“Your Inner Eyelid”
Mark 1:1-8
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
December 7,
2008
Advent 2
The Sacrament
of Holy Communion
Do
you have things you wonder about? Of
course you do. We all do.
I long have wondered, for instance, how they get those sailboats inside
the wine bottles. I have wondered
about how things get their names. Like,
I am not the first to wonder why is it that we drive on a parkway and park on a
driveway? I found a list this week
of things the late comedian George Carlin wondered about, like
Of
course, there are more serious things about which to wonder as well, like, how
in a land of plenty, like ours, is there such extreme poverty?
Or, why is it that fifty million people in our country go without
appropriate health care because they lack adequate health insurance?
Here
is something else I wondered about this week, this from the world of nature.
How is it that a camel is able to see and navigate through blinding
desert sandstorms? (I bet you have
spent time on that as well!) I got
to thinking about camels because it says of John the Baptist in our gospel
reading today that “he was clothed with camel’s hair.”
I
want to say a word about John’s camel hair clothes because it gives evidence
of Mark’s writing genius. We said
last week, in talking about the quadratos approach to the gospels developed by
Alexander Shaia, that each of the four biblical gospels addresses one of the
four basic questions that all human beings face repeatedly in our lives.
Matthew helps us to embrace and embark on change in our lives, something
we must do if we are going to grow and not live puny lives.
Mark teaches us how to endure suffering, how to meet head on the storms
of life that inevitably blow our way.
John shows us how to find joy in our lives even in the midst of
change and suffering. And Luke tells
us how we can share the joy and the wisdom we have gained in a way that is of
service to others and that makes meaning in our lives.
The gospel readings are spread across a three year reading cycle called a
lectionary so that we can circle around again and again to these crucial
questions for our living. We now are
in the Mark year of the lectionary in which we are seeking better to know how we
can live into and through times of hardship, change, uncertainty, and
suffering…a perfect gospel for these times in which we are living.
So,
Mark, in helping us to deal with the difficult times in our lives, dresses John
the Baptist in camel hair clothes because in ancient times and among indigenous
peoples, people wore the clothes of animals or the feathers of birds that had
the characteristics they felt they needed, believing that they would transfer
from the animal or the bird to themselves. So,
one would wear an eagle’s feather if one was seeking to gain clarity about a
matter or to see a situation with clearer vision. To
wear a bear skin would be to put on courage and strength.
One would wear camel hair clothes to sharpen his or her skills for
surviving harsh times since that is what a camel is designed to do.
Camels
can survive for long stretches of time in barren places and desert heat because
they carry within themselves a reserve of water that constantly and consistently
keeps their bodies hydrated even in a drought until a water source can be found
again.
So,
by wearing clothes of camels, Mark maybe means to say that there is an inner
reserve in John the Baptist that will not be depleted, a spirit that will not
run dry…God’s Spirit, Mark claims…that will see John through all of the
suffering that will be heaped on him.
Now,
finally, we come back to my wonderment about how a camel can see through
dizzying desert storms. The answer I
have found is that a camel, in addition to having an outer eyelid, also
possesses a transparent inner eyelid. So,
when desert storms rise up, a camel can keep his outer eyelids open because
there is over each eye a protective inner
eyelid through which the camel can see and find his way in even the fiercest
of conditions. (1)
Just
so, Mark is meaning to tell us that John the Baptist also has an inner eyelid
that enables him to weather the stormy path he is called to walk.
That inner eyelid is the spirit of “the
one who is more powerful than I and who is coming after me, the one of whom I am
not worthy to stoop down and untie his sandals.”
John the Baptist is so convinced that the life exemplified by “the
one who is to come” and to which John is pointing by his preaching, is so
important, so life-giving, so transformational, so hopeful for the world that
the slings and arrows and troubles and trials he has to endure have a purpose,
that they ennoble his life, and so he does not back off but presses onward.
John the Baptist drew big crowds as well as the ire of the authorities,
but the storms of adversity and danger did not stop him because his inner
eyelid, the spirit of the Christ soon to be manifested in Jesus of Nazareth,
provided for him a way through the wildernesses he encountered.
So
the Advent question we are being asked by Mark is whether or not we shall allow
the same Christ who was born in Jesus of Nazareth many years ago to be born no
less in us today in the midst of our trials and suffering?
Will we allow the Christ-in-us, Emmanuel, to be our inner eyelid through
which we see and navigate the storms of our lives, the changes through which we
are called to move, the vexing events that confront us?
Suffering sometimes can be delayed, but it cannot be avoided.
It will find us soon or late at least in part because it is a part of our
maturing and growing. We are not
masochists who go and seek it out, but suffering comes to all of us and how we
respond to it determines the quality of our lives. Do
we strike back or strike out at those we believe are the cause of our suffering?
Do we lament our fates and fold our tents? Do
we become embrittled or embittered? Do
we close off to roads less traveled because they are not familiar to us and so
seem too risky even if, in the long run, they are filled with benefit and
blessing?
Or
do we allow ourselves to learn the lessons that are to be found within our
suffering, whether the suffering is personal or collective?
Do we trust that we are being held in the love and life of God no matter
what? Do we find within our
suffering the courage to go on and the peace to persist that only the Christ can
give? Do we see through our
inner eyelid the great truth that in all the circumstances of our lives – the
good and the bad, the happy and the sad, those that cause us to exult and those
that bring suffering – that “we live
and move and have our being in God?” The
gospel truth is that if we are not always safe, we are
always secure and so we need not fear. Not
even in perilous, trying, transitional times.
That is the good news of the
gospel.
Mark
wrote his gospel in a time after Nero fiddled while
This
is how the poet Jan Richardson puts it:
I am not asking you
to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know the wildness within
me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that pace inside me,
to finger the brambles
that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst
that tugs at my tongue.
But send me
tough angels,
sweet wine,
strong bread:
just enough.
When
suffering comes to you, dear people, do not try to avoid it or deny it or to go
around it for it will find you again. In
the face of whatever storm comes blowing in your face and into your life, use
your inner eyelid that sees beyond the present appearances of things. Use
your inner eyelid that is no less than the Christ of God who is born in you as
surely as he was born in Jesus. Use
your inner eyelid to find your way. It
will not, Christ will not, fail you. Do
not be afraid.
Amen.
(1)
Alexander Shaia in e-newsletter
(2)
Excerpted from Alexander Shaia’s Beyond
the Biography of Jesus.