John 9:1-41  A sermon from The Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs, Assistant Priest, St Martin’s Providence

We have here a story of a man who has had a transforming encounter with Jesus; a man whose story of God’s love and compassion is so compelling that he can’t help but share it. A man whose story is the cause of curiosity, wonder, and consternation all at once. A man who was cast out by his community of fellowship. A man who knew Jesus’ presence with him even in a moment of rejection and vulnerability, and worshiped him.

That man was the writer of the Gospel of John. His community of Jewish Christians was expelled from their synagogue because of their belief in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, and this painful rupture in all likelihood influenced this narrative of a man cast out because he refused to disavow Jesus as the source of his healing.

So we have a story within a story; both of them about communities in points of transition and how they respond to the prospect of change.

I’ve always loved this passage because of its energy; a kind of theatricality that catches the listener up in a swirl of question and accusation, a cast of thousands (sort of) and a back-and-forth dialogue worthy of The West Wing.

And at the quiet gravitational center of it all; a blind man and a Messiah. One thing I do know; that though I was blind, now I see. This statement is a simple narrative of transformation. The man, whose name is unknown, doesn’t need to embellish; he just speaks his truth while neighbors, Pharisees, and parents talk past him, flailing about for more answers than he can provide, nor does he care to, really. Perhaps he has enough to deal with as he negotiates his way in a world now flooded with light and color; a world in which the Dream of God has come intimately close. He is, through the application of dirt, spit, and water, a new creation.

So he asserts his new identity though the cost is high; he is expelled from his synagogue. And yet Jesus, who, you will note, is only actually in this drama at the beginning and at the end, though his presence is felt throughout—Jesus seeks the man out and reveals his own identity:

Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.

For the writer of John’s gospel, this was personal. The energetic images make real a moment of conversion and its initially chaotic aftermath. The perseverance of the man who has been healed, the confrontation with the community, the pain of rejection and the moment of worship are related by a storyteller who is deeply invested in what he is telling.

…I was blind, now I see. A simple statement of identities; an old one transformed into a new one. And the Gospel writer has incorporated it into Great Story: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Great Story of God’s love for creation is woven of smaller stories like this, of encounters with the Word made flesh; a tapestry of God’s Dream unfolding before our eyes.

And what gives this tapestry its vividness and dimension is its authenticity. There is not only the joy of healing in this encounter with Jesus, there is also the spiritual blindness and deafness of a community, and the pain of rejection—human frailty and vulnerability on full display. And this is important because it is frailty that teaches us the most about ourselves and who we are called to be as children of God and disciples of Jesus.

Notice the interaction of the man who had been born blind and his interlocutors. Question after question are launched at him, but does anyone really seem to be listening? The Pharisees are focused on violation of the Sabbath and whether the healer was a sinner. The man’s parents, rather than being overjoyed at their son’s healing, would rather be anywhere than being questioned by the authorities on the unusual way in which the healing had occurred. The neighbors are curious, but they either talk about him rather than to him or they keep asking the same question over and over: How did this happen? Where’s the guy who did it? And he keeps telling his simple story: …I was blind, now I see.

It’s like a feedback loop that they can’t escape. See, the thing about stories is that they are a two-way street. We’ve talked a lot about Story here at St. Martin’s, in part because storytelling is the connective tissue of the Body of Christ. But we haven’t talked much about what is fundamental to making a story truly effective. It must have a teller, obviously. But it isn’t a story until it has a listener—someone to attend to it. And the quality of the listening is as crucial as the narrative itself because it is only then that we have meaning, within the community.

So at the end of the story, when Jesus talks about blindness, he’s also talking about deafness—whatever dulling of senses has come to insulate us from fully encountering the truth of another. “Surely we are not blind, are we?”, the people say to Jesus. Well, actually, yes, you are, he says. As long as your own agenda keeps you from seeing, hearing, truly knowing the fullness of what is in front of you, yes, you are blind. And your blindness and deafness are distorting the story that someone is trying to tell you; they are obscuring the signs of new life that he is trying to show you.

The first-century community of John’s Gospel and the 21st-centurymainline church both share the experiences of enormous change and transition. An encounter with something new and untested tends to raise the adrenalin level so that we perceive threat where there might just as easily be opportunity. And when that happens it is vital to resist the temptation to retreat into nostalgia—a kind of blindness–and instead stop, breathe, and attend to what is in front of us.

