John 9: 1-41 (links validated 3/2/23)

("At First Sight is a moving and faithful re-telling of the real story of Virgil and Amy and the peculiar challenges of learning to see when one has never seen before,' notes renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks, who documented the true story on which the film is based as part of his bestselling book An Anthropologist On Mars...")

(lots of Greek exegesis!)

("Many of us first visited Grover's Corners when we were in school. Do you remember this scene, from Thorton Wilder's Our Town? Young Emily Webb has married her childhood sweetheart George Gibbs. In fact, when the play skips ahead to Act III, she's borne him a child and died while giving him a second. She's buried on the hill overlooking town, and, as mourners depart, she begins to converse with her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, also deceased..." well worth a read!!)

(always good insights!)

(excellent exegesis with numerous quotes from commentaries)

For both Abraham and Paul, this reality of "being a stranger in a strange land" was not a matter of their own choice, it was not part of an attempt to better their lives, or take daring advantage of a new economic opportunity in a new place. They were refugees, immigrants, wanderers upon the earth for one reason and one reason only – they had heard and responded to the voice of God. A voice that called them to leave where they were, and who they were, to go where God directed them to go, to be the people God called them to be. This business of people hearing and obeying God's voice is a bit unsettling to most of us modern folk, isn't it? I thought I heard the voice of God once. I was six and I lived next door to my grandparents. I often spent the night with them and had breakfast there before heading home. This was great, because at home - Mom served cereal – at Grandma's - you had homemade biscuits and sausage gravy. This was also not so great, because you had to be perfectly quiet while Grandpa and Grandma listened to MOODY'S OBITUARY COLUMN OF THE AIR. It started with dark, creepy, organ music...

Jesus is not a life insurance policy… That’s not who He is. Who is Jesus? I had been praying and working on a project for a couple of months that hasn’t come together yet, but Friday night, I pulled out my notes as I sat with that question. Who is Jesus? – Here’s 50 descriptors, names, titles that come from different places throughout the Bible in rapid fire:...

James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. From birth, he was black and gay. There were and still are narratives of blame and shame about being black or being gay in our culture. Baldwin knew those narratives well, but he did not let them define him. He claimed the power of defining himself. He said many insightful things about trust and courage. One thing he said was "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."...

I saw Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun last summer, a production that the New York Times claimed burned “with new fire.” One thing I love about it is its look to the future, its focus on the coming generations. The family at the center of the play is even named the Youngers, three generations all living together in a cramped, worn apartment that they keep dignified against increasing odds. As a family of Youngers, they are literally concerned with the younger ones to come, each generation of racial progress one step further along a path that offers little cause for optimism but that is imperative to travel, fueled by outrageous hope (equal parts outrage and hope). Those of the oldest generation aren’t living for themselves; they’re living for the grandson who sleeps on the couch, or even for the generations yet unborn...

As an illustration of jerkness, I think of one of my favorite literary villains, Inspector Javert from Victor Hugo’s mammoth classic Les Miserables. I actually read the whole unabridged novel once. It’s about a thousand pages and Hugo digresses almost as much as I do. He’d never get that bad boy published today without some serious editing (But I digress). If you know the story—and perhaps you’ve seen the wonderful opera based on it—you’ll know (spoiler alert) Javert is a police inspector and former prison guard who has been on the lookout for decades for the hero, Jean Valjean, a guy initially imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. Valjean has committed a minor parole infraction, but Javert can’t let this go. In his legalistic brain all crimes have to be punished and all criminals are rotten down to their Fruit of the Looms. At the end of the story Valjean saves Javert’s life and forgives him for decades of persecution. This is a crisis for Javert, because he can’t accept that a criminal could do a merciful and grace-filled act. The contradiction is too much for his world view. Rather than surrender his life-long beliefs, Javert throws himself into the River Seine and drowns...

It was shortly after World War II when the World Council of Churches decided to check on how its money was being spent in a remote area of the Balkans where the World Council was trying to help needy churches re-build after the war. So it dispatched Dr. John Mackie, who was at the time an officer with the WCC and the president of the Church of Scotland. Accompanying him were two other pastors, both of whom came from a fairly conservative, pietistic denomination. One afternoon they paid a visit to an Orthodox priest in a remote village. The man was clearly thrilled to receive the visit in that he otherwise worked in rather lonely isolation. Immediately upon seating the guests in his study, the priest produced a box of fine Havana cigars and offered one to each of his three guests. Dr. Mackie gingerly took one, bit the end off, lit it, and took a few puffs, saying how fine it was. The other two pastors looked horrified. “No thank you! We do not smoke!” they quickly said. Feeling bad that he maybe had offended the two brothers, the priest wanted to make amends and so left the room only to re-appear with a flagon of his finest wine. Dr. Mackie took a glassful, swirled it, sniffed it like a connoisseur, and then praised its fine quality. Soon he asked for another glass. Meanwhile his traveling companions drew back even more visibly. “No thank you! We do not drink!” they snapped. Well, later when the three returned to their car, the two pastors assailed Mackie. “Here you are an officer with the World Council and the leader of Scotland’s Church and yet you smoke and drink!?” “No, I don’t,” he barked at them. “But somebody in there had to be a Christian!”...

At the time of my writing this commentary, President Carter’s family announced that he was entering end-of-life hospice care, which has led to a number of reflections about his life and legacy. One quote I’ve seen shared is from a cover story for The New York Times Magazine written by Jim Wooten in 1995. In it, after Wooten describes Carter cleaning up his local church’s yard then flying the next day to Bosnia to try to negotiate a cease fire, Carter says, “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. I’m free to choose what that something is, and the something I’ve chosen is my faith. Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort. My faith demands—this is not optional—my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.” As most of us are aware, Carter kept this practice to the last years of his life—helping to build Habitat for Humanity homes even as his health and strength waned into his mid-nineties. In his commitment, Carter joined Jesus in the demand that Jesus gives in verse 4 as he moved to heal the blind man: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.”

