Fact Checking

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.25.15; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:46-52

Listen to Sermon Audio Here:

I’ve always been a skeptic.

It’s kind of a strange thing to admit, as a pastor, but really, I don’t believe things easily.  Human beings are just too good at making stuff up.  At least, I know that boys are.  When I was a kid, I’d listen to the wild tales of braggadocio that the other boys would spin out, of their exploits with girls, or their exploits with cars, and I’d just sort of nod and smile and not believe a word of it.

Maybe it was because I was a compulsive daydreamer, spinning out my own tales of wild adventure, a tiny little Walter Mitty of a boy.  I knew, as storytellers do, that the world was full of people with stories, and those stories are fun and you can trust ‘em just about as far as you can throw ‘em.

Wild stories have always been out there, like, say, the one about how Mikey from the Life cereal commercial died after he ate poprocks, drank soda, and exploded.  I remember that being passed around the schoolbus, presented as something that was perfectly true because the kid behind you had heard it from their cousin, who knew a guy who worked with the doctor who tried to save Mikey’s life.

I’d shake my head, and just let it fly.

Now that I’ve grown up, more or less, the world seems even less trustworthy, a wild nest of totally fabricated folderol.  And for that, I have Snopes.

Snopes, in the event you’ve not bumped into it yet, is a site created by Barbara and David Mikkelson, two folklorists, back in the early days of the internet.  It was 1995, and their interest was in chasing down the truth of the stories told and retold in our culture.  

As a skeptic, I’m fond of Snopes, because someone out there has to be pushing back against the tendency of the internet to be a swirling festival of flagrant fabrication and falsehood.  Just about every single day, someone in my network of souls will pitch out a quote or a meme that I know in my heart of hearts just can’t be true.

Like, for instance, when someone earnestly passes on a picture that attributes a saying to Confucius, when in fact it was said by that old turtle dude in Kung Fu Panda.

Like, for instance, that picture of a snoring dormouse, which was soooo cute but totally doctored.

Like, for instance, that story about a special needs bagger at a grocery store who was insulted by a cruel shopper who then got her comeuppance.  

Like, for instance, a meme this last week purporting to be a quote from Donald Trump.  I, as you might imagine, am not really Donald Trump’s biggest fan.  A reality TV star/oligarch/casino magnate, brash and loud and insulting, who celebrates materialism and uses a third grade vocabulary to manipulate nationalist and racist sentiments.  I mean really, what’s not to like?  But the quote, which claimed to be from an article in People magazine, was outrageous in the wrong way, as Trump purportedly mocked Republicans as gullible and claimed he’d be able to con them into voting for him.  Whoever created it knew, without question, that they were creating disinformation.

Or, for other instance, a website called Creation Science Study, which makes a point of announcing after every major world disaster that the people who died brought it on themselves for being such wretched sinners.  I’d researched that one a little, and discovered that it was run by neoatheists, just out to say outrageous things against the faithful, sort of like unusually cruel and mean spirited performance art.

In this era when information is passed, soul to soul, more easily and virulently than ever before, skepticism seems necessary if we’re to remain even tangentially connected to reality.  

But when my inner skeptic comes into encounter with the stories I hold dear about Jesus, sacred and shaping and ancient, how is it to process them?  Like, for instance, the story of Blind Bartimaeus, which comes to us today from Mark’s Gospel.  It’s a lovely story, drawn from the very late stages of Mark’s story of Jesus.  

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, heading for what he knows is to be his death.  As he and the disciples pass through Jericho, they’ve picked up a crowd of onlookers, a teeming throng.  On their way out of town, that throng catches the attention of a Jericho fixture, a roadside beggar who’d been around for a while.  His name, or so Mark tells us, is Bartimaeus, and his father’s name was Timaeus.

With this itinerant prophet-rabbi and his vast entourage moving by, Bartimaeus starts shouting out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  Son of David, as it’s used here, doesn’t have to do with who your dad is.  It’s one of the titles that first century Judaism used to describe the messiah, as a way of evoking the lineage of kingship running back to King David.

Despite the efforts to shush this inconvenient attention seeker, Jesus hears him, and he is invited forward.  Their exchange is simple.  A question: what do you want from me?  The answer: Teacher, I want to see again.  The answer: Go, your faith has made you well again.

And the story tells us that Bartimaeus sees, and joins the swirling throng walking with Jesus.

I love this story.  And I struggle with this story.

I struggle with it because I am unable to silence my inner skeptic.  I have never reliably experienced such a thing.  Miracles of this sort exist outside of the range of my day-to-day life, and out of the range of what I understand to be the way the world works.  What are the mechanisms by which such a thing could happen?

And I look to where some people now make those claims, the bright eyed televangelists who’ll hold their hands up to the camera and swear that they’re healing someone’s lumbago right now, yes, there it is, someone out there right now has a heeeeaaaling upon them, hallelujah, have your mastercard ready when you call.

But not everyone is out there manipulating.  When I look to others, if I am honest with myself, I see only an earnest and well meaning hunger for miracles.

I look to the tools of historical critical scholarship, the unvested and analytic Biblical equivalent of Snopesian methodology.  There, scholarship tells me that Mark might not have been the only source for this tale, that both Luke and Matthew tell a very similar but slightly different story.  Only in Luke, who seems to directly use a version of Mark as his source in chapter 18:35-43, Jesus is on his way into Jericho when he encounters a nameless blind beggar.  And in Matthew 20:29-34, he’s on his way out of Jericho again, but the story involves not Bartimaeus, but two blind beggars.

And because it was two millennia in the past, there were no disciples wearing Go-Pro body cams.  There are just those three witnesses, each with their slightly different stories.  That’s all we’ve got.

It’d be tempting to do with this story what Thomas Jefferson did, just tossing it out as unsubstantiated irrational superstition, leaving it on the cutting room floor of history, just pasting in the moral teachings of Jesus and ditching all of the stuff that might trigger a visit to Snopes.  There are those who’d let it go.

But as much as I struggle with this story, I do also love it.

I love it because, well, sometimes things happen that seem both wildly improbable and miraculous.  Sometimes sick people get better.  Sometimes you look at the broken, seemingly barely alive body of someone you love...your parent, your friend, your child...and they get better.  And you know it doesn’t always happen, doesn’t *have* to happen just because we want it.  That makes those times when it does feel all the more miraculous.  

I love it because it is true in ways that go well beyond the material nature of the story, in ways that speaks to how faith can radically transform us as persons, opening us up to possibilities that seem outside of our reach.  It is an ancient tale that shapes our self understanding, that has shaped the understanding of countless broken souls, opening them to possibilities about themselves that they never thought possible.  Sometimes addictions are overcome, and long broken parts of our souls heal, and we suddenly see the path towards reconciliation and restoration, and danged if it doesn’t feel like the most amazing thing.

I love it because it gets at who Jesus was, at the strange shrouded magic of this soul whose impact on the world has been told and retold, yet whose identity is so veiled in history that we could walk right by him on the street and not have a clue it was him.  The best we can get is this historical triangulation, this story cobbled together out of old remembrances and recollections.    We know that something happened, something worth remembering, that in the strange organic crowdsourced way of the Bible got remembered.

When I honestly check the impact of such a story, the truth of how it plays across human beings, I see only something that bends our world towards hope and healing.

And that, to be honest, is something worth holding on to.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.