 And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch even the fringes of his cloak. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. My little girl is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her. My teacher, let me see again. If you choose, you can make me clean. I do choose, be made clean. Stand up, take your mat and go home. Daughter, your faith has made you well. Immediately, her hemorrhage stopped. Immediately, the leprosy left him. Immediately, the little girl got up and began to walk about. Immediately, his ears were opened. Immediately, he regained his sight. Immediately, immediately, immediately. This is what we expect to hear when we read the healing stories in the Gospel of Mark. But our text for today doesn't quite live up to our expectations. In this scene at Bethsaida, healing happens incrementally, not instantaneously. Here, Jesus is acting more like an optometrist than the son of God. Can you see anything? Is it better, worse, or about the same? They can see people, but they look like trees walking. Trees walking. Trees walking. No, this is not some scene out of the Lord of the Rings where you have these giant trees walking around, talking to wizards and hobbits. This is just how the man described his partial vision at this initial stage in the healing process. Jesus had restored his vision part way, but things were still a little blurry. He would need a second touch to have his sight fully recovered. So what's going on in this unusual healing? If we back up a few verses, we discover that the two-stage healing of the blind man is a perfect reflection of the disciple situation. Just as the blind man gained sight gradually, so will the disciples. At this juncture in Mark's gospel, the disciples are standing in that hazy space between the two touches. They have heard Jesus preaching the kingdom and witnessed him calming seas, casting out demons and feeding thousands, yet they do not see clearly. They perceive Jesus' identity and mission only partially. During the boat journey to Bethsaida, it becomes apparent that the disciples' blindness, their lack of comprehension is creating a crisis. Jesus overhears the disciples fretting about not having enough bread to eat. This just after he fed thousands of hungry people with plenty left over for the second time. And he confronts them with a stream of question. Why are you talking of having no bread? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? Do you not remember? Do you not yet understand? The disciples are struggling here, folks. But are we really that removed from their blindness and their half understanding? Don't we also struggle against sinful powers that harden our hearts that render us deaf and blind? Don't we also need to be touched by Jesus again and again and again? We need Jesus' touch so that we can clearly identify the places where our culture, our institutions, our churches, our families, and our own lives are plugged into the oppressive structures that Jesus resisted, racism, sexism, classism, militarism, structures that do violence to our minds, hearts, and bodies that threaten the vitality of our souls by twisting and crippling our baptismal identity as the beloved of God. Structures that damage our fellowship and undermine our ministry of reconciliation by subtly forming us to perpetuate practices of exclusion, to inflict the violence of assimilation which occurs when we incorporate the other into our reality by diminishing his or her own, or to inflict the violence of abandonment when we just keep our distance so that the other has no claim on us. We desperately need Jesus' touch to sharpen our vision of God Shalom so that we might see what truly leads to an abundant life for us, for our neighbors, and for all of creation. So then, how do we open ourselves to Jesus' healing, liberating sight, restoring touch? Perhaps we begin like the blind man by honestly acknowledging our limitations, our confusion, our inaccurate and sometimes downright wacky perceptions of people and the world around us. I can see people, but they look like trees walking. We may live hopefully toward the time when we shall see clearly, but for now we must confess that we know only in part and see only as in a dim mirror. Secondly, like the blind man who was brought to Jesus by others, we must seek support from our fellow travelers. Knowing that we don't see clearly that we all have blind spots, we must test our understandings of faith and our interpretations of culture against those of our brothers and sisters. Do you see what I see? Help me out, are those people or trees? You may have a clearer view than I do. What do you see? This summer I had the privilege of interning at St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church here in Elkhart, an experience that taught me the importance of crossing boundaries in order to test our perceptions and receive insight and instruction from brothers and sisters who can help us overcome our blind spots and see Jesus in new and liberating ways. Scales started falling from my white middle-class eyes on my very first Sunday at St. James. That Sunday, the gifted preacher and pastor of St. James, Reverend Jennifer Tinsley, preached a sermon that helps me to see more clearly how racial disparities in every facet of life cause emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical death for people of color. She preached on Luke 7, 11 to 17, the story of Jesus raising the widow's son at Nain. In this scene there is a convergence of two crowds, Jesus and the crowd of disciples coming into the town and the widow and the crowd of mourners heading out of the gate to the cemetery where she will bury her only son. Focusing in on the crowd that formed the funeral procession, Reverend Tinsley raised the question, where are there death marches happening in our community? Then she shared what she sees as she ministers to her congregation and the surrounding community. She sees an unjust and economic order that is creating a death march for those in our community who can't get good jobs and living wages, who are chronically stressed by the daily struggle to survive, who end up turning to alcohol and drugs for medication because they cannot access the healthcare they need. Furthermore, she sees how this corrupt economy which bails out Wall Street bankers while it builds private profit making prisons that warehouse poor folk and people of color is fueling