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October 28, 2012 | 8:00 a.m.

In Defense of Institution,
In Praise of Constitution

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 34:1–8
Mark 10:46–52

Neighbor is not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.

Gustavo Gutiérrez
A Theology of Liberation

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The richness of this morning’s text is that we could approach this story as a discourse on knowledge and faith, light and darkness, as the name “son of Timaeus” might have reminded a Hellenized world versed in Platonic imagery.

We might also look at the context—following Jesus’ teachings on who will be first and last—that all must be like children to enter the kingdom of heaven and how we must honor one another in community and in God’s love. The placement of a story in the shortest Gospel of the four carries special weight then, especially as Jesus seems to travel from event to event as if on an election campaign bus tour from verse to verse. This particular healing is followed by Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem.

I think both of these approaches are interesting, and for the curious minds, you are welcome to further explore and hold on to those for another time.

But on this morning, I want to talk about what was particularly striking about this scripture. What struck me was what did not happen. Had I read this in another time and place, I would have been angry. As a younger man in high school, through college, and even up to seminary, a passage like this speaks to the ways we exclude, miss out on ministry opportunities, become key-hole visionaries caught up in our own paths so that we neglect those in need. Yet that did not happen in my reading of this text this time around.

Instead, I became defensive. I get the followers of Jesus. Maybe they just want to protect him—protect him from burnout, from doing too much for too many, or maybe they want to shield him from danger, as threats against his life have been made. They have a major project ahead of them, a big campaign—the entrance into Jerusalem—and do not have time for the small things like attending to a blind man crying out in despair. I’m not here trying to paint a stark contrast, but instead I’m arguing that I really believe the followers had good intentions.

It reminds me of another story, one of my favorite books by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, in which the Grand Inquisitor questions Jesus, something famously read in high schools and colleges for various reasons. For me, the story is particularly powerful because, if you’ve read it and if I could paraphrase, Jesus has returned and has stirred up society again and the inquisitor marvels at his audacity. “Who do you think you are,” he seems to say in summary, “returning to stir things up when we’ve worked so hard to build your church? It has not been easy. We’ve had to make sense of your parables, of obscure passages in the Hebrew scriptures, of Pauline rhetoric, and it has been hard. But we’ve done our best. We have encyclicals, tomes, a canon, commentaries, doctrines, clergy to try to understand what you wanted, to follow your Way, to build your church, the church you instituted. But tomorrow, Christ, I will judge you!”

Friends, Christ has instituted the church. By the sacrament of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, through the Word of God, we are gathered as a community as the body of Christ. And it is hard, this human condition of trying to make sense of scripture. So I stand today in defense of institution, as we do our best to understand, faith seeking understanding, and to follow the Way. Now institution has gotten a bad rap. In the film Shawshank Redemption, we hear of being “institutionalized”; indeed the various institutions in our culture, schools, prisons, universities, etc., all have been challenged and found themselves in the business of preserving the institution for its own sake.

Which is why, in defense of our natural way of organizing and our being called by the Spirit as a gathered community, I defend how we are doing our best to share the good news. But I must also stand here in praise of constitution.

You see, constitution plays an integral role in institution; institution is what is—that is the corporate nature of something—and constitution is what it is made of, its essence, its core, its heart and soul. We are constituted not by our institution, but as an institution of God; as the church, body of Christ, we are constituted by God. Constitution is about identity; who we are is caught up in whose we are. In life and in death, we belong to God. In our essence, our institution is constituted by God’s gracious love in Jesus Christ.

Here in biblical story, the institution of Christ’s followers are just trying to make sense of things and so they miss a ministry opportunity, a blind beggar on the side of the road, crying out for mercy. But the good news is that we are constituted by God, so even when we miss these opportunities, even when we exclude, when we marginalize, when we neglect the other, we are often evangelized by the very marginalized. In this story, the followers think they are bringing the blind beggar good news, but in fact, through his crying out, he has brought them good news. Jesus tells his followers: “Go and call him here.” Even when, as an institution, we miss the opportunities to address needs and marginalize, God’s grace calls us right back to that area of our utter failure and of our greatest need and says, “Try it again.”

Even when we have not been very good messengers of the good news, Christ sends us again, to “Go and call him here.” The good news is that as an institution, we can try again, we can go back to the place where we were being too defensive, too protective of our interests and cliques, attempting to guard and protect the good news as if it needs our protection, and we can say, “Take heart; get up; he is calling you.”

But there’s more good news that the beggar gives us; there is light that the blind man offers us. His cry reminds us that our faith is not a noble one; it is not one in which we have reasonably made a choice among a variety of factors and conditions and formulated a final decision on a logical option. Instead, our faith is a desperate one, one in which in our hour of greatest need, we cry out for help, from anyone and anything. We stretch out our hand, begging for mercy, hoping someone can take our hand, but we find a hand that had been outstretched to us all along. We find there, in our desperate faith, the hand of God that lets us know that we’ve been heard and that we are cared for and constituted by our identity in Christ.

Go, therefore, as a people instituted by God as the body of Christ, and go remembering that we are constituted by God’s gracious love in Christ Jesus that calls us, again and again, to the areas in which our institution has failed, remembering that ours is a desperate faith in need of this gracious love of God.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church