Can you see?

 

I actually got the two recordings together this time (3rd time of asking!); there will be a gap after the main sermon, and then the secondary sermon will begin.

This is a very splendid story in John's Gospel, although it's rather long, which is why I divided the reading into two bits.

It's not just about a healing, it's about what happened afterwards.

We start with the man born blind,
and first of all the disciples want to know why this had happened.
We all want to know why, don't we,
when dreadful things happen.
Why was this child born disabled?
Why did that earthquake devastate towns on the Turkey/Syria border?
Why did so and so get cancer?
Why did so and so get cancer and then get better,
when someone else couldn't get better, and died?
And so on and so forth.
It's human nature.
Even though we sometimes know the answers, or at least part of them –
the buildings in those cities didn’t conform to earthquake-proofing regulations
which is why the earthquake caused so much devastation;
that person shortened their lifespan by smoking.
And so on.
But other times there seems to be no reason for it.

And so the disciples ask Jesus whether the man's blindness was some kind of punishment for him, or for his parents.
I wonder if the parents were asking, too:
“Why us?
What did we do wrong?”

But Jesus said no, it wasn't anything like that, but to show how he, Jesus, is the Light of the World.
And he proceeds to heal the man.

Now, all the Gospels tell of Jesus healing a blind man, sometimes called Bartimaeus, but this is the only one that takes it further, and looks at the consequences.
You see, after all, if your life is touched by Christ there are, or should be, consequences.
If nothing changes, was it a real touch?

For the blind man –
and let's call him Bartimaeus for now,
as it makes life easier with pronouns and such –
life changed immediately.
My sister-in-law, who is blind,
says that not only would he have been given his sight,
but he would have been given the gift of being able to see,
otherwise how would he have known what he was looking at?
He wouldn't have known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a tree, would he?
But he was given that gift, as well.

And he could stop begging for his living, he realised,
and he went and did whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was.
And, of course there were lots of mutterings and whisperings –
Is it him?
Can't be!
Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!

“Yes, it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story.
“Yes, I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”

“So what happened?” asks the neighbours.

“Well, this bloke put some mud on my eyes and told me to go and wash,
and when I did, then I could see.
No, I don't know where he is –
I never saw him;
Yes, I'd probably know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”

And the neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day.
And they don't believe him.
Not possible.
Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen.
And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath.
Not unless the person who did it was a sinner,
because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath –
it's work, isn't it?
And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!

They got themselves in a right old muddle.
Now we, of course, know what Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were –
he is on record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed donkey,
or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink,
whatever day of the week it was,
so surely healing a human being was a right and proper activity for the Sabbath.
But the Pharisees didn't believe this.
They thought healing was work,
and thus not a proper activity for the Sabbath at all.

So they decided it couldn't possibly have happened,
and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to say
“Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he?
What has happened?”
And his parents, equally bewildered, say
“Well yes, he is our son;
yes, he was born blind;
yes, it does appear that he can now see;
no, we don't know what happened;
why don't you ask him?”
And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.

Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions, don't you think –
thrilled that their son could suddenly see,
scared of the authorities,
wondering what exactly Jesus had done,
and was it something they ought to have done themselves, and so on.
And, of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on.
Very soon now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more;
now he was like other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry and have a family.

So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus, and he says,
“Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is a sinner or not?
All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!”
And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen,
and he gets fed up with them going on and says
“But I told you!
Didn't you listen?
Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?”
which was, of course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it,
but then again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed.
And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be,
and they get even more fed up with him, and sling him out.

And then Jesus meets him again –
of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before,
doesn't actually recognise him –
and reveals himself to him.
And Bartimaeus worships him.

Then Jesus, the Light of the World,
says that he has come so that the blind may see,
and those who see will become blind –
looking hard at the Pharisees as he said it.
The Pharisees are horrified:
“What, are we blind, then?”

And Jesus says, “If you acknowledged that you were blind, you, too, could be healed.
But but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains!”

That's the thing, isn't it –
the Pharisees wouldn't admit they needed Jesus.
They wouldn't admit there was anything wrong.
Jesus has picked up on this before –
you remember the story he told about the Pharisee and the tax-collector,
and the Pharisee was too pleased with himself to be able to receive God's grace.
The tax-collector knew he was a rat-bag, and thus God could do something.

We know that bit.
We know that we need to acknowledge our need of God before God can act –
we must make room for God in our lives.
But when we have done that,
and God has touched us, in whatever way,
things change.
For Bartimaeus, it was about learning to live with his sight,
and about dealing with the issues that it raised.

