March 10, 2002 - Fourth Sunday
in Lent
Psalm 23; I Samuel 16: 1-13; Ephesians 5: 8-14;
John 9:1-41
BORN BLIND
Theme: Healing
ILLUMINATING TEXT AND THEME
Many stories about Jesus recount him simply passing by. In the gospel lesson
for this week, Jesus passes by a blind man there on the side of the road.
The disciples want to know if it was his parents' sin that caused the blindness
or if he himself commited the deed that blinded him. This was the standard
medical thinking of the time: that sin, or something within human agency,
is the cause of disease. Ancient thought patterns die slowly. Jesus answers
with a real puzzle, contradicting the medical theory of his time. "Neither
one," he says.
Instead, the cause of the man's disease is a screen on which God's works
shall be "manifest." Shown. Made visible. Here is the first irony.
The man who can't see will show us something that we can see, as we are
spiritually blind.
Then Jesus plays with his favorite metaphors, those of light and dark,
almost dancing on the previous puzzle about who can see and what we can
see. Jesus says he must work in the day, not the night.
Once when he had spoken about the times of his work and the need to make
God's work manifest, he performed a physical healing act. He spat on the
ground, made clay of the spittle, made a paste of it, and anointed the man
who was blind with the clay. He rubbed wet dirt in his eyes. This action
alone is enough to get most of us thinking.
Then he recommended a certain kind of healing bath in a certain place,
the pool of Siloam. The text allows us to understand the pool as both a
place and a verb; it is called "sent." The man did what he was
told: he went his way, washed, and came back sighted.
What follows is a repeat of the story in the eyes of the villagers and
then in the eyes of the Pharisees, who can't so much see that the man is
no longer blind, but instead they focus on the fact that Jesus did this
deed on the Sabbath. We are now deep in the web of sight and blindness.
The legalists of the period get involved and investigate the entire matter:
was he really blind in the first place? By what means did Jesus heal him?
The controversy results in division of the people and focuses on the question
of whether Jesus is the Messiah or not.
The final part of the chapter addresses the question of the many different
levels of sight in the chapter—that it is not just physical sight but
the ability to see the Messiah and that it is odd that holy people can't
just rejoice when someone who couldn't see can see. Jesus seems to get almost
angry at the conversation. No doubt he has heard it before.
One dawn, before the September 11 tragedy, I went down to the river at
Battery Park, buying myself what I think of as the greatest New York City
luxury, a buttered hard roll. I told the deli man light butter, but he didn't
listen. So I sat on a park bench schmoozing and oozing the butter off the
rolls on to the waxed paper in which it was wrapped. I like a hard roll
with a half pound not a full pound of butter on it. A guy came out of nowhere
and said, "Don't do that." He had clearly not eaten for a while.
I asked him if he wanted some of my roll. He replied, with a twinkle in
his eye, "Not after you have taken all the butter off!"
When we sit at the side of the road and don't see, we are living with only
half the butter that is offered to us. God offers us a lot. God offers us
a lot of love, a lot of help, even in time of war. From the dirt, God heals
us our blindness, in all its different forms. God is with us right now,
even though we may not be able to see.
ILLUSTRATING TEXT FOR THEME
Pascal said that "Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere,
whose circumference is nowhere." He could have been reading this passage.
It starts but doesn't stop. At the end we are back to our sin, but our sin
is not physical blindness. It is the way we get in our own light and can't
see God in action. We miss the Son of Man even when he is standing among
us.
**************
The history of humanity is a story of occasional leaps in the right direction,
followed by a return to the old ways. We go ahead two steps, back three.
We don't always see where we are going or that God is with us. We join the
Jews in the wilderness and Jesus on the streets of his time and place. God
is right there with us, but we are fussing about how healings happen or
whether someone is pulling a trick on us.
**************
What clay do we need for our eyes these days? Surely we are not that far
away from either Pharisee or legalist, disciple or man born blind. As the
nation has learned once again what war is like, we need the spittle of ancient
theory. We need to know that we are not the only Christians who ever confronted
war. Old-timers who thought long and hard about war can help us see. They
can show us that God can come in even the darkest of times.
One such old-timer is St. Augustine, who first developed the just war theory.
In that theory it is not war so much that is wrong as the passions it excites.
Another is Father Murphy of the Archdiocese of New Jersey, whose brother's
firm lost half its work force in the World Trade Center. "Yes,"
says Father Murphy, we must act to end terrorism, but we cannot allow our
hearts to be filled with hatred, anger and revenge. He stands in Augustine's
line: be careful for your heart. Another is the Imam at the Islamic Center
of Cleveland who entered his mosque the Monday after September 11 to see
broken windows and glass. Hours earlier, a man had rammed his car into the
building, shattering the front door and plowing into the marble fountain
inside. The police arrested the driver, who was hospitalized with juries
from the crash. What did the mosque's Muslims do? They prayed for the man.
