What do you see?
March 2, 2008
Michele Rizoli
Text:
I Samuel 16:1-3
John 9:1-41
Take a moment to brainstorm with me about how many different ways we have of seeing things in today’s world. We can use corrective lenses, sunglasses, [from the congregation: telescopes, swimming goggles, binoculars, windows, lights, magnifying glasses, webcams, microscopes, fingertips, camera, television, the mind’s eye]. Electron microscopes can magnify up to 2 million times (I found that number amazing). We have telescopes to see into space and laparoscopes to see inside human bodies. We’ve harnessed x-rays, infra-red rays, ultrasound waves and so on, all so we can see more and in different ways.
I wonder if there is one way of seeing that we have yet to comprehend fully, a more metaphorical one, to be sure, that is God’s way of seeing things. I wonder if we have as much imagination about al the ways to perceive God. Maybe you’ll think of some listening to these stories.
Our scriptures today, from 1 Samuel and the gospel of John are about blindness and seeing and about people who are overlooked by other people. They are about how God wants us to see things differently.
First let’s take a quick glimpse at the story about David, because it establishes a precedent about how God seems to operate in a way that is not our instinctual way of doing things. It also has that wonderful verse about how we look on outward appearances, but God looks on the heart. People who know ancient Hebrew will be quick to point out that heart means not only the seat of emotions but the seat of thought, so God looks on the heart and mind. So when we say heart, I like to think of it as God seeing the whole person.
In this passage, Samuel, has had a rough career trying to get a godly monarchy going for ancient Israel. After a lot of floundering and gory political intrigue, he hears God telling him to go to Jesse’s house and conduct a sort of interview, head-hunting or more like pageant to pick a new king. Samuel looks for the obvious, he’ll pick a man who is the oldest in the family, who has a strong sense of authority, who is tall dark and handsome. But God helps him to go against his usual sense and to see differently. God picks David. God shows Samuel what there is to see in David; someone who is willing to do the grunt work, who has kind eyes and who is amenable to God’s Spirit. David was such an unlikely candidate that he was not even in the lineup, he was on the margins, the blue-collar brother in the family. Yet he is the one God chose to be king. Humans look on appearance, but God looks on the margins of hierarchy, to the heart and mind.
We can see this same God and these same criteria at work in our wonderful Gospel story about the healing of the blind man and his subsequent encounters with people who are blind to God at work.
I would like to invite you to experience this story in your mind’s eye. As you are comfortable, please close your eyes and keep them closed until the part in the story when the blind man regains his sight. (Sermon-nappers this is your chance to have some fully sanctioned shut-eye!). You are the blind man. At the point in the story where Jesus touches your eyes, you may touch them too and then open them after you have washed them in the pool. [Close your eyes]
It’s a sunny day and you are sitting at your usual spot where you beg for alms. It’s just another day like so many others. You know it is sunny because you can feel the warmth of the sun beating down on your face and through your robe. Every once in a while a trickle of sweat goes down your back. You know it’s your regular spot because you can feel the familiar hardness of the stone you are sitting on, that little dip where you’ve been settling in for all these years. You remember how your parents taught you to feel your way here when you were a kid, to walk close to the wall, count the turns and find the right doorway to sit in. You are just on the edge of the souk, the market where everyone comes through on their way to the temple. There’s not much going on today because it is the Sabbath, but you can still smell the scent of the mint and parsley from the closed herb stand next door and (unfortunately) the lingering stench of the goats a few stalls down.
The usuals have been coming by to give you a few coins, or some bread or cheese to take home, but you can sense there is some kind of a new tension in the air. It sounds like there is a group of people approaching. You hear the clap, clap of sandals on the paving stones, the rustle of fabric and the buzz of words that swarms around them. It must be one of those rabbis who have people following them around. They are getting closer and then they stop close by. So you hold out your hand to see if anyone will give you some money and somebody does. You feel the warm bumpy coin in your hand to find out how much it is.
Soon you realize that they are talking about you, like you weren’t even there. By now you are used to it, that is what everyone does, talks about you and around you, rarely to you. Like not seeing means you also can’t hear or think or make friends. You tune into the conversation, they’re wondering why you are blind. Asking the usual question about who sinned to make your punishment so severe, blind from birth. How many times will you have to hear that one? Is there no other way of thinking about it, people? What’s funny is that you’ve never really felt like you were being punished for anything. Sure, you’re curious about what it would be like to see sometimes, but you never feel cursed, this is just who you are.
This rabbi must be different from the others because his voice has a kind of confidence about it. He certainly gives a different answer. “It’s not about sin,” he says, “it is so that God’s works can be revealed in him.” Ha! God revealed in you, the blind guy? Did you hear that right? Revealed? Now you can feel someone really close, he seems to be squatting down to your level, everyone is suddenly quiet, you hear them breathing, you smell dust, you hear him spit and then… you feel someone touch your eye sockets and put some sort of a poultice on them. [Touch your eyes.]
He sends you to go wash at the pool where you have always gone as part of your cleansing rituals. You feel your way there, inch towards the edge so you don’t fall in, reach your hand into the cool water and bring it up to your face several times. Once the poultice or mud or whatever it was washes clean you feel strange, different. You find you can actually open your eyelids, so you make the unfamiliar
movement, you open your eyes and light rushes in. It is completely overwhelming. It is almost as though you have been baptized and reborn into a different world. [Open your eyes.]