The story of the blind man does, however, ring a bell for anyone who has ever read “The Myth of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. There we find a story of all humanity chained in a darkened cave throughout life. These captives can see nothing but flickering images on a wall—shadows, appearances, illusions—which they take for reality. One prisoner, liberated from the chains, makes the arduous crawl upward to the world of the shining sun. When he returns to the cave with his tales of the new-found source of light and the life and warmth it gives, the prisoners think him crazy. They simply deny his experience. It just can’t be. The chains and the amusing images on the wall are reality. Thus his conversion is ridiculed; his invitation is resisted. This is how the Greek Plato describes the intellectual assent of the soul to truth. To contemplate divine life is to find freedom; but it is also to encounter opposition from “the evil state of man, misbehaving in a ridiculous manner, arguing over shadows and images.”...

When Helen Keller was two years old a serious illness destroyed both her sight and her hearing. Imagine being unable to see or hear! When she was seven, a teacher named Annie Sullivan tackled the apparently impossible job of making contact with Helen’s mind through the sense of touch. Annie Sullivan worked out a sort of alphabet by which she spelled words on Helen’s hand. Gradually the child was able to connect the words with objects. Once started, Helen made rapid progress. Within three years she could read and write in Braille. At the age of ten she decided to perfect her speech. At 16 she entered Radcliff college from which she graduated with honors in 1904 and she became one of the most highly educated women of her time. Annie Sullivan was constantly at her side until the dedicated teacher died in 1936. — Today’s Good News tells us how Jesus cured a man of his blindness, giving him both physical and spiritual eyesight.

The story of the blind man does, however, ring a bell for anyone who has ever read “The Myth of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. There we find a story of all humanity chained in a darkened cave throughout life. These captives can see nothing but flickering images on a wall—shadows, appearances, illusions—which they take for reality. One prisoner, liberated from the chains, makes the arduous crawl upward to the world of the shining sun. When he returns to the cave with his tales of the new-found source of light and the life and warmth it gives, the prisoners think him crazy. They simply deny his experience. It just can’t be. The chains and the amusing images on the wall are reality. Thus his conversion is ridiculed; his invitation is resisted. This is how the Greek Plato describes the intellectual assent of the soul to truth...

Alabama artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth used mud as paint. Because of the volume of paintings that he created, he wouldn't have used spit for all of them, but he was known to make a little mud to smear across a canvas with his finger in the way that another artist would use a brush. Sudduth's most characteristic mud was what he called "sweet mud." The mud was bound with soft drinks or sugar. Sudduth once claimed he could get more than thirty colors from the dirt and clay around him. Mud can do remarkable things...

Why does the community feel such an urgent need to silence the healed man? I wonder if the core reason is fear. A fear so primal and so deep, it drives away all compassion, all empathy, all tenderness, all sense of kinship. If the man’s blindness isn’t a punishment for sin, then what does that mean about how the world works? Anyone might get sick, or suffer from a disability, or face years of undeserved pain and suffering for no discernible reason whatsoever. That wouldn’t be fair — would it? That would be a version of reality the good religious folks can’t control. A terrifying, destabilizing version. Who among us can bear to surrender the illusion of control?...

Paul Ricoeur occasionally applied his complex, fruitful ideas about human knowledge and language to the specific task of interpreting biblical texts. He argued for retrieving the “profound” or “existential” experience which inspired the text in the first place. Each interpreter should seek the universal human experience that inspired the text to be written, not narrow polemical, moral or theological concepts. Taking Ricoeur’s approach to this passage from John, we might ask: what is the concrete, universal human experience which I can recognize, even in my own experience, to which this story is testifying?

As the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is obviously, a program of complete disorder.” Jesus brought complete disorder to the established colonial order centered in Rome and the religious (colonial) order based at the Temple.

Whether you tweet or not, you probably have heard of Twitter... But more than likely few of you would recognize the name "Biz Stone." Biz Stone and two of his friends were the inventors of Twitter. Back in 2006 they recognized the number of people who have cell-phones had skyrocketed beyond anyone’s imaginations - and thought "imagine if we can create a social networking thing that people could use on their cell phones through text messaging. That’s why twitter is only 140 character messages so that you can send it over text message. Well you guys know the rest of the story (and are helping to write it) The phenomenon of it is only growing. Reportedly, it generates two and half billion dollars a year in revenue... over 100 million users post over 342 million tweets a day...

What are his references? That’s a question most of us ask in one way or another from time to time. Employers ask it: no one hires someone without at least trying to find out how they did previously. And the answer doesn’t always have to be positive! I was fired from my first job as a ministerial intern in seminary after a long period of conflict with the senior minister. A while later I began looking for a new job and found a church and minister that really excited me. I told them about my experience, trying to be objective, not trying to hide any of the details; I remember the minister interviewing me saying, “So, you resigned from your last job? I said: No, I was fired. The minister said he didn’t feel a need to check my references, but of course he did, so he did something ministers do under the circumstances: he called a friend in a church nearby. So not long afterward I was called into the senior minister’s office to hear him say, well I decided to do a little checking on you after we talked, so I called a friend who knows the situation in the church where you worked…and he said the guy you worked for is crazy and being fired there is an honor!