Let the teller tell the story

In our Lenten Program this year this is what we are doing. In the course of our dinner discussions we have the opportunity to tell stories about our journey of faith and to listen to each other. We are learning to articulate our faith in a way that is magnetic to others—attracting them to a community that seeks—and very much needs–to grow. And the corollary to the telling of each story is that we also learn to attend to it—to see the identity of the teller as beloved of God who can offer a story of his or her own. Because we are not just called to name and claim our own identity as followers of Jesus; we are called to see Jesus in others. And that carries with it the risk that comes from true listening; the risk of change.

To truly listen to someone is to be open to the possibility that what you hear will change you. As the community of the man born blind learned, that is a scary proposition.

If the neighbors, parents, and religious authorities in this story had set their anxious questions aside they might have glimpsed the Dream of God becoming manifest right in front of them. They thought they were listening, but they weren’t. What they were doing was listening in order to change someone, rather than taking the risk that the listening would change them.

Last Saturday I had a humbling experience. I was involved in the annual Diocesan Learn & Lead workshop, which this year tackled the topic of generational differences and what they mean for the church. As I look back on it, the committee’s biggest concern as we planned the day was to gain understanding of what we perceived as “that shy, elusive creature, the Millennial.” Our committee made a special effort to invite Millennials– young people born between 1982 and 1999 because we felt that it was important that we not be talking about them in their absence.

So instead we talked about them in their presence. We had made the mistake of not asking a member of the Millennial generation to lead the discussion of a video presentation. So instead of observing an informative back-and-forth dialogue between generations I watched in some consternation as Baby Boomers began to opine about Millennials in the third person even though seven of them (they were totally outnumbered) were sitting right there. The opinions about them swirled through the air for several minutes until one young woman was finally able to get to the microphone and say, If you would like to know more about us, we’d be delighted to tell you, if you would ask us. Thanks be to God this was greeted with widespread applause.

But it was during lunch that the real grace happened. As the rest of the conference attendees moved around them a couple of older folks and five of the young people took their sandwiches and sat in a circle on the floor. At that quiet gravitational center, the young folks talked. They talked about their frustration at being treated as the automatic go-to people for social networking and technology when their gifts, talents and interests are vastly more diverse than that. They talked about their frustration at being assumed to be too young to take things on when they are more than fully capable of developing and running successful programs; They told of their childhood experiences of church and faith; about their desire for community with their friends, and their desire to have their questions about spirituality and religion truly heard and not dismissed. As one person said with an ironic smile, If I may generalize about Millennials, we all hate being generalized.

And as the hour and the conversation went on, I noticed a number of people quietly gathering around the little group. This time, instead of opining, they listened. I think I was not the only one who felt humbled in the presence of the vulnerability and wisdom of these young people.

I was blind, but now I see. Now I could see, not generalized “Millennials”, but individual story tellers with names: Mike, and Christopher, and Patrick, and Kenny and Frank.

That’s all anyone really wants, isn’t it? Regardless of age and wherever we meet. To be truly seen; to be known as a child of God with both strengths and vulnerabilities. Our challenge as a community focused on Jesus—because that is, after all, what we are—is to be that quiet gravitational center for others—that place where they not only encounter Jesus, but where they show Jesus to us, so that we all may be transformed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stating the dilemma 

I am the rector – which is Episcopal speak for senior priest-pastor of a church where many faithful people are perplexed about how and in what to believe. Given our formation and experience in the modern world, we are a highly educated, middle-class congregation, both attributes that seem to only add complexity to our perplexities concerning faith.

For many of us, the metaphysical image of an enchanted universe in which God is actively present within the material structure of time and space seems improbable to our disenchanted, rationalistic minds. What we seem clearer about is the social action bit – we understand about being good people doing what good people do. Yet, is this really enough to sustain a robust and dynamic faith in this brave new world of ours?

Many of us feel an affection for the parish community rooted in memories of former times when family and community jelled together in a seamless whole. Some of us are new or newer seekers, attracted by the messages heard from the Sunday pulpit or read in the online sermon blog relationalrealities.com.

The Anglican approach of sitting in the tension where Tradition meets Modern Family is attractive to people fed up with easy answers to complex questions. However, this approach is not for everyone. We are keenly aware of our greying, we know that the biggest challenge facing us is the need to grow in order to maintain our historic witness. We are warm and welcoming and committed to social action, yet our worship life, which lies at the heart of our self-definition, is complex and not instantly user-friendly.

Nevertheless, it is the human dimension of community life that holds many of us still in place, despite our perplexities and complexities about what it means to be a Christian in the modern world.

How are we to find a good account of the hope that is within us for ourselves, let alone give it to those who are searching? 

I came across this paragraph in a wonderful piece: Why nothing seems to get people back to Church in which Erik Parker challenges the notion that the way to attract Millennials (outsiders) is to emphasize the community – social networking aspect of church life. He tellingly notes:

Now, imagine someone is looking for a church. They are looking for a church with a commitment to following Jesus at its core and they show up at a social commitment church. It would be like showing up for a soccer team that stopped playing soccer years ago, and who instead gathers for coffee and donuts with friends and family. But this gathering of people still call themselves a soccer team. Now imagine members of that “soccer team” wring their hands week after week over the fact that no one wants to join the team to clean up coffee and pick up the donuts. You can see why soccer players looking for a team wouldn’t join. You can see why many members of the team left a long time ago.

Our future lies in being a community that offers an experience of being part of what Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry calls the Jesus Movement. I know it sounds kind of glib, but it focuses attention on the core nature of Christian community. The actual playing of soccer is not an historical artifact for something called a soccer team. It is the sole justification for existing. Likewise, being disciples of Jesus is not an historical artifact for a Christian community – an optional bolt on for a minority of those who are so minded.

In my community, we are less perplexed by the question – in whom can we believe? Jesus is a magnetic figure. The gospel message of hope over despair is a compelling one. Given what I have said about our levels of education and intellectual sophistication, the real question we stumble over concerns the how of belief.

How are we to find a good account of the hope that is within us to give to ourselves, let alone give to those who are searching?

Faith

Last week I preached on the call of Abraham, the first of the Hebrew Patriarchs. This Sunday we hear of an incident at the waters of Meribah involving Moses, the first of the Hebrew prophets. These are two chapters from the greatest story ever told, to quote from the title of that old Hollywood blockbuster. The greatest story ever told is a story that is technically an epic. Epic and myth are both a variety of story. But whereas myth is a story that exists outside temporal time – i.e. it is always the same and forever unchanging, an epic is an unfolding story that develops and changes within time. Epic is a story embedded in history, playing out within time through its impact on the lives of individuals and communities. The greatest story ever told is an epic story. Abraham and Moses are major footnotes in this epic story; a story that for Christians culminates with Jesus.

Abraham, Moses, and Jesus demonstrate lives of faith, modeling within their particular contexts day-to-day experience of what living in covenant with God looks like. In John’s Gospel, we eavesdrop on an encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well that models how we too are called to challenge the limitations of social convention in order to reveal something completely new[1].

We talk of having faith as if it’s a noun, a commodity we either possess or don’t. I don’t understand what having faith as a commodity I can have more or less of this looks like. I do understand what keeping faith as a verb means. Keeping faith helps me deal with what comes at me day-by-day. Keeping faith is not like telling myself that ten impossible things are true before breakfast every day. Keeping faith is letting my life be shaped by the greatest story of faith. The greatest story ever told, my current catchphrase for the Biblical epic is such a story and it must be at the center of our lives if we are to be followers of Jesus.

Story

We are storied beings because stories shape and guide our lives. Stories make sense of the world and ourselves in it. One pervasive story shaping our lives in the 21st century is the materialist story of the individual deal maker, who through the exercise of power grabs material success. We are shaped by the story of the autonomous individual who beholden to no one else pulls him or herself up by their own bootstraps. There is a corresponding story that shapes those who don’t match up to this story; a story of losers or victims. Competing stories have different consequences not only for those in them but for wider society. It’s not difficult to see the consequences of competing stories playing out around us.

