“Turning A Blind Eye” September
24, 2013
John 9:1-41 Rev.
Cheryl D. Galan, Transitional Leader
Do you remember a time when you couldn’t see?
I’m remembering one summer when I was serving as a Volunteer
Director
at Camp Whitman on Seneca Lake in New
York
….I’d just
finished getting ready for bed at the shower house,
and realized I’d
forgotten my flashlight.
Oh well, I shrugged.
After all these years, I know these woods like
the back of my hand.
Surely I can find my way back to my cabin without it.
It happened to be a cloudy night.
No
stars, no moon, and out there in the wilderness,
no ambient light reflected
onto the clouds from lights on the ground
because
there weren’t any.
Just dark.
Pitch black. Night.
I
headed back in the direction of my cabin on a dirt road,
following the ruts with
my feet, the brush to the sides of the road, barely discernible,
the black shadows
of the tree tops - dark against dark
forming a tunnel around the open
sky.
I found the fork in the road
and turned to the right.
Home free, I thought.
But
then I got to the tree-lined field.
Somewhere, at the edges of the field
buried within the
trees was the path that would lead me home.
Now I couldn’t see a thing. And I’d lost my bearings.
Just on the other side of the trees
I could hear the laughter of
my campers,
settling in for the night, but there I was alone,
just me and my
blind eyes in the darkness.
For the blind man of John’s gospel, life had always been
like that.
Since
birth, only darkness. Since birth,
all alone in the not seeing.
NEVER a time when he could see.
Until Jesus.
Until Jesus spat on the ground and scooped up a fingerful
of
dirt mixed with saliva and touched his eyes with it.
Until he felt the cool, wet mud on his eyelids.
Until he heard Jesus tell him to go wash in the pool of
Siloam
and he stretched out his arms, one more time groping in the
darkness,
one
more time reaching in the darkness,
one
more time walking the well-worn path in the darkness,
a path he knew so well he didn’t falter or stumble, once he
got clear of the crowd.
And one last time he fell on his
knees by the cooling waters of the pool
plunged
his hands into the water,
scooped
it up by hands-full to splash his eyes,
now caked with
the mud that was hardened and dry, like crust.
Washing the mud away, the blind man
opened his eyes. And
now, he could see!
Where he’d walked with unhalting steps on the way
to those healing waters,
I imagine he stumbled now; he faltered now
as
he walked in a world he’d never seen before.
Now he made his way along a path, both familiar and entirely
foreign.
Now he came home to voices that had
faces and faces that had questions
and
questions that flew at him and unsettled his soul.
How were your eyes opened?
Where is he?
How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?
Is this your son?
How does he now see?
What did he do to you?
How did he open your eyes?
The neighbors, the Jews, the Pharisees, even the man’s
parents struggle
to reconcile the truth
as they have
KNOWN it with this new
reality represented in the answers
the formerly
blind man gives them.
They ask. He
speaks. And it’s as if they are
moving through thick, pea-soup fog,
It makes no sense.
It turns the conventional wisdom on
which they have depended
on its head.
And so, it rocks
their world.
With mud and spittle, by a touch and a command, on the Sabbath, a blind man sees,
but
now everyone else does not.
The neighbors, the Jews, the Pharisees, and the man’s
parents
do not see that Jesus has come
among them to touch
where conventional
wisdom says…do not touch.
Do not touch my certainty. Do not touch my comfort.
Do
not touch the institutions in which I have invested large parts
of myself.
Do not touch my beliefs, the rules
that help me find my place
in a sometimes
chaotic and confusing world.
Do not touch my relationships-in-community, the way my life is ordered.
Do not touch my family.
Do not touch the carefully constructed arguments of my
well-informed mind.
Do not touch my judgments. Do not touch my prejudices.
Do not touch my heart. Do
not touch……me.
There we have it, right?
It’s one thing for Jesus to mess
with a blind beggar’s life,
but quite another for him to mess
with mine.
Earlier today, we saw just a snippet of the film, Something The Lord Made.
We saw courage and vision,
pain-staking experimentation and
practice,
ambition and more than a smidge of
grandiosity
as Dr. Blalock
went out on the limb that led to
the world’s first
surgical procedure on the heart.
