I Once Was Blind

Text: John 9:1-41

03/19/2023

Earlier this week, Seamus read my “Pastor Jamie” coffee mug so kindly given to me by Amy and Laurie for Christmas, except he read the other side that says, “Don’t make me put you in one of my sermons.” And he quickly said, “Daddy, I don’t want to be in your sermons.” OK, buddy. No problem. When Seamus was a toddler, he possessed a motor that could run full blast for what felt like 20 hours a day. He had a curiosity that had him in a state of constant exploration for ways to stimulate his brain. He was also a climber of anything and everything. One day we walked into the great room of our house in New York and found that he had grabbed onto the chandelier that was above our dining room table and used it to swing up to the top of the refrigerator where we had found him. We took a few links off the chain of that chandelier that night after the kids had gone to bed. At the same time, he was (and still is) incredibly loving and sweet. So it was, at roughly the same age range, that every time he did something that would qualify as getting in trouble, whether it is “accidentally” spilling a drink, “accidentally” knocking one of his mother’s decorative frames off the wall, or “accidentally” hitting his brother when Jameson has gotten too close for his comfort, (though I imagine that one was more intentional), before his mother could get more than three words of chastisement out of her mouth, he would run up and give his mother a big kiss on the lips and a little snuggle into her chest and just like that, all would be right in the world, again. If nothing else can be said, he’s always known how to play to an audience. With me, though, he was somewhat different. My primary parenting technique for that age was always one of picking the child up up and carrying them away from whatever the offending issue was and setting them on my lap to have a conversation with me about whatever had just taken place and maybe making some better choices along the way. And for Seamus, anytime this happened, before I ever got even a single word out, he would shut his eyes so tight that there is no way that any light could possibly get through, and in an instant, in his mind, he had completely disappeared. It is one of those laws of parenting that we all know. When you are two or three, there is a transverse effect between the two parties. “If I cannot see you, then you cannot see me.” And in his case, the fact that he looked completely adorable when he would shuts his eyes as tightly as he could and as he swiveled his head back and forth, also, a key part of his disappearance, took him almost as far as actually disappearing would. Again, at least you can say that he’s always known how to play to an audience. And it strikes me thinking back to these moments of Houdini like disappearing that Seamus used to employ, those times of strife in which he would shut his eyes and “disappear”, he had stumbled into one of the great truths of the spiritual life. All of us are often blind to the presence of God in our midst. And sometimes we are the children of God sitting on the holy lap and shutting our eyes as tightly as we possibly can in hopes that God will not see us. But more than that, we too often are blind to the love of God, upon which all of our lives are founded and all our lives are grounded. Because whether we are trying to hide from God or whether we simply have grown unable to see or sense God’s love in our lives, sight often comes as a gift from the Spirit. Sight often comes and shows us the grace of God that forgives over and over again. Sight often comes and we see God’s love flowing not just to us, but, indeed, all around us and we are moved to reach out to all those that we encounter, those that are stumbling blindly around, as well, and help each another see that love that we each so desperately seek.

We are told that Jesus and his followers were out one day when they came across a man who had been blind from birth. And also immediately, the disciples ask that question that so many of us ask in the face of suffering, “Jesus, why did this happen? Why was this man, in a world that necessitates sight for having even the most menial job, been blind since his birth. And, no doubt this is how most of us feel if we let our passions overwhelm our rationality when thinking on this, and the disciples immediately begin to try and assign blame for why this could have happened. Surely it was something he did, something his parents did, remembering that the sins of the father are often visited upon the son, surely there is a reason for why this has happened. But Jesus, as he always did, saw the situation very differently. Rather than focusing on who had been the cause, he chose instead to illuminate the power of God through healing. Through sight coming from blindness. Through light finally breaking in through the darkness. And so it is that Jesus spits on the ground and makes a paste of mud only to spread it all over the man's eyes and tell him to now go wash himself. Jesus creates mud to make someone clean. Mud shows the messiness of life and creation, this blind man included. The mud shows that in order to gain healing, he must first gain cleansing. The mud shows that we must all gain cleansing before we may be healed. But before the healing might be completed, the disciples switch places with the man, those who have been given every opportunity to see, show that they are far more blind than the man sitting before, far more unable to see and perceive the movement of God throughout all the world and in this very place. And in this way, we are not really so different from the disciples. Even in the midst of modern medicine and diagnoses, we too seek to know why it happens that people are born with one affliction or another. We want to know why young and old face illness that comes seemingly through the fault of no one, we want to know why it can be that bad things happen in a world created good. And in doing so, do we too become blind to the power of God in our midst? Perhaps this is why Jesus uses this moment for healing, this moment for new birth, that he might demonstrate the power of God, not just not in this man’s life but in the lives of all who encounter him—all who believe in him. And just as this man was blind from the time of his birth, just as the disciples failed to see the healing power of the Spirit in their midst, so to are we all, on some level, spiritually blind. Too often, we miss the movement of the spirit in our midst, too often we turn a blind eye to the needs of those surrounding us, too often we discover our lives are lived in the midst of darkness when what we really need is light. We fail to see the world, as it truly is, is a’washed with the movement of the spirit, with the love of God, with the constant calling of all God’s children to return home. The world, when we are blind and broken, is scary and dangerous. The world of true sight, is teeming with life, alive with the spirit, and singing songs of praise to God.

