"Praying for a Miracle"

John 9:1-39

Fourth Sunday of Lent + April 3, 2011

Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404

It was Helen Keller who once said, “The only things worse than blindness is a person with sight and no vision.” It is this irony that is at the heart of this morning’s Gospel story. It is a narrative of resounding hope and missed messages. The disciples, the neighbors, the parents, and the Jewish authorities are all hovering around the subject of the story, a man who has been blind from birth.

“Who sinned, that this man was born blind” This is the way the story begins. Jesus and his disciples see someone who was probably a fixture on his street corner, a blind man who has become part of the scenery. The disciples want to discuss the cause of his impairment but Jesus will have none of their conjecture. You may be familiar with the superstitions of the time which linked sickness with sin: In the case of a blind person, apparently, there was a belief that vision was made possible by a light projected from behind the eyes that illuminates the world. If there was no inner light, a person was incapable of seeing. Lack of inner light came from the darkness of sin. Blindness was seen a moral illness in those days, a sign of inner darkness. Who was to blame, the man himself or the parents who created this sightless child without inner light?

It may sound a bit bizarre. Still, finding someone to blame is not that remote from our own experience of illness, is it? Of course we know a lot more about anatomy and physiology these days. We are certainly sophisticated about pathology and the reasons for particular illnesses. We know, for example, about congenital illnesses that are directly attributable to abuse of alcohol or drugs. Even aspirin and coffee are linked to some birth defects. Cigarette smoking is now considered as dangerous to the non-smokers who share the smoker’s environment as it is to the smokers themselves. Diet, cholesterol, tri-glycerides . . . we still blame the victim, but Jesus is not interested in blaming anyone. He is more interested in a demonstration of the power of faith to make one whole. So the man is healed.

There is an issue of authenticity which surrounds this healing which makes the story memorable. It is really a play in three acts. After the blind man is pointed out to him, a cure is affected by Jesus kneading together some mud from the ground mixed with his own spittle. Jesus places the mud over the blind man’s eyes and instructs him to make his way to the Pool of Siloam to wash. As he is going the miracle occurs and the man can see. At this point the story takes an interesting turn as the poor blind man labors to have the miracle accepted. As one commentator points out, “Not one living soul says, “Alleluia” or “Thank God!” No one asks him what it is like to see for the first time or whether the light hurts his eyes. All they want to know is how, who, where and what.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Willing to believe,” The Christian Century, March 6, 1996, Chicago, page 259.

Then comes the second act, the investigation which is held by the Pharisees. Like the kind of infamous hearings which our elected representatives love to convene in Washington, the Sanhedrian, the ruling authorities of First Century Jewish culture, are determined to find something illegal here. This is the second time they have interrogated the blind man himself. Having called other witnesses, the parents and the neighbors, they recall him to the stand. They ask him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his discipels?” (John 9:26, 27NRSV) Having first doubted the fact of a cure, now the Pharisees and their cohorts are bent on impugning the miracle. “This healing, from where does it come?” they ask. “We have never seen anything like this before.”

I was in college when the Civil Rights Movement began in the U.S., but I still remember that kind of innuendo seeping into discussions about the Montgomery bus boycott and the new leader who was emerging, a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. “Outside agitators” was the code phrase then. This movement, the new strength and the vision of freedom which seemed to have awakened people in the deep south, from where did it come? It was too much too soon. It was tainted . . . maybe Communist inspired. The same brush was used to tar the activities of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They were terrorists according to the Government’s emergency resolutions. Authorities protecting the status-quo put up all kinds of smoke screens to obscure the work of justice when it is on the move.

The blind man answered his interrogators, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.” (John 9:30) An insurance adjuster tells the story of a woman of whom he was quite critical for not having reported a burglary. “Surely,” he said, as he pointed to a ransacked room, “you must have known when you saw all the drawers open and the contents scattered all over the room that you had been robbed.” And the woman replied, “I only thought my husband had been looking for his shirts!”

