John 9
The long and rambling Gospel
reading for today (41 verses) gives the preacher many avenues in which to
pursue. When I was first ordained as priest 40 years ago today I would have
happily explored all of them, even as the congregation fell into a deep sleep.
But now perhaps a bit wiser and
less long winded, my prayer and study of John 9 has led me to the end of the
passage and to focus on Jesus’s statement “I came into this world for judgment
so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become
blind.”(v. 39)
Back in Jesus’ day, it was
assumed that there was a connection between present disability and previous
sin. The only question then was whose sin was it – the person’s or his parents?
So, faced with a man blind from birth, the pharisees and Jesus’s disciples
deduced that someone must have done something wrong for which his blindness was
God’s punishment.
I doubt whether any of us today
place the weight of sin on someone we see with a mental or physical disability,
but clearly throughout history up until the present time people have been and
are being judged negatively on the basis of their being different whether it be
their physical appearance, religion, education, political views social status
and so on. Today we hear some say: ‘panhandlers are drug addicts, illegal
immigrants are all criminals and want to take away jobs from Americans; rural
poorly educated Southern whites are racists.’
Allison Stanger, a professor at
Middlebury College in Vermont, after a particularly angry and violent incident
on that campus recently, wrote in the New
York Times: “Americans today are deeply susceptible to a renunciation of
reason and a celebration of ignorance. They know what they know without
reading, discussing or engaging those who disagree with them.” So we have to
ask are not these kind of blanket assumptions and knee-jerk judgements one of
the reasons our civic and political life are so toxic these days?
Jesus firmly resists any such
analysis of how the world is ordered. He challenges us to dismantle some of our
cherished popular assumptions and let God remake them in a different way. He’s
not big on our judgment of others. In His Sermon on the Mount he said, “Do not
judge so that you may not be judged and the measure you give will be the
measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not
notice the big log in your own eye?” In his turning the assumptions and prejudices
of his day and ours, upside down Jesus calls pharisees and those us with large
doses of self-righteousness “blind.”
And that’s where we need to begin:
to recognize our own need for healing; to begin to see is to recognize that we
have blind spots in our lives, that there are dark places in our world view
that are not healthy and do not lead to peace and reconciliation but rather to
increased division and enmity. And even worse, such attitudes are tragic,
indeed sinful because they cause us to
miss out on the power and love of
God to heal and transform all lives starting with ourselves.
So, in the end this passage isn’t
just about the healing of the blind man, it is John’s readers and we who are
being led towards the light which is Jesus himself. As a verse in one of my
favorite contemporary Christian hymns puts it: ‘Lord the light of your love is
shining. In the midst of the darkness shining. Jesus light of the world shine
upon us. Set us free by the truth you now bring us. Shine on me, shine on me.’
The real gift Jesus gave the
blind man was not his sight but the faith to know who he Jesus really was.
‘Lord, he said, “I believe.” Our prayer needs to be ‘God, give me the faith to
believe in you, to see you for who you really are and then Holy One work
powerfully in my life to heal me; let your love flow into my life and let that
love overflow into my attitude toward my neighbor,
especially those who seem unlovable.’
A person who has been a major
influence in my ministry was a Southern Baptist minister named Will Campbell.
Raised in poverty in rural Mississippi, Campbell as a white man was an early
supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom he became a close friend and
confident. He
marched, he protested, survived
death threats. He became an outcast to many of the people he grew up with.
Yet despite his passion for the
civil rights movement and very progressive political views, he always felt that
because the Church’s main mission is always reconciliation. After the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he visited James Earl Ray, King’s
killer, in prison and gave him communion. Later he reached out to members of
the KKK and called his ministry “The First Church of Rednecks, White Socks, and
Blue Ribbon Beer.” This too earned him enemies- this time on the left. In
response he said, “Anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the
dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something
less than a Christian. For after all, Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well.”
Someone asked Helen Keller, who
had been blind since the age of 19 months if blindness was the worst thing that
could befall a person. She answered that the worst thing that could befall a
person was not to lose their sight but to lose their vision As my own active
ministry is winding down, I pray that the Church and particularly the Episcopal
Church, the Church I love, will not lose its vision; that it will always
remember its primary mission is of reconciliation.
Building the peaceable kingdom.
In today’s context that means engaging patiently, lovingly with all of God’s
people – and respecting the dignity of every human being, especially those with
whom we disagree.
Preferences will remain; politics
will always be a tug of war; and free civil and open dialogue will always be a
necessary component in democratic society, but with God’s help and healing
power we can, as God calls us, to be a part of the solution not a part of the
problem. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment