Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
When Healing Causes Vertigo
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC March 22, 2020, fourth Sunday of Lent. “How Can You Believe This?” series.
Text: John 9:1-41
Did God make this happen? Is God doing this to us to teach us a lesson? Or to punish us? These kinds of questions often emerge in moments of disaster, tragedy or plague. Sometimes the plague is proclaimed as God’s judgment against a particular group by someone with nothing but their hateful prejudice backing them up. Other times, the questions are whispered in the corners of human hearts, uncertain and perhaps embarrassed to even acknowledge that the question has arisen: Is God punishing me? I’ve heard variations on these themes floating around over the past couple of weeks. It’s not a new idea. This theology shows up in various strains within the books of the Old Testament. And variations of the theme occur across cultures and religions through the ages. That theme includes ideas like these: If something bad happens it is punishment for some sin. Sinners get punished by a vengeful God. Sin is connected to anyone who is outside of whatever norm has been socially constructed. It is punishment to be created differently from “the norm.” God made things this way and God works this way… This kind of thinking is one of those places many people get stuck, one of the places folk may wonder how in the world we could believe this, wondering why in the world we would say God is a God of love if God punishes people by sending some disaster or if God values some bodies over other bodies or if God makes bad things happen to good people in order to make a point. I wish I could say that all biblical examples that might support such ideas are attributed to God only before Jesus comes on the scene.
But we have this text from John today that not only uses a person born with a body outside the norm as an object lesson to be “fixed” without ever being given any agency in the matter (beyond washing mud and spit off his face), but also a text that seems to reinforce what I believe is bad theology. The disciples ask the question that would be typical in their time, place, and culture: was it the man or his parents who sinned and made the man blind? Jesus comes through like a champ saying that it’s neither! Sounds promising… But then we hear: “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Ugh. Really?
Here’s where a shallow reading of the text can get us into serious trouble. The Gospel of John was the last of the four Gospel accounts to be written, composed for a very particular late 1st century Christian community in the midst of painful separation and persecution from leaders of the Jewish community they’d been part of before. The Gospel is rooted in that historical context, but is widely understood to be more theological than historical literature. That is to say, the images and stories in John are deeply symbolic, always holding subtle layers of meaning. In the opening lines of the book we are given the overarching symbolic frame for John’s version of the Jesus story: Jesus is the word of God and the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. Jesus came to the world—to his “own”—and they didn’t recognize him. (Jn 1:1-5, 10-11) In addition to this context in the book of John, it’s helpful for interpretation of today’s story to understand that, in the cultural idiom of biblical texts, the “eye” is the “lamp of the body” (Mt 6:22) and the “eyes of the heart or mind” can be enlightened or opened (Eph 1:18).
We can still have feelings and critique the story as it comes to us—and it’s important to do so in order to counter years of harmful biblical interpretation. But understood within its literary, theological, and cultural context, it is clear that the writer wants to convey not that God punishes, devalues, dehumanizes, manipulates, or uses people. The writer is saying something about the power of God to bring light out of darkness, to open minds and hearts, to help people perceive in a new way—and Jesus, the light of the world—is the one who facilitates and embodies this power. The conflict throughout the story is found in the struggle to perceive what God is doing, to perceive in a new way, to allow God’s light to illuminate our understanding and perspective in ways that help us move forward, free of things that have gotten in the way of deeper faith, hope, and love.
Some of you may have seen the 2004 film, Finding Neverland. The movie is about author James Barrie and the widow and her four young sons who inspired the story of “Peter Pan.” Early in the film, Mr. Barrie, playfully and imaginatively describes to the boys how he is going to perform a daring and frightening thing: he, the circus ringmaster, will dance with a magnificent bear who has large, scary teeth. The stand-in for the bear is Barrie’s dog. Well, one of the sons—Peter—is having none of it, saying, “That’s silly. That’s just a dog.” To this, Mr. Barrie comes close to the young, skeptical boy and says: “With eyes like that, you’ll never see.”
