What Do You See?

Scripture:        I Samuel 16:1-13,   Psalm 23,  Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

When I talked to the local leadership of the UCC a number of years ago to tell them, after many years as an active church member in another congregation, that I felt called to be a pastor, they sent me for psychological testing.  Now, it may sound like a commentary – maybe they were telling me that I’d have to be nuts to think I could be a pastor, or warning me in advance that I’d have to be nuts to want to be a pastor these days, and there’s some truth in that – but actually it’s a very important part of the process for weeding out candidates for ministry who may be destructive – there are plenty of religious sociopaths out there, folks who can other ruin peoples’ lives and destroy congregations without a second thought, quoting scripture all the while - and for pointing out potential dangers for folks who may have a sincere desire to be a pastor and who may have gifts for ministry, but who also have emotional issues that will trip them up and hurt any congregations they might serve if left unaddressed.   Part of the process involves looking at a series of ten inkblots and telling the evaluator what I saw in them, or what they looked like.   After staring at the first one and turning it sideways and upside-down, I gave the Captain Obvious answer, “well, it looks like an inkblot”.  I was told that wasn’t the answer they were looking for.   I remember that most of them, at least to me, looked like butterflies or moths, one looked like a mask, one looked a little like a giant with big feet and other lower extremities, small arms, and a tiny head, and so forth.  And I was encouraged to give more than one response to any given image – “well, it looks like a butterfly, but it could also be an angel without a head.”   The point of the exercise was that the inkblots were ambiguous – different people would see different things - and so what I saw in them reflected on my emotions and mental patterns at the time I viewed them.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus heals a man who had been blind from birth.  On one level, it seems like a fairly simple story:  Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who had been blind from birth.  Jesus spits on the ground to make mud, spreads the mud on the man’s eyes, tells him to wash in a certain pool, and when the man did this, he came out of the water able to see. 

It appears, though, that this man’s blindness, and Jesus’ healing of this blindness, affected the vision of everyone around him.  When Jesus and his disciples first meet the man, the disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  That is to say, who is to blame for the man’s blindness.  To us, it might seem like an odd question, as we know that people can be blind from an early age from any number of causes, for example, a birth defect, or something gone wrong in the delivery process.  But the popular theology in the time of Jesus said that God blesses good people with good things and smites bad people with bad things; that is to say, good things happened to good people and bad things happened to bad people.  But Jesus rejects this simplistic explanation, saying that nobody was at fault, but that the man’s blindness was an opportunity for God’s works to be revealed in him.  And indeed, God’s glory was revealed; this man who had sat in darkness for his entire life could now see.  Imagine what this would have been like – for the first time, seeing colors, seeing shapes, seeing some things near and others far away, seeing the faces of those who had spoken to him in the past, and being able to link up a face with the sound of a person’s voice.  For this man, it was like a whole new world had opened up.

After the man’s healing, the apparent blindness of those around him spreads.  Some of the neighbors who had known him as a blind beggar weren’t sure it was the same man – maybe he had a twin brother around who could see, and they swapped places.  Their mindsets just would not allow them to believe that this man who had been born blind could now see.  The man was brought to the Pharisees – one of the major denominations of Jewish thought of the day – and the Pharisees said that since the healing had occurred on the Sabbath, the healing was sinful, and the man who performed it was a sinner.  They couldn’t take in the wonder and mystery of what had just happened, couldn’t share the man’s joy at all the newness he was experiencing.  No, their mindsets said that no work was to be done on the Sabbath, and by their definition, healing was work, and so the healing shouldn’t have been done.  Even the man’s parents would only vouch that the man was their son and that he had been born blind; what Jesus had done they weren’t willing to touch with a ten-foot pole.   The religious leaders keep interrogating the man over and over again, and finally the man tells them that only someone sent from God could have opened his eyes.  And the religious leaders tell him “you were born entirely in sin” – there’s that simplistic connection between sin and illness again that we heard from the disciples earlier – and expelled him from their place of worship.   Jesus later catches up with the man and explains that he was the one who had healed him, and the man believed in Jesus.  And then Jesus says something that is both hopeful and chilling:  “I came into this world for judgment,  so that those who do not see can see, and so those who do see may become blind.”  And the Pharisees correctly guessed that the latter part referred to them.

What did Jesus mean by this?  He wasn’t threatening to strike the Pharisees with physical blindness – they could see with their eyes as well before meeting Jesus as after.  But, while their eyes were working just fine, their minds weren’t.  More to the point, their minds wouldn’t let them understand what their eyes were seeing.  They had just seen sight given to a man who had been blind from birth, and instead of feeling joy, wonder, awe, they felt anger and condemnation.  Instead of seeing a miracle, they saw a sin.  Jesus acted outside of the expectations of the Pharisees, and because of that, the Pharisees were blinded to the meaning of what Jesus had done.  Like the ink blots I mentioned earlier in the sermon, different people interpreted the healing of the blind man in different ways, and how they felt about it often said more about them than about the healing itself.

How about us?  What do we see?  How do we see?   Do we see?    Here today, our physical ability to see varies from person to person.  To my knowledge, nobody here today is totally blind.  Some of us can see colors better than others, some can see in the dark better than others, and so forth. Some of us need glasses and contact lenses to see what others can see without them. 

But there are many ways of seeing, and many ways of being blind.   And I’d suggest that in this wider sense, each of us here has the ability to see some things, and each of us here is blind to other things.  Some of this may be due to training.  While any one of us may be able to hear that our car is making a funny sound, it may take someone with experience as an auto mechanic to be able to look under the hood and see what’s making the sound.  Any one of us may be able to tell that we’re not feeling well physically, but it may take someone with medical training to know what’s causing the problem.

Beyond our specific training, our life experience – where we grew up, how our parents raised us, what we learned in school, our religious training, our employment, the newspapers we read or the news shows we watch – affect our vision.  We are often blind to things that are outside our life experience.  We who live in the city may not understand the problems faced by people in rural areas; and folks in rural areas may not understand urban problems.  I grew up in northern Berks County, an area with farms and small towns.  My family used to go to the Jersey shore – my mom loved the beach - and as we drove down the Schuylkill Expressway toward New Jersey – this would have been back in the early to mid 1970’s, Philly was just this smog-covered place where we held our noses from about the Manayunk exit until we were over the Ben Franklin Bridge, and while we were in Center City – this was before the Vine Street expressway - beggars would lurch out at our car, and so we’d keep the windows up and the car doors locked.  My parents would ask “how can people live like that”?  And growing up, that’s all I knew about Philadelphia.   All I knew about Philly was smog, stench, and being stalked by homeless people – which left me blind to 99.98% of Philly.  It wasn’t until I started working in the city, until I lived in the city for a time, that my attitudes changed.  I was blind to most of Philadelphia, but now I see – at least I see more than I did, though there’s still plenty that I’m blind to, and I’m still learning.  (And how did I end up pastoring a city church?  God must have a sense of humor….)

Our life experience shapes how we interpret what we see and hear, allowing us to see some things while being blind to others.  Often the news and other information we seek out just reinforces our views – back in the day, we all watched the same three news channels, but now conservatives watch Fox News while liberals watch MSNBC – and viewers who know nothing but what’s on Fox News or what’s on MSNBC live in bubbles, often unable even to talk to one another.   And based on what we hear inside our bubbles, we are often blind to how our actions affect others, for good or for bad. 

