Sermon for 1st Sunday in Lent, 9 March 14 John 9:1-41 Hymn: Be Thou My Vision (#793) As Richard Bruxvoort Colligan is with us today and we’re benefiting from his work with the Psalms, I’m starting with show-and-tell from our church library. This version of the Bible (The Way Living Bible), published in the early 70’s, was trying to be contemporary and relevant. For Psalm 119:105, a more traditional wording says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet.” I love that here it gets paraphrased as “Your word is a flashlight to light the path ahead of me.” King David or whoever wrote these words 3000 years ago probably didn’t actually use the word flashlight, since they hadn’t been invented yet. But that can prompt our reflection today. Jesus says, “I AM the light of the world,” and that verse may make us reflect on what kind of light he is, or what the light does. Lamps drive away a sphere of darkness, lighting a wide area. Flashlights, though, focus the beam indeed to light a path well. But it leaves everything else pretty dark, so you may not see what is ready to leap out at you from aside the path. We may also think about light as beacons, like the star that shines on our roof. Or lighthouses with dual functions—to warn ships away from rocky obstacles, and also to help navigate closer to shore and not out to distant, dangerous depths. We may think of the light of the sun, which warms us and is the source of all life on this planet, but with radiation that burns. That may call to mind lasers, the ultra-focused version of the path’s flashlight, so intense they can cut. We might well claim that any of those shed some light on God and Jesus. He could be the flashlight to guide our journey. He could be the lamp to ward off evil. He might help us know where obstacles are or be a beacon to draw us safely in the right direction. We might associate the Son of God with the solar system’s sun as being the source of our life. We may say, like a laser, that he can surgically remove the bad and sin, making us better by cutting us apart. And, actually, all that analysis (a word, by the way, that has to do with cutting up things), all that trying to reason through this may illustrate the defining view of our light-talk. See, we continue to be heirs of the age of reason, called the Enlightenment. And if we are now called enlightened, that tries to indicate a distinction from the dark ages. Enlightenment is defined by our trust in the answers of science. In the last several centuries, we have come to understand our world much more deeply in almost every respect—from atomic to lightyear scale, of systems and their components, all around us and inside us. It has revolutionized our understanding, but also our interactions with the world, leading to inventions that assist and entertain us, and heal us and extend our lives. I’m certainly not disparaging science and technology and the amazing insights we’ve come to share. But we need to see that the scientific method of testing hypothesis to prove facts is a separate category from our Christian faith. Again, it is not that they are incompatible much less antagonistic. It is just that they don’t necessarily work to answer each other’s questions. It would be like bringing a baseball bat to a soccer game; there’s nothing wrong with baseball bats, you just don’t use them to play soccer. We are so much people of the Enlightenment that this can be a tough concept for us. We want to be able to prove our faith. We give citations of studies that say prayer is verified to speed up recovery from sickness. We search archeology for evidence of our convictions. We assert that Christians are factually happier or more successful or more charitable. We even say that Christian values are objectively right, that our norms are upheld by the design of the universe and so everyone should follow them. Our opinions and worldviews become self-substantiating and end up exclusive. Even to insist on tolerance and acceptance is an exclusionary faith claim. The thing is, we can’t prove any of it, since that’s not how faith works. That’s not what this is about. It is the realm of hope, not of fact. Instead of something quantifiable, faith often operates even contrary to evidence. Yet it’s not just our Enlightenment heritage that wants to analyze and find reasons. 1700 years early, it’s already in our Bible reading. As Jesus disappears into the background, there is a debate or disagreement about the alleged facts which fails to shed much of any theological light. The disciples’, too, began today with asking the question, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” These guys were already trapped into thinking cause-and-effect, testing a hypothesis and looking for proof. They figured physical condition was indicative of relationship with God, and that problems equaled punishment. These guys were experts at bringing baseball bats to soccer games. So Jesus promptly replies, “Wrong question.” This isn’t sin. This isn’t punishment. Jesus just says, “He was born that way.” Don’t try to reason or puzzle God out of that; you won’t get an answer. Instead let’s do God’s work, setting aside the stuff of night and doing the works of daylight; that’s where the revelation is. That is the essential center of this reading, where we should focus. Jesus says, “I AM the light of the world.” Since we’re still starting this season of hearing the “I AM” passages, I’ll remind you again what Tim said on Ash Wednesday, that this takes mental translation. “I AM” is essentially the Old Testament name of God. The Hebrew is Yahweh, a name so holy it was not allowed to be said aloud. So our first mental adjustment of “I AM the light of the world” is “God, the light of the world.” But in John’s Gospel, we know the identity of God through Jesus. So then it becomes “Jesus the light of the world,” or more loosely “in Jesus we see what God wants us to see.” Again, this is a statement of faith. We don’t have a control group or baseline of divinity for comparison with Jesus. We don’t start with a definition of God and see how well Jesus stacks up. It’s not like we can say, “well God is male, and so is Jesus. Check.” This works exactly the other way around. We know God because of Jesus. Further, these are intended as statements for you. If God is bread, it isn’t saying God is like a crusty loaf of whole grain—it’s that you need nourishment. If Jesus is the good shepherd, it’s not that he was in 4-H— it’s that you are lost sheep. Since Jesus is God’s light for the world, it’s because you were in darkness and couldn’t see without him. And what Jesus reveals, the God he sheds light on, is not the one we expected, not what we were guessing our way toward. This is a God whose power is made perfect in weakness, the eternal who dies, who welcomes into community during exclusions of being driven out, whose light to the nations is manifest in the humiliation of defeat (Isaiah 49:6). In the reading the man was blind, meaning he was supposedly living in the darkness, completely disconnected from the light of God. But Jesus says that’s got nothing to do with it. In fact, those who think they have it figured out are probably more in the dark than that man was. This isn’t so much a story of a blind man coming to see as it is the story of a blind man coming to see that Jesus reveals God to us. So if we thought that following the rules or being more accepting made us closer to God, if we thought that brokenness in our lives meant we were further from God, Jesus ends those misconceptions. If you thought praying harder would make the bad stuff go away, then your little science experiment is bound to go astray. If you thought you could look for the evidence of God’s presence or absence, Jesus replies, “wrong question. Welcome to the soccer game, though,” and he grabs the baseball bat away from you. He shows you that God is more eager to forgive your sins than to punish you for them. You see that your hardships are not retaliation from God. You see that your arrogant misunderstandings, however, may point you away from God. You see that the most tentative, uncertain belief is still your best confidence. You see that this light goes into the very heart of darkness. You see a God who reveals love for you by dying, that the center of this story, where X marks the spot, is on a cross, that even when the sun refused to shine that was the beacon, the revelation of the Light. The final twist is that even in its clearest revelation for you, it remains shrouded in mystery. You can’t prove it. All you can do is trust that in Jesus is God for you. He bears love and life that overcome the darkness. And neither death nor blindness nor sin nor lack of understanding nor even your best intentions will be able to turn out the Light.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 17:40:21 +0000
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