I started thinking about Jesse Owens and what he represents to the world. Of course, history remembers him best for his performance in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, at which he won four gold medals, ascending to the top of the medal podium that Adolf Hitler had built for his own Aryan athletes. Initially, Owens was criticized for taking part in the 1936 games because it seemed to lend credence to the Nazi attempt to show the world that everything was just fine under Hitler’s regime, but the result spoke for itself. Two truths collided in those Olympic Games—one a belief that only a racially pure society could rule the world and the other a belief that the best athlete in the world might even be a so-called “colored man” from rural Alabama—and Owens won the gold…four times.

But if we need to learn to see on the physical level, we know very well that there are still other levels of seeing that require learning. "You see what you're trained to see," I recall a sociology teacher repeating over and over. Think of what a few savvy remarks from Sister Wendy can do to your ability to see new dimensions in a familiar painting. Think how the observations of the color commentator help you realize you didn't fully see what was going on a moment ago on the tenth yard-line. A physician's diagnosis lets us know that he sees something in Uncle Joe's complexion that we didn't catch...

In a memorable story, William Willimon tells us that years ago he was the pastor of a medium-sized suburban church. Every week during the church season he led the women’s Bible study group and always enjoyed the gathering of those saintly pillars of the congregation, most of whom were well into their retirement years. One week the topic of discussion was temptation. So Rev. Willimon led the ladies in a review on the nature of temptation and how to rely on God to resist it. Then he asked that most typical of all Bible study-like questions, “Does anyone want to share a story of a time you felt tempted but were aided by God’s strength?” One kindly soul piped up to say, “Yes, Reverend, I have one. It was quiet for a moment before Chelsea cleared her throat and said, “A couple of years ago my boyfriend and me were big into cocaine. Well, you know how that stuff messes with your head! So one day we’re in the pharmacy and my boyfriend all of a sudden decides to tell the cashier to give him all the money in the cash register...

I punched in the security code at the front door of ‘Pine Acres’ and mistakenly turned right instead of left. This meant that I found myself passing by twice as many people as I normally would on such an errand. Some of them stared vacantly from their wheelchairs as they waited to be rolled to dinner or back to their rooms. Others looked up pleadingly, perhaps hopeful that I was someone arriving just for them. Or maybe not really caring if I was ‘meant’ for them at all, but just hoping to be noticed. To be “seen.” While I usually try to offer a pleasant ‘hello’ when I walk that hallway, I know that it is easy to rush by and only see wheelchairs. It is far too easy to not look long enough to see the human being sitting there with all of his or her complexity.

In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the protagonist is Jean Valjean – who is forever called by his prison number, 24601. A person reduced to a number. The stage version of the story depicts prisoner 24601 as a complex character. Is he just a thief, plain and simple? Is he a victim of an unfair system of justice? Is he a compassionate businessman and mayor? A benevolent step-father? A valiant revolutionary of the Paris Uprising of 1832? A compassionate liberator of his most persistent enemy, Inspector Javert? Or, in his own words, is he “no better and no worse than any other man”? Just as Hugo attempts to shed light on the complexities of post-Revolutionary France, so the Jesus in John seeks to shed light on all sorts and conditions of humankind – and the artificial and often arbitrary ways in which we treat others – especially others who are not at all like ourselves...

It seems that grace upon grace is possible simply when Jesus is present. And it also seems that Jesus counts on us to bring that presence to others. Grace upon grace happens in those one-on-one moments in ministry you know so well. Grace upon grace happens when the last person you thought was paying attention says, “I heard Jesus in your sermon today, Pastor.” Grace upon grace happens when someone says, “Pastor, that is exactly what I needed this morning.” Grace upon grace happens because they feel it and you feel it at exactly the same time.

Artist Chuck Close has made his reputation painting faces in large format. His own face is among his most frequent subjects. His earliest works are photographically real. The faces are recognizable -- so photographically real that the individuals would be recognizable by strangers, even, As his work develops, though, the faces begin to dissolve and fragment. The practice of gridding, often used by artists to keep proportion correct when enlarging, comes to the front of the portrait's appearance and becomes, even more than the subject's facial features, the driving force of the portrait's structure.

On Wednesday mornings, SBC’s preschool has an 8:30 chapel service. The lesson for this morning was an excerpt of Sunday’s Gospel lesson about the man born blind. To illustrate that story, the School Director told the story of Fanny Crosby, a prolific poet and hymn writer who became blind at a very young age. at age 8, Fanny wrote her first poems, which often focused on her condition. She wrote, Oh, what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see! I am resolved that in this world Contented I will be. How many blessings I enjoy That other people don’t, To weep and sigh because I’m blind I cannot, and I won’t! (1)

I value the connections I’ve made over social media, but at the same time, I wonder how to reconnect and engage with the world which lies beyond the screen of my phone. I am experiencing the tension of seeing the world in new and different ways, but at the same time, I wonder if I truly “see” my neighbor in the midst of additional noise and distractions. Do I see the beauty of the image of God in my neighbor in online and in embodied spaces?

Healing the man born blind will, in fact, cost the town something. With his sight restored, this young man will have a right to a place in the local economy, he can take over a niche of earnings someone else has presumably been pocketing. He can compete now, as well as earn. Everyone else will have to move over a bit, and share, perhaps uncomfortably, with this newly-sighted man who has a right to earn. He will no longer have to settle for a blind man’s spare change in a cup. So healing isn’t just about the cost of medicine and doctors. There is a cost to wellness, and a convenient pocketing of riches when you don’t have to share with others, who are poor because they are sick.

Imagine being born blind and living into adulthood without ever having seen light and color. Then, through some miraculous operation, doctors are able to give you sight. What would you feel immediately upon opening your eyes? Here is how JZ Young, an authority on brain function, describes what happens: The patient on opening his eyes gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning mass of light and colors. He proves to be quite unable to pick up objects by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch.