The congress is currently struggling with competing stories about the role of health care for American Society. One story shapes us as a society in which health care is a right of all citizens and as such becomes an inclusive instrument for social good. This story competes with another story that sees health care as the private concern of individual citizens, the outworking of personal responsibility and personal choice. In this instance, in trying to decide which story to give allegiance to, as Christians we need to ask how does each story on health care fare when judged by the consistent priorities and demands of the greatest story ever told?  We then need to repeat this analysis with respect to the other stories – stories of race, gender, sexuality, power and powerlessness, in short, the many other stories that shape our lives.

Relationship

The greatest story ever told has one central recurring theme that translates human experience in a variety of contexts that could not be more different from one another. It is the story of covenanted relationship. Covenant is a form of relationship that binds separate persons together in mutual partnership. The covenant made between Abraham and God is renewed between God and Moses and uniquely reaffirmed in the covenant between God and Jesus. The interesting thing about covenant relationships is that they not only serve the interests of the partners but exist for the fulfillment of a higher purpose.

This last week in the New York Times David Brooks wrote of the human dimension of covenanted relationships:

People in a covenant try to love the other in a way that brings out their loveliness. They hope that through this service they’ll become a slightly less selfish version of themselves…. Love is realistically a stronger force than self-interest. Detached calculation in such matters is self-strangulating. The deepest joy sneaks in the back door when you are surrendering to some sacred promise. 

Will the story of covenanted relationship provide the good account of the hope that is within us to give to ourselves, and most importantly of all to those who are searching?

[1] We see the dynamics of this played out in the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman; in the way she comes her eyes become open to seeing him contrasting with the continued cultural blindness of his disciples.

1. The encounter with the woman at the well occurs within the context of the historical dispute between Jews and Samaritans about the location of God’s dwelling place, whether here on the Samaritan Mt. Gerizim or at Jerusalem and reflects the sad legacy of division following the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel some 700 years earlier.

2. Using living water as a metaphor for faith Jesus offers a new vision of a world freed from the disputes of history and geography.

3. This sign story offers a radically new vision of gender relations in which Jesus speaks directly to a woman in public to whom he is not related. He addresses her as woman not sister – implying a level of equality between them contradicting the gender hierarchy of his society.

4. Water also becomes the metaphor for inclusion. The living water that Jesus offers cannot be polluted by racial or religious differences. It can be drawn by anyone, and shared with everyone without distinction.

5. Liberated from the blinders of history, religion, race, and gender, the woman is led to make the first proclamation of Jesus as messiah from the lips not from an insider, i.e. one Jesus’ Jewish disciples, but from the despised Samaritan outsider. Foreigners have a way of comprehending the truth first.

6. The shock and horror of the disciples on returning to find what has been taking place between Jesus and the woman simply reinforces the radical nature of this exchange. Faced with Jesus radical departure from strict religious, racial and social conventions they instantly reject the possibility of discovering something new. This is what insiders do. When their worldview is challenged they quickly foreclose on possibility and retreat into the blindness of conventional expectations.

 

Bernard Malamud along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth was a prominent Jewish writer in the middle of the 20-century. Last week I quoted from his novel- The Natural –in which he writes: we have two lives … the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Faith is what moves us from the life we learn with into the life after that.

We approach a major turning point at Genesis, chapter 12 with the introduction of the man who comes to be known as Abraham, the father of nations whose descendants, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim have become as numerous as the stars in the heavens. Abraham’s story is a story of the journey from the life learned with to the life after that, a journey taken by the quintessential person of faith.

Genesis 1-11 reveal that the story between God and humanity has not gone so well. If God learns from past mistakes with the introduction of Abraham we see God developing a new strategy. In singling out Abraham, God shows that for the foreseeable future it’s the personal relationship touch that will make all the difference. God’s choice of Abraham shows us that God seems to choose unusual candidates for this kind of partnership. Abraham and his wife Sarah are already beyond childbearing age; odd candidates for the father and mother of a new nation. In the choice of Abraham, we come to see God’s desire clearly. God and Abraham develop a relationship that is startling in its portrayal of God as intimate and personal.

Historical data

Genesis 12:1-4 opens with God identifying Abraham, known at this point by his earlier name of Abram with the request to 

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.