"If America has not seen the Islam which is coming directly from God,
I have to double my efforts to teach about Islam."
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in
New York, preached on "radical evil" in his Yom Kippur sermon
last year. Dr. Schorsch uses the concept from Jewish philosopher Hannah
Arendt. "Radical evil is never a natural catastrophe, It's a product
of human will, gone awry." While there is a need to exterminate radical
evil, he cautioned, it should not be done in such a way that we sell our
souls in doing it. A Buddhist scholar gives us a another view: "Much
of the Buddhist path is to reduce our own aggression...and to increase kindness."
Again we see the foundations of just war theory: we have to protect both
our country and its heart.
Seeing all the way to the foundations is one of the gifts that God's spittle
gives us. We need it. We need to see deeply enough to protect our heart,
to keep it for the kind of love that the Messiah set loose in the world,
even though all have yet to see it, even in the beginning!
We join the ancients in not understanding blindness. We join the ancients
in thinking illness can't be cured or that somehow we are the cause of it.
And we join the ancients in needing spittle, needing some simple odd device
to get us home.
**************
An old sailor was having a very hard time figuring out the new computer
on the boat he was to captain one last time. He was especially miffed at
the supervisor the company had sent over. That supervisor was looking over
his shoulder, understood his resistance to the new dials—and all the
old captain could think to do was to trick him. On their way back in, on
his final journey, he tells a friend in a letter, "I sat all the buttons
and I studied them hard. I fixed all the points on the computer-based compass.
And then I went outside and stared at the stars and smelled the wind and
I got us home." The supervisor thought my victory was based on his
wonderful training. He just thought it was. I got myself home the old way.
**************
The Bible is the story of constantly opening eyes. Sometimes we get the
miracle stories, like this one. Other times, we are just told that people
see God. Even they are surprised! The Bible is acceptance upon acceptance
within acceptance, including acceptance. It is repeat acceptance. God gives
the Garden. Adam and Eve slip. God sends Moses and the law and the burning
bush and the people say yes, only to say no. God forgives them. God sends
a rainbow after the flood. God says, let's try again. The people say sure
again for a while…and then they once again wander. Repeatedly, we go
blind to the presence of God in our lives. Finally, God sends Jesus, his
only son, to say, "It's alright, I still love you." The entire
story of the Bible can be summed up in one repeat motion: God hounding the
people with love, but the people not quite seeing. Obviously, some of us
still haven't gotten it. We either just don't understand ,or we ignore God.
We are in good company as the same issue captured and captivated the early
disciples and the majority of the Israelites.
We also ruin our human relationships by not seeing how much we are loved
at times. A man who had cheated on his wife and was in deep penance—and
even deeper therapy with her—told me this story. He told of how they
made the turn back toward their marital vows. He said that they stopped
the courtly ritual of saying to each other, "I love you", on the
advice of their therapist. Instead, the therapist had them say, "You
love me." The man had not heard that his wife loved him—the way
very few of us really hear God saying to us, I love you. He was empty even
though he was loved. But he couldn't hear what she had to say. So he was
sticking to the road of ethic and obligation, of action and duty—and
saying to her, "I love you." When he changed and said to her on
the phone when they were in different cities or late at night as they turned
off the light, "You love me," he began to hear something different.
One day, he reports, he simply broke down on the street and wept. YOU LOVE
ME! He heard that he was loved and became able to love. Once we know that
God loves us, things change. We are actually capable of good and loyalty
and faithfulness in a way that we simply weren't capable before. We can
see the presence of the Messiah among us.
**************
"An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
(Mohatma Ghandhi)
**************
"All things change to fire and fire exhausted falls back into things."
(Heradotus)
**************
Peace is the art of of stress-free productivity—a lot more accomplished
with much less effort.
**************
"Know your bone
Gnaw, bury, unearth." (Henry David Thoreau)
**************
"Bless us, dark earth as we give back that which we have received as
we make a forest of blessing a ridge of blessing for the future to grow
upon." (Chinook Psalter)
**************
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown
aside with great force." (Dorothy Parker)
**************
Help us loosen our grip.
Foul whisperings are abroad (Wm. Shakespeare, MacBeth)
**************
"All gossip is rooted in our own psychology." ( Mordecai Lainer
of Ishbiz)
**************
"The unique torture of modernity: disassociated, de-storied, displaced."
(Franz Kafka)
**************
I need an antacid. Or a spiritual analgesic to decongest myself.
**************
Finding the Afikoman, as Jewish Children do during the Passover celebration,
is simply connecting the dots. We need a staff person and a family member
who does nothing but connect the dots. That would make for peace instead
of chaos around here.