A few years ago a man named Jerry Farrell had a teenaged son who threw a beer party. Since he was underaged, the boy and his friends broke the law. But the police didn’t arrest just the teens. They went after Jerry too. He was arrested, fingerprinted, and charged. Farrell was shocked. “I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he complained. “I didn’t even know [my son] had friends over.” Lack of knowledge about the drinking did not get Farrell off. Under a parental responsibility law in his community, whether or not a parent knows his or her child broke a law doesn’t matter. The parent is held accountable...

How is your vision? When was the last time you had a checkup? Sure the input hitting your optic nerve may be 20/20… but what do you see? Do you see people in need as a nuisance? Do you even see them at all? Is your day filled with opportunities to praise God and serve your neighbor? Or is it a self-centered blur… full of fuzzy good intentions you’ll get to later? Jesus has a cure for all of our vision problems. He wants us to see the world through his eyes… the eyes of faith… and what a vision it is.

Near the end of the program, the speaker, a leader in the state NAACP, allows time for questions and comments. Lanier, who is the only African American in the room besides the speaker, stands. SueAnn is sitting next to her, and she can see Lanier’s hands shaking as she speaks. That’s a surprise. Lanier tells about her son Ray, who got his driver’s license about a year ago. Since that time, he has been pulled over by the police nine times. In none of those traffic stops was he charged with anything. She is afraid every time he walks out the door with the car keys that someone will take a dislike to him for no good reason.

The day after this week’s attack in London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, spoke in the House of Lords, a legislative component of the British government. He told the assembled, still numb in shock from the unexpected events of the day before, that he wanted to offer them three pictures. The first, he said, was “of a vehicle being driven across Westminster Bridge by someone who had a perverted, nihilistic, despairing view of objectives of what life is about, of what society is about, that could only be fulfilled by death and destruction.” The second, he said, was “of that same person a few minutes later, on a stretcher or on the ground, being treated by the very people he had sought to kill.” The third, he added, was “of these two Houses [of Parliament], where profound disagreement, bitter disagreement, angry disagreement is dealt with not with violence, not with despair, not with cruelty, but with discussion, with reason and with calmness…Those three pictures [he continued] point us to deep values within our own society” that come from a narrative that has been “within our society for almost 2000 years,” a narrative that “speaks of a God who stands with the suffering, and brings justice, and whose resurrection has given to believer and unbeliever the sense that where we do what is right, where we behave properly; where that generosity and extraordinary sense of duty that leads people to treat a terrorist is shown…that there is a victory for what is right and good; over what is evil, despairing and bad.

French social commentator and philosopher, René Girard, says that all human societies are characterized by an unbearable tension that is born of the conflict of desire. Desire leads to competition, rivalry, and conflict, and Girard holds that scapegoating becomes the “solution”. A person or group is blamed for the crisis, and then is persecuted and sacrificed. Once a victim is found, the community has created a social “glue” that gives them cohesiveness and peace. This peace, achieved by violence, is unstable and false because it requires constant denial.

("I am reminded of the poignant, bitter, ending to the story line of the dwarves in C. S. Lewis' classic Chronicles of Narnia. In the last book, the dwarves, who had mostly been Aslan's loyal Narnians, have tired of waiting for Aslan to make all things right in their world. They had been disappointed one too many times. So when Aslan finally does return, though in an unexpected way, they refuse to be taken in..." and another illustration)

A new eye prosthetic can download electrical data right into a blind person's retina, bypassing a camera and placing digital information right onto the nerve cells. A blind patient who used the device could read Braille patterns in less than a second, according to Swiss researchers...")(See more on the Argus II here..)

Things happen and at times we miss whatever the it is: There are times we need to "excuse" ourselves after having a few beverages; other commitments might have prevented you from being able to go out with your friends; and how were you to know that if you had skipped that class or cancelled that appointment that you might just bump into a celebrity?...

("A few weeks ago my mother called me with what she calls 'a preacher question'. She said, Help me know what to tell Bill Smith's grandsons. He was 61, died this week. They're 6 and 9 and always sit with me in church. They want to know why God killed Grandpa. What do I tell them?'...")

("Simone Weil, the French philosopher who was reared as an atheist, writes of discovering a poem called "Love" by George Herbert. She learned the poem by heart and, at the culminating point of one of her frequent and violent headaches, she would recite it: 'I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer...")

("I was six years old and had just learned to read. A whole new world had opened up to me then and I couldn't get enough of it. I read everything I could lay my hands on at home and everything I could lay my eyes on out in the world. I can remember being in the back of the family station wagon one day and looking out at a world whose written symbols suddenly held meaning for me...")

("Andrew Solomon, in his 2012 book Far From the Tree, explores the startling proposition that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender....")

("What happens when a person receives his sight for the first time might surprise us. Here is how J. Z. Young, an authority on brain function, describes what happens: 'The patient on opening his eyes gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning mass of light and colors. He proves to be quite unable to pick up objects by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch...")

("At 14 years old, Lisa Reid and her family had a hard decision to make. Lisa had a cancerous brain tumor that was causing her headaches, vomiting and loss of coordination. Her only choice was a delicate operation to remove the tumor and save her life. However, as a consequence of the surgery Lisa's optic nerves were damaged and she became blind. Deciding not to let her blindness hold her down, Lisa became a poster child for children with cancer...")

(This gospel passage through the "eyes" of a blind pastor.)