This work saved the life of a baby who otherwise would
have died
and paved the way for medical procedures we now take for
granted.
Blalock, Thomas, and their medical team created new norms,
crafted new conventional wisdom,
and
charted a new course from which we reap benefits to this day.
But this is also a story about Dr. Blalock’s struggle to allow his own heart to be
touched.
The under-current
of the story is the largely unquestioned and unchallenged racism of the Jim
Crow culture in which Dr. Blalock operated.
It was unconventional, that he forged such a close
partnership
with Vivian
Thomas, an uneducated black man
whose trade was carpentry.
It was highly irregular when he invited Vivien into the O.R.
to talk
him through the procedure they’d
together developed and rehearsed.
But at the end of the day, when the accolades came, Dr.
Blalock stood alone….
Vivien Thomas was not there, not in
the headlines, not in the photo ops,
not
in the recognition ceremonies.
Turning a blind eye to the blockage in his own heart,
Blalock
could not see and would not allow
it.
Later
he would look back on that time and say, “I have some regrets.”
Isn’t that the way it goes for us?
We want healing, for ourselves and
for our world.
We pray for
it. We work, that it may be
so. We plan for it.
We protest and advocate for
it.
We
educate for that which we believe bring healing.
…..while about
our own hearts we insist…..Do not touch
So where does this leave us?
It leaves us where we began…with our blind eyes…in the dark.
And along comes Jesus, who will climb out on a limb,
to overturn the
conventional wisdom that in this story that begs for our hearing
and
calls out for our healing: that someone did
something wrong.
Who sinned? asked the Pharisees.
To which Jesus responded, Neither this man nor his parents
sinned.
In a recent interview, Diana Butler Bass spoke of the
condition of many
congregations today and said,
“It’s not your fault.
The world you grew up in has
changed very radically.
You didn’t change
it. It changed around you.”
Who sinned....that we minister in a context of
ever-diversifying demographics
and disparities
of wealth and opportunity in our churches and communities?
Who sinned.....that
institutional patterns and policies which formerly
served
us well are now falling apart?
Who sinned....that we
suffer numeric decline,
not
to mention the aging buildings with creaky floors, our Achilles heel?
Who sinned... that graying congregations and greening
congregations alike
face the daunting challenge of
articulating why it matters that we are
Christian,
not to mention Presbyterian, in a world that mostly doesn't care?
Who
sinned...that we struggle to find our prophetic voice
in
the mist of pervasive violence and deep, persistent injustice?
Who sinned....that the signs of dis-ease in the earth, in
our bodies, in our relationships
so rattle us to the core, that in our fear we become brittle, blind, or blocked,
unable to see the beauty, the pain
and raw vulnerability
in the faces of our brothers
and sisters.
Don’t you see? It’s
not your fault, Elizabeth Presbytery.
Instead, it’s our opportunity,
for Jesus also said,
“This
man was born blind so God’s works might be revealed in him.”
What if this moment in our shared history could be less
about
who
is to blame and more about God’s works, revealed through us.
Here’s your opportunity to shine with the light that has
been given to you.
Did
you notice, when you read the lines of the blind man in the story,
while
everyone else was confused and arguing,
while
they bickered and complained, you spoke with
growing clarity.
It was as if, in the telling of your own story, in reflecting on
your experience
with Jesus Christ, in the questions
that came flying at you,
and the words, however inadequate, you used to answer them….
a growing awareness snuck up on you, a strengthening voice rose
up in you,
like the gradual brightening of the morning sky,
until suddenly
astoundingly, it
burst over the horizon and you blurted out,
“If this man were not from God, he
could do nothing.”
And then Jesus found you….again.
Jesus
found YOU….who have been tumbled, tussled and tossed about
…and
Jesus presented the question toward which this whole drama
has
been leading: “Do you believe in
the Son of Man?”
And sight turns to insight as YOU, the blind one confess,
“Lord, I believe,” and worship him.
May it be so, for us and for our congregations, for
the sake of the healing of our world.
Amen.