After the family of Harper Lee controversially decided to publish "Go Set A Watchman", I was taken by a scene where Scout, now a very proper Jean Louise, is in a heated argument with her uncle, Dr. Finch.

He draws a somewhat elusive analogy about race and inclusion, and Jean Louise, who is rather naïve, reacts.

"But I don't get the connection," she says.

"That's because you haven't looked," he replied.

Then he uttered the line that I remembered even after I finished the book:

"You've never opened your eyes."

Sometimes it takes real commitment to keep our eyes closed, but don't we do it?

A while back, I bought a new-to-me car that had what it called "Blind Spot Detection." It would flash a strobe-light at you when there was something close to the car that it perceived you are about to hit. It certainly wasn't perfect; I very nearly caused an accident panic-braking to avoid my neighbor's garage, but by and large, Blind Spot Detection has helped me to avoid plowing into at least a few cars. It's a wonderful feature.

But I've never encountered blind-spot detection in real life.

In real life, blind-spots are not so easily seen. Significant things can lurk in our blind spots. Racism lives in the blind spots. Religious intolerance lurks in the blind spots. Homophobia hides out where we can't see it.

But miracles can live in our blind spots too.

Our Gospel lection for today has set us up to wonder about miracles.

Jesus is walking along with his disciples, and in Mark's version of the Gospel story, this is the part just before when Jesus will turn toward Jerusalem.

And we know what happens there -- waiting in Jerusalem is the cross.

The cross has been foreshadowed and hinted at, we know it's coming, but if we're committed to not seeing something, we can generally succeed.

And the disciples have demonstrated just such a commitment.

It's old-hat to make fun of the obtuseness of the disciples, and they give us plenty of fodder.  A few paragraphs ago, they were arguing about which of the disciples is the GOAT, and not in a sheep-and-goats sort of way. Jesus responded by plopping a child on a tabletop and saying to the disciples, "Don't be like that, be like her, because to such as these belongs the kingdom."

Just a few verses ago, they were walking along, and James and John sidled up to Jesus and said, "You know, it would be mighty fine if you'd give us the two best spots in the kingdom, one on your right and one on your left. If nobody else has asked, can we get dibs on those seats in the kingdom?"

Jesus has been telling them that the kingdom is all around them. He has been telling them that reigning in that kingdom begins on a cross.

He is walking toward Jerusalem, he's making his way to the place where he is going to face a reckoning for all this kingdom-talk, and they want to know the seating chart.

Blind spots are everywhere, aren't they?

What is hiding in our blind spots?

Just as the disciples are showing again and again what they do not see, Jesus ambles alongside a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. Everyone is shushing the beggar, waiting to hear some compelling preaching about the kingdom, but when Jesus says, "bring him over," choosing to act rather than to preach, the same people who were shushing him now want to be his best friend.

There are a lot of folks in Mark who can't see Jesus.

Oftentimes, they are people with status, or at least status of a sort.

It's others who see Jesus and know who he is: A woman with a hemorrhaging disease, a Syrophoenician woman, therefore a foreigner, a Gerasene man, also a foreigner, who suffers from demons. Unlike the others, Bartimaeus is named, possibly because his name may be a play on words, a reminder that, in order to see, we must put aside one way of looking at things, and really open our eyes.

The blind man sees what the others are missing.

And then he follows, going a new way, because really seeing means following.

Otherwise, we are still stuck in the blind spot.

For the ancients, everything about life was always a miracle, whether it was spectacular in its presentation, such as Jesus' roadside healing, or simply the reality that rain falls in the quantity that is needed, or that the sun goes down in the evening and rises again in the morning.

The truth is the disciples are only doing what most of us do, I suspect, most of the time. They were wandering along with some vague notion that there's something important in the way-off, distant horizon called the kingdom, and they're missing what's right in front of them. I know that's true of me at least part of the time... we go right on living in our blind spots.

But sometimes we see clearly what it takes a blind man to point out.

And when that happens, it is surely a miracle.

Do you ever stop to think about miracles?

Perhaps we expect miracles always to be earth shattering.

They are not always.

They are the very building blocks on which creation is made. They're sort of the opposite of earth-shattering in that sense, rather they're earth-grounding. They're foundational. They are the heart of life, if we can see them.

Generosity is a miracle.

Not all of life, but enough of it, suggests to us that we better get what we can while the getting is good, that we have earned our abundance when we have it, and no one better try to take it from us. We believe it is necessary to hold it all. Not all of life, but enough of it, suggests that it is a good thing to say, "I want, I want, I want," because that is the only way to stave off scarcity.

I've never forgotten a conversation I overheard sitting in a barbeque joint in Decatur, Georgia. I was enjoying a Cheerwine, which for the uninitiated is the nectar of the Gods, and I heard a father hectoring his son, "I just didn't see you playing to win today. It's fine to have fun, but you have to have your head in the game and you have to want to win every time."

Not all of life, but enough of it, tells us we have to win, every time.

My friend Bill Enright writes,

"The voice crying from somewhere deep within you, 'I want, I want, I want!' doesn't have anything to do with things and the accumulation of things...that voice is our starved soul crying for God."

Generosity is the transformed life in Jesus Christ giving of its abundance, growing in gratitude, transforming a fear of scarcity to a knowledge of the generous grace of God.

It's a miracle.

Do you want to see?

Having a community in a world that seems literally hell-bent on dragging us apart is a miracle, a gift from God.

I remember when the church I served in Scotland for a summer was facing closure. It was a purely financial decision, their building wasn't worth what it cost to repair it, and sometimes congregations have to make really hard decisions. This congregation was a post-war church plant in a planned community, one of the first actually, and it was mostly veterans of the Second World War. They spent their lives together, and I just felt terrible about the ending this congregation was facing.

But then I stumbled across a wonderful passage from Seamus Heaney, who wrote:

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall.

Pleasant little splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some were crying

I remembered her head bent toward my head,

her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives -

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Then I remembered, the miracle of community, people who love us from generation to generation, in the most mundane moments, is a gift from God. The gift that was doesn't end, even if it changes.

Do you want to see?

Forgiveness is a miracle.

I bet forgiveness is about one of the hardest things any of us ever really has to do.

I know for me the greater the hurt, the harder the forgiveness... Talk about work. But it's even more work to nurse that grudge. Peter Gomes writes, "It takes a lot of work to maintain anger and estrangement. Those of you who have been involved in maintaining your share of your family's feuds all these years know how hard it is to remember that you are supposed to be thoroughly disgusted with your sister-in-law for something she did forty years ago."

And if the hurt was yesterday, or last week? I think it's the hardest thing people of faith have to do; to forgive. It happens in fits and spurts, it comes in drips and drabs, and then one day, you're free and you don't have to do all that work anymore. It's foundational to who we are, but it is the way of the cross.

And it's a miracle.

Do you want to see? Then you may have to set aside old ways.

Love is a miracle. How else could we think that it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Life -- Forgiveness -- Generosity -- Community -- Love -- it is not an exhaustive list, because the generosity of God is inexhaustible.

But these things are also likely as vivid of manifestations of the kingdom of God that we will see. If we can set aside the old ways of seeing and look instead through the lens of the cross.

The miracles of God are perpetually unfolding, ever-present, if we can move out of our blind spots, set aside what is keeping us from seeing, remembering what the fox told the little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Do you want to see? Sometimes what you see will be terrible. Sometimes what you see will be beautiful.

Do you want to see? You'll have to open your eyes, and set aside old ways of seeing.

Do you want to see? You'll have to follow.

Do you want to see?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.