("Herbert O'Driscoll when he was at the College of Preachers in Washington, DC, told us that we can see Jesus as a template, a transparent image who we place between ourselves and the people and situations we meet. I used the image one Sunday and a woman came up to me after the service. 'I have to be in a situation I dread tomorrow. I recently began to work with a re-constructive surgeon. Tomorrow I have to meet a man who tried to kill himself with a gun and destroyed part of his face...")

("Three centuries ago in the village of Olney, England, a new parish priest came to town. The townsfolk flocked to hear him, fascinated with his vibrant, personal style of preaching and his checkered past as a slave trader. In those days learned clergy frequently wrote original verses for congregational singing, and the priest at Olney wrote in a testimonial, plainspoken style...")

("Jason watched in horror as the twins, the resident bullies at Park Jr. High, once again went after their favorite victim. He was too far away to help. Sandy stood cowering before the twins, reduced once again to tears in the hallway between classes. Her crime at the tender age of 13 was that she had been born legally blind, yet had the tenacity to come to school to act like any other student...")

("Ray Charles, who died in 2004, was a charismatic, brilliant, driven, and immensely-talented singer-songwriter and performer. He will be remembered for all these traits. He will also be remembered because he accomplished so much in his long career and he did it all as a blind man..." recommended!!)

("I'm a big sports fan. When we were living in Europe, believe it or not, I got interested in cricket. It's a rather obscure game for us Americans. But the more I watched it, the more I was sure I had at least a basic understanding of it. Then a man in our church gave me a book called Cricket for Americans. I began to read this book, just fascinated, and I realized that I hadn't understood any of it. When I watched the game again, my eyes were opened in a whole new way...")

I was only seventeen years old, working on an oil tanker with all these tough guys, but they took good care of me. I came home. You know, the tankers, when they pull into port, only stay for maybe one or two days, because they’re all small tankers, so I ran home. And I walked in and my mother met me at the door and she says, “Now, Denis, I’m going to introduce you to a very lovely lady. She’s sitting in the living room. She’s just a little different.” I said, “That’s okay.” Florette and I got to be fairly good friends in the short time I was home, and she herself told me her story. I said to her when we were quietly at some point, I said, “How did you become blind? Were you born blind?’ She said, “No, I was living in Harlem, and it was a tough neighbourhood and I got into a little difficulty. But it wasn’t my fault, it was the lady I lived with. And one day I walked out of my house and this man took acid, a little vial of acid, and threw it in my eyes and from that time I was blind.” And I said, “That’s terrible.” And she said, “Yes, it is. Because I took it and I was so angry. And I wouldn’t leave the house, I just stayed in the house...

("in a scene from the chilling film Unforgiven, a young gun-slinger from the Old West is trying to convince himself he did nothing wrong in having just shot another man dead...")

("In the spaghetti westerns that established Clint Eastwood as a global star, his characters were known as 'the man with no name'. The credits listed names, like Blondie in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly or Joe in a Fistful of Dollars, but Eastwood's antiheroes were really anonymous drifters, like high plains wraiths without a past or future...")

("Lest we think the blessing is not in the dirt. Lest we think the blessing is not in the earth beneath our feet. Lest we think the blessing is not in the dust like the dust that God scooped up at the beginning and formed with God's two hands and breathed into with God's own breath....")

("Tennessee had just lost to Notre Dame for a trip to the Final Four. Before this, they had never lost to Notre Dame – they had beaten the Fighting Irish 20 times in a row. I heard Pat Summit on the radio, and it almost sounded like someone had died. It was catastrophic. The players had failed miserably. 'I hate this for our program,' Summit said..." and other illustrations)

("We might ask, 'Are the Pharisees not more handicapped by blindness than the man who was healed?' for this is a story of two kinds of blindness. One is physical--it's a tragedy--but one that can be dealt with through courage, determination, and education. It calls for our support through research, compassion, and consideration. The other is spiritual, for which there is no excuse...")

("In the film Into Great Silence, it is no accident that an old man who is blind is the one who speaks. He sees with a clarity that we, the watchers of the film, might struggle to achieve. 'Why be afraid of death?" he asks, gently and with a wry smile. "It is the future of all humans. The closer one brings oneself to God, the happier one is.'...")

("Perhaps our friends will use the famous illustration of Thorton Wilder from his book The Eighth Day, where he compares life to a beautiful tapestry: 'Looked at from the right side, it is an intricately woven work of art, drawing together threads of different lengths and colors to make up an inspiring picture. But turn the tapestry over, and you will see a hodgepodge of many threads...")

("A popular movie illustrates the paradox about blindness and vision. The film is titled Juno after its principal character. Juno is a high school girl who gets pregnant and, after talking with her boyfriend, decides to 'nip it in the bud'....")

("My son, Benjamin, is a great kid. He is smart. He has a great sense of humor. He loves slapstick humor and NASCAR. In 7th grade this year he is in advanced science and advanced math. He has the potential to be an actuary or an aeronautical engineer when he grows up. Benjamin also has an Individualized Education Plan. For despite his gifts in science and math, he struggles profoundly with receptive and expressive language skills. Benjamin has Aspergers Syndrome...")

("George Herbert's poem Affliction (IV) is a masterful confession of one's own blindness and inner struggles. It's a perfect prayer for the Lenten season: 'Broken in pieces all asunder, Lord, hunt me not,...")

("A story is told of the Buddha who when asked by one of his disciples to describe the human condition likened it to a man walking through the forest who is struck by an arrow...")

("Once upon a time there was this boy, a senior in college who had a total crush on a young woman who was a junior. She was totally gorgeous and very smart and also very nice...")

("In this world there is more to honoring the body than keeping it clean and dry…. In this world, when the body is honored, the whole person is honored. And when the body is dishonored, the whole person is harmed...")