Somewhere between 2000 and 1800 BCE, Abram, with his father Terah and their extended clan migrates from the Chaldean city of Ur-Kasdim, finally arriving at Harran, a town located in southeast Turkey. Although we don’t know the reason for this clan migration, this type of moving around is a feature of herding societies, often in response to changing climatic and grazing conditions. Abraham subsequently moves around the region between Harran and the Nile delta in response to drought and famine events. It’s only when Sarah dies that Abraham makes his first purchase of land at Machpelah near modern day Hebron. Here he buries Sarah in the Caves of the Patriarchs where later he himself as well as Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, are laid to rest. Rachel, Jacob’s principal wife is missing for she is buried in Ramah, north of Bethlehem. The purchase at Hebron is the first actual indication of the land that God promises Abraham and his posterity.

As a result of the explosion in archeological excavation following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, scholars came to believe that the Patriarchs were the personification of tribal units that eventually coalesced into what comes to be known more generally by Abraham’s clan name of Hapiru or Hebrews.

The story of the relationship between God and Abraham is the first story cycle in a series of story cycles that comprise the rest of Genesis. Abraham is remembered as the first of the Patriarchs, a title that descends from father to son through the story cycles of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; Joseph being the last of the Patriarchs, and with his story cycle the book of Genesis draws to its close.

Coloring in the outlines

Genesis describes the major events between Abraham’s leaving Ur until his death at the age of 147. The Biblical narrative is rather spare in that it speaks in the language of external events, i.e. he went here, where this happened, and he then did that and this, then happened – so on and so forth. We are fortunate in that we live in a period of time when the archeological data has greatly expanded our knowledge of the historical context for the Age of the Patriarchs’. Interesting and helpful though this is, we receive the story of Abraham and God as a story about faith, love, obedience, and responsibility. As a story of faith, it acts upon us as we color the external, historical events with an internal, imaginative meaning.

In Abraham God enjoys the kind of relationship immediately recognizable to our 21^st-century sensibilities. It’s more than a typical Biblical transactional relationship. It’s a relationship, which from our more psychological perspective is truly reciprocal in a modern relational sense.

God finds in Abraham the quality of connection originally hoped for in Adam and Eve. But as the subsequent events in the Garden of Eden reveal, this was not to be. Like the partners in a true relationship, God and Abraham are each capable of deeply affecting the experience of the other. God commands and Abraham obeys and so far this is not so startlingly different from what has gone before. Yet, in the developing narrative about their relationship, we discover something quite new in the way Abraham and God relate to each other. Abraham claims the authority conferred by relationship to confront and challenge God. Abraham engineers the changing of God’s mind with God conceding to Abraham, time and again. In Abraham, God finds a willing partner, who will also be responsible and faithful in a relationship that becomes the foundational template for covenant as the key expression of a relational theology.

Faith is what moves us from the life we learn with into the life after that. Abraham’s story is a story of the journey from one life to the next taken by the quintessential person of faith.

The God of Abraham’s faith

In our Lent program titled Going Deeper, we are exploring our engagement with faith as a public expression of our baptismal covenant that makes us accountable to God to work together for the renewal of the world.

Like Abraham, we don’t necessarily begin this collaboration with a completed sense or understanding of God. Like him, we continually discover the reality of who this God is, as we go along. Drawing on our tradition’s transgenerational experience of God as the fruit of the relationship between God and Abraham, we are led to our own generational –individual encounter with God.

Location, location, location – but where?

Christians, traditionally have believed in a metaphysical dimension in which God exists objectively, i.e. independently of our subjective experience or non-experience. We tend to no longer share an enchanted perception of this objective God’s physical location in places, objects, and people. We are by and large no longer super-naturally minded outside the genres of entertainment. The entertainment industry’s focus on the supernatural indicates that there is, nevertheless an unrequited need in us that our spiritual lives now seem unable to meet.

We are an intensely, relationally-seeking people. For some, this experience is a directly apprehended mystical experience but for most of us, and Episcopalians tend to fall into this category, God communicates through the sacramental story. The sacramental story is by its very nature a participatory story through which God becomes present and active in our lives and the events of our history. As we participate in this sacramental story we become shaped by it through worship and action. Sunday by Sunday and on the days in between we affirm our accountability to God, playing our role in the renewal of creation.

God told Abraham:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.

For Christians, the covenant God made with Abraham comes to a complete fulfillment in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is our transformational story through which God is now telling us:

Go from the life you learn with into the life after that – the new life I will show you!