I here by convene the weekly meeting of the Grace Church God Spy society!
How would that sound as a way to start off Church on Sunday mornings?
Because that is what we are about. We are not leisurely admirers of God. We have a fulltime job, eternity hinges on our diligence, on our unswerving commitment!
Every day we polish off our spy glasses, our magnifying lenses, we don our Sherlock Holmes cloak and hat, we hang our meerschaum pipes from our mouths. We are all gumshoe detectives out and about at all hours. We are gum stuck to the bottom of God’s shoe, in close pursuit, on the trail.
We fall asleep red eyed and bleary from always looking, paying attention. We fall asleep desperately trying to stay awake not giving up on the search, attending to all the details and trivia of life.
What to some is mere boring dust, insignificant things, accumulations, a cluttered life, crowding stuff, is to us much more! It is evidence, evidence of God, evidence of God creating, evidence of God becoming flesh, mortal, corporeal, evidence of the blood, of the sacrifice that upholds the Universe.
As king Lear says we, “take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God’s spies.” (V, 3)
Even in loneliness, even in pain, even in forsakenness we spy out God.
Now blind Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, is one of our more esteemed and gifted colleagues in the trade.
They thought he was just another blind beggar on the road side, but he was much more, he was a spy, attending, waiting, under deep cover, a sleeper cell, waiting.
When Jesus came near he cried out to him for mercy.
The crowd told him to be quiet.
Now this is where so many of us fail, we let the crowd tell us what to do, we don’t want to disturb things, disrupt, get rowdy.
We forget our job, our mission that must not fail, to spy out God and to attend. We let all the details around us distract us. The details become our focus rather than evidence pointing us on.
We are told to hush, the phone rings, some one is rude, and we forget to attend to the evidence. Sometimes we forget so long that we forget that we are spies with a job, and we become our cover, we go native, and forsake the mission.
God is revealed through the mystery of things, of life, of people, of stuff. We forget to attend to the evidence, the luminous glory that infuses all this crowded life that God has made— life that is somehow like God. It is all evidence, transfigured and transfiguring clues.
Bartimaeus didn’t have this trouble, he didn’t get distracted, he didn’t hush, he didn’t behave, he stayed on task and got rowdy and yelled out again even louder, “Son of David have mercy on me!”
Jesus stood still.
“Call him here.”
Bartimaeus, threw off his cloak, dropped everything, and ran blindly.
“What do you want me to do for you?”
“Teacher, let me see again.”
“Go; your faith has made you well.”
He regained his sight and followed Jesus on the way, like gum on his shoe.
If you listen to some of the old stories about angels, about Cherubim and Seraphim, they are sometimes described as fiery serpents, or as having many wings, or as having many eyes.
An ancient hermit, Abba Bessariun, when he was dying, said, “The monk should be like the cherubim and seraphim: all eyes”
Attend, always attend, and never forget our mission.