("Reading this text in the context of lectio divina, however, urges me to consider where I find those maddening questioners inside myself. And I feel a measure of compassion for them...")

(Scroll down the page and hold your mouse to highlight these reflections.)

("Eddie was the extrovert in the community for the disabled in the assisted living unit. He always plunked himself down right in the middle of where the action was – in a chair by the mailboxes, at the entrance to the dining room, or right in front of the TV in the sitting room. He knew everyone by name...")

("What John wants for us today is to have our own vision restored. He does that by presenting this story with several other characters, each of whom suffers from spiritual blindness. First, there were the disciples. They suffered from the blindness of theological ineptness...")

Bill Wilson tells his story in the Big Book. (His story is printed in the first 164 pages so I guess it’ll always be there.) And there’s a part in there when Ebby comes into Bill’s kitchen and he brings him the Good News of his own recovery. Ebby had gotten sober – and now he’d been sent to tell his story to Bill. And because all he did was tell his story and because he didn’t try to preach to him – Bill was able to hear – and it was that day also that Bill began to see. He began to see that if this simple God-program could work for his once-drunken-friend – then maybe there was a chance it’d work for him too. Maybe the Light of God really was powerful enough to overcome his darkness Bill says in his Big Book story: “It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. Bill writes: “It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning. I saw that growth could start from that point. “Upon a foundation of complete willingness I might build what I saw in my friend. Thus was I convinced that God is concerned with us humans when we want Him enough. “At long last --- I saw… I felt …. I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view…. And so it has been ever since.” Then Bill adds: “How blind I had been.”

("Out on the cattle ranches of the West the unbranded calves that roam at large are known as 'mavericks'. They are claimed by the man who is the first to get his brand on them at the annual 'round-up'. A little Western girl had been baptized one Sunday by the Methodist minister of the town...")

("There is an animal which lives in Northern Europe that it called an ermine, which is noted for its snow-white fur. The animal will go to great lengths to keep his coat white. Hunters will use this trait of cleanness to capture the animal. Instead of using mechanical traps, the hunters will find the home of the ermine, which is usually a cleft in a rock, a hallow tree, or some other place with a hole, and the hunters will daub the entrance and interior of the house with tar...")

("A youngster had seen his first baptism. When he got home from church, he announced, 'I saw a boy get 'at pbertized' this morning'. Although he meant to say 'baptized', his comment echoed a basic truth because baptism is one way to advertise one's faith...")

("I am reminded of an old episode of the Sopranos in which Carmelo, the wife of Tony, the mob boss, goes to see a psychiatrist who happens also to be Jewish. After pouring out her soul to the psychiatrist, he tells her that her whole lifestyle is maintained by the evil acts of her husband...")

("One of the things that Sue and I enjoy is dropping in on art stores. You know...the ones filled with art work that no one can afford to buy? Well, of all the artists whose work is popular enough to hang in these stores....one of our favorites is Bev Doolittle...")

("The most powerful sermon I have heard on the story about Jesus' healing of the man born blind was delivered by Dr. Benjamin Mays. It took place during the height of the Vietnam War student protests. The local controversy called The God Is Dead Movement, had spilled over onto the cover of TIME magazine...")

("The story is told about a famous Professor of Theology that had lectured at one of our great church related universities. He had evidently cast doubt upon the core of faith and during the question and answer time an elderly preacher got up, took an apple out of his lunch bag and began eating it...")

("there is the famous illustration of Thorton Wilder from his book The Eighth Day, where he compares life to a beautiful tapestry. 'Looked at from the right side, it is an intricately woven work of art, drawing together threads of different lengths and colors to make up an inspiring picture. But turn the tapestry over, and you will see a hodgepodge of many threads...")

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times calls Mukhtaran Bibi “one of the gutsiest persons on earth.” She never attended school as a child and lives in a poor, remote village in Pakistan. Kristof writes, “As a part of a village dispute in 2002, a tribal council decided to punish her family by sentencing her to be gang-raped. She begged and cried, but four of her neighbors immediately stripped her and carried out the sentence,” then “made her walk home naked while her father tried to shield her from the eyes of 300 villagers. “Mukhtaran was meant to be so ashamed that she would commit suicide.” Whether or not we mean to, suicide, self-destruction, can be the effect of the “spiritual violence” we do when we speak in the name of God’s judgment to condemn one another to fast and lasting shame at the person we are created, or otherwise forced, in this instance, to be. “But in a society where women are supposed to be soft and helpless,” Kristof continues, “she proved indescribably tough, and she found the courage to live. She demanded the prosecution of her attackers, and six were sent to death row.” (Though just last week the sentences of four of them were reversed, and Mukhtaran lives in fear for her family again. Please see: www.mukhtarmai.com) “She received $8,300 in compensation and used it to start two schools in the village, one for boys and one for girls, because she feels that education is the best way to change attitudes like those that led to the attack on her. Illiterate herself, she then enrolled in her own elementary school.” Amazing!...

("I think this is what God says to the church. 'I know you have differences, but you must struggle to resolve them as brothers and sisters. This is what I expect of you because you are my children.' Jesus said it this way in the Gospel of John, 'By this, everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.'...")

("Sometimes people tease us by not telling us the whole story about something. We complain, 'Don't keep me in the dark!'. Being 'in the dark' is the opposite of being 'in the know'. 'In the dark' we are ignorant, unable to respond properly to a situation or story...")

("You wonder what could cause such blindness. The answer, I believe, lies in today's quote from Swedenborg: 'Where there is no compassion, selfishness is present and particularly a hatred for everyone who does not agree...")