One of the gifts – a challenging gift, but it is a gift - of coming to a church like Emanuel Church is hearing different viewpoints and having our eyes opened to new realities.  I talk from time to time with my fellow pastors in Center City, and while they struggle to deal with much that’s going on, their congregations all tend to think a certain way – with few exceptions, their members all support certain policies and oppose others.  All they need to do is rally the faithful.  And, similarly, back in northern Berks County where I grew up, likely most of the pastors and congregations also all support and oppose a given range of policies, though likely very different policies than in Center City.  But here at Emanuel, while we’re a tiny, struggling congregation, we have a surprisingly wide range of life experience – old and young, married, living together and single, parents and nonparents, city and suburban, straight and gay, varying levels of education, employed and unemployed, immigrant and native born.  And we have a wide range of viewpoints.  Discussions about health policies, about education, about social programs, about law enforcement, about immigration policies, about environmental policies affect us – and affect us in different ways.  Because of this, our members can have conversations that may not take place at other congregations. And often talk of issues or policies can be very abstract - until its us, or a family member, or a close friend, who is affected.  It's at that point that an issue stops being abstract, and becomes real and visible to us.  So while at times it’s painful and frustrating, I’d encourage us to have those conversations, if we can; to listen as well as talk.  And I’d encourage us to talk, not about the garbage propaganda we see or hear on the cesspits of TV or talk radio, but our own life experience:  how does this or that issue or law or policy affect me, or affect you?   What do you see?  What do you hear?  You might be surprised what you hear.  You might be surprised at the realities to which your eyes become open.

Most of all, as Christians, Jesus is the lens through which we should see everything around us.  If we claim Jesus as Lord, our lives should bear at least some resemblance to the life of Jesus.  We’ve heard of the question “What Would Jesus Do?”; some people wear WWJD bracelets.  But the WWJD question isn’t just for Sunday morning.  It isn’t even just for how we deal with people in our personal lives.  The WWJD question – what would Jesus do – is not just for us as individuals, not just for the church, but for the kind of society we want to support.  If Jesus is Lord of all, then Jesus is Lord not just of our Sunday mornings, but of all things. So – what would Jesus do?  Who would Jesus bomb?  Who would Jesus deport?  Who would Jesus arrest?  Who would Jesus evict, or leave homeless, or hungry?  Whose water would Jesus pollute?   And these answers to these questions may not be simple – after all, for example, some people commit horrible crimes and need to be arrested.  But even though the answer may be complicated, we still need to be asking the question – what would Jesus do?  That question may clear away blind spots, may open up new ways of seeing, indeed may change our lives.

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see can see, and so those who do see may become blind.”  May Jesus open our eyes, that we may see the pain and the beauty that surrounds us.  May Jesus open our eyes to one another, and to our neighbors.  And where Jesus leads, may we follow.  Amen.

Thirsty?

Scripture:        Exodus 17:1-7,   Psalm 95,  Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42

This week’s reading is the 2^nd of two stories of Jesus in John’s Gospel that are as different as night and day.  And I mean that quite literally – the first – the story of Nicodemus’ meeting with Jesus, which we read last week – took place at night, under cover of darkness, while the second – today’s reading about Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well – took place at high noon, in broad daylight.  But there are other contrasts – Nicodemus, a respected religious leader, comes to Jesus with great self-confidence and on hearing Jesus’ words is reduced to confusion and silence.  Jesus comes to the woman asking for hospitality, in the form of a drink of water, and as their conversation runs its course, the woman is liberated to invite everyone she sees to come meet Jesus.  We may notice other contrasts as well, as we consider today’s  reading.

Some geographical and historical background:  Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus took place in Jerusalem, while Jesus had gone south from his home in Galilee to Jerusalem in order to celebrate the Passover.  In today’s reading, Jesus is on his way home, back north to Galilee.  Between Jerusalem in the south and Galilee in the north, however, was Samaria.  Samaria represented the remnants of the former Northern Kingdom of Israel, which had been conquered by Assyria many centuries before.  The Assyrians had exiled the elite of the northern kingdom of Israel to Assyria, and had settled people from other countries in their place, with whom those left in the Northern Kingdom of Israel intermarried.  The Samaritans were the descendants of these mixed marriages.  While Samaritans shared some religious traditions with Jews – both Jews and Samaritans worshipped the same God and shared the first five books of the Bible in common - Jews looked down on Samaritans as being not fully Jewish.  There were differences in religious observance as well; Jews believed God was to be worshipped in Jerusalem, while Samaritans believed God was to be worshipped on Mt. Gerazim, where their own temple stood.  This painful history resulted in generations-long feelings of hostility between Jews and Samaritans, and this history plays out in the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman.

