'Whaddya want?' - asks God?

Sermon. Christ Church and St Lawrence, Brondesbury.

Last Sunday after Trinity.

Mark 10.46-52

Where are you?

I am in an unusual position, in that I am a guest here. I do not know you. Yet I can say that I do know, beyond all probability, where it is you think you are. Where are you? You are very nearly there! Just a couple more days and you can welcome your new priest. Just one more week, and he’ll be here, in the ecclesial saddle, and the next stage of this church’s adventure with God can begin. You are very nearly there. It is almost as if it does not really matter what happens this week. If you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel and pick up some random priest, whom nobody knows, to do the business this week, then, so what? You are so nearly there. (Friends, when I wrote that I was joking. But I am feeling so rotten with this cold that it rings a bit too true.)

Where are you?

That is, you will remember, the very first question in the Bible. It goes like this. Eve and Adam have eaten from the fruit of the forbidden tree, and God comes to speak with them. God walks about in the garden in the cool of the day, and asks them: ‘Where are you?’ It’s easy to see this story as what is called ‘crude anthropomorphism’. God is a human-like character who takes a stroll, who does not know stuff, and so has to ask questions. It happens that I do not see it like that. I think it is possible to see this story, which stands as the very first story of humanity, in a different way. I think it says that, from the very beginning of our time with God, God does what is necessary to be with us. To be with us, as one of us. To be an agent among agents. God ‘condescends’ to be with us. God ‘comes down’ and gives up at least some of the privileges of heaven to be with us. God humbles Godself. God – let me say it – humiliates Godself to be with us. So God will present as if walking around in the cool of the day, if that is what it takes to be with us. That’s not some primitive idea. It’s as profound a theological idea as there can be.

And in that condescended, humble, humiliated role, God asks the human beings: ‘Where are you?’ This isn’t a question from an ignoramus, seeking information. But if God knows the answer, what is going on here? I think we can say. God here is asking the therapeutic question. God is here the good, non-directional therapist, putting the question back to Eve and Adam, and asking them to give their own answer to the question: ‘where are you?’ You tell me where you are, so that you truly hear where you are, perhaps for the first time. If that is right, if that is the first question, and in that sense the archetypal question, then it is a good question, and one may have to live with.

What do you want me to do for you?

That is today’s question, the question Jesus puts back to Bartimaeus in today’s gospel. What do you want me to do for you? Do you realise it is not an unusual question for Jesus to ask? He asks it at least five times in the gospels, and really more than that, when you include variations like ‘what do you seek?’

Now, notice this. If I were to say that God in Jesus comes to us to ask ‘what do you want?’ it would be quite easy to portray me in all kinds of unappealing ways. I am a wishy-washy liberal, who thinks Jesus is there to listen to me, nod, and give me what I want, while patting me on the back. Or… I am a friend of capitalism, who thinks that Jesus asks me what I want, so that I spend and get it, ‘because I am worth it’. Or… I am a believer in magic, who thinks that all you have to do is concentrate on Jesus hard enough, with what you want on your mind, and you get it, and all your problems dissolve, as he supplies. No, no and no.

What do you want me to do for you?

Instead of the above caricatures, I am suggesting this is a hard – the hardest – question. To be asked what you want can leave you exposed like no other question. It can make you aware of your nakedness, even more than the ‘where are you?’ question. Typically, we just do not know what we want. We do not stop to think about what we want, and when we do stop and think what we want, we haven’t the first idea how to weigh up the competing desires, impulses, fantasies in our mind. There are all kinds of questions we can answer immediately. What do you fear? What do you want to avoid? What do you expect? What fits in to your pattern of doing things? These questions we can answer. But we do not know, purely and simply, what we want.

Bartimaeus knew what he wanted. He was able to answer the question ‘what do you want?’ straightaway. He wanted his sight. But he had the special grace (I am not saying this flippantly) of desperation. He was already in contact with his deepest need when he cried out in desperation ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Would to God that we were all Bartimaeus, always, but we are not. We do not know what we want.

What do you want me to do for you?

Maybe your new priest will ask you this. Maybe – and this is a different point – maybe, you should ask your new priest this. Either way, it will not be an easy question. And I renew my point. What if? What if we knew God in Jesus is really with us? What if we knew God in Jesus wants intimacy with us? What if we knew God in Jesus wants to ask us something? What if the question was monosyllabic: What/Do/You/Want…? Would we have the first idea how to answer? Part of Jesus’ insistence on precisely this question is that he is telling us it is possible to find the answer.

Brothers and sisters, I do not know what you want. But I am going to risk one more thing. I know what I want to want for you. Towards the end of my curacy, someone asked me what I had learnt, informally, not from my incumbent or teachers, but from my peers and informal conversations. I had an answer. It was this. A good motto for church life is: ‘Do less and do it well’. So much of church culture is based on the principle: ‘Do more, however badly you do it’, that it has to be good to press the peddle and say: No. Do less and do it well. I said this to a colleague (a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, it so happens), and his eyes widened. He said: ‘Yes, Patrick, that is right. Do less. Do it in depth. And know why you are doing it’. I thought then what I think now: the Gospel of God has been preached! Do less. Do it well. Do it in depth. Know why you are doing it. With these mottoes in mind, it is at least thinkable that you as a congregation will come to know what it is you want.

Another name for today is Bible Sunday, as the collect reflects. And the Bible is full of stories of people who did not know quite where they were and did not know quite what they wanted, and God keeps faith with them (us) and pulls them (us) through, nevertheless. We are all children of Eve and Adam after all. And another ‘another’ name for today might be the Feast of the Apostles Simon and Jude, the forgotten apostles, so forgotten that Jude comes to be the apostle of… hopeless causes. What would it mean if someone with a hopeless cause were told: ‘It is not hopeless. So tell me, what do you want, and we will take things from there?’ Would that question – ever – be a comfortable one? I wonder.

Where are you? What do you want? These questions seem like the easiest and most trivial. They are the hardest and most profound. Of course, answers to these questions can emerge in the rough and tumble -  in the really practical stuff - of you getting to know your new priest. But my prayer is also that it’s something you as disciples of Christ and as a Christian congregation will also be asking yourselves, any way. Amen.