March 6, 2005
I think I’ve mentioned that in a couple of different settings here at First
that I love words—I mean, I love reading something well-written, or even
well-said, a sentence that gives texture and weight to an idea, or an
experience, or a moment in time. In my opinion, a not-so-impressive
story, or even pacing of a story, can be saved by great writing, but rarely
does it work the other way around, I think. I can’t suffer through a great
story that is poorly written, not matter how exciting the plot may be—but,
on the other hand, I’ve plowed through stories and novels that almost
bored me tears because there were moments in the novel when the
words just jumped off the page, or just really moved—a certain line
captured a moment so incredibly well—but when those great words were
actually stretched across the length of a story or novel, it just didn’t work
as whole, no matter how well it was written.
And so this love of words has translated into the weirdest of fetishes, to
be honest—I love good titles of books, I think getting the great title down
is half the job of writing a book, though I know that’s actually fairly
absurd. And let me be honest: just because I admire the title doesn’t
mean that I’ve actually read the book or actually have any real plan to
read that book with the great titles. You know who I think the one of the
best title writers is? The novelist Joyce Carol Oates: the woman can
craft a title! And I hear she is actually a good writer as well! Listen to
these titles: WE WERE THE MULVANEY’S, I’LL TAKE YOU THERE, and
my personal all-time favorite book title ever, in the history of the
universe: BECAUSE IT IS BITTER, BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART! Now,
THAT is great title. Have no idea what the book is about, but it’s a really
cool title. And one of my more recent favorites, a title that I think is really
great, and the whole reason I bring up this whole “really good book titles”
topic is Wally Lamb’s novel of a few years ago: I KNOW THIS MUCH IS
TRUE. I don’t know if I’m ever going to read it, but I tell you, when I’ve sat
with our exhaustive passage from John 9, it almost instantly this title
came to mind. Now, Wally Lamb probably didn’t have our blind man, and
the Pharisees of the first century in mind, when he wrote his novel, but I
think that title captures a moment in the Gospel reading we just heard
better than anything I’m going to offer you. And I swore to myself that
one day I would use this Wally Lamb title someday, somewhere,
somehow—and now, after spending a 5 minutes of your valuable time—I
have fulfilled my vow.
“I don’t know if this man is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I
was blind, now I see--I know this much is true,” so says the blind man in
this exhaustive narrative we heard minutes ago. This is one of those
classic passages in John where the narrator spends time with us, with
the us listeners and readers. There are huge chunks of stories in John,
stories told in details—the Samaritan woman at the well, we heard a few
weeks ago. Long, detailed stories where conversations go on and on,
and the person Jesus is talking always takes Jesus too literally, once
again, and then there is a pivotal moment in the text, where the Jesus is
affirmed as the Messiah—here, Jesus is affirmed at the latter part of the
text, and later in this Gospel, Thomas who had doubted the resurrection
of the Christ will fall to his knees, before the resurrected one, and
declare him to be lord and god. And though the affirmation, in typical
Johannine fashion, happens in the end of story with the blind man, there
is, I think, an equally important moment in our text today, when this blind
man gives testimony to what he knows, what he has experienced, what
he knows to be true at this moment in time.
And this affirmation of what this man knew, it is no minor thing, really, if
one remembers the background and lenses that John is written.
Overwhelmingly, scholars see John as the last of canonical Gospels to
be written and it is, in many ways, a clear product of the late first century,
when the great break between Judaism and the emerging Christian faith
happened. For most of the first century, throughout the Roman Empire,
the people who believed that Jesus was the Jewish messiah had
worshipped together in houses with each other, but many of them also
tended to worship in Jewish synagogues, since many of them also felt
themselves to be Jews as well. But as Judaism was seeking to find a new
way for itself after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, and Christianity
was becoming stronger, and perhaps more bold, in saying that Jesus
was the Jewish messiah, the tensions within those synagogues became
almost unbearable. Somewhere along the line, Christians were either
explicity asked to leave these synagogues or perhaps they felt they
unwelcomed, or perhaps these early disciples even felt frustrated
because they could not convince other Jews that this Jesus of Nazareth
was the Messiah. Whatever the way it happened, the Gospel of John
shows an almost animosity towards Jews, and, horrifically, has often
been used throughout the centuries as justification for anti-Semitism.
There is so much evidence in this Gospel that the community that
produced this particular story of Jesus is in deep pain, and is struggling
with the experience of being told that they were no longer part of the
Jewish family, in those synagogues.
And this story is, in many ways, the testimony of that community to its
experience of this Christ, this one whom they had come to believe in, and
whom they considered the fulfillment of Judaism. In fact, in many ways,
the story is about that inner dialogue within the Johannine community—in
the story, Jesus comes into the story at the beginning, and exits the
scene—and then re-appears at the end of story, after the large bulk of
the story happens, when the Pharisees grill the poor blind man and his
parents about the healing, in their attempt to dismiss the work of this
Jesus. This feeling of being constantly questioned, of being under siege
or at least being dismissed, informs this text, and the story even explicitly
implies as much in verse 22 when the narrator that the parents, in many
ways, betray their son, because the “the Jews had already agreed that
anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the
synagogue.” That fear and even hurt permeates the Gospel of John, as
this early Christian community deals with its feeling of being rejected by
its mother religion, and yet throughout the texts of John there are
moments like the moment I mentioned earlier, where the community
asserts itself amidst its emotional pain—it speaks to the truth it knows but
a truth it sometimes cannot sometime even explain or even defend: ”all I
know is that once I was blind, but now I see—I know this much to be true.”
