March 2, 2008 Fourth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 24: 1-6; John 9
A headline about the Oscars appeared in the newspaper this week. It said,
“In Dark-times, We Get Dark Cinema.” Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of one of
those dark movies, said, “Maybe what you’re getting is a ghostly, forensic glimpse
of what has happened in our culture….We’ve just lived through eight years of
dark, mysterious soul-killing events. It’s like these films are saying, ‘What…just
happened?’” (Valley News, February 29, 2008, pC-1)
For Gilroy, the response to dark times was to make a film that “reflects his
disgust.” It could be argued that such films are cathartic, or wake us up and move
us to work for change, but responding to darkness with more darkness is not what
the Judeo-Christian tradition recommends. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”
But how can we find light when times are dark? And what do we do with it
when we find it?
Today’s scripture can give us some answers if we reflect on them and peer
through their own obscurities a bit. The John passage begins so obscurely that it
takes some effort to find a light in it that can be useful; and yet, it is all about
vision and light.
The disciples see a man blind from birth and they ask Jesus whose sin
caused him to be blind. This was a common way of thinking—that where there
was suffering, God must be punishing sin. But Jesus says it is not about sin. He
says the man’s blindness is for a different purpose: so that God’s work might be
revealed in him.
Many people think that Jesus means that God wills the suffering of the
blind man, that God sets him up and puts him through prejudice and rejection by
his society and makes him beg just to have a few scraps to eat, all so Jesus could
come along after years and years of darkness and do a work of light. But if you
read the passage carefully you see that Jesus is not talking God’s role, or God’s
purpose, he is talking about his role and purpose, and therefore our role and
purpose.
Jesus is saying that when we confront darkness what matters is not so much
what caused it as what we will make of it. To speculate about sin is just to meet
darkness with darkness. What we should do is see every injustice, every form of
suffering, every desperate need as an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed in
it by what we do or help God do. Jesus does not want to dwell on the cause. He
wants to put all his focus on our response. This is a crucial shift of attitude—to be
able to see and say to ourselves that this trouble is so that God’s light might be
revealed.
We see three responses to darkness in the story. First, Jesus heals the man.
Jesus squats down, spits in the dust along the road, forms mud with his fingers,
and then gently spreads the mud over the blind man’s eyes. Then he sends him to
a pool named “Sent” to wash off and be healed. This seems symbolic of how we
can respond to the darkness in our life and society, being agents of healing by
combining our bodies and the common elements that the earth affords us on our
journey with faith in the grace that God sends. We have all we need right here and
now to do the works of light that we are called to do. We can make miracles out
of mud pies, with a little faith and hope and love.
The second work of God in response to darkness is the whole sequence of
struggles for the truth in the story. The blind man speaks truth to power. His
parents do not. Out of fear, they give in to the darkness. But the man insists on the
light of the truth even though it gets him in trouble. Confronted with the darkness
of our individual lives or society, the work of God is to speak the light of truth,
even truth to a power that could punish and cast us out.
The third work of God is simply to see God’s presence and God’s work. It
may seem out of order to mention this last since the story begins with making the
blind man see, and we have to see the truth before we can speak it and take risks
on its behalf. But we can see the truth and yet not see it all the way to its source in
God. Jesus condemns the Pharisees for claiming to see when in fact they are not
seeing God, but only human things. The blind man did not see God in Jesus
entirely until the end of the story. Then he worshipped—that act that names the
light and honors the light and opens the heart to be filled with light.
Remember the Christian philosopher Dan Clouser’s near-death insight that
in the end, all that really needs to be said is, “Praise God!” That is 180 degrees
away from responding to dark times by making dark movies. When we retrain our
eyes to see every dark situation as an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed,
for God’s light to be made visible, we reach the holy place where the author of
Psalm 24 stood. The Psalmist saw that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.”
Seeing God leads not only to worship, but, to right relationship.
The Psalm goes on to ask, “Who shall stand in God’s holy place?” That is
a funny question if you stop to think about it. It is part of the Psalm’s obscurity.
If the earth is God’s and those who live in it are God’s, then are we not all
standing in God’s holy place? The Psalm says that only those who have clean
hands and pure hearts and are true and seek the face of God of Jacob receive
God’s blessing. The face of the God of Jacob sounds like just a formulaic way of
saying God, but in fact it is a clue to the answer of “Who shall stand in God’s holy
place?”
The answer is that those who do what Jacob did will see God’s face and see
that they are standing in God’s holy place. As you may recall, Jacob made two
journeys through the wilderness. On the first one, he lay down to sleep with only
a stone for a pillow, and he dreamed he saw a ladder with angels going up and
down between heaven and earth. God spoke to him there of his blessedness and
the land’s blessedness and his relationship to it. Jacob awoke and said, “Surely
God is in this place, and I did not know it! This is none other than the house of
God, and this is the gate of heaven!” (Genesis 28: 10-17)
If we heed our deepest intuition, if we listen to God speak to us in our
silence and our dreams, we too may perceive the presence of God even in the
Lenten wilderness, or even in the darkness of our own struggles or our society’s
soul-deadening wrongs. We may see that even here God is present, and this place
is holy. We stand in God’s holy place as soon as we see that the place where we
stand is holy.
On the return trip Jacob spent another night in the wilderness, but this time
he wrestled with God all night, and by the light of dawn he saw God’s face and
gained God’s blessings. Then that very day Jacob walked forward to meet his
greatest enemy, his twin brother Esau whom he feared and whom he had wronged.
As they met Jacob saw God’s face revealed in Esau’s face—a face of possible
healing and forgiveness, reconciliation and peace. (Genesis 32)
If we wrestle with God, if we stay in the process with God through the dark
night of our suffering and fear and grief, we will come to know the face of God in
a way that we could not otherwise. We will come to see that the human faces we
thought were over-shadowed by irreconcilable differences or fearful hate—that the
faces of our worst enemies, like every face on earth, like our own face, have
within them the face of God.
Every place and every face exist so that God’s light might be revealed in
them through the works of healing and truth, and through the hard work of seeing
through the shadow of fear and death to God’s presence. This is the work Christ
calls us to undertake in a dark time. It is the light that our world desperately needs
right now.
Jesus said. “We must work the works of God who sent us while it is day;
night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the
light of the world.” May we have the courage to make those words our own.
Let us pray in silence, asking the Holy Spirit to show us what work of light
we can do in our lives right now, what work of healing, or speaking truth, or
seeing God in a place or face. What can we do to transform this dark time?
Sermon 03/02/2008