Sermon: Fourth Sunday in Lent, John 9:1-41, March 19, 2023 Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church, Pastor Jonathan Linman

Sermon: Fourth Sunday in Lent, John 9:1-41, March 19, 2023 Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church, Pastor Jonathan Linman

Few things in life are as precious as our eyesight. For those who cannot see at all, or who have major impairments to vision, life and routines, obviously, are quite formidable.

My own biggest health scares over the years have involved my eyes. First, I had a case of shingles that started above my right eye and which eventually involved the surface of my cornea, an episode that threatened permanent damage to the quality of my vision. Then, a few years later, I had to have emergency surgery to repair a detached retina in my left eye. Thanks be to God, all turned out well, but these episodes certainly made me appreciate my physical vision all the more and to realize what a fragile gift our eyesight is and how vulnerable we are to losing sight.

And, of course, others are not so fortunate. Perhaps you have had or are having struggles with your vision of one sort or another. Or a loved one struggles with their eyesight. You, too, can surely identify with the profound meaning of vision for our quality of life.

That’s physical, literal eyesight which is so central to how we live. But there’s a myriad of ways in which we humans can be metaphorically blind or figuratively vision impaired.

Our physical vision might be just fine, but we all know that there are times when we become so preoccupied with the burdens of our lives and to do lists that we don’t see what is before us, even literally. For example, there are those incidents in our cars where we’re preoccupied and we don’t happen to see the other car coming at us which is about to crash into us (I’m finding that’s a huge concern when driving around Phoenix!).

Then there are still more metaphorical ways in which we can be blind to what’s going on around us. Sometimes this is a willful blindness to what is going on, intentionally ignoring what is right before our eyes: the plight of homelessness and poverty which appears at so many intersections in Phoenix, for example, when we ignore the people we encounter or fail to consider the socially systemic reasons for poverty and homelessness. That’s a form of blindness.

Then there’s the specter of climate change when we see the ravages of extreme weather, but turn a blind eye to what’s causing it, refusing to acknowledge the need to change our all of our habits to nurture environmental healing.

Like using water in our homes as if there is an unending supply of this precious resource here in Arizona. And on the lists go of the ways in which we are blind to the world around us.

Such willful human blindness takes a huge toll on life and the quality of our lives. Those who are prescient and see what needs to be seen and who name aloud what they see are precious gifts to humanity. They are the prophets among us, the prophetic seers who provoke us to open our eyes to what is needful, what demands to be acknowledged and seen.

But there are too few prophetic seers these days. Motivated by greed and the desire for power, too many of our leaders and media personalities and others perpetuate our blindness to social injustices and systemic causes for human suffering and death.

In short, willful blindness, the metaphorical kind, is all wrapped up in the tendrils of human sin and brokenness and often makes for much suffering and even death.

Think of this, too: there are also intimate links, both metaphorically and literally, between blindness and darkness and between light and sight. When we’re in the deepest shadows of night, we cannot see very well if at all. When we are amidst the brightness of daylight, we can see much more clearly. This is true literally and it’s true figuratively. When we’re in the night of sin and human frailty, we cannot see straight in moral ways. But in divine light, so much can become clear and bright. We can see the truth.

And this, of course, brings us to today’s gospel reading about Jesus’ encounter with the man born blind. Because our eyesight is so very crucial, we can appreciate and relate to the man born blind and his plight – and the preciousness of our eyesight  also heightens our appreciation for the miraculous healing by Jesus in giving sight to the man born blind.

I love this feature of the story because it’s so provocative: Jesus “spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes.” Yuck! That’s just gross.

But now that Jesus has gotten our attention, let’s look deeper. Remember that in John, Jesus is the very word of God made flesh who was sent by God to dwell with us, fully divine, but also fully human – full of grace and truth and light.

Spitting and making mud is very human. And when the very Son of God does that, it says that God has made a decision to come down to our human level to abide with us in the down and dirty of our lives, in our muddy places, even our willful blindness. 

