“To be Blessed”

 A Sermon Preached by

Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle

 John 9:1-41

Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 6, 2005

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214 

Phone:  446-0960 FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

          But the way we normally hear this term used has little in common with the Bible’s understanding of blessing.  At best, it’s a mixed bag to be blessed by God.  In the story from John’s gospel about the man born blind there is the blessing of the man receiving his sight at the hand of Jesus.  But after he is healed he gets nothing but abuse from his family, his neighbors and the religious leaders.  The story is 41 verses long.  The cure of the man’s blindness takes only the first 2 verses.  The controversy around it takes 39! 

          We don’t need to rehash the story.  It tells itself.  There is so much going on here.  Jesus is absent for most of the action.  After the healing he disappears until the end.  In the meantime, everybody’s trying to figure out what happened to this man, why, and by whom?  There’s no joy over the man - their son, their neighbor, their parishioner - being healed of his blindness.  There’s no rejoicing.  Everyone is trying either to find fault, or protect themselves, or defend their own traditions and understandings. 

          It’s amazing what God has to put up with, isn’t it?  This story has it all - defensiveness, pettiness, jealousy, pride...  It starts when Jesus and his disciples are walking down the street and they see the man who was blind from his birth, probably in the street, and they ask Jesus who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind.  But Jesus isn’t interested in discussing theology.  There is no cause and effect here.  Don’t try to fit this into the parameters of your world view, into the slot in your brain called “explanations for suffering.” Human pain and suffering are not given as punishment for past sin, but in all pain and human suffering, Jesus says, God has an opportunity to make visible the healing power, the redemptive power of the new creation.  You see, if you can blame the one who suffers, or hang it on some social or family inheritance - it makes it easier to walk by, to accept it as part of the way things are.  Jesus didn’t bite.  Not much is truly going to change in this world as long as we insist that God act in ways that meet with our standards of appropriateness, that God is bound by our human notions of justice.

          This group of people didn’t know what to do with Jesus.  We see what happens in the story when he goes away after healing the man.  The man goes back to his old neighborhood and his friends and neighbors, rather than rejoicing with him, question whether it’s really him at all.  He told them what happened, how Jesus made some mud with spit and dust, rubbed it on his eyes, and told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam - and he did - and he could see.  Well. . . they weren’t sure about this, so they marched the man over to the Pharisees.  They knew about this stuff!  They were even more skeptical, more concerned that he healed the man on the Sabbath, which was against religious law, than in the man being able to see.  In fact some of them said it must be the work of the devil because it was done on the Sabbath.

          It’s starting to become obvious who is really blind here, and the rest of the story only confirms it.  I think we are not unfamiliar with this particular form of blindness - because it is something I think we all need to be aware of in ourselves.  And it strikes me that, among other things, this story points to how stuck we get in the past and how, if we let it, it so severely limits the future.  The disciples, the man’s parents, his neighbors, the Pharisees - all of them - their reaction and response to his healing was to grab on to what they knew and use it to relate to this new reality.  They couldn’t rejoice with him and for him because they couldn’t “see” the power that had come among them.  God has only acted in such ways that have given us some commandments to live by, some forms in which to worship, some traditions to adhere to.  It is more important for life to be ordered, for everything to fit in proper categories - including God - more important to be this way than to allow for the possibility that there is a newness to be found, that God might somehow and sometimes work outside the lines.  We understand that there is much in life that is not controllable, and so we seek to control what we can.  We have to do that in order to have some sense of order and predictability about life.  The creativity of God continues to be expressed in bringing order out of chaos.  There is comfort and assurance in the firmness of the earth, the stability of relationships, a church that carries on traditions, that sings the old familiar hymns and prays the familiar prayers. 

          But how easy it is to lose our vision of the God who does marvelous things even as we sing of the marvelous things God has done.  How easy it is to see the world as locked in to its present arrangements, the blind staying blind, the poor staying poor, the rich remaining largely indifferent.  How easy it is to see the work, vitality and growth of the church and its ministry determined by demographics, and budgets, the time constraints of its busy members.  How easy it is for each of us to expect no surprises from God.  

          What is to break through the impasse of a present that is determined by the past, so that we might see and live in a present transformed by the promise of God’s future?   It’s going to take nothing short of a miracle - or a bunch of miracles.  It’s interesting to note that in the story in John’s gospel that while the miracle of the man gaining his sight after being blind for his whole life helped him a lot, it didn’t solve anything for anybody else.  In fact it just created a big mess, because it confronted them all with the demand to make a decision about what was happening in their lives (this man, their son, neighbor, parishioner), and who is at work in this world.

          Like the healing of the blind beggar, life keeps giving us moments which challenge us to decide what is at work in our lives and what does life want from us.  In George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan there is a high powered discussion between the general and the Bishop, and the bishop says that miracles happen all the time, because miracles are simply those events which awake faith in us, when we have to either go with faith or decide that there is nothing to have faith in.  We have Moses, we have our traditions, our understandings, our ways of thinking and believing that have worked OK for us so far.  A miracle won’t help you with your faith; it won’t make your faith stronger.  They are simply those moments, those events in your life which bring you to the place of decision about whether to live by faith or to reject it and go with what makes sense.  “The birth of a child is no scientific mystery.  But over and over you hear those who hold a little child in their arms say, ‘What a miracle!’ because every new birth presents us with the choice either to believe in the ‘Goodness of God in the land of the living’ or to say, ‘Just another hungry mouth in the ghetto.’” *

          As it is with birth, so it is with new birth.  As it is with life, so it is with new life.  Is life just a series of incidents and accidents, determined by fortune or fate, or what we make of it, or is there another hand, another power at work?  Life keeps giving us moments which challenge us to decide.  It can all get pretty messy, depending on which way you go.

          Amen.  

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