So Jesus and his followers were on their way home from Jerusalem, and had arrived at a Samaritan city named Sychar.  Jesus had sent his disciples into town to buy food.  Meanwhile, Jesus himself was worn out and needed to “set a spell” – and so he rested himself at Jacob’s well, which was not only a place to draw water, but a place of religious significance to Jews and Samaritans alike.  We’re told it was about noon, and Jesus was alone…..

….But not for long.  Along comes a Samaritan woman to the well, with a jar with which to draw water.  While we’re told why Jesus was at the well at high noon, it would have been odd for anyone else to be there; women usually came to the well in the morning, when it was cooler, to draw water – in that society, drawing water was definitely women’s work - and also to converse and catch up on the news of the day.  Earlier that morning, many woman would have been there, getting water for their families and socializing.  Now, in the burning noonday heat, ordinarily nobody would be there.  Except today, Jesus was there…..and now, this woman who for some reason preferred to draw water when nobody else was at the well.  At this point in the story, we’re left to wonder why she would have wanted to come to the well when nobody else was there. 

So the Samaritan woman comes to the well, hoping to be left alone, and ….drat! – there’s a man there.  A Jewish man, yet, one of those who had always looked down on her and her kind.  Jews normally wouldn’t give the woman the time of day, but this Jewish man was asking her for a drink.  And so she responded, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”  And here’s a bit of ironic contrast with last week’s reading:  in last week’s reading, Nicodemus, a revered teacher, accustomed to instructing others, before Jesus was reduced to silence.  Here, this Samaritan woman, with no official standing whatsoever, acts as a kind of teacher to Jesus, several times reminding Jesus of the differences between their traditions, including, in this case, reminding Jesus that as a Jewish man he was more than a bit out of place in asking a lowly Samaritan woman such as herself for a drink.  Jesus responds to her words by making an offer to her of living water.  Once again, the woman acts as a kind of teacher, reminding Jesus that he has no bucket, and reminding Jesus that they shared some religious traditions by asking if Jesus is greater than her – and Jesus’  - ancestor Jacob, who acquired the well and whose descendents had drunk from that well through the centuries.  Jesus again makes his offer of living water, saying, “Everyone who drinks of this water – that is, the water from Jacob’s well – will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I will give them will never be thirsty.  The water I give them will become a spring gushing to eternal life.”  The woman takes Jesus’ words at face value, and takes him up on his offer of living water.

When the woman takes Jesus up on his offer of living water, Jesus responds by becoming a bit personal, as he tells the woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”  The woman responds, “I have no husband.”  Jesus responds, “You are right in saying you have no husband, for your have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.  What you say is true!”

And at this point, I think the Samaritan woman gets a really bad rap.   Judgmental sermons on this passage through the centuries have painted the woman as a serial adulterer, unfaithful to five husbands and shacking up with yet another man she hadn’t even bothered to marry.   And I think such sermons just plain miss the point.  Much more likely, the Samaritan woman found herself in her situation through no fault of her own.  We’re not told whether she had been widowed one or more times, or whether perhaps she had been infertile and thus had been divorced by one or more husbands.  In that patriarchal culture, a woman’s primary source of security was her husband; put another way, a woman in that culture was one man away from poverty, even starvation.  For reasons unknown, over the course of her life, she had been widowed or abandoned by five men, and was living with a man not her husband, doing what she had to do in order to survive.  Of course, the woman was not eager to share her painful story with a total stranger – in fact, she went to the well to draw water at high noon, when nobody else was there, so that her tragic situation wouldn’t become the center of community gossip – but Jesus, the light of the world, brought her painful history into the light of day – not to judge, not to condemn, but to empathize, to communicate his understanding of her situation. 