I wonder what it is for us.
For make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes –
perhaps we used to get drunk,
but now we find ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses.
Perhaps we used to gamble,
but suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a bookie!
Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer,
but now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope.

Very often these sorts of changes happen without our even noticing them.
Others take more struggle –
sometimes it is many years before we can finally let go of an addiction, or a bad habit.
But as I've said before, the more open we are to God,
the more we can allow God to change us.
Sometimes, of course, we cling on to the familiar bad habits,
as we don't know how to replace them with healthier ways of acting and thinking, and find it too scary to trust God to show us the way.

But perhaps it isn’t just our personal behaviour that changes.
Maybe we find ourselves getting involved in our community in a way we hadn’t been before.
It will be different for all of us, but we will probably find ourselves, in some way, walking alongside the poor and marginalised in our society.   

The point is, when God touches our lives, things change.
They changed for Bartimaeus, I know they changed for me,
and they will have changed for many of you, if not all of you, too.

But it's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you.
I know I have, many times.
The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back.
We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves –
we would always fail if we were.
We just need to acknowledge to ourselves –
and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway –
that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course –
there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off.
But I'm not going into that one right now;
nobody really knows why that happens, except God!
But for most of us, most of the time,
if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us,
we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened,
and we are back with him again.

It can be scary.
Bartimaeus was scared, and with some reason
as his healing ended up with his being chucked out of the synagogue.
That was relatively mild compared with what has happened to some of Jesus' followers down the years, though.
But then, we always seem to be given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes.
It’s not necessarily true that God never gives us more than we can handle, but what is true is that we don't have to cope alone.
God is there, not only changing us,
but enabling us to cope with that change.

And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory!
Because it's not just about what happens to us –
although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most.
It's also about showing God's glory to the world,
showing people that Jesus is the Light of the World.
As happened when Bartimaeus was healed;
as may well happen if and when God touches our lives.
Amen.

---oo0oo---

What day is it today?
Mothers’ Day –
is the wrong answer!
At least, it might be Mothers’ Day out in the world,
but here in Church it’s Mothering Sunday,
and that, in fact, is only tangentially about human mothers!

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday –
it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now,
it was a day when you could relax the rules a little.
And the tradition grew up that on that day,
you went to the mother church in your area –
often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area.
Or sometimes, it might have been the church where you were nurtured and taught as a child, before you left home.
I have had the honour and privilege of preaching at my own “mother church” in a Sussex village, and I love to visit there when I can.

Families went together to the local cathedral, if they lived near enough;
sometimes even whole congregations went together,
and it became traditional for servants to have time off to go home and see their families on that day and go to church with them,
if they lived near enough.
In the Middle Ages, servants may only have got one day off a year,
and it was, traditionally, the 4^th Sunday in Lent.
Many servants had to leave home when they were very young –
only about 11 or 12 –
because their parents simply couldn't afford to feed them any longer.
And, indeed, many of these children hadn't known what a full tummy felt like until they started work.
But even so, they must have missed their families,
and been glad to see them every year.

And today is also a day for remembering God’s love for us.
We’re having the readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent today,
but if we’d had the traditional Mothering Sunday readings,
we would have heard Jesus weeping over Jerusalem:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you.
I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
But you wouldn't let me.”

The image of Jesus as a mother hen!
What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers,
although that, too,
but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother.

Mothers, Mary, Mother Mary

Today, it will not have escaped your notice, is Mothers’ Day. At least, it might be Mothers’ Day out in the world, but here in Church it’s Mothering Sunday, and that, in fact, is only tangentially about human mothers! Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday – it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now, it was a day when you could relax the rules a little.

And the tradition grew up that on that day, you went to the mother church in your area – often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area. Families went together, and it became traditional for servants to have time off to go home and see their families on that day, if they lived near enough. In the Middle Ages, servants may only have got one day off a year, and it was, traditionally, the 4th Sunday in Lent. Many children had to leave home when they were very young – only about 11 or 12 – because their parents simply couldn't afford to feed them any longer. And, indeed, many of these children hadn't known what a full tummy felt like until they started work. But even so, they must have missed their families, and been glad to see them every year.