In our scriptures today, we hear basically the same thing. With eyes like that, you’ll never see… When the man who had formerly been blind is brought to the leaders of the religious establishment, the response is stunning: there is no rejoicing or awe at this wonder that’s taken place. Instead, the leadership puts their focus on a church rule that’s gotten broken: the healing had been done on the Sabbath. Another response is to discount the man’s own experience and to accuse him of lying—he must not have once been blind. Finally, it becomes clear that the focus of the proceedings is to figure out who is a sinner—and the ultimate verdict is that both the man who now sees AND Jesus are sinners. The result? The man whose life has been changed, whose darkness has been turned to light, who stands as a testimony to the power of God to bring light into darkness is driven out of the community. It seems ludicrous really, when we stop and look at what happens in this story. And it’s tempting to think that we would never react as the Pharisees do. But if we’re honest, perhaps we will admit how difficult it is to even acknowledge—much less address—things that dwell in the shadows of our soul that might easily lead us to line up with the likes of the Pharisees. We all have proverbial “blind spots”—places of ignorance, prejudice, confusion, judgmental attitudes, rigidity, fear—that keep us from fully perceiving, much less appreciating, the new things that God may be doing right in front of us.
This story in John offers the promising news that when we encounter Jesus, the Light of the World can cut through our darkness—whatever that darkness might be—and give us “eyes to see”…not just what we want to see, but to see things as they are, to see the truth. As with the Pharisees, we may not want this—at least not at first. We know, don’t we, that the truth will set you free but first it will likely make you miserable. Perceiving the way things are can make us depressed and overwhelmed. Waking up to realities that had once been buried in denial can be disorienting. As priest and theologian Rowan Williams says, when Jesus’ light cuts through our darkness it “is not a comfortable clearing up of problems and smoothing out of our difficulties and upsets. On the contrary, it brings on a kind of vertigo; it may make me a stranger to myself, to everything I have ever taken for granted…In short, when God’s light breaks on my darkness, the first thing I know is that I don’t know, and never did.”
The Pharisees struggled to let go of what they knew, of what they took for granted—the church rules, the cultural norms, their cozy power and prejudice, “the way things have always been.” And, in that struggle, remained in darkness, unable to see the beautiful truth of what had happened right in front of them—and what was offered to them if only they would receive it. This happens in our own lives—our own preconceived notions and expectations and desires can keep us from seeing what is being offered, what is happening, what is possible. Because someone doesn’t do things the way we think they should be done, we grumble about the means and may miss the beautiful ends! Because we don’t like the person involved, we may miss seeing the good they are accomplishing. Because our comfort is disrupted and our irritation flares, we may miss seeing the opportunity to learn something new. Because we are so habituated to seeing things one way, we may miss amazing new visions that God presents to us in any given moment.
Last week, our spiritual path led us in the wilderness to a well. And today, in the midst of this moment when “vertigo” may be an apt description of our experience, when we are all ever more aware that everything about our day to day lives is upended, when we feel off balance and like the world is spinning off its axis, when we don’t know the timetable or how the pandemic will play out, when we begin to have an inkling that things will never ever be the same, when we are living on the razor edge in so many ways, when the days outside are generally lighter, but so much of the world seems veiled in darkness…on this day our spiritual path leads us to an encounter with Light that shines in the darkness.
The paradox is that the light of Christ will shatter all the prideful and fearful darkness in order to bring us to a deeper darkness, a place of vertigo, being off balance—that place of humble acknowledgement that we are not God, that our way of seeing is not God’s way of seeing, that we don’t know everything and can’t control everything, that God is at work for good in the world even when all seems lost. This is to see the truth, to see things and ourselves more realistically; it may be painful sometimes, but with God at the center of things, light will always be shining…always the darkness will not overcome it—all we need is for Christ to give us the eyes to see. With these new, humbled eyes, we are able to look at our lives, at the lives of others, at the state of the world differently. So that in the face of fear we can look with the eyes of trust; in the face of prejudice or judgment, we can look with the eyes of mercy and compassion; in the face of change, we can look with the eyes of hope; in the face of confusion, we can look with the eyes of wonder; in the face of suffering, we look with the eyes of solidarity and tenderness; in the face of a seemingly impossible mess, we can look with the eyes of creativity; and in the face of even this present moment, we can look with the eyes of life-giving beauty and love.
With eyes like that, just imagine what you will see!
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