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“Though I was blind, now I see”, Jeff Wright, 3/30/14

“Though I was blind, now I see.”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church

(Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, Colorado

March 30, 2014

The story of the man born blind is a one-act play in six scenes, with a large cast of characters, as biblical stories go: there are at least twelve disciples, a crowd of nosy neighbors, some Pharisees, two parents, the man himself, and Jesus. These last two get most of the attention, but it is not the kind either of them wants. The story revolves around them because they are the only so-called sinners in it – the man because he was born blind, which in his day was a sure sign of God’s judgment – and Jesus because he broke one of the Ten Commandments by healing the man on the Sabbath.

Barbara Brown Taylor,

Home By Another Way

Texts: Psalm 23 & John 9:1-41 3/30/14

John’s big on metaphors, figures of speech that describe one thought or experience but are used to help explain another. Like blindness and sight in this story – who can see and who can’t, and who thinks they can but can’t. John‘s Gospel is full of this kind of imagery describing the differences that Jesus makes in a life. I think John offers these metaphors because it’s hard for us to find the right words to talk about our faith. I think it was just as hard for Christians in John’s day as it is in ours. We’d like to say something about our faith, or at least be ready if somebody asks, to put our experiences of God’s grace into words that carry some weight, that others can understand. I think John wrote to help us. He strings together this beautiful necklace of a Gospel, each story a remarkable pearl. In each, John gives us a clue, a hint, an image, a metaphor we can use to tell our own story.

Born again, for example, one of the first metaphors in John’s Gospel. From the story of Nicodemus. Nicodemus – a prominent Jew, a member of the governing board of the Jewish community – comes to Jesus to check him out. Jesus tells Nicodemus that in order to understand and share in what Jesus is up to he’s going to have to be born again. Nicodemus doesn’t get it – that Jesus is using a metaphor! Maybe this is John’s way of alerting us to expect even more. Born again: it’s one of the most common ways that others have talked about what their following Jesus has meant to them. Our starting over, beginning again with God’s help, putting the past behind us and opening ourselves to the future. It’s a journey, growing in our trust in God, living into the ways of Jesus. This is part of what it means when we say, “born again” – there’s a lot of life and learning ahead of us.

The first time we read about Nicodemus, early in the Gospel, he approaches Jesus in the dark of night. The second time he appears, later in John’s Gospel, he comes to Jesus’ defense before the Sanhedrin. The third time, near the end of John’s Gospel, in the light of day:

Nicodemus helps another leading citizen of Jerusalem take Jesus’ body from the cross and prepare it for burial. Faith as a process. Something we plant, nurture, grow.

I love the metaphor, born again. I don’t use it, because it’s been abused by many. But when people ask me if I’m born again, I tell ‘em, “For sure, again – and again and again.” But you’ve got to find the words that’ll fit for you, that authentically reflect your own experience.

John offers another way to frame our story in his report of Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well. We read the story last week. Jesus meets a woman, an outcast in her village, who’s come to the well alone, in the middle of the day. This is how we know she’s been shunned in her village: she’s alone at the well in the middle of the day. Respectable women didn’t draw their water alone in the middle of the day. Jesus reaches through her isolation, asks her to draw a drink for him. Her response prompts a conversation that changes the woman’s life. She runs back to her village and says to those who’ve rejected her, “Come and meet a man who knows everything about me!”

I think John is suggesting that we can tell this story about the woman and then work in our own experience of Jesus’ caring, his drawing us out of our isolation. We could say, like the woman – I’m sure John won’t mind if we don’t mention her story, if we use the metaphor of “being known” as if it were our own and say something to the effect – “I’ve discovered that Jesus knows everything about me, and still he loves me, cherishes me.” If you’re a guy, you may not want to use the word cherish. You can borrow one of these stories for the metaphor, but it’s gotta be your story, in your own words. This is what others want to hear from you: what difference God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit makes in your life.

If “born again” or “being known and loved anyway” doesn’t work for you, John’s not done. There’s one about our need to eat – how Jesus likened himself to bread, talked about his being the Bread of Life (Chapter 6). It’s a straightforward, powerful metaphor. “Jesus feeds me.”

Then there’s the story about the woman caught in adultery and dragged to Jesus for his condemnation. Jesus speaks first to the ones ready to stone her to death. You remember: he says, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.” I know a woman who uses this story to tell her own. She has a rock on her desk at work. A pretty good-sized throwing stone. It has the word First printed on it. When people ask her what it means, she refers to the story – it’s one of the few nearly everybody knows. She says, “Jesus wasn’t into throwing stones. It reminds me not to throw stones.” Isn’t that cool?

And the story of Lazarus who had died and been buried for three days before Jesus raised him to new life. For me, this is the most defining metaphor of Jesus’ ministry, what it means for Jesus to have come into the world. Death is just too much a part of life for us to pass on this one. The death of our dreams, the death of joy in a relationship, the death of a loved one and that feeling that life has come to an end for us too. Then Jesus comes along and resurrection happens. It doesn’t happen immediately. It’s a process. We’ve talked about it around here. The Friday of our crucifixions, the awful and sometimes season-long Saturdays of wandering and wondering…then resurrection. When I’m asked to tell my story, I talk about how God has worked in my life to raise me from the dead – in a marriage that was failing, in a ministry that was faltering, from the dead-ends that I too often took as a parent.

Will you take a couple of minutes, right now, to think about one of these metaphors that describes your experience of God’s hand at work in your life? I’ll sit for a couple of minutes. You reflect. Born again, starting over. Being known and loved for who you are in spite of who you are. Confronted by Christ with a stone in your hand, or in your heart; then forgiven and challenged to live into a new way of being. Fed by God, nourished by the life of Jesus in ways that have shaped your own life. Death and resurrection. Blind, but now you see. Did you read Mary Luti’s meditation in our Lenten devotional Thursday?

 She writes about Psalm 23, our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s full of delightful images. “I’m grateful for my Shepherd’s provision,” she writes, “for the straight path he shows me, the green meadow where he makes me lie down, the wide clear stream I get to drink from…” You could use one of these, or maybe maybe you have your own way of putting it – your experience of God’s guidance and care. Take a couple of minutes to think about how you’d answer if someone were to say, “Why Jesus?”

1From Calmly Plotting 2014 Lent Devotionals, United Church of Christ, uccresources.com

Return with me to this morning’s Scripture. There’s a warning for all of us who are willing to tell our story. You recall the controversy that followed the healing – an official investigation during which some of the Pharisees work themselves into a fit, accusing the man of lying, threatening his parents, speaking evil of Jesus, interrogating the man a second time. You’d have thought that instead of miraculously healing the man Jesus has just robbed a Seven Eleven. It takes John just two verses to record the miracle and 34 verses to describe the controversy that followed and the consequences for the poor man.

Listen to me: “poor man.” The beggar, blind from birth, has received the gift of sight and I’m feeling sorry for him! But by the time his neighbors and friends argue about his identity, and the authorities harass him, and his parents distance themselves from him, and the rabbi kicks him out of the synagogue – you gotta wonder. Except for this one thing the man keeps saying: “I was blind. Now I see.” Everyone but the beggar seems blinded to this incredible reality. When we tell our story there’ll be some who won’t see, won’t understand, may want to argue, even dismiss us. But that didn’t keep the man from telling his story. He told the people grilling him, “I don’t know about all this other stuff you’re asking, but this one thing I do know. I was blind and now I see.”

—Jeff Wright