3-30-14: Light

Light

 

Psalm 23 (NRSV)

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

 

John 9: 1-41 (The Message by Eugene Peterson)

Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?”

Jesus said, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light.”

He said this and then spit in the dust, made a clay paste with the saliva, rubbed the paste on the blind man’s eyes, and said, “Go, wash at the Pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “Sent”). The man went and washed—and saw.

 Soon the town was buzzing. His relatives and those who year after year had seen him as a blind man begging were saying, “Why, isn’t this the man we knew, who sat here and begged?”

Others said, “It’s him all right!”

But others objected, “It’s not the same man at all. It just looks like him.”

He said, “It’s me, the very one.”

They said, “How did your eyes get opened?”

“A man named Jesus made a paste and rubbed it on my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ I did what he said. When I washed, I saw.”

“So where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

They marched the man to the Pharisees. This day when Jesus made the paste and healed his blindness was the Sabbath. The Pharisees grilled him again on how he had come to see. He said, “He put a clay paste on my eyes, and I washed, and now I see.”

Some of the Pharisees said, “Obviously, this man can’t be from God. He doesn’t keep the Sabbath.”

Others countered, “How can a bad man do miraculous, God-revealing things like this?” There was a split in their ranks.

They came back at the blind man, “You’re the expert. He opened your eyes. What do you say about him?”

He said, “He is a prophet.”

The Jews didn’t believe it, didn’t believe the man was blind to begin with. So they called the parents of the man now bright-eyed with sight. They asked them, “Is this your son, the one you say was born blind? So how is it that he now sees?”

His parents said, “We know he is our son, and we know he was born blind. But we don’t know how he came to see—haven’t a clue about who opened his eyes. Why don’t you ask him? He’s a grown man and can speak for himself.” (His parents were talking like this because they were intimidated by the Jewish leaders, who had already decided that anyone who took a stand that this was the Messiah would be kicked out of the meeting place. That’s why his parents said, “Ask him. He’s a grown man.”)

They called the man back a second time—the man who had been blind—and told him, “Give credit to God. We know this man is an impostor.”

He replied, “I know nothing about that one way or the other. But I know one thing for sure: I was blind . . . I now see.”

They said, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”

“I’ve told you over and over and you haven’t listened. Why do you want to hear it again? Are you so eager to become his disciples?”

With that they jumped all over him. “You might be a disciple of that man, but we’re disciples of Moses. We know for sure that God spoke to Moses, but we have no idea where this man even comes from.”

The man replied, “This is amazing! You claim to know nothing about him, but the fact is, he opened my eyes! It’s well known that God isn’t at the beck and call of sinners, but listens carefully to anyone who lives in reverence and does his will. That someone opened the eyes of a man born blind has never been heard of—ever. If this man didn’t come from God, he wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

They said, “You’re nothing but dirt! How dare you take that tone with us!” Then they threw him out in the street.

Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and went and found him. He asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

The man said, “Point him out to me, sir, so that I can believe in him.”

Jesus said, “You’re looking right at him. Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Master, I believe,” the man said, and worshiped him.

Jesus then said, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.”

Some Pharisees overheard him and said, “Does that mean you’re calling us blind?”

Jesus said, “If you were really blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure.”

Imagine living in a world where people believed that if something bad happened to you, it was because you did something wrong. A world where if you were suffering, your neighbors would believe it was because you were being punished for a mistake you made.

This morning’s Gospel reading, again from the Gospel according to John, takes us into a world just like that one. This morning, as Jesus and his disciples are making their way through Jerusalem, they meet a blind man. Presumably a man they had never met before, who they didn’t know at all. But, from his physical appearance, and from the manner in which they found him begging on the streets, they could deduce that he was a blind man.

How might we suppose Jesus would react if he came upon a blind man? Let’s pretend for a moment that John hadn’t made this story available to us nearly two thousand years ago. Let’s pretend that this scenario is all new to us—Jesus is walking down the urban streets of his home country’s capital, and comes across a blind man, begging for his living. How might we suppose Jesus would react, just based on what we’ve seen of him in the first nine chapters of John’s Gospel? Just based on everything else we have been taught about Jesus, how might we suppose he would react to this? Certainly the man we’ve come to know as a healer, as a miracle worker, as a man with tremendous compassion for the poor in spirit, could do nothing less than show mercy to this man, right?

Well, we might know that. Based on the way we know Jesus, and understand his place in our world, we might know that. But his disciples sure didn’t. The twelve men that he entrusted to join him in his ministry, the twelve men that have witnessed his miracles and listened to hours upon hours of his wisdom, the men who spend more time with him than anyone, see this blind man, point a finger at him, and ask Jesus—whose fault do you think it is that he’s blind?

