March 26, 2017

John 9:1-41

 

I shared with you a few weeks ago part of the charge that I gave to my brother-in-law at his installation as the pastor at the Congregational Church in Madison. This morning I thought I would share another part, which I ripped off from Mother Theresa.  She says,

• People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self centered; Forgive them anyway.
• If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives; Be kind anyway.
• If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.
• If you are honest and frank, people may still cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway.
• What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.
• If you find serenity and happiness, people may be jealous; Be happy anyway.
• The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway.
• Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
• You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

After the service someone who had heard and appreciated these words before came up to me and said, “You know, Mother Theresa’s advice isn’t just for pastors. They are good advice for us all.”  I told him that I absolutely agreed, and in part, that’s why I shared them that afternoon (and that’s why I share them now).

They come to mind again for me because of this long story from the gospel of John about the man whose sight Jesus restores.   Did you notice that nobody’s happy for him?  He’s been blind his whole life.  If he ever had hope for sight he likely gave that up a long time ago.  Pegged as a sinner because of his blindness – what besides moral weakness could have caused it? – he no doubt had given up hope of ever overcoming that disability either.  But then, what he didn’t dare hope for happened.  After all this time of being in the dark he now has sight.  And nobody is able to celebrate this with him.  They are all willfully blind in their own way.  The light, which he now sees, reveals that everyone around him is a disappointment (kind of the way Mother Theresa suggests).

First, it’s his neighbors, the people who see him begging every day. They aren’t even sure who he is.  Deborah Kapp writes, “This is so odd.  The man has lived in their midst all his life; his neighbors have interacted with him, perhaps helped him cross the street or draw water; they had worshiped with him.   Why do they fail to recognize him after he is healed?  Is it because the only marker of his identity was his blindness?  Has the fact that he was differently abled been the only thing they could ever see in him?”[1]

The Pharisees are just as blind, if not more so. They can’t see or believe the miracle because it doesn’t fit into their mold.  Jesus is not the hero of their story; he is a sinner who works on the Sabbath.  This healing – if it really happened – just can’t be part of God’s good news, they say.  So they go to the blind man’s parents for an explanation before going back to the blind man and chasing him from the community because in the man’s new sight he rejects their ability to determine what’s a sin and what’s not.

Perhaps most disappointing are the blind man’s parents. They can neither celebrate their son’s new sight nor stand fully behind him because they are afraid.  They are afraid if they associate too closely with Jesus, if they point to him as the source of healing, they will lose what they have, and they’ll be chased from the community as well.  So, they hang their son out to dry: We’ll let him tell the story; we’ll let him suffer the consequences.

So, they are all disappointing. The neighbors, the religious authorities, the man’s parents – they are all blind for one reason or another to the opportunity that is before them.  None of them can celebrate the miracle that is before them, none of them can perceive the presence of God in their midst, and none of them therefore can step into a world that’s greater and more sacred than the world they’ve created for themselves.  None of them, that is, except the blind man, the one who has nothing to cling to, the one who is willing to see on Christ’s terms, the one who says to Jesus, “Tell me about the savior!  Show me the savior, so that I may believe.”

It is important to note that the first readers of John’s gospels would have heard this story in a pretty particular way. John’s people had differences with Peter’s.  They were setting their own course and emphasizing their own theological priorities.  They were distinct from the mainline church, and they were also distinct from the Jewish community, which had formed them.  “Like the man born blind,” says David Bartlett, “they are forced to choose between confessing Jesus and being cast out of the synagogue and denying Jesus in order to stay safe within the familiar, dominant community.”[2]

So, to them the blind man’s story isn’t simply the miracle of physical sight restored to a person who could never see; rather, it’s the story of a faith community this is willing to suffer it’s own losses, it’s own sort of death, in order to be raised into the light, in order to see God’s kingdom, in order to live in a world where the savior reveals himself and works with a compassionate power that is immune to the prejudice illustrated by the neighbors, the legalism of the Pharisees, and the fear of the family.

The church was the blind man’s new family. The church was the community that with the blind man would see what the rest of the world couldn’t.  The church was the gateway into a world of people who knew that what mattered most was between them and God anyway, a world of people who were free to sacrifice their hangups in order to receive God the way God comes – a world that could love the outside world anyway because the outside world wasn’t aware of its own blindness.

At the stewardship seminar that a few of us attended on March 11 the speaker talked about the new dynamic that churches are facing during the offering. Lots of us give online or send a monthly check or transfer stock; we don’t really use the offering plates so much, and so when the plates come around what do we do?  The solution that the speaker held up was to reclaim the act of testimony.  One church plays a two-minute video during every offering in which someone from the congregation says something about what God has done or what God is doing in their life.  “Testify” said the speaker.  In fact, he said it three times, “Testify, testify, testify,” that’s what we need to do, and as he said it I found myself wondering: Are people comfortable doing that?  Have we forgotten how?

The good thing about testimony is that we don’t need to understand how God did what God did; we simply need to share what God did and what it meant to us – how it changed us. The blind man does a good job of modeling that.  “I don’t know how Jesus did it.  I don’t know who Jesus is.  I don’t know if he’s a sinner or not.  Why do we have to put a label on him?  What matters to me, and what I know is this: I was blind, and now because of this man, I see.”

Can we talk about what it is we think that God is doing in our lives? I hope so because I really believe it is one of the most important things we can do together as a church.  Whenever I hear another’s story of God’s action in their life I come away with the sense that God is bigger than I had previously thought.  “If God worked that way in their life maybe God can work that way – or some other surprising way – in mine.”  Plus, the more we share our stories the more real God becomes.  The more we “testify,” the more we become a part of a culture that is able to believe, see, and feel the presence of a God who is working beyond our understandings and abilities.  In other words, it is by sharing our stories that we become a church this is able to see what the world often cannot.

At my last church, I asked people to share their God moments, their testimonies, little pieces of their faith journeys, and I would put them together in a book which we could read and share with visitors. One guy at the end of a service one Sunday gave me a little shred of paper and said, “Here’s the note you asked for?”  Did I ask for a note, I thought?  If this is his testimony, I’m pretty sure he missed the point.  So, I put it in my pocket and forgot about it until later that afternoon.  This is what he said on that little, crinkled up piece of scrap paper: “All my life I have been confused and angry because my father left us.  This church has helped me to realize that my true Father has been with me all along.”

That church, that small community of believers, had given him without exaggeration a life-changing gift. He, in turn by sharing his testimony, had shown the church their true identity; he had reminded them how to see.  And of course, all of the other testimonies had done the same thing.

So, guess what I am asking you to do. Would you please share your testimony?  Not your only testimony?  Not your life’s story?  But, a God moment, or a time of awareness that God was present to you in one way or another.  If you’ve never been blinded by a divine light and knocked off your horse (Apostle Paul reference) that’s okay.  And, if the voice of God never thundered in your ear that’s okay too.  But, if you’ve experienced God’s grace, if you’ve experienced God’s love, if have in one moment or another realized that a sacred, holy, God of love cares deeply for you or has acted through you or for you, would you please share your story with me?  The best way would be for you to type it out and email it to me, but if you prefer to write it on a piece of scrap paper and hand it to me I’ll take it that way too.

 

 

[1] FOTW, Year A Volume 2, page 118.

[2] What’s Good about This News, page 100.