the death march of mass incarceration. Reverend Tinsley looks at her congregation and sees the death march of internalized oppression. She sees women who have absorbed the denigrating messages of our racist and sexist culture and are living with a diminished sense of self-worth, doubting their voice, their gifts, their call. She sees that there is a death march in Elkhart when young people pass through our schools without getting the education they need being suspended and arrested rather than mentored and supported and then end up on the streets joining gangs and getting gunned down. Two weeks after this sermon, I found myself in a large crowd of mourners who gathered at a nearby Baptist church to grieve the premature death of a 16-year-old who was killed in a drive-by shooting just north of here on Benham Avenue. And shortly after that, another wave of mourning was stirred by the stunning yet more of the same verdict in the Trayvon Martin case. More scales fell from my privileged eyes as I listened to the pain, anger, and fear expressed by members of the St. James community, any one of whom could have had a loved one walking home from the store only to find themselves the target of racial profiling. Any one of whom could have had a loved one killed with no one brought to justice. Listening to the community earnestly pray, God protect our children, opened my eyes to the ever-present danger of violence and death for people of color who live under constant surveillance and suspicion. It opened my heart to confess and lament that, yes, I've breathed a smog of our racially charged culture and I know what it means to see someone's skin and be suspicious. In the days following the Not Guilty verdict, I read an article by Christina Cleveland titled, Three Things Privileged Christians Can Learn from the Trayvon Martin Case, in which she writes, all cultures are imperfect and have their share of blind spots. That's why we need each other and that's why the metaphor of the body of Christ, which preaches humble and mutual interdependence is so powerfully instructive. Privileged people have a lot to learn from oppressed people. Oppressed people have a unique view of the world and possess an important insight that is otherwise unavailable to privileged people. Through these prophetic words and through my experience at St. James, I am learning that in order to minister effectively, in order to be neighborly, in order to see the gospel of Jesus and fleshed in our world, we must be willing to shift our allegiances and our lifestyle so that we inhabit new spaces that help us to keep company with those who suffer the impact of unjust structures and are really hungering and thirsting for justice. We must be willing to leave wherever we call home and enter spaces of cross-cultural relationship building because that's where Jesus went. And those of us who are privileged must be ready to enter spaces where we are the minority, not the majority. It's in these spaces where healing and transformation happens gradually, awkwardly and painfully, but also graciously and wondrously. It's in these spaces where our blurry vision is focused, where our heart and hearts break open as we listen to and learn from the experiences of those who live in a world quite different from our own, as we acknowledge that our perceptions of each other really have been distorted by a whole assortment of poisonous stereotypes and imbalances of power, as we help each other connect the dots between various forms of oppression, creating a clear picture of the liberation we all need. It's in these spaces where we are touched by Jesus and gain a restored vision of life in the beloved community as we repent and forgive each other endlessly, as we experience the gifts of each other's culture, tradition, denomination, and honor them as assets to the body of Christ. As we come together to both lament the places where death is marching through our communities and celebrate the places where God's life is breaking in. It's in these holy, spirit-filled spaces where we learn to trust and rely on each other knowing that our commitment to interdependence helps us see Jesus more clearly and fully, helps us to see the world as our reconciling God is working for it to be. While pastoring at St. James, I got much closer to the death marches that parade through the streets of Elkhart than I have ever been before. And in doing so, I got closer to the Jesus who interrupts them through the power of their resurrection. I came to see Jesus as, in the words of Reverend Tinsley, the only one who can stop a death march, the only one who can activate life-affirming transformation in our lives and in the world. I received many gifts from my summer of worshiping with the St. James family of faith, but I am especially grateful for the ways they showed me how to open myself to the healing, sight-restoring, life-restoring touch of Jesus. They showed me how to risk vulnerability for the sake of conversion, how to lay down my got-it-all-together independence and perfectionism, those demons of white culture, and just fall on my knees before Jesus. That's what they do every single week. It's the liturgy of the altar call where everybody walks forward to the altar, falls to their knees, and prayerfully cries out to Jesus like those first desperate and courageous seekers. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. My teacher, let me see again. This is how we open ourselves to Jesus, the one who mercifully helped the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the one who stopped death marches and raised people to life, the one who, through the power of the spirit, continues to lay his healing hands on our lives and invites us to be part of God's new resurrection world that overcomes the violence and oppression of this current world. See, I am making all things new. See, I am making you new. See, I am making the church new. See, I am making the world new. You can't see. That's all right. It's hard to see the newness springing forth when the world that appears on the news every day is so broken it hurts all over. But we are the ones who step forward in faith, believing what we cannot know fully, trusting what we cannot see clearly. We are the ones who choose love over fear. We are the risk takers and the boundary crossers who gain sight gradually as we seek Jesus together as we join hands to pray and wait for the clarity of future light. Amen.