August 22, 2010
The Blind Man - John 9:1-25
Pastor: Luke Maybry
Download“It was wood and it was white, and it was balanced like a box on upturned native stones. Its back snuggled close in the brow of a little hill, and the front, because it was level and true, stood several steps above the ground. The building stood in a grove of red oak and hickory nut trees, and the yard around it was hoed free of weeds and swept clean with dogwood brooms. Its windows, tall and narrow, were filled with squares of handmade glass… The steeple had no ornamental frills but was proportioned well to the size of the building… It was a one-room building, but should anyone think it crude or Spartan, let it be quickly known that this was the House of the Living God.”
Ferrol Sams starts his book, Whisper of the River, with that paragraph. I have similar images about Campobello First Baptist Church, my home Church. I don’t know if this is true for just me, or if it has something to do with growing up in a small town and especially being active in that Church, but it seems to me that things were and are simpler in Campobello, South Carolina. In fact, I try to get back there often for that very reason (though life is typically too complicated). I love the simplicity of it. I promise you that when I get off I-85 in Spartanburg and head north on HWY 176 and drive towards Hog Back Mountain, I can literally feel my headache vanish. I think it has something to do with the simplicity of it all, not just my hometown, and not even my childhood, but maybe, on some level, the simplicity of the faith that I once had.
This passage in John 9 is a simple passage. In fact, I greatly admire its dogged refusal to get complicated. Jesus and his disciples came across a man who had been blind from birth. The passage starts off with the complex question of why the man was blind. More specifically, whose sin created his blindness? That’s a million dollar question, isn’t it? Now if you can answer that question, why exactly anyone could be born with such a horrible malady, then, well, you’re a lot smarter than I am, or than anybody else is who has ever existed. Everybody asks that question and nobody has really answered it.
The story could have gotten very complicated there, but Jesus doesn’t even go there. He just heals the blind man. That settled that, didn’t it? Jesus then left until the very end of this passage, so most of it is just the formerly blind man. Everybody wants to complicate this thing, but, like Jesus, the blind man man refuses. First, the people from his town see him, and they just can’t believe it’s him. This is the same guy who used to beg day in and day out. It could have gotten complicated there, too, because I can’t tell you how many people come to our Church to beg. We’re not designed to directly help people like that, but I feel horrible just turning them away. It’s complicated.
That problem in that story was solved, though you see, at the literal blink of an eye when Jesus healed his blindness. So then the Pharisees got a hold of the man, and they said that that just can’t be. There is no way that Jesus simply just did that. Life is way too complex for that kind of stuff. Nobody understood more about either the human condition or God than the Pharisees. They were the subject matter experts. There’s just no way, the experts said, that that could ever happen. And besides, Jesus wasn’t supposed to be healing on the Sabbath anyway. Even an ordinary layman should know that. Even the blind man should know that.
So all the man needed to do to was to change his story and confirm to them that life is complex and therefore simple things like what this man said just happened were impossible. Therefore what little hope we have in this complicated world rested with the experts. Isn’t that right? If you have tax problems, then go to a CPA. If you have legal problems, go see a lawyer. If your heart’s out of whack, go see a medical doctor. The Pharisees were the experts then, and they knew that Jesus was a sinner. He just had to be. The man said that he did not know how he was healed, or whether Jesus was a sinner or an expert, or what exactly was and was not lawful on the Sabbath, or exactly how the complexities of life related to any of that. All he knew was that “whereas I was blind, now I see.”
It’s just all so simple. Even in all those times that the story could have gotten complicated, it never did. It’s like driving towards Hog Back Mountain. I can feel my headache vanish. Ferrol Sams begins his book with that paragraph that I read about that Church, but does not end it there. The book is about a boy who grew up in that Church and then goes off to college. At end of the book, the boy – all grown up now – finishes college just in time for the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Needless to say, after all that, the boy – the man now – has a decidedly more complicated outlook on life.
Doesn’t that always happen? We live in a very muddled world. Maybe it is true that we often muddle our own lives or own selves. I served a Church in Texas and most of the congregation there were cattle ranchers. Life seems so much simpler back there. But even there, it’s complicated. One of the things I love about children is their simplicity. It’s refreshing. But, being a parent is anything but simple. In fact, it’s so complicated that nobody really knows how to do it, not even the experts.