Saul Alinsky, who originated what we now call community organizing when he created the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, once said, “They’ll see it when they believe it!” The human tendency is to discount the reality that stares us right in the face if it conflicts with a system of belief on which we have been dependent. Just as they were unwilling to admit that their nation could be involved in genocide, well-meaning German citizens could not “see” the horror of Treblinka or Auschwitz. Consequently, they did not see the cattle cars filled with their neighbors who were disappearing; they did not see the smoke of the furnaces or smell the stench of death. Today many of us have a hard time believing that there is any connection between the prosperity of our own society and the continuing abject poverty and despair in Central America and the Caribbean. Although we “see” much of the reality of the third world through media of all sorts, the witness of the church, and travelers who come back to tell what they have experienced, we just don’t see it. It was Edmund Burke who said, “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good people to do nothing.”

It seems to me that at the heart of this story from John is a drama about coming to see God in the liberating activities of Jesus and the high price that must be paid for that vision. One character in the story is transformed from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, from begging and dependency to recognition that he has a place in that community. We watch other characters in the story gradually shut down, shut out the light, and become more entrenched in their darkness.

Beyers Naude in South Africa was a white Afrikaans man, a leader in the Dutch Reformed Church. It was that Afrikaans church which blessed Apartheid and wove through the racist institutions of the South African Government a message that God had chosen white South Africans for a special mission. Their’s was a burden to dominate and rule the wealth and the resources of South Africa. Naude was among the top leadership of his national church. Then his eyes were opened, and, somehow, he began to doubt what he knew. He began to doubt that the Dutch Reformed Church’s interpretation of scripture regarding “non-whites” was true. He began to question the theological basis for apartheid. He was arrested, stripped of his position in the church, and banned – that is, held under house arrest – for years. Think about his separation from his community. Think about the struggle of beginning to see Christ in a new way . . . and losing the fellowship of your family, your neighbors, the community in which you were born. Naude, who at one point was the head of the Council of Churches of South Africa, was one of the heroes of the movement which finally won the day . . . but not without cost.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, the primary step for an addict is to admit that they are powerless over their addiction. “I am an alcoholic . . . I am a drug addict . . . I am trapped by habits of dependency and need to be set free.” Paradoxically, the only way to reclaim our personal power is by admitting our powerlessness. “You don’t mean that we are blind, too” say the Pharisees. “If you were blind; if you would admit your dependency on corrupt systems which serve your habits and not your Lord, you would not be guilty,” says Jesus. “Since you say, we “see” . . . that means you are still guilty.”

The miracle of healing begins by saying, “I need you, God.” The path to wholeness asks us to suspend our own need to control. There will always be one more question which could logically be asked, one more excuse which could legitimately be put forward, one more reason to resist or postpone a change of mind or heart. Paul says to the church in Ephesus, “Why do you who have learned the truth about God’s love, continue to live fearfully as if in the dark. ‘Live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.’” (Eph 5:9) In spite of the way in which movements, political, or economic systems have provided us with the examples to understand our healing story this morning, it is not, after all, about world affairs. It is about us . . . challenging us at the point of our own individual hesitation, challenging us at our own growing edge, not to blame or to be defensive, but in each of our interactions with family, with strangers, with neighbors, even with those people whom we fear the most, to take the risk and to live by a vision that we are all bound together in a common humanity, bound together by love.

In a British Church yard there is a grave with an inscription written by the man whose mortal remains lie interred there. It says, John Newton/Clerk/Once an infidel and libertine/A servant of slaves in Africa was/by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ/ preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith/he had long labored to destroy. Newton, at one time in his life a slave trader who found God in the midst of human misery, discovered the light of Christ at a point of personal transformation. He is the author of many hymns, including one we sang today about a blind man who received his sight. The story of a man born blind is the story of the Amazing Grace of our God who in Jesus Christ joined us in life to trouble us and push us, to knock us off center . . . and ultimately to love us with a love that does not fail. The strength of that love, that amazing grace, is what gives us the courage to live as children of light. And that is the miracle you and I should be praying for today. Amen