stayed true to the unfolding of their time, their ethics, their sense of possibility beyond what many would declare impossible.
And this makes me think of the youth of Nico Lang’s new book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era.[8] In an era in which, trans and nonbinary lives are being used as political fodder, distorted and exploited at the local, state, and national levels, including by a presidential campaign, those of us who are trans and nonbinary are not being seen by far too many. Particularly the lives and stories of the youngest among us are not being centered. But in Lang’s book, thanks be to God, they and their families, our families, are. We who read the book, or who learn about the people in it from Nico just after this service, will have an opportunity to hear joy as well as pain, challenge as well as possibility, the simple realities of day-to-day life for trans and nonbinary youth around our country. Thanks be to the God who sees them, loves them, stands with them, supports them. Thanks be to the people who walk alongside us, forging family and possibility anew, even in the face of hatred and ignorance, mistrust and distortion. Thanks be to the God for whom nothing is impossible, who calls us to join with one another in the making of a new world in which the last become first, and the divine dream can begin to be realized in this age, in this time, even now. May it be so.
[1] We celebrated this dimension of our ministries at St. Aidan’s last week with a video slide show which is now online here: https://vimeo.com/1016871101
[2] As always, the divine dream references the Kingdom of God as expressed by Verna Dozier in her book The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 1990).
[3] The phrase is from the Nicene Creed, interpreting John 1:3.
[4] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Pullman’s website: https://www.philip-pullman.com/hdm.
[5] The Collect for Purity in the Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 323, 355.
[6] The phrase the dream of God, as always, references Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1990)
[7] The Goonies (1985). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089218/
[8] Nico Lang, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era (Harry N. Abrams, 2024)
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