Jesus made mud and spread it on the man’s eyes. This is so visceral, so literally earthy, grounded in the dust from which we were created.

So, I cannot help but think of the mud in relation to Ash Wednesday, when we make a kind of mud out of the ashes of burned palm fronds mixed with holy oil, a mud that is spread on our foreheads in the shape of a cross which connects up with our confession on Ash Wednesday, our confession of sin, to be sure, but also simply our acknowledgement of our humanity, that we are humus, mud, earthen creatures not the creator.

Then think of what happens next in the story: Jesus said to the man born blind now with mud on his eyes, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.” Presumably he washed off the mud, and in the water, and with this cleansing came the eyesight – seeing for the first time in his life. Amen. Thanks be to God!

Here, I cannot help but think also of baptism, how we are washed in those sacred waters, having our mud cleansed in the water by word and the Holy Spirit. And we come up out of the water with a new kind of eyesight, seeing the world from God’s perspective as ones cleansed, forgiven, healed, redeemed and sent into the world to proclaim Jesus as the Son of God, just as the man did who was formerly blind.

In the baptismal waters of our version of the pool of Siloam, we are drowned to our blindness as we are immersed into Christ’s death on the cross. But then, we are lifted up out of the water, from that shadowy abyss of the night of our sin, and we enter into the splendor of the light of Christ’s resurrection. We once were blind, but now we see – seeing with the eyes of faith generated by the Spirit active in water and the word.

And here’s the paradox of the whole story: the ones blind end up seeing and the ones allegedly sighted and visionary are ultimately revealed to be blind. That’s what we see with the elite religious leaders portrayed in today’s long gospel reading. They were so preoccupied with the fact that Jesus, in their eyes, broke the rules about the Sabbath day by working to heal the blind man, that they failed to see the divine power of Jesus. Despite the formerly blind man’s testimony about Jesus and what he did for him, the religious leaders could not see beyond their own theological myopia. They drove the man out of their midst saying to him in their pride, presumption, and arrogance, “You were born entirely in sins, and are your trying to teach us?”

This conflict with the religious leaders of Jesus’ day reveals in plain sight how Jesus comes to turn our worlds upside down. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. The poor will inherit the earth. The lowly are lifted up and the mighty are brought down from their thrones.

This is how our God works. In the story from 1 Samuel, we heard how God instructed Samuel to pass over all the obvious choices for king among the sons of Jesse. God chose the youngest of Jesse’s son and least likely, David, the simple shepherd boy, to be king. That’s the divine logic of our God made visible later in salvation history in Jesus and his ministry with the least, and the last.

In Christ, the blind see and the religious leaders, the religious elites are shown to be blind. They cannot see the truth of who Jesus was and is. That’s the case when we’re lost in the nights of deep shadows of sin, of arrogance and pride and being know it all’s. In that sinful state, we simply cannot see.

But the light of Christ, who is revealed to be the very light of the world, creates through his word and in the sacraments the conditions of faith for us to see clearly. Baptism, the proclamation of the word, the holy meal of bread and wine, absolution, our holy conversations with each other give us the grace to see the truth of Jesus, and the truth about our often willfully blind world.

Here’s how the author of the letter to the Ephesians puts it: “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true…. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them…. Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’” (Ephesians 5:8-14)

In the Spirit of the risen Christ, we live as children of light bearing the fruit of words and deeds that are good and right and true, reflecting Christ’s light. When we serve our neighbors in need, Christ’s light shines forth. When we seek the justice of God’s reign, Christ shines forth in the dark shadows of our world, an antidote to turning blind eyes to the plight of the poor, revealing the systemic injustices that cause so much suffering and death.

Friends, in Christ we are light to heal many forms of blindness and to bring sight and vision to our bleary-eyed world. God give us the courage and vision to do this holy, healing work in the name of Jesus. Amen.