Sermon - March 2, 2008: Fourth Sunday in Lent

Pastor Heisley

When I read today’s gospel aloud this week for Vicar Mark Niethammer and our interim musician, Erik Floan, I couldn’t help myself. I had to read it in voices. And I had to stop after each voice to laugh. For instance, “Some were saying, ‘It IS he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone LIKE him.’” And then, when I read the next sentence, “He kept saying, ‘I am the MAN,’” our good Vicar said, “Yes! My favorite verse in the Bible. ‘I AM the MAN.’” And I rolled my eyes at his bravado, his pseudo-macho image-making. 

But the reality is that this story begs for just such just such a reading, just such an interpretation, just such thinking. There are parts of holy scripture that we need to be able to laugh along with, to lean into with our best dramatic readings so that we can look anew, look in a fresh way at their truth, their reality, so that we can look with brand new eyes at how these words of holiness are changing our lives even as they touch us. 

Jesus saw a blind man, and his disciples, who had disappeared a while back in John’s gospel but who now suddenly reappear, asked a haunting and ancient question. Whose sin made this person blind? What failure on the part of human beings caused this one to be less perfect than…I? 

Pastor, what did I do wrong? I’m young and I’m dying. Pastor, what did I do wrong? I had a miscarriage. Pastor, what did I do wrong? I’m constantly depressed; or my husband has died; or I’m broke; or I lost my job? Whose sin is this? It must be mine. What did I do wrong? 

Jesus said, “’Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.’” We are who we are because we are God’s children. What happens to us happens not because of the failures of anyone, but because we are engaged in the depth of the mystery of life itself. Engaged - and accompanied by Jesus. 

Last week Pastor Rob Ruff preached from this pulpit. In part, he talked about how the woman at the well who gave Jesus a drink was afraid to get too close to him. She kept him at arm’s length. She was afraid of intimacy. 

But today, the man born blind is not afraid of being touched. Jesus mixed his own spit and the dust of the earth and made mud. He mixed a life-filled human fluid and the soil out of which the fruits of the earth grow. He made mud and spread it on the eyes of the blind man in a moment of earthy, person-touching-person intimacy. And the blind man didn’t back away. He was anointed with the power of heaven and earth. And yet, he could not see. He didn’t see until he washed in the pool of Siloam, that ancient water at the base of Mount Moriah, the life-giving waters that watered the Jews through centuries, through millennia, in times of peace and in times of siege. It was the promise, the hope, the cleansing of water that Jesus’ words filled with power to open the man’s eyes. And they were opened. 

We return to the same water, year after year, at the great festival of salvation, Easter. We splash water around in a wild fashion as it is thrown about during the Easter Vigil, entitled Lumen Christi, the Light of Christ. We splash and we get wet and our glasses drip so that we cannot see clearly, and the water opens our eyes yet again, opens us yet again, to the light of Christ shining in the midst of the darkness of our night. Eyes opened. Opened by the words of Jesus reaching out to us, anointing our blindness so that we might see, know, understand, so that we might laugh, laugh along with life itself. 

“’Is this your son, who you SAY was born blind? How then does he now see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age.’” 

The blind man’s parents have not had their eyes opened, but they wash their hands of the situation. “Don’t talk to us! Talk to him. Let him get in trouble with the authorities for allowing such a thing to happen to him on Shabbat, on the Sabbath. Don’t implicate me in all of this. I’m just minding my own business.” Status quo. No washing. No eye opening. Let me alone. I’m afraid. 

Life can be fearsome. Fearsome in its challenges to who we are, to what we have become, to what we want to be. Life can be fearsome when it hits us between the eyes and says, “This is the truth. Look at it. See it. Face your brokenness. Wash and be healed.” 

Life can be fearsomely uncertain. The economy. The battles in the legislature. The presidential race. Not to mention continuing, continual war, violence. And not to mention how all of these things affect us, our personal fortunes, our futures as individuals and our future as a congregation and our future as a church. 

We’re talking about launching a capital campaign here at Mount Olive and I know that there is some fear in our midst. Can we really do this? Can we do much of anything more than we are doing? After all…the economy, taxes, gasoline, and the entire litany of what’s in the papers all the time. “Ask him; he is of age.” But the truth is that Jesus spits on the earth and anoints his church with the mud that he makes. He spits on the earth and applies it to us, to the church, and he constantly challenges us to go to Siloam. 

Go to the waters. Wash and believe. Wash and be healed. Wash and see. He doesn’t say, “When the time is right you’ll probably see.” He says, “Wash and see.” Wash and understand. Wash in the waters of Siloam that flow from our font in times of peace and in times of siege, waters that flow with equal force throughout eternity. Wash; have no fear; believe. 

The scene that day in Jerusalem went on and on and it got even more complicated. The blind man who could now see was driven out by the crowd, driven out because they distrusted his healing. Jesus went to find him and said, “’Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘Who is he, sir?’…Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped him.” 

And that’s the bottom line. Do you believe? Do you really believe that the power that you have to see beyond the mud of this life is the power of God in Jesus the Christ in your life, in our community? Do you really believe? Maybe not. 

I know it’s hard. I know it’s hard to see through the caked on mud of failure and fear and illness and weakness and hatred and death. And that’s why yet again, yet again in this winter becoming a too late, too harsh spring, yet again we are asked, invited, begged to wash in our Siloam. “Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see.’” 

Come here. Come to the waters. Come, and be washed and see. There is nothing to fear. Amen.

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