And yet this passage adamantly refuses to get complicated. I will say that John 8 is complicated. Go read John 8 and you’ll see what I mean. But go read John 9, and all we need to know is that whereas the man was blind, he met Jesus and then he could see. That seems to me to be the moral of this story. That’s it.
I personally have never bought the idea that faith solves our problems. The Church ought to be sued for false advertisement for suggesting that faith solves our problems. At the very least, it does not solve them quickly or simply. You’ve got a job that you don’t like, if you have one at all. Your parents are sick and require more and more and more care. Your marriage is in a rut. They’re building a Mosque blocks away from Ground Zero! We’re getting whipped in Afghanistan, so should we go home or send more troops? If we do send more troops, can we send you, or, better yet, can we send your children?
Faith does not give us easy answers. My headache vanishes when I drive up Highway 176 to Campobello, SC, but those questions are still there when I get back, along with the headache. Answers, it seems, are nowhere to be found. Karl Marx once called faith the “opiate of the masses.” Very much like a drug, we sometimes use faith to remove ourselves from the terrible complexity of our lives for a little while on Sunday morning. At some point, according to Marx, we hve to admit faith is a coping mechanism to help us get by. That’s all it is to him.
I’ll have to confess that sometimes it seems as though Karl Marx was right. We all know David Abernethy and we all love him very much. I cannot count the number of times that he made us laugh. We were all very sad at the news, then, that he had pancreatic cancer. We all knew that pancreatic cancer was bad news and that David was in for a long and hard struggle. And yet David persevered. He barely survived the initial surgery, but he did, and he got stronger. But then he started the chemotherapy, and it was just brutal. And then he got weaker, and then weaker, and the cancer spread to his liver. David suffered a great deal. His family did, too. This past week has been just horrible. It has to be the most helpless thing in the world to watch someone you love waste away. There are some things that you should never have to see, and that’s one of them.
David is certainly not the first person I have seen go through that awful journey, either. At least from my experience, when I look back on those things and when I help people look back on those things, they don’t realize how the world they made it. Somehow, even in the valley of death, there really is a God who somehow transcends all of that. Faith does not make it okay. The pain is real. The loss is devastating. You can’t just deny the pain and put on a happy face, but God still shows up. I think I’ve said this before, but for me it was the children. When Leah’s father died, our children and her brother’s children played together like they were long-lost friends. I’ll never forget that. Inside that house was horrible. But if you went outside that house to the swing set, well, it was just so evident to me that even in the loss, that God was there and transcending it. There was a greater reality, a greater presence than the pain.
None of that makes any logical sense. And, furthermore, none of that brings Leah’s father back, and it won’t bring David back. A happy face is a deceptive face and a happy faith is a deceptive faith and a simple answer is a wrong answer. But, somehow God does simply show up. In ways that logic can neither explain nor comprehend, God shows up. And, of course, God shows up in the good times, too. We are not in a state of crisis all the time. Most of us are doing pretty well. Our marriages are good, we like our jobs, our children are healthy and happy (even if they do work us to death), and we like our Church. Some of us are having the time of our lives. God simply shows up then, too. Again, I cannot explain that, but if you pay attention, it’s true. Maybe we have to be more consistent in our prayer life, or maybe we need to take a Sabbath on occasion. Maybe we need to go to Campobello. And maybe, God shows up in ways that we’d rather he not show up, like in judgment. I do believe that God has a way of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But in all of it, God shows up. Neither the good times nor the bad times are ever simple. But I do believe that at every point in life, God simply shows up.
“There were probably some people who thought themselves indifferent to that Church,” Sams went on to write, “but they all wanted it there. It gave a feeling of security and it guaranteed succession. Even the most outspoken cynic would have been uncomfortable and filled with foreboding had it vanished. It was needed right there, where it was, in the quietly supervising grove of Peabody, Georgia. The Church was hope and assurance; it was challenge; it was judgment. It was also comfort and benediction. The area would have been desolate indeed without it.” Indeed it would.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
