March 6, 2005

John 9: 1-41

Credentials

Elizabeth Macaulay

There are plenty of people who feel as though scripture is long dead. They would have us believe that there’s nothing in it worth digging around in, these thousands of years later.

Well, I’d argue a bit about that.

Scripture is very much alive, infused with the power of the Holy Spirit, designed to give us a look again and again and again at how we are to live in relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with our God.

The story you experienced this morning is so alive with wisdom. The story of abundance made small and distrusted by folks who cared more about the letter of the law than about the living of love.

To begin.

We encounter a man who has not been able to see. Ever. He has been blind from birth. The disciples want to use him somehow as an object lesson. After they encounter him, they want to have him used as a teaching tool

Their assumption is straight out of the teaching of their time. That teaching is this:

If someone suffered physical or emotional pain or misery, it was a sign that God was punishing them. Surely the people suffering had somehow brought it upon themselves; earned the pain they were forced to endure.

It was the understanding in the time of Jesus that it made perfect sense to steer clear of anyone who was suffering. Because they were suffering, they were considered damaged goods, and surely not the concern of good folk who know better than to be caught sinning.

In the time of Jesus this was the way affliction was viewed.

In the time of right now, this is the way affliction is so often viewed.

I went to see a movie playing at the Edina Theatre called “Children of the Brothel”. The movie is a documentary film, which won an Academy Award for excellence. That award was well earned.

The true story is told of a woman photographer who chooses to live in one of the most notorious red light districts in Calcutta. What she discovers there are children. Lots and lots of children.

She decides that instead of merely recording their lives as an outsider looking in, she will encourage the children to record and reflect upon their lives through their own eyes. She decides to teach them about photography. They are given cameras and spend time taking pictures of the life they live, as well as analyzing what makes for fine photography.

Imagine, if you can bear it, the scenes these children witness daily.

What the documentary shares with us are a group of vibrant, curious, tough and tender youth who are exposed to a family business that seems impossible in its inclusion of children.

What the documentary shares with us are a group of beautiful souls who see amidst the stark real of their lives the color of poetry captured in the snap of a shutter.

And, what the documentary shares with us is a woman, the American photographer, intent upon freeing these children from their assumed paths, from their assumed taking up of the family business.

She wants to get them into boarding schools. She goes through an amazing gamut of paperwork and pleading and hoop jumping

The biggest obstacle for these bright and talented and engaged and smart children?

Their parents were acknowledged sinners in their culture. Outcasts. So the doors of many schools and institutions were automatically closed to these children whose parents were judged as sinners.

“Who sinned, this man or his parents”, gets asked yet today. Let us not believe otherwise.

What does Jesus do with that question when he is asked? He shrugs it off as the meaningless dodge that it is. He does not allow the fascinations of moral debates to distract him from what is truly essential.

What Jesus does it take the most elemental stuffs at hand – his spit and the dirt of the ground at his feet – and he fashions from those elemental stuffs the gift of healing.

He forms a healing salve of spit and mud and compassion and touch and the NOTICING of the pain of the other and he reaches out and smoothes it over the sightless eyes. He heals.

And again, the rule tenders are affronted by the unorthodox blurring of lines. The miracle of the healing is eclipsed by the snarling of those who have seen rules and proprieties violated.

While the healed man is trying to get their attention with the wonder of it all, the gathered religious elite mutter about the seemliness of this healing. You can almost hear them muttering through the ages…

I mean, really, this man we were so comfortable writing off as a sinner is healed by a man we know to be a sinner because he broke the rules and healed on the Sabbath and we wish he would stop being so excited about the sight he now has that he never had before because he is keeping us from figuring out how to protect our rules…. Ah, let’s just throw him out. His insistence upon telling the good news of this man Jesus is so tiresome – and dangerous.

And of course, the ones in need of healing, as Jesus later points out, are the religious elite – the ones who cannot see the good news of Jesus Christ. Even when it is cavorting and dancing and begging to be heard in front of them.

This story from scripture is so alive because this story is so alive yet today.

When we allow ourselves to cast any group out of the circle of our care because we say

“Well, they brought it upon themselves; they must have somehow sinned or they wouldn’t be in this position”, we are the spiritually blind. And oh, we need some holy mud to save our sight.

We are taking a special offering this month to support our local food shelves.

We are taking this offering because we know that all too often we allow ourselves to look past the hungry in our midst. We talk about them instead of touching them. We do our version of Pharisaic muttering about how these folks ought to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because by golly we did.

So what if we did? This morning’s lesson would have us to know that our judgments of who somehow deserves compassion are some of the worst kind of spiritual blindness.

We are not called to judge others and distance ourselves from those who are in need of healing.

We are called to take whatever we have at hand – our hands, our wallets, our compassion, our shared humanity and our huge hearts – and use them to mix up some healing for this world.

Figure it out. What is your version of spit and what is the dirt at your feet that grounds you and how are you going to mix them up so that you too with your Savior can be called a sinner; a person who dared to be a healer.

Let’s mix it up! From Calcutta to South Minneapolis, there is healing to be done.

Amen