And today is also a day for remembering God’s love for us. What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although that, too, but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother. After all, there are people whose mothers have died; people who didn’t or don’t have a good relationship with their mothers; and above all, people who would have loved to have been mothers, but it didn’t happen, for whatever reason. Many of those will not be in church this morning. The Church isn't always very tactful about Mothers Day, I'm afraid – I used to find it very patronising, especially considering that for the rest of the year I was rather left to get on with it, and was told that the loneliness and isolation and lack of fellowship was “the price you pay for the wonderful privilege of being a Christian Mother!” As if....

The worst Mothers Day sermon I ever heard was from a young curate who had just discovered his wife was expecting their first child – sadly, he moved away during the course of the year, as several of us were longing to hear what he would have had to say after several months of the reality of parenthood!

But, talking of motherhood, you will have noticed that our readings for today seemed more like Christmas ones than suitable for mid-Lent. You see, yesterday was 25 March, exactly nine months to go until Christmas, so, of course, that is the day when parts of the church celebrate what’s called the Annunciation, when Gabriel came to tell Mary she was going to have a baby. And even though we Protestants don’t really think about Mary much, the fact that she’s such an important figure in so much of Christianity means she’s probably worth thinking about from time to time.

So what do we actually know about her from the Bible, as opposed to tradition? She first appears in our Bibles in this very reading, when Gabriel comes to her to ask her if she will bear Jesus, and, of course, as we all know, she said she would, and Joseph agreed to marry her despite her being pregnant with a baby he knew he wasn’t responsible for.

I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary – how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years. And, as we heard in our reading, Mary rushes off to visit her. Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth? Or to congratulate Elisabeth? Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose? We aren’t told.

But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”. Or if it wasn’t exactly that – that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt – it was probably words to that effect! I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy! And later, in Bethlehem, when the shepherds come to visit her, we are told that she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” The next time we see Mary is when Jesus is twelve and gets separated from them in the Temple. I spent a lot of time with that story when my daughter was a teenager – how Mary and Joseph say to Jesus, “But why did you stay behind? Didn’t you realise we’d be worried about you?” and Jesus goes, “Oh, you don’t understand!” – typical teenager!

We don’t see Joseph again after this – tradition has it that he was a lot older than Mary, and, of course, he had a very physical job. It wasn’t just a carpenter as we know it – the Greek word is “technion”, which is the same root as our “technician”; if it had to do with houses, Joseph did it, from designing them, to building them, to making the furniture that went in them! And tradition has it that sometime between Jesus’ 12th birthday, and when we next see him, Joseph has died.

 But we see a lot more of Mary. She is there at the wedding at Cana, and indeed, it’s she who goes to Jesus when they’ve run out of wine. And Jesus says, at first, “Um, no – my time has not yet come!” but Mary knew. And she told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you”, and, sure enough, the water is turned into wine.

There’s a glimpse of her at one point when Jesus is teaching, and he’s told his mother and brother are outside waiting for him, but he refuses to be diverted from what he’s doing. And, of course, it could have been that it was just random people who said they were his relations to try to get closer to him.

We see Mary, of course, weeping at the Cross – something no mother should ever have to do. And Jesus commending her into the care of the “beloved disciple” John. And, finally, we see her in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came.

That’s really all we know about her from the Bible, but other early traditions and writings, including some of what’s called the apocryphal gospels – they’re the ones that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament as we know it – tell us a bit more. They tell us that her mother was called Anne and her father was called Joachim, and that she was only about 16 when Gabriel came to her. One source has it that Anne couldn’t have babies, and when Mary finally arrived, she was given to be reared in the Temple, like Samuel. And traditional sources also tell us that she went to live in Ephesus, probably with John, and died somewhere between 3 and 15 years after the Crucifixion, surrounded by all the apostles. And that her body was taken up to heaven.

Well, so far, so good, but how did they get from there to the veneration of her, not to say worship in some cases, that we see today? This may be something you find difficult to understand – I certainly do – and that’s okay. We aren’t required to do more than honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord; we mention her when we say the Creed, of course, and there are lots of churches dedicated to her. My parents’ church in Sussex is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, as are loads of other churches around the world. But we do not think of her as quasi-divine in some way. We do believe that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by ordinary human means, but that this was something that happened in time, not in eternity! She became the Mother of God – she was not the Mother of God before Jesus was born.

I wonder, though, just how it happened that veneration of Mary became such a thing among Roman Catholic Christians. Orthodox Christianity also venerates her, but make it quite clear that she is not divine – the distinction, sometimes, among Catholics gets a bit blurred. One theory I have heard put forward is that she gives a female aspect to Christianity, which may or may not be lacking from the Trinity. Well, if that is so, how come Protestant women have managed without for so many generations?