I have been lucky enough that life has afforded me numerous opportunities to see the movement of the spirit in different times and places around the world. And whether that is the brilliance of a flowery meadow on top of a mountain in Tennessee after a long day of hiking, or the panoramic view from the top of the world high atop an African mountain, or the celebration of the goodness of God by persons desperately poor by any standard of measurement. I have seen with my own eyes the movement of the spirit. But lets be honest, that’s easy. It is easy to gush over the beauty of the movement of the spirit on top of mountains, or in remote villages where churches gather to sing and dance, it is easy to see the movement of the spirit with people become genuinely overcome with joy in God. The challenge comes in seeking to see the movement of the Spirit in the everyday, in the challenging, in broken. The challenge comes in seeing the goodness of God on the face of the blind man in our midst.

But this is what makes the appearance of the Christ in the blind man's life so profound, this is what makes this story of healing so important to the faith of all of us. Because Jesus takes this bleak picture, this blind man, calling out, blind from birth, and offers a focal point in the midst of the dreary mist, Jesus says to the man, be healed and see. Today your search for sight ends, just as for us, today our search for God may end. Can we even begin to imagine the experience of the man who since birth had been unable to see, calling out day after day for people to drop whatever pennies they had in his little wooden bowl, left in the care of his friends, because he couldn’t care for himself, unable to see his parent’s faces, unable to see the road before him or behind him, can you imagine the brilliance of opening his eyes for the first time. How beautiful must this dusty road in the Judaean countryside must have been. How beautiful the face of the one who had given him sight. How much he must have taken in every single moment because you have to imagine that he must have been clinging to this new reality like it was his salvation. Because it was.

But there is a second half to this story. Upon gaining his sight from the Christ, the man begins to move around the community and everyone who used to pass him as a beggar begin to notice that this man now has his sight, they begin to notice that he has been healed. "Is this not the one that we saw begging everyday," they asked. "How is it that you have come to have your sight?" And as the man begins to explain, they don't get it. And then he goes before the Pharisees, and they don't get it. Twice he goes before the power structure of the community, twice before the religious establishment and tells this his story and yet, they do not see. The one who was blind has now been given sight and those with perfectly good eyes cannot see the work of Christ in their midst. This man comes before them with newly working eyes, and in their blindness they cannot see. The over the top nature of the whole episode comes close to the edge of comical, almost like the old Monty Python movie, Life of Brian, in which people from all over worship and follow the guy born in the stable next to Jesus’ as Brian tries in vain to constantly shoo them away. The man testifies to his healing, but the powers that be cannot see it so they call in his parents, who essentially throw up their hands and say, "what do you want from us our son was blind and now can see?" But still not enough for the council, they again call the man into their midst to ask a second time how he was healed. The presentation of the struggles of the council to understand the work of God, betrays a deeper message in the pages of the Johannine Gospel. Too often, when those who come into our midst, those who have gained their sight, those who are prophets in this age we cannot see what they see. We cannot break away from the structures of the past the old order to see the world in a new manner as they see it. History is replete with examples of those who have come into a new sight, have come into a new way of understanding the world and our relationship to it, a new way of understanding the Divine and our relationship too God and far to often they are missed by those around them. To be able to see in a world of blindness is to be different, to be weird, to be feared. To be holy in a world of sin and brokenness is to challenge the belief that the world cannot be helped. And too often we don’t know what to do with these people, these people who challenge the prevailing notion of everything, who challenge everyone’s comfort, including our own, who make people and nations see the world in a starkly different way than had been conceived before. We don’t know what to do with them and just like that, we see why Jesus was such a threat to the order of the day, we see why historically, those who we would later call prophets endured death threats and beatings, ostracism and prison, and, at times, death. We don’t like to be challenged. We don’t like to have our comfortable worlds rocked with new messages of the radical nature of God’s love and acceptance. We like being blind. But when you see, when the vision of the spirit comes over you in real and powerful ways, you can never go back to the old ways of being and of doing. So it is that the apostle says that everything old has passed away. Everything is new!