Beginning to See (3.22.20)

Beginning to See
John 9
March 22, 2020
Fourth Sunday of Lent

The trajectory of Lent this year mixed its metaphors, but that’s ok. We’re right at home given the zig-zagging, no-two-weeks-alike experience we’re presently living.  Four weeks ago, we were taken into the wilderness and introduced to this time-away-from-time, a place-away-from-place, and were told this time and place will enable us to have a deeper sense of who we are, who we were created to be, and how our very beings are linked to the Divine Source of all. It’s a tall order for a 40-day journey and sounded a lot more exciting when it was a poetic invitation and not such a literal one.

Now we really do find ourselves in time-away-from-time and place-away-from-place. And the prospect of being alone with ourselves and our thoughts and our spirit and our connection to God for weeks on end…may not sound as inviting. Almost as if he can hear our moaning doubts about all of this aloneness, John offers new metaphors.

The scripture laid out over the past three Sundays, had we followed them all, each had to do with light and dark, sight and blindness. Nicodemus, esteemed religious leader and curious seeker, reaches out to Jesus in the dark of night to ask his questions about the Way Jesus is not just describing but embodying. This is the story that gives us the most famous verse of the New Testament—John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…’ In this late night visit, Jesus tells Nicodemus he has to be born again, born in a different way, born from above by Spirit and wind and the breath of God. Nicodemus is, rightly, frustrated and confused and mesmerized by Jesus’ dancing responses to very straightforward questions.

Jesus is asking Nicodemus (and those of us listening in on his story all these years later) to LIVE the metaphors and stop trying so hard to comprehend them. His ability to welcome a birth of Spirit from above will be the thing that frees him to live out this transforming way through tonight’s darkness and into tomorrow’s sunshine. We want that, too. It’s not just enough to want it, of course, we have to practice and cultivate the ways of the Spirit. We have to welcome that light into our darkness.

And while we’re still pondering whether or not we can live the metaphors, we move onto the next one. The next week in the sequence was last week, and we needed to set aside the poetry of the Lenten path to name this uncertain time of exile in which we find ourselves. As we begin to adjust to this routine and this way of gathering, and as we allow our minds to consider that we may be here in this place awhile, I wonder what all of these images and juxtapositions in John’s gospel might offer the rest of our Lenten time.

From Nicodemus by moonlight, Jesus next encounters a woman at noon sitting beside a well. Jesus is on a journey with his disciples and stops at a well in the middle of the day, in a town that people like him didn’t frequent because it was a town of “others” to be avoided. Like the caste system dividing Hindus in India or the railroad tracks dividing one part of town from another, Samaria and its descendants were marked by 1st century Jews as unclean; a place and a people to be fully avoided.

And its there in that place that Jesus sees this woman for who she fully is, and she sees Jesus as the Way and Path that he is…not just that he describes but that he is. In trying to make sense of it all, the woman challenges Jesus and comfortably talks about theology and religious meaning-making with him. They actually have a little debate about where people can worship. The separation of the Samaritans had also moved them away from the religious life of Jerusalem. So which group was right? Worship on the mountain? Worship in Jerusalem. Which way is the Right way? And in their exchange, Jesus says, “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Maybe the place isn’t the part that matters but the spirit and truth. Maybe the religious practice isn’t want matters but the wind and the fire of the thing. For someone totally on the inside and in a position of power and importance, to recognize that the details are just details requires a shedding of some ego identity. It’s like being born anew, born from above because your sense of self is being completely made over. 

For someone totally on the outside, not just as a Samaritan but as a scandalized woman in Samaria, to be told that she herself has everything she needs to worship and experience the one, true God right where she is requires a shedding of labels and attachments and dividing lines. 

So a pillar of religious life in Jerusalem comes to Jesus by night and wants to know what his secret is. What’s the source of his bravery and his boldness? How are his disciples so full of light as they move through their days? What are they about? And the answer is a mystery of being born from above…starting a fresh life in the midst of this known life.

Then a woman who is at the margins of society in an already marginalized society sits with Jesus when the sun is highest in the sky. And in broad daylight, they talk about God and Spirit and Truth and rightness and wrongness and who owns the fullness of who God is and where God can be fully experienced and deeply found.

And today, John’s gospel combines the two scenes in the story of a man born blind. 

The man born blind had been forcibly removed from fully participating in life itself because his religious culture excommunicated him and labeled him a product of sin. He might dirty the window, so he can’t come in the house. He has to stay outside. Jesus sees him, though, and stops what he is doing to change the man’s story with a healing that looks a lot like a metaphor. He gathers up the most ordinary elements of life—the ones that don’t appear sacred to us at all—some spit and some dirt, and he makes a healing mud paste that upends the man’s life and expands the hearts and minds of the witnessing community. With spit and dirt rubbed across his eyes, the man is sent to wash himself in a sort of ritual cleansing—maybe something like a baptism of mud and healing waters—and he comes back home seeing the vastness and vibrancy of the world around him.

But the religious leaders don’t seem amazed by his sight. Instead, they are asking questions about the origin of his ailment. His blindness must be linked to sinfulness. If so, whose? Are Jesus’ healing actions sinful? What is the origin of sin, whose actions are sinful, who defines and names sin, who punishes sin, how is sin forgiven, how can sin be avoided. There is a flurry of panic about identities and actions that separate humans from the presence of God.

For John’s gospel, sin is a blindness to the work of God. So who is blind in this story? The Pharisees. The ones so dedicated to the individual acts of preserving their faith and maintaining the spaces of worship and sacrifice, so anxiously distancing themselves from their sin and everyone else’s, so fastly holding to their narrow and distinct interpretation of the law that they miss the essence of sin in their own lives and fail “to recognize God at work in Jesus.” They think they are the ones who see and get it and are calling the world to come and worship rightly. And in their noble efforts to maintain a structure that points to God and remembers God’s promises, they have lost sight of the essence and begun worshiping the structure itself. They’ve spent so much time and energy guarding the window of their worship that they’ve forgotten the purpose of a window is to be a portal; it’s an access point allowing them to look out beyond themselves.

Because they have gotten lost in a mode of anxious maintenance, they have lost sight. They have lost sight of the calling on their lives to be a witness to the world of God’s love. They have lost sight of the image of God placed within every person. They are so narrowly focused on preserving that they do not see people who are hungry and hurting and exhausted and terrified and alone and cast aside and feeling invisible and hanging on by a thread. They have lost sight of the old story that God scooped up dirt and breathed into it and created their very lives.

Friends, we’re in a remarkable moment right now of truly seeing. We are in a transformational thin space, forced sabbath time, and the radical clarity of life and death all at once. Do not squander this. Whether it’s 4 or 8 or 12 weeks of time-away-from-time and place-away-from-place, settle into this and listen for the lessons. What can we shed in this time that we thought was absolutely sacred and never to be released? What no longer serves because it simply can’t right now? How can we be radically born from above right now? What blindness is being wiped from our eyes and now allowing us to truly see the world and each other and our faith and our practice as they are? This is holy time with a stretched out clarity of what matters most and what does not. Embrace the lessons, friends. Embrace the metaphors. May we all begin to see.