("A number of years ago a psychiatrist named Karl Menninger wrote a best-selling book entitled Whatever Became Of Sin? In that book he describes how the concept of sin has fallen into disfavour in both the psychiatric and legal fields...")

("Once upon a time, a group of popular teenagers at a local high school began to ostracize certain people based on the way they dressed or how they talked or if they seemed too studious. Only the 'acceptable' teens were invited to the activities planned by this group...")

In the late 1970’s Annie Dillard, writer, naturalist, novelist, moved into a small cabin overlooking the Puget Sound in Washington state, hoping to do some writing. During the course of her time in that little community there was a horrible private airplane accident in which a small child was terribly burned. Like the disciples in the story from John’s gospel, it set her to thinking about sin, punishment, suffering and whether there is any operative relationship among them. Here is part of what she wrote: “His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, ‘Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ And Christ, who spat on the ground, made mud of his spittle and clay, plastered the mud over the man’s eyes, and gave him sight, answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’ Really? If we take this answer to refer to the affliction itself — and not the subsequent cure — as ‘God’s works made manifest,’ then we have, along with ‘Not as the world gives do I give unto you,’ two meager, baffling, and infuriating answers to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here? “The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flame-faced children, to remind us what God can — and will — do? “...Who are we to demand explanations of God?...We forget ourselves, picnicking; we forget where we are. There is no such thing as a freak accident. ‘God is at home,’ says Meister Eckhart, ‘We are in the far country.’”...

("There is a story told by Laura Richards that I found in a book called The Moral Compas. It concerns a meeting between 'The Angel Who Tends To Things' and a man at work - perhaps a man we have met somewhere - sometime...")

("When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, she had an eye infection. Her regular doctor was out of town, and a man posing as a doctor gave her the wrong treatment. Within a few days, she was totally blind. If that happened to some people, I am afraid they would be very bitter and would probably spend a lifetime feeling sorry for themselves. Fanny was never bitter and she never felt sorry for herself...")

("I recently read an interview with a doctor who works with people who have Hansens disease, or leprosy, one of the cruelest diseases there is, in that people can not even feel their pain, and so go about mutilating their bodies because their bodies' warning system, namely pain, does not function for them. he was asked whether the suffering of these people had, in general, turned them toward God or away from God...")

("Here is one of my favorite reflections on the Man Born Blind - the gospel for this week found in John 9. It is from Stories of Faith by John Shea: 'Another time, Jesus smeared God like mud on the eyes of a man born blind and pushed him toward the pool of Siloam...")

("Sherlock Holmes, the great detective who had solved many mysteries, and Dr. Watson, his companion, went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine, they lay down for the night and went to sleep...")

("The writer of the hymn Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine! was Fanny Crosby. She was blind from her earliest babyhood as a result of an accident. When she was only eight years old, she wrote this little rhyme, 'Oh, what a happy child I am, although I cannot see...")

("Once upon a time a man named Dean Acheson who had served in the Roosevelt administration was called back to serve in the Truman administration. A friend of his was Alger Hiss who turned out to have been a highly placed Communist spy in late nineteen thirties and the early nineteen forties...")

("Once upon a time there was a woman who was a cynic. Even as a little girl, she was suspicious of everyone and trusted no one. Every body, she figured, had an angle, a hidden agenda, a trick up their sleeve. Someone told her when she was fourteen that she was a paranoid...")

("Perhaps you've seen the movie The Miracle Worker, or the stage version, which tells the true story of how a teacher named Anne Sullivan helped transform Helen's life...")

("In a scene from the chilling film Unforgiven, a young gun-slinger from the Old West is trying to convince himself he did nothing wrong in having just shot another man dead. 'Well,' he nervously muses aloud, 'I reckon he had it coming to him....")

("An ancient Greek fable tells the story of people who had lived in caves beneath earth's surface for generations. Living conditions on the surface demanded this sub-terranian lifestyle. But -- there was always a longing within the people for the light...")

Martin Luther King became a Baptist minister and went to be the minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He became involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He did not want it, but he was drawn into it by his call to service. It wasn't what he wanted: he wanted to be a good preacher, a scholar and perhaps even a seminary president. One night, when the boycott was not going well, with bickering in the ranks of the participants and threats of violence from their enemies, King received a phone call. Standing in the parsonage kitchen, tired, down, defeated, he heard an angry voice say, "You better get out of town nigger or we're going to kill you." The threat threw King into the depths of despair. He was so young, so afraid, and he said to God, "I just can't go on!" Then he heard a voice, "Martin, stand up for right, stand up for justice, and I will never ever leave you!" Whenever any study of history is made there are many many instances and examples where those least qualified and least likely to succeed are the ones who do lead and who do succeed.

"I love watching the various versions of CSI TV show, short for Crime Scene Investigation. It has an original version, a New York Version and a Miami version..."

"A man drove a cab twenty years ago for a living. He says: "It was a cowboy's life, a life for someone who wanted no boss. What I didn't realize was that it was also a ministry..."

One of my favorite Garrison Keillor stories is the story of the storm home and the storm child. Keillor begins the tale by saying that the principal of his school was fearful that a winter blizzard might strand at school the kids who lived in the country. So he assigned them all a "storm home" in town just in case. If a blizzard struck, each child was to go to his storm home. Keillor recalls his storm home vividly. He remembers it being a house near a lake inhabited by a kindly older couple. The grounds around the house were filled with all sorts of colorful and fragrant flowers. Keillor also recalls that his storm home had a statue of Mary among the flowers, thus suggesting to him these fine folks were Catholic. Given Keillor's Lutheran upbringing, he remembers wondering how a Protestant boy would manage in a Catholic home. Nevertheless, his imagination led him to envision what it would be like to spend the night in his very own storm home; what it would be like to be a storm child. Keillor even imagined the kindly older couple somehow choosing him: "That one!" they would have said as they pointed at the young Keillor. "We want that boy! The one with the thick glasses!" There was no great storm that year, no blizzard that would have led to the need of a storm home. Still, Keillor anticipated the possibility of spending the night in his very own storm home...

