Tiggers like everything.
That is how one of the great pilgrim stories begins.
Tigger visits Winnie the Pooh, looking for breakfast, and Pooh shares his Honey because “Tiggers like Honey the best”.
But, when Tigger tries the honey it is too sticky, and says that it is only suited for Heffalumps and woozles. “Tigger’s do not like honey.”
So they journey on to Piglet’s looking for Tigger’s breakfast.
Where we discover that Tiggers do not like Haycorn.
Then on to Eeyore’s where Thistles are added to the list.
And then to Kanga and Roos’ to finally discover that Tiggers like everything, except honey, and haycorns and thistles but they do especially like baby Roos’ breakfast of Extract of Malt.
The journey.
The things we learn along the way.
Looking for something.
“Looking for love in all the wrong places,” as the song goes.
Our mistakes and misadventures, they are holy, discovering all the things that Tiggers don’t like, trial and error is a spiritual discipline for most of us.
Mark’s Gospel has been taking us down that road, of learning mostly what is not the way of God in the world, until today when we meet Bartimeaus.
Along the way we have learned that Peter’s rejection and rebuke of Jesus’ suffering, is not the way. Peter did not want the way of God to about the pain in the world. He wanted it to be about victory and success.
Along the way we learned that the rich man, who wanted to add God to his many acquisitions, who had it all and wanted even more, we learned that this too is not the way of God in the world.
Along the way, we learned that James and John, who wanted to get ahead in the world, to be great, we learned that this too is not the way of God in the world.
Not this, nor that, or the other but rather this.
And we meet the blind beggar man, Bartimeaus, son of Timeaeus.
We are finally shown what a true disciple of the way of Jesus is like. He is the model disciple, the example.
Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, cries out for mercy and asks for healing, to see again.
To regain what was lost.
And his faith made him well.
He throws off his old life like his old cloak.
He sprang up and came to Jesus.
Disciples. We are beggars before God, crying out for mercy, asking to see again, to regain what we have lost.
To be a disciple is to be desperately in need of God.
And that is where faith finds us.
To be a disciple of Jesus, to be an apostle, is to carry that need like sacrament to a world that no longer recognizes the way of God.
Faith finds us.
God can be trusted to bring about the healing of a withered creation.
And Bartemaeus is a green branch, an olive shoot, brought to us by a dove in the wild endless sea. Creation is beginning again, God is resettling and renewing.
In the middle of a world that denies pain, that worships having it all, that wants to get ahead by putting others down, Bartemaeus is the promise of Eden returning, a foretaste of Easter Morning, of leaping up from the graveness of things.
Faith is returning to a faithless world.
Faith finds us.
Holy mistakes and misadventures, discovering all the things that Tiggers don’t like, trial and error is a spiritual discipline for most of us.
Not this, nor that, or the other but rather this.
We are finally able to see God begging for mercy by the side of the road.