**************
"Descend with me to the seventh circle of buzz, the ground zero of
zing, the hub of hip, the Sodom of synergy. Beneath the Statue of Liberty,
the masses, the tired and unhumble, yearning to be chic, huddled at Tina
Brown's talk party." (Maureen Dowd,
The New York Times)
**************
Use orthodox spellings.
I as Shug Avery what she want for breakfast. (Alice Walker, The Color
Purple)
**************
Use figures of speech sparingly.
"Will felt that the reader was…floundering in a swamp, and that
it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp
quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope."
(E. B. White. The Elements of Style)
**************
Avoid foreign languages.
"It was Will Strunk's parvum opus, his attempt to cut the vast
tangle of English rhetoric down to size." (E. B. White, the Elements
of Style)
**************
Do not break sentences in two (do not use periods for commas).
"He had thrown a book. Hers. From across the room. A hot welt across
the cheek." (Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek)
**************
Avoid fancy words.
Algolagniac, cicatrices, deracinate, pelagic and piliginious. (Some words
used by T. C. Byle in Water Music.)
**************
Braille posters that were specially commissioned to promote the theme of
equal treatment for the blind were displayed last year at the Truro Leisure
Center in Truro, England, and at the University of Alberta in Edmonton,
Canada. The problem, however, was that sighted people were not able to read
the posters because the words were only in Braille, and the blind people
could not read the posters either because both locations displayed the posters
behind glass covers to protect them.
**************
The story of the blind man is a reminder of our perpetual inclination to
demonize and discriminate against those who are different from the majority.
Within the past couple of years the oldest synagogue west of the Mississippi
River was the target of an arsonist, with the damage including the loss
of more than 5000 books. A new mosque in Yugo City, California, was set
ablaze before it was even able to open its doors. Members of a Hindu temple
in Pittsburgh found that someone had smashed their sacred statues and had
spray-painted the word "Leave" above the altar. A Cambodian Buddhist
fellowship in Portland, Maine, experienced a similar incident when they
found the message "Dirty Asian Chinks Go Home" on the wall of
their sanctuary.
**************
It doesn't take much to make us blind to what's going on around us. If you
took the amount of fog needed to shut down a major airport, the water from
that fog would fit inside an eight-ounce glass.
**************
With the rise of genetic science, it might now be possible to determine
in utero if a child is going to be born blind or with some other
physical disability. In the past, before the development of ultrasounds
and other prenatal testing, parents accepted any child that was born to
them. But now with sperm banks and the ability to alter DNA codes, parents
are increasingly going to have the opportunity to "design" their
own children. Parents, if they want, will be able to pick and choose which
characteristics they would like their children to possess.
**************
Barbara Brown Taylor, in
Speaking of Sin, comments that "repentance
begins with the decision to return to relationship: to accept our God-given
place in community, and to choose a way of life that increases life for
all members of that community." Those who attacked the blind man in
the temple may have very well taken seriously their need to repent and to
restore themselves to a proper relationship with God within the community
of faith. But they were completely unconcerned with allowing the blind man
to find his place within that same community.
**************
The traditional way of thinking was that people with physical disabilities
were being punished for some sin. Yet Jesus attempted to get the leaders
in the temple to understand the man's blindness from an entirely different
perspective. In a like manner, Albert Einstein once said, "We cannot
solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them."
**************
"Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They
invade somebody else's life or they flee their responsibility for it."
(Cornelius Plantinga in
Not The Way It's Supposed To Be: A Breviary Of
Sin)
**************
"The Christian faith best says to the victims of suffering: (1) I don't
understand, and I can't imagine why you should be suffering in this way,
but (2) I trust that God has not forgotten you, and that you do not finally
lie outside God's love." (William C. Placher in
The Domestication
of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong)
**************
"The eyes are the window of the soul." (Proverb)
**************
"Faith tells you to believe in things when common sense tells you not
to." (Movie,
Miracle on 34th Street)
**************
Mud in his eyes? Even a blind man has feeling in his eyelids. Jesus promised
to heal him and put mud in and on his eyes. The discomfort was considerable.
He did not need to be told to go to the pool of Siloam. He ran to the nearest
water to cleanse his eyes. How cruel, if he could not then see, but he could.
Jesus' methods for healing our lives are often irritating before they are
healing. Remember the Ethiopian who was told by Elijah to wash in the Jordan
seven times to be cleansed of leprosy? He bristled, but his servant said,
"If he had asked you to do something great you would have ran to it.
Why not do what he says?" He did and was healed.
**************
This text addresses several issues: Is there a cause and effect relationship
between sin and sickness every time? When someone's witness is that God
has acted in his or her life, how do those for whom he had not acted respond?
Is it possible to be found as Christian leaders that the blind are leading
the blind? (It happened in Chapter 9 in a Jewish community. Why not in our
day?).
2nd
Quarter 2002
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