These twelve men were endlessly lucky that Jesus was so patient. I don’t know if I could be. Then again, Jesus was raised in a devoutly Jewish family, exactly like these twelve men, and knew something about what they were all taught from childhood on that some of us sitting here today might not without doing a little bit of research. Jesus, as an upstanding Jewish man, knew that his twelve disciples had always been taught, by religious leaders that they respected very much, that nearly anything that can go wrong in your life—disease, injury, strife, dysfunction, poverty, homelessness, disability, anything—was the natural consequence of your own sinful behaviors.

So, in the eyes of Jesus’ disciples, they weren’t asking a shockingly insensitive question. In their eyes, they were seeing a familiar sight—that of a poor, disabled man—and asking a respected Jewish teacher and leader, Jesus, to explain the man’s sins to them. Ironically, the man they saw may have been blind, but it was the disciples who were short of sight.

But it’s not really about sight at all, neither in this morning’s Gospel story, nor in our own stories, that we’re living out here and now. It’s not about who can see and who can’t. It’s certainly not about fault or blame for anyone’s shortcomings. In fact, the point here is not at all about what anyone can’t do. It’s about what God can do.

And, more importantly, it’s about what God does. God brings us Light.

God brings us Light. What does that mean? It means that God illumines our path through this life, and shows us the way to wholeness, healing, and strength. And when we have those things, we can follow God, and be his ministers.

If you’re the man in this morning’s Gospel story from John, then it might mean that God shines upon you by restoring in you the one thing that has always held you back—for this man, the ability to use his eyes.

Does God shine upon you in that way? What’s that one thing for you? Is there one thing, more than anything else, that you need? Is there one particular thing missing in your life that’s held you back from living to the fullest? Is there one thing you wish God could restore for you? If that’s true for you, then you have walked the same road as the man Jesus healed in this morning’s story from John.

But, for some of us, God’s light shines upon us in a different way. For some of us, it’s not one particular thing that we seek from God. It’s a whole lifetime of tender, loving care. The kind of care a shepherd gives to his flock. The kind of care we hear about in the Psalm the lectionary appointed for us to hear this morning—perhaps, with little room for argument, the most well-known, widely used, and adored of all one hundred fifty of our Psalms: Psalm 23.

For some of us, what we need to be whole enough to follow God is to be reminded of God’s promises for us. Psalm 23 tells us beautifully of God’s promises.

The promise that if we trusted in God, we would find we lacked nothing that God doesn’t provide in time. The promise that, even in the midst of the chaos in our lives, we will find stillness, tranquility, and peace. The promise that, in spite of the confusion we face in this world, we can trust that the path that God chooses for us is the right one. The promise that God is more powerful than anything that could scare us—even death. The promise that we will be fed what we hunger for. And, most importantly, the promise that God is forever.

Our Tuesday Bible Study group talked about this, and I have a hunch that if I hadn’t printed the words of this Psalm in our bulletin for our Call to Worship, that a good number of us could have recited it from memory together. These are words we never forget, and we find great comfort throughout our lives in being able to recall these beautiful words whenever we need to be reminded of them. That’s the Light of God, shining upon us. That’s a salve to our wounds. That’s our Daily Bread. That’s wisdom for our journey.

And once we have received that, once we have been filled by that, once we have been saturated with God’s Light, we can reflect it in our world.

So the first thing I ask of you is, do you find that there’s something missing from within you, something that leaves you feeling incomplete, or undernourished? What do you need from God? How can God fill you so that you can find the strength it takes to minister to your neighbor? Pray to God to complete you. Pray that God will fill you. And if you can find the words, or if you don’t know if you’re missing something, or what that something may be, then just repeat the words so many of us can repeat from memory—The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Let those words help you find peace in God.

The second thing I ask of you is just to think back for a moment to how I began this sermon—remember what I said? Imagine living in a world where people believed that if something bad happened to you, it was because you did something wrong. A world where if you were suffering, your neighbors would believe it was because you were being punished for a mistake you made.

Friends, the sad thing is that, as far as we have come since Jesus’ time, in many ways we still do live in a world that works exactly like that. In a lot of ways, we still do live in a world where if something bad happens to you, you get blamed. A world where people believe that if you suffer, it’s because you got what was coming to you.

Two thousand years since the time of Jesus, we still live in a world that struggles immensely with compassion. We still live in a world where we cut funding for the government programs that care for the poor, or for the disenfranchised—welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, disability, even veteran’s benefits—because some among us believe that if you can’t afford to get by, if you struggle to provide for your family and make ends meet, it’s because you don’t work hard enough.

And, tragically, even on our best days, we still will look on one another’s suffering—that of a person who lives with a disability, or of a person who has survived an act of violence, or of a person afflicted by an illness or injury, or of a person struggling with unemployment, or homelessness—and the first thing we want to do is figure out who to blame.

These are the mistakes we make when we’re in the dark. These are the mistakes we make when we fail to be ministers to our world.

As God’s sons and daughters, we can do better. As people who have seen the Light of God, we can do better. We can stop placing blame, and just start helping. We can reflect the Light of God to a world that desperately needs it, so that all may see.

May it be so.

Amen.