Having said that, of course, it’s worth remembering the days when Christianity was first spread around the world. If you were Jewish, you were quite used to thinking of God as Father and Creator, but if you came from a background which worshipped a virgin goddess, Mary obviously provided what you found you were missing. And again, if you were used to worshipping a mother figure, as so many people were, you found something in Mary that perhaps you missed in the Christian depiction of God. Don’t forget, in the olden days you had to convert to Christianity when your ruler did, or the head of your tribe, or whatever, and if the worship you were used to was suddenly no longer provided, you had to make what you could of what you did have!

And then, of course, the Catholic Church being nothing if not practical, formalised a great deal of what was happening, and thought, about Mary into doctrine.... and so it went on. Chicken and egg type of situation, drawing on tradition and practice more than on Scripture. And so, of course, when the Protestants went back to the Bible, discarding most, although not all, traditional theology, Mary rather fell back into the background.

We Protestants, of course, do have a choice – there is a tradition of venerating Mary in some parts of the Protestant Church, but it is far from compulsory. We honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord – and we honour her, too, for her bravery in saying “Yes” to God like that. After all, had Joseph repudiated her for carrying someone else’s child, she could have ended up on the streets!

 But what, then, can we learn from Mary? We don’t tend to think of her very much, at least, I don’t. We don’t necessarily find in her a mother figure to worship. But there is that incredible bravery that said “Yes” to God – and remember, she didn’t know the end of the story, not at that stage! There are times I wonder what she must think of it all! But she was totally submitted to God in a way that very few people can claim to be. And, of course, there is what she said to the servants at that wedding in Cana - “Do whatever He tells you”.

And that’s not a bad motto to live by, either: Do whatever Jesus tells you. Amen.

Mothering Sunday (Second sermon for 4 April)

What day is it today? Mothers’ Day – is the wrong answer! At least, it might be Mothers’ Day out in the world, but here in Church it’s Mothering Sunday, and that, in fact, is only tangentially about human mothers!

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday – it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now, it was a day when you could relax the rules a little. And the tradition grew up that on that day, you went to the mother church in your area – often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area.

Families went together, and it became traditional for servants to have time off to go home and see their families on that day, if they lived near enough. In the Middle Ages, servants may only have got one day off a year, and it was, traditionally, the 4th Sunday in Lent. Many servants had to leave home when they were very young – only about 11 or 12 – because their parents simply couldn't afford to feed them any longer. And, indeed, many of these children hadn't known what a full tummy felt like until they started work. But even so, they must have missed their families, and been glad to see them every year.

And today is also a day for remembering God’s love for us. We’re having the readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent today, but if we’d had the traditional Mothering Sunday readings, we would have heard Jesus weeping over Jerusalem:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you. I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you wouldn't let me.”

The image of Jesus as a mother hen! What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although that, too, but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother.

We do give thanks for our mothers - this year it's all a bit special because it's my first as a grandmother, and Emily's first as a mother - and I texted my own mother this morning, remembering that it was her first as a great-grandmother. But we have to remember, too, people whose Mums are no longer with us, and to remember that some people didn't have satisfactory relationships with their own Mums, and some people have never known the joy of motherhood.

But we can all celebrate God's wonderful love for each and every one of us.

Can you see?

This is a very splendid story in John's Gospel, although it's rather long, which is why I divided the reading into two bits. It's not just about a healing, it's about what happened afterwards.

We start with the man born blind, and first of all the disciples want to know why this had happened. We all want to know why, don't we, when dreadful things happen. Why was this child born disabled? Why did that earthquake and tsunami devastate part of Japan? Or part of New Zealand, for that matter? Why did so and so get cancer? Why did so and so get cancer and then get better, when someone else couldn't get better, and died? And so on and so forth. It's human nature. Even though we sometimes know the answers, or at least part of them – that city was built on a fault line, which is why the earthquake happened just there; that person shortened their lifespan by smoking. And so on. But other times there seems to be no reason for it.

And so the disciples ask Jesus whether the man's blindness was some kind of punishment for him, or for his parents. I wonder if the parents were asking, too: “Why us? What did we do wrong?”

But Jesus said no, it wasn't anything like that, but to show how he, Jesus, is the Light of the World. And he proceeds to heal the man.

