March 26, 2017 An Alternative Mind: Seeing (from Lenten Sermon series)

Sermons by Hamilton

Scripture: JOHN 9:1-41
This past Wednesday, at our staff prayer time, Dolly Herschel, our primetime director, shared with us the substance of a TED talk she had seen and that I have since watched. Candy Chang, a resident of New Orleans, lost someone dear to her a while ago. And as she grieved the loss, she realized she wanted to do something to celebrate life and to prepare, in a way, for death. So on an old abandoned building near her, she wrote on one of the walls this line: “Before I die, I want to . . .” Then she left some chalk and a whole lot of blanks for people to fill in.
To her surprise, by the next day, every blank had been filled in. People had written things like, “Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy.” “Before I die, I want to straddle the International Dateline.” “Before I die, I want to sing for millions.” “Before I die, I want to plant a tree.” “Before I die, I want to live off the grid.” “Before I die, I want to hold her one more time.” “Before I die, I want to be someone’s cavalry.” “Before I die, I want to be completely myself.”
Some of the people who wrote on that wall may have known for years about the goal they mentioned. I’m guessing, though, that most of the people who wrote there had not known what they were going to write until that invitation appeared in front of them. It took someone asking the question for many of them to realize what was so important for them. And then the blank wall provided an opportunity for growth and understanding: this is what matters to me; this is what I need to do or be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uebxlIrosiM). Now I see!
When Jesus encounters a man who is born blind and heals him, at least part of the story’s beauty is that it’s not just a physical healing that occurs. It’s also a transformation in this previously blind man’s inner life. If the story were just about a physical healing, it might well leave us feeling a tad irritated. Lots of us, too, have prayed for our own variety of healing—relief from pain, a negative biopsy, a let-up in the depression—and healing has eluded us. And here’s this long-ago man who, after all, doesn’t even ask for healing and he gets it. What’s up with that? It’s no help to us.
If the story is not just about physical healing, but also and centrally about inner transformation, though, then that’s a different story. There’s something in it for all of us. And it’s clearly about more than just the restoration of a man’s eyes. The story’s symbolic quality is palpable. This is not just about eyesight. It’s about wisdom and new life and faith.
One of the story’s telling details is the gradual progression in the way this healed man perceives Jesus. When he first talks about the stranger who’s given him his sight, he doesn’t really have a clue about Jesus’ real identity: he tells the neighbors about “the man called Jesus” (John 9:11). As word gets around and the Pharisees question him about this amazing thing, he sees something more and calls Jesus “a prophet” (9:17); he’s growing in his sense of who Jesus is. Still later, he tells the religious leaders that Jesus is “from God” (9:33)—a yet deeper recognition. And finally, when he meets Jesus again at the end of the story, he gets Jesus’ totally unique role in the world. “Lord, I believe,” he says, and then he worships Jesus (9:38). A notable dimension of the story is that seeing, for this man, entails a growth in wisdom.
We, too, use the word “see” as a metaphor. “I see,” we say as we finally figure out to make one of our three TV remote controls the universal remote—a sentence I confess I am not yet able to utter. Or “You see what’s going on?” we might ask a friend who’s confused about family dynamics or why the Cavs are struggling to win games lately. We say we “see” when we grasp deeper dynamics, when we understand the fullness of what’s going on. We “see” the truth.
So because growth in wisdom is so central to the story of the healing of the man born blind, let’s suggest some ways in which such seeing might happen for us. The first is this. Earlier this week, I ran across a poem by Amy Lloyd called “i am learning.” Listen for resonances in your own life. This is how it goes, and I’ll read it slowly:
i am learning to be brave
i am learning to speak my own language
i am learning what i want to become
i am learning what kind of life i want to live
i am learning to stand in my place without flinching
i am learning to go my own way
i am learning not to help people who don’t want help
i am learning to embrace my powerful spirit
i am learning how to build my own bridges
complete with lions to guard against foot traffic
i am learning i have value to bring to those waiting to hear my voice
i am learning the intensity of my own burning passions
i am learning to keep digging in the murkiest of my own brokenness
i am learning to accept my imperfections as beautiful
i am learning to think in terms of unlimited possibilities
i am learning i will not always be understood in the way i intended
i am learning to apologize and then move freely forward
i am learning
and learning
and learning
new things
every minute
every day
i am learning to be a part of the healing of the world
because i am willing to learn to be me
You might want to write your own version of this poem. Just begin every line with “I am learning,” and fill it in with the ways in which God is enabling you to grow and chang and find newness. Seeing in new ways.
Here’s a second way of seeing. And this one is going to invite us to think intently about a subject that is not at all easy. So if you’ll work with me on this, I think you’ll find it worth it. One of the striking things I’ve learned as I’ve studied this story is that it offers us an entirely different way to understand the notion of sin. Remember the question posed at the beginning of the story: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (9:2). Gail O’Day, an extremely astute scholar of the New Testament, says that the notion of sin in John’s gospel is entirely different from the way we so often think of sin.