The blind man says these words, but they are not only his words—they
are the words of a people, an early Christian people, who desperately
wanted to share their experience of what they have experienced to be
the truth. Despite all the pressures, despite all the dismissals, of all the
perceived threats, real or not, from their Jewish brother and sisters in
that first century, they tell their truth, their experience of God as
embodied in their experience of Jesus. The internal dialogue, the
attempt of forces within and without that early Christian community to
convince them that their truth was not THE truth, it didn’t work—in the
end, they didn’t believe what others were saying about Jesus—that he
was a sinner, that he could not have done what he had done—all these
people knew was what they knew, what they had experienced—“all I
know is once I was blind, but now I see.” And I just love that moment,
obviously, because it is the moment when this blind man, this community
under intense pressure, they gives witness to the truth as they know it,
the truth of their experience of God in this Christ. And it is also, I think
the moment when he, they, maybe we, we honor the truth that in the end,
our truth is always OUR truth, that especially in matters of spirit, we can
only authentically tell the truth of our experience, of what WE know and
have experienced to be true about who God is and the universe God has
created, and world as we have lived and love in it. Over the years, I’ve
asked a lot of people in the churches I’ve served to trust their personal
experiences, and that is no minor task, no minor work, especially when
people feel the world is arrayed against you in that work.
But I tell you, I don’t think the naming of our own personal spiritual
experiences is all that hard in our culture—I mean, this is a culture
immersed in self-revelation—reality TV, if anything is a testimony towards
our cultural willingness to let it all hang out, in all sorts of ways! And one
of the great things about this church is our willingness to speak out of
our own spiritual truths—we aren’t shy about saying what we do and do
not believe in this place, or sharing the truth we’ve each come to know
about God and the world, and that is something to be thankful for, I think,
and is probably one of the reasons many of you find yourself here.
So, I don’t think the real work for us is in the speaking of our respective
stories around spiritual truth, our tales of spiritual blindness and spiritual
sight. We Christians have gotten that down, in many ways, a couple of
millennia away from this early struggle of the church to assert itself, and
the truth of its experience. What I think we continue to struggle with is
not the attitude of the blind man in this story, but the attitudes of the
Pharisees here—I know I identified immediately with the blind man in this
text, in his speaking of his truth, but the more I sat with this story, the
more I began to think the work before us is found in the challenge that
the narrator actually gives the Pharisees, which is this struggle to accept
the stories of others, the sight and experience of others, the stories of
others and their experience of revelation. And I don’t think we Christian
liberals are exempt from this struggle to actually hear the stories of other
people’s experience of being blind but now seeing, of being in the dark
but now being in the light. We automatically assume that our more
conservative brothers and sisters have a corner on intolerance, but,
obviously, we can sometimes be just as smug as anyone and dismissive
of others in our worst moments when it comes to their experience of
faith. But, of course, the reality is that if we want people to hear our
stories of now seeing, of now being in the light, we might actually have to
give away what we want to receive, which is a listening ear, a willingness
to hear and sit with what we cannot understand, nor really agree with,
nor even really relate to. And, in my experience, it is one of the hardest
things, to do, to hear another, and not be threatened by the fact that
their story of revelation is not my story of revelation, their experience of
the Christ or of God is not our experience of God.
And of course, that is the hard work, isn’t it? The letting go of being right
about things, especially about matters of the spirit, of being comfortable
with a multitude of experiences and stories of revelation. We instinctively
don’t want to accept what other people see, especially if it doesn’t
correspond with what we see. And of course, that is what the Pharisees
were obsessed with this in this story: they were desperate to be right
about this Jesus, about the fact he was a sinner, and could not have
done this, and even if he done this, he done it at the wrong time, the
wrong day, etc. Their obsession was to dismiss this man’s experience of
being healed, and I dare say that, in their worst moments, that we would
rather have him had remain blind if he was not willing to see the world
and to see this Jesus the same way they did. That is how badly, I think,
the sickness of being right about had sunk into them—they would rather
have him blind than for him to see, to literally see, and to spiritually see
what he now sees about this Jesus. But we Christians have been no
better, in many ways, than these Pharisaical characters in the story, both
to those within the faith, and to those who are on the outside—there is a
deep irony that the complaint found within this early Christian story of
being rejected by Judaism because of their faith experience has so often
been replicated within our own Christian communities of faith that came
afterwards.
So, maybe, in our storytelling about being blind, and now seeing, maybe
we ought to continue letting go of our need for OUR story to be THE
STORY. We see what we see in this world, we experience blindness the
way we have experienced blindness, and we have a God that lifts that
blindness in a multitude of different ways, sometimes even in
contradictory ways. And that is OK. All we have to do in this world is to
share what we know, and what we see, and if what we see in this world is
different than what others see, if the light we are given is a different light,
then our task is to ask what the light looks like through the eyes of our
brother and sister. And the asking after and the hearing of, of other
people’s story of blindness and sight is not a dismissal of what we
ourselves see in this world, or an implicit agreement to see what others
see in this world—it is simply the work of hearing how the light might
shine differently in this world, or how the light might reflect through the
eyes of someone else. That is the hard part, isn’t it, making sure that we
let go of our need for light to shine the same way for everyone. Once I
was blind, but now I see—this is my story, this is what I know to be true
for me—and now, what about you? What do you know to be true about
God, about others, about life? Amen.
