Sermon 4/14/13
John 9:1-41
Not-So-Secrets of New Life: Simplicity
Many of you know I’ve
been trying hard to have a healthier lifestyle – eating better, moving more. I’ve
been getting into a rhythm, and it feels good. But, like most people, I admit I
sometimes wish there was an easier
way, a quick fix, that would still allow me to eat as many slices of pizza as I
want at our pizza and games party this afternoon! The easy way out. Aren’t we
all looking for that sometimes? I still vividly remember meeting a woman while
I was serving as a chaplaincy intern at Crouse Hospital during seminary. She was
telling me about her diet plans, because when people are stressed and worried
about big things in their life, they will often talk a lot about the less
stressful, worrisome things just to have a break. She was frustrated that her
dieting didn’t seem successful, and she explained to me in detail what she was
doing. On certain days of the week, she’d follow the Atkins plan, and on
certain days she’d do South Beach, and certain days she’d do Weight Watchers,
and so on. A little bit of this plan, a little bit of that plan. The end result
seemed to be that she picked the foods she liked best from every program, and
ditched any parts of the diet that were too tough or unpleasant. And
surprisingly, this was not proving to be a successful plan!
We can smile/laugh at this obvious plan for failure,
because we can see the absurdity of it. But I suspect that all of us have some
areas of our life that we approach the same way. There’s something we want to
do or be or achieve. We may even want it very badly. But we really, really want
to find an easy way to do it, to get it, to be it. We know the steps it would
take to accomplish the task, but we’d really like to skip steps 2-9 and go
straight to the last step. In my experience, though, almost nothing worth
having in life can be attained in this way. As Jesus-followers, I believe that
sometimes we approach our discipleship, our walk with God in the same way.
There are certain things we’d like to get out of relationship with God. But we
really, really want to find an easy way to do it.
For
example, there’s how we read the Bible. We all have different ways of reading,
understanding, and interpreting the Bible, which is not a bad thing. We bring
different perspectives together in a community of faith, which makes for great
conversation, where we learn from each other. Most of us tend to use the same
techniques to read the Bible for the whole book. For example, if we tend to
read stories and view them literally, we do that consistently. If we see a lot
of metaphor in the Bible, we tend to always see a lot of metaphor. If we seek
out the historical fact of a passage, that’s often how we read the whole Bible.
The usual “lens” we use to look at the scriptures is called our hermeneutic.
Your hermeneutic, your lens, might be different from my lens, and that’s ok. But
it is the best if you are consistent with what lens you use. What raises alarm
bells for me is when we suddenly discard our usual method of interpretation when we get to challenging passages
of scripture because we don’t like the conclusion our usual method brings us
to. If your usual way of reading scripture works for you right up until you
realize you’d have to change your life if the scripture means what you think it
mean, well, we’re probably looking for that easy way out. One of my favorite
quotations is from theologian Søren Kierkegaard. He writes,
The
matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians
are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it
because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act
accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except
pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my
whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies
the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s
prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can
continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh,
priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall
into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the
New Testament. (1)
Kierkegaard writes with a
sense of humor, certainly. But he also means very much what he says. He argues that
what the Bible calls us to do, how it calls us to live – that’s simple. We try
to make it more complicated to protect ourselves from having to do what the
Bible says – we take the easy way out, ironically, by pretending the Bible is
too difficult to understand. I love this quote because of how uncomfortably
true it rings for me! I think simplicity is
something we seek after in our crazy, fast-paced culture. I seek it. I value
simplicity. I think the Bible even speaks to the value of simplicity. But I
think sometimes we hear “simple” and we think “easy.” We’d like that too –
easy. Just like the Staples commercials. A nice, big, red Easy button. But
simple and easy are not actually synonyms. What God calls us to do might be
simple. But I’m not sure that means it is easy.
Our gospel lesson from John today is a passage that
starts out as a simple healing story. Ok, healing might not be simple for us,
but for Jesus, stories of his healing are frequent, and if you just read the several
verses of this story, you’d think it was a “typical” healing story. Jesus sees
a man who is blind, a beggar who has been blind since birth, while traveling
with the disciples, and Jesus, saying he is the light of the world, creates mud
with his own spittle, puts it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash the
mud off in the pool of Siloam. The man does as Jesus tells him, and sure
enough, he is healed. He can see.
A healing. How would you respond? If someone was blind,
and this man, preaching about God, healed this person’s blindness, what would
you say? Well, of course, we’d rejoice! We’d be thrilled, right? We’d thank God!