Now, all the Gospels tell of Jesus healing a blind man, sometimes called Bartimaeus, but this is the only one that takes it further, and looks at the consequences. You see, after all, if your life is touched by Christ there are, or should be, consequences. If nothing changes, was it a real touch?

For the blind man – and let's call him Bartimaeus for now, as it makes life easier with pronouns and such – life changed immediately. My sister-in-law, who is blind, says that not only would he have been given his sight, but he would have been given the gift of being able to see, otherwise how would he have known what he was looking at? He wouldn't have known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a tree, would he? But he was given the gift, so he knew.

And he could stop begging for his living, he realised, and he went and did whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was. And, of course there were lots of mutterings and whisperings – Is it him? Can't be! Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!

“Yes, it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story. “Yes, I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”

“So what happens?” asks the neighbours.

“Well, this bloke put some mud on my eyes and told me to go and wash, and when I did, then I could see. No, I don't know where he is – I never saw him; Yes, I'd probably know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”

And the neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day. And they don't believe him. Not possible. Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen. And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath. Not unless the person who did it was a sinner, because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath – it's work, isn't it? And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!

They got themselves in a right old muddle. Now we, of course, know what Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were – he is on record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed donkey, or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink, whatever day of the week it was, so surely healing a human being was a right and proper activity for the Sabbath. But the Pharisees didn't believe this. They thought healing was work, and thus not a proper activity for the Sabbath at all.

So they decided it couldn't possibly have happened, and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to say “Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he? What has happened?” And his parents, equally bewildered, say “Well yes, he is our son; yes, he was born blind; yes, it does appear that he can now see; no, we don't know what happened; why don't you ask him?” And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.

Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions, don't you think – thrilled that their son could suddenly see, scared of the authorities, wondering what exactly Jesus had done, and was it something they ought to have done themselves, and so on. And, of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on. Very soon now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more; now he was like other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry and have a family.

So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus, and he says, “Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is a sinner or not? All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!” And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen, and he gets fed up with them going on and says “But I told you! Didn't you listen? Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?” which was, of course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it, but then again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed. And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be, and they get even more fed up with him, and sling him out.

And then Jesus meets him again – of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before, doesn't actually recognise him – and reveals himself to him. And Bartimaeus worships him.

Then Jesus, the Light of the World, says that he has come so that the blind may see, and those who see will become blind – looking hard at the Pharisees as he said it. The Pharisees are horrified: “What, are we blind, then?”

And Jesus says, “If you acknowledged that you were blind, you, too, could be healed. But but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains!”

That's the thing, isn't it – the Pharisees wouldn't admit they needed Jesus. They wouldn't admit there was anything wrong. Jesus has picked up on this before – you remember the story he told about the Pharisee and the tax-collector, and the Pharisee was too pleased with himself to be able to receive God's grace. The tax-collector knew he was a rat-bag, and thus God could do something.

We know that bit. We know that we need to acknowledge our need of God before God can act – we must make room for God in our lives. But when we have done that, and God has touched us, in whatever way, things change. For Bartimaeus, it was about learning to live with his sight, and about dealing with the issues that it raised.

I wonder what it is for us. For make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change. Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes – perhaps we used to get drunk, but now we find ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses. Perhaps we used to gamble, but suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a bookie! Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer, but now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope.

Very often these sorts of changes happen without our even noticing them. Others take more struggle – sometimes it is many years before we can finally let go of an addiction, or a bad habit. But as I've said before, the more open we are to God, the more we can allow God to change us. Sometimes, of course, we cling on to the familiar bad habits, as we don't know how to replace them with healthier ways of acting and thinking, and that's scary.

But the point is, when God touches our lives, things change. They changed for Bartimaeus, I know they changed for me, and they will have changed for many of you, if not all of you, too.

But it's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you. I know I have, many times. The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back. We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves – we would always fail if we were. We just need to acknowledge to ourselves – and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway – that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course – there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off. But I'm not going into that one right now; nobody really knows why that happens, except God! But for most of us, most of the time, if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us, we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened, and we are back with him again.

It can be scary. Bartimaeus was scared, and with some reason as his healing ended up with his being chucked out of the synagogue. That was relatively mild compared with what has happened to some of Jesus' followers down the years, though. But then, we are always given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes. We don't have to cope alone. God is there, not only changing us, but enabling us to cope with that change. And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory! Because it's not just about what happens to us – although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most. It's also about showing God's glory to the world, showing people that Jesus is the Light of the World. As happened when Bartimaeus was healed; as may well happen if and when God touches our lives. Amen.