("I love that song by Bob Dylan BLOWIN IN THE WIND. 'How many times will a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn't see?..." also includes a dramatic reading of this text)

("Noah benShea's book, Jacob the Baker, Gentle Wisdom for a Complicated World, tells this story. A neighbour of Jacob's needed to start a journey, but it was the middle of the night. Afraid to begin, afraid not to begin, he came to Jacob. 'There is no light on the path,' he complained. 'Take someone with you,' counselled Jacob...")

("Born in a poor town in Georgia, Ray Charles went blind from Pediatric glaucoma at the age of seven shortly after seeing or not seeing his younger brother's accidental death...")

("We need what John Howard Yoder calls the 'politics of Jesus' and what Stanley Hauerwas calls the 'peaceable kingdom'. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says it well:...")

("Journalist David Hajdu recently told a memorable story about Wynton Marsalis, one of the most easily recognizable jazz musicians in our day and one of the premier jazz trumpeters of all time. One night, Marsalis was playing with a small, little-known combo in a New York basement club...")

Have you ever observed a miracle; a bone fide, honest to goodness miracle? I have. When Marsha and I were first married, her parents had been asked to take in two foster children because their mother had an inoperable form or cancer. It was rampant in her body, and since she only had weeks to live, the girls had already begun spending some weekends at my in-laws home. All of that didn’t stop this woman, and her church friends, and Marsha’s family from praying for a healing; they did pray, but they also prepared for the worst. And then one day Mrs. Weeks went to the doctor for a sort of final exam, and the cancer was gone. Not just better, not just in remission, but gone, without a trace. The doctor was speechless. He had no medical explanation for what he was seeing with his own eyes. But the patient did; she firmly believed that Jesus had healed her. And everyone who knew her and her circumstance was astonished...

("There's another e-mail I just got that illustrates this better than I can say it. It tells of a young boy who takes off to meet God. He knows it's a long trip to where God lives, so he packs his suitcase full of Twinkies and a 6 pack of root beer, and leaves on his journey...")

("On an ABC New Special In the Name of God, Peter Jennings interviewed the founder of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, John Wimber. Wimber said that the first time he went to church he expected dramatic things to happen...")

("Today our song from The Lion King is They Live in You. This beautiful song appears twice in the musical, with slight variations. First, Mufasa sings this song to his son Simba, trying to teach him about the responsibilities he will someday have as leader in the Pridelands. Mufasa sings the song to remind Simba that his ancestors live with and in him...")

("Unlike Ercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's immortal little Belgian detective, who is forever seeking out what's wrong, precisely what crime has been committed and how, and who, then, must be pursued, prosecuted and punished...")

("Tatyana Tolstaya in her short story, See the Other Side tells of visiting a church in Ravenna, Italy, to see its ceiling mosaic of heaven. The problem is it is so dark in the church visitors have to pay 300 lira, about 25 cents, for the mosaic to be illuminated for a few moments...")

("There's an old story about Arnold Palmer. It seems he was invited to come to a convention of blind golfers. He was curious and asked the golfers how they knew what direction to hit the ball...")

("There is a story told by Harry Emerson Fosdick in the Twelve Tests Of Character about a young man who announced to his friend, 'Mr. Jones is the most brilliant man I ever knew. He remembers every card that I held at bridge last week...")

("Joseph Donders in a book Christ the Divine Network tells the story of four people from the up-country who came to the city of Nairobi. He begins by saying that they came from a very small place, in fact it was hardly a place at all...")

("God doesn't send us more than we can handle. Of all the simple sayings of the Christian faith, I most wish we could reconsider this one. It suggests that God intentionally sends us hardships, tragedy...")

("My wife Jeanne teaches drawing. The problem with learning to draw is not correctly placing the lines, but how you see. So, she sometimes uses a technique many others use...")

Most of us who preach on these readings will be tempted to make our real text this wonderful sentence from Antoine de Saint- Exupéry's The Little Prince. "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."...

("One year a rural community was suffering from a terrible drought and their crops--their livlihood--were threatened. The pastor told his flock, 'There isn't anything that will save us except a special litany for rain. Go to your homes, fast every day from sunrise to sunset, believe that God will answer our prayers, and come on Sunday for the litany of rain.'...")

In the late 1970’s Annie Dillard, writer, naturalist, novelist, moved into a small cabin overlooking the Puget Sound in Washington state, hoping to do some writing. During the course of her time in that little community there was a horrible private airplane accident in which a small child was terribly burned. Like the disciples in the story from John’s gospel, it set her to thinking about sin, punishment, suffering and whether there is any operative relationship among them. Here is part of what she wrote: “His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, ‘Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ And Christ, who spat on the ground, made mud of his spittle and clay, plastered the mud over the man’s eyes, and gave him sight, answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’ Really? If we take this answer to refer to the affliction itself — and not the subsequent cure — as ‘God’s works made manifest,’ then we have, along with ‘Not as the world gives do I give unto you,’ two meager, baffling, and infuriating answers to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here? “The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flame-faced children, to remind us what God can — and will — do? “...Who are we to demand explanations of God?...We forget ourselves, picnicking; we forget where we are. There is no such thing as a freak accident. ‘God is at home,’ says Meister Eckhart, ‘We are in the far country.’”...

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