If we didn’t know God, or know this preacher, we’d probably start to take this
man and his message a little more seriously, maybe think there was something to
this God thing after all. Simple, right? The most natural way in the world to respond
to this miraculous healing, right?
And yet, instead
of this passage being a few verses long, it is 41 verses, one of our longer
single scenes with Jesus. And in those 41 verses, no one, other than Jesus and
the formerly-blind man himself seem particularly happy about the healing. Something
else is happening here. We’re tipped off in the first verse when Jesus and the
disciples first encounter the blind man. One of the disciples asked, “Who
sinned, that caused this man’s blindness? Was it the man, or his parents?” That
question might sound weird to us, but in Jesus’ day, blindness or illness in
general, or really any bad circumstances in your life, like poverty or disease –
they were mostly attributed to sinful behavior, punishment from God as
consequences for not being righteous enough. And the punishment could span
generations. If you, a parent, were sinful, your children might be punished.
Part of us recoils at this logic, thinking it totally ridiculous. But part of
us can relate – the questions we ask when someone gets sick, gets cancer, aren’t
always so different today. Why did this happen? What did so and so do to
deserve this? Our questions imply we believe God is the cause of the event, don’t
they? When Jesus answers the disciple, “neither this man nor his parent sinned,”
his response is hugely impactful. Jesus heals to glorify God, to show that he
is the light of the world. And a man who was born blind can now see. But the
rest of the passage shows us the curious reactions of everyone around Jesus and
this man.
The disciples
start out wanting to analyze the reason for the man’s blindness, as if he is an
interesting subject of theological debate. They never speak to the man directly
– Jesus does that. The man’s neighbors, when they see him healed, don’t
recognize him. Remember, nothing has changed about this man’s physical
appearance. He was blind, and now he can see. But his neighbors, who have lived
near where he sat begging, aren’t sure it is him. How can they fail to
recognize him? I can only suspect that as a blind beggar, someone on the fringe
of society, his neighbors never really paid him much attention, never really
looked him in the face, made eye contact, as we sometime do when we are
confronted with need and we’d rather keep on walking. So the neighbors aren’t
sure this is even the man born blind at all, or that maybe, this man wasn’t
blind his whole life as he’d claimed.
The Pharisees, the
religious leaders of the day, get involved. They fight over whether the man was
healed by a person from God or not, since the healing took place on the
Sabbath, and healing would have been a forbidden act of “work” not “rest.” Some
of them say only a man from God could have done this healing, and the formerly
blind man calls Jesus a prophet, but other Pharisees can’t believe a
rule-breaker like Jesus could have performed this healing. How they explain the
man in front of them who can see, I’m just not sure. So they call the man back
to explain his situation again, and to urge him to call Jesus a sinner, and
tell the truth – in other words, tell some other
version of the story that would fit with their rules about who God can use and how God can use them. The man, once blind, is baffled. “Do you want
to become his disciples? Is that why you have so many questions about this
miracle?” The Pharisees become more enraged.
The man’s parents
are called in. Surely, they will be
thrilled, right? But instead, they deflect questions. They will confirm that he
was blind, and now he can see. But they say they know nothing about who healed
him or how, and repeatedly they tell people to talk to their son, not them.
They’re afraid of getting in trouble with the synagogue leaders.
Finally, the man
who was healed is reunited with Jesus, and when Jesus confirms his identity as
the son of God, the man worships Jesus. Jesus responds, “‘I came into this
world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see
may become blind.” The Pharisees, overhearing this, can’t believe that Jesus
implies they are the ones who are
blind. But Jesus concludes, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now
that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.” This story, this healing, is about
something that should be so simple. A man was blind, and now he sees. Thanks be
to God! But we witness in this passage everyone taking what is very simple, and
making it very, very complicated, so that they can take the easy way out, and not have to change
their lives, not have to give up their power, not have to admit their wrongs,
not have to wrestle with their assumptions, not have to let go of their
prejudices and stereotypes, and not have to let God be in charge.
Easy sounds so
good to us sometimes. But that’s not that how we receive the fullness of the
abundant life God promises. Fortunately, even though discipleship isn’t always
easy, it is pretty simple, when we don’t muddy the waters. Follow Jesus. Try to
do what he does, love like he loves. Not always easy. Maybe the hardest things
we will ever do. But Jesus, light of the world, opens our eyes, and leads the
way. We simply have to follow. Amen.
(1)
From Provocations,
by Søren Kierkegaard.
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