For most of us, sin is always about doing something wrong, usually to someone else. You who grew up Roman Catholic will remember the sort of sin you confessed as a child: “I swore at my mother”; “I put gum under the desk”; “I was mean to Billy.” And as we’ve gotten older, we’ve thought of our sins as morphing in that same vein. Sin, we think, is taking an ethical shortcut at work, or abusing a spouse, or neglecting to help a friend in need. Sin, for us, is invariably about hurting someone else.
And without at all shortchanging the ways in which we hurt other people, sin, in the gospel of John, is an entirely different matter. And it’s here that we’re asked to stretch. For John, sin isn’t about doing something wrong to those around us. For John, sin is simply this: it’s about neglecting or forsaking a relationship with God. In John, the only real sin is denying the incredible power of God that’s available in Jesus Christ. It’s not a moral failing, in other words. It’s a spiritual shortcoming.
This is an extremely odd notion for us, because we’re largely convinced that sin is about making someone else’s life worse. Not for John. For John, sin is about refusing to take in the radical love God has for each of us. If we don’t love God, of course, the likely upshot is that we will be less geared to loving others. But sin here has nothing to do with our action toward others. It has only to do with not nurturing a relationship with the Holy One. The Pharisees in this story do indeed have physical sight, but it’s only the blind man who really sees who Jesus is. So it’s he who is without sin.
I myself find this notion so odd that it’s almost incomprehensible, but it’s also such a gift that I find it revelatory. So I’m going to say a little more about it. One of the more common Christian ways of understanding sin and forgiveness has been that we make mistakes and Jesus dies to take away that immorality. And while for many people, that’s a helpful way to understand faith—and if that way of understanding is a gift to you, then by all means stick with it—I confess that for me, it has always left me wanting.
John’s way of understanding sin and salvation is entirely different from that. For him, salvation has nothing do with Jesus dying to remove the blot of what’s evil in us. It has only to do with whether we seek the presence of the Holy One in the midst of our frenetic lives. For John, the heart of life is that God adores us as we are. And if we refuse that love, or ignore it, then we are, in John’s eyes, living in sin. The whole purpose of life is to take in the wonder of God’s affection for us, to give thanks for it, to celebrate it—and then, of course, to pass it on. When we fail to take that love in, we are blind, we are sinning. When we absorb that grace, though, we are seeing, we are living in fullness of life.
Not incidental to this is that it’s not Jesus’ death that is the decisive saving act in John’s gospel. It is, instead, Jesus’ life that makes all the difference. As the theologian O’Day says, “it is the very life of Jesus as God’s Son and incarnate Word that makes it possible for people to move from sin to eternal life” (cf. her extended discussion in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX, pp. 664-665). Sin, for John, isn’t a moral category. It is fundamentally about our relationship with God.
And that means that any judgment for sin does not come from God. The consequence for sin is not divine punishment—as though, in this way of thinking, God would say, “You don’t love me, so I’m going to penalize you.” The consequence for sin is only our own spiritual impoverishment. It’s that we miss out on what can make all the difference: the opportunity to live with the light of God at our core. The penalty for sin, in other words, is self-imposed not God-imposed.
A little later in the gospel of John, Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me” (14:1)—meaning come to God, come to Jesus. As the 11th Step in 12-Step programs puts it, we “sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God.” This is the heart of faith for John. If you want peace, if you want to find your true home, then come to the God we know in Jesus Christ. Lean on “light and life.” Receive your blessing.
So the way to really see then, for John, is to live out of our grace. It’s to bask in the embrace of the one who never lets us go. And when it comes right down to it, it’s to back off on our worrying, and let go of our sense of entitlement, and begin our celebrating. It’s to cease our complaining and to live out a life of gratitude and appreciation. That’s all. Come to the waters. Receive the holy benediction. Live in grace. That’s what it is to really see. “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see” (“Amazing Grace,” v. 1). To really see is, at heart, to see God’s grace.
One last take on the matter. My staff colleague Amy Eugene, our still relatively new Senior Director of Operations, tells a story about her own journey, a story she gave me permission to tell you. At a point earlier in her life, when she was struggling with some things and wondering about her place in the world, she was talking with an astute friend, who listened carefully to her and saw beneath the surface to the deepest questions Amy was really asking. As this woman took in the struggle and the self-doubt, she looked at Amy and she said, “Amy, the whole reason you were born is because you matter.”
Earlier in the service, we baptized three precious little children. In second-century frescoes in the catacombs of Rome, images of this very story of the healing of the man born blind appear as a symbol of baptism. You know why? Because in this fabulous story, Jesus anoints the man. He blesses him. Baptism essentially means “chosen.” As we are baptized, we are chosen by God. In so many words, what Jesus declares is this: “the whole reason you were born is because you matter.” It’s true for that long-ago blind sufferer. It’s true for Peter and Charlotte and Samuel Franz. It’s true for you and me. And it’s true for everyone the world over. “The whole reason you were born is because you matter.” Do you see?