Flash back to TUMC. I wonder what that experience of seeing for the first time would have been like? That rush of light. Was it entirely pleasant? Frightening? Did he have to close his eyes so he could find his way back home? Well, it was certainly life-changing. So much so that even people who knew this blind man weren’t sure they were seeing the same guy. He had to keep on telling them, “yes, it’s me.”
One thing is certain, Jesus was right, God’s works were being revealed in this formerly blind man. Was this revelation in the fact that he could now see, or in the fact that people could now see him? Like with David, the blind man was not anyone’s first choice about where to look for divine workings. He was on the margin, just minding his own business, some to whom you can extend charity; when God turned a spotlight on him and proceeded to use him as a walking talking seeing metaphor. At least metaphor is how John sees it and how he is framing this story.
That’s lovely so far, but what happens next, is what we didn’t read in our passage earlier. No sooner is this guy opened up to literal vision, then he stumbles up against spiritual blindness. In fact, I think that is why John is telling us this story in the first place. It’s long and convoluted and I encourage you to the whole story in John 9.1- 41 in your bibles. The basic gist is that the miracle was amazing and got everyone talking and called the attention of the Pharisees who were the religious leaders. They mostly looked for God through the lens of purity rules. They spent a lot of time arguing and debating and the case of this newly seeing man really had them going. It just didn’t add up.
So they bring him in, and his parents (to make sure he really was blind in the first place) and they start to go back and forth on how it was that Jesus could have done this. In some Pharisees’ view Jesus was a sinner because he had kneaded the poultice on the Sabbath. Others had the perspective that he couldn’t possibly be a sinner because how can a sinner heal someone blind from birth? It was a conundrum, and they couldn’t see their way out of it because they were looking at it through a legal, religious, everyday viewfinder. With that way of looking at things they were never going to see God at work in the seeing man.
The seeing man was right there giving them his viewpoint, “I think he’s a prophet. All I know is that I was blind and now I see. To me it’s perfectly clear.” The whole theological discussion turns ugly, as these things can sometimes do (not that we’d know anything about that) and the Pharisees try to put the seeing man back in his place. “Who are you to try and teach us anyway?” They completely lost sight of the wonder right in front of their eyes.
I imagine that the seeing man’s head is spinning when he walks out of there, plus, he is still getting used to this whole vision thing. I mean, isn’t it obvious that God did an amazing miracle? So what if you can’t prove it or understand it. At this low point, Jesus makes an effort to seek him out and lets the seeing man know who healed him. Jesus finds the seeing man to confirm he is indeed revealing God’s works. He in turn affirms his belief and worships Jesus. He’s back on track. This is not something to be grasped with theological discussion, or through logical conclusions; it is something that is lived, felt, known.
The way John tells the story, Jesus claims he came into the world “so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” That’s a strange way of putting it. He is talking about a different way of seeing, a way that gets beyond the usual ways of thinking about religion and has new perspective on how God works in the world. Jesus, through John’s story, affirms that if you can’t see God in transformation, in seeking out someone from the margin and turning them into a witness to God’s power, then you’re the blind one.
Our church has entered what we’ve called a visioning process. In light of this story what does that mean? Who are we in the story?
Just before this passage in John and again in verse 5 Jesus claims to be the light of the world. Light was also the first thing that God created in the Genesis account. If you consider that interactions of light are basic to us seeing anything at all it is no wonder that light has become a longstanding metaphor for vision.
We need to keep the light of Jesus as the source of our visioning. What an interesting word to use. We are hoping to see who we are and what direction we should take. Perhaps like the blind man we need to get used to seeing light, to recognizing God at work in places we haven’t looked before, to resist the temptation to close our eyes again because it’s easier. Perhaps like Samuel we need to learn to listen to God and not judge by what appears to be right, by what is usually appropriate, by the way things have always been done. Let me give you a personal example.
A couple of years back I was going through a dark spot. I was grieving my Mother while at the same time going through the breakup of my marriage, I used to get almost weekly calls from Rayleen. She would phone me just to see how I was doing. She didn’t need any details, she just let me know she was thinking of me. Rayleen was a member of our church who was on the margins of society any way you cut it. She had a very rough life and was limited by illness, by a wheelchair, by financial circumstances, etc., etc. She would probably not have been voted as an obvious candidate to be on many church committees. Yet, here she was quite clearly ministering to me. I didn’t see it, I kept thinking that I should be the one to be visiting her. But one day it hit me and I saw that God was clearly caring for me through Rayleen. It was not what I expected and it took a while to recognize. I hope I have learned that lesson a little better.
God’s way of seeing things includes looking in directions no one has thought to look: the edge of society, the end of the line, the young, the impaired, the different. God’s way of giving vision is so radical it’s like learning to see all over again. It takes practice, it takes being a witness of God’s workings before others who just can’t see things in the same way and it takes coming before Jesus, affirming faith and worshipping, just like the seeing man in the story.
Our church has entered what we’ve called a visioning process. As we continue to discern who we are as a church and who God wants us to be, I pray that God will touch us with this kind of perspective and renewal. Amen.