Of course, the woman is taken aback by Jesus’ words, and acknowledges, “Sir, I see you are a prophet.”  And then the woman brings into the light a point of division between Jews and Samaritans – we Samaritans worship here on Mt. Gerazim, but you Jews say we have to worship in Jerusalem.   Jesus responds by saying that God doesn’t care whether we worship on Mt Gerazim or in Jerusalem or anywhere else – and the day will come when neither the temple on Mt Gerazim nor the temple in Jerusalem will be places of worship but it matters how we worship, in spirit and in truth.  The Samaritan woman responds, “when the Messiah comes, he’ll explain it all to us.”  And Jesus responds by saying, “I am he, the one speaking to you.”  The woman is refreshed by the living waters of the Gospel that Jesus gave her – after all, she leaves her water jar behind – and she goes back to her city, saying, “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he be the Messiah?”   Before, she had been wary of people learning too much about her story; now, after a meeting with Jesus, she’s ready to share it with everyone she meets.  She becomes an evangelist to her city of Sychar, and many of the citizens of that city come out to see Jesus and come to believe in him.  Again, contrast with Jesus’ night-time meeting with Nicodemus:  Nicodemus, the officially approved teacher in Jerusalem, is brought to confusion and silence; by contrast, the Samaritan woman, who had been forthright in proclaiming to Jesus her own religious traditions, winds up becoming a teacher to her people, at least for a time. 

Thirsty?  The living water Jesus offered the Samaritan woman is the living water Jesus offers us.  We’re all thirsty for something – for love, for acceptance, for community, for healing, for connection.  And our society has us looking for water in all the wrong places.   As the old song says, money can’t buy you love.  All the gadgets the advertisers on TV try to sell us can’t buy us love.  Indeed, true love, true acceptance, true community cannot be bought.  Like those against whom the prophet Jeremiah preached, our society has forsaken the fountain of living water, and we have dug out cisterns for ourselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.

We also poison our own wells.  If today you can safely drink what comes out of your water tap at home, count your blessings, because fewer and fewer can.  It is a telling symptom of how sick our American society has become that, in the name of profit for a wealthy few, American communities are losing access to clean drinking water, a basic necessity for survival.  Think of the folks out in Flint, Michigan, with lead in their drinking water.  Or communities like Sacramento suffering drought, where water rights have been sold to large bottling companies like Nestle, leaving little for folks who just want to be able to drink what comes out of their water tap.  Is that too much to ask?  But you don’t have to go that far.  Here in Pennsylvania, fracking and construction of pipelines to transport oil and natural gas has made the water of many Pennsylvania residents undrinkable.  You’re not supposed to be able to light water on fire, but lots of folks in rural areas of Pennsylvania who live in fracked areas can do just that.  And many of the pipelines being built across the country – many of which will end here in Philadelphia, are being built to transport fuel for export.  So the fuel being transported in these pipelines won’t even go to benefit Americans.  The jobs promised by the companies building the pipelines are only short-term – and often to out-of-state workers.   Too often, the rosy promises made by the fracking and pipeline companies are lies.  Many suffer, so that a wealthy few can profit. 

The Samaritan woman, abandoned by five husbands and alienated from her people, became a teacher and an evangelist, leading her people to the Lord.  “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did!”, she said.  She has lessons to teach us as well.   All of us have parts in our lives that aren’t so pretty – Pastor Dave as well.  All of us have said and done things we’d rather not see published on the front page of the Philly Inquirer.  And on a national level, government and corporate decision makers often try to hide what they are doing, making decisions without input from the public.  But, as the saying goes, sunlight makes the best disinfectant.   Jesus invites us, as individuals, as a church, as communities, as a nation, to come, just as we are, warts and wounds and brokenness and sin and all.  Jesus invites us to bring our lives, the good parts and the not so good parts, into the light of day.  For those of us who are thirsty for love, for acceptance, for welcome, for community, for healing, for connection….Jesus says, “Come, just as you are”.  Like God providing water to Moses in the wilderness, Jesus will provide living water to us in the wilderness times of our own lives.  Come to the living waters.   Come, and drink, and be refreshed. 

When the Samaritan woman left Jesus, she left her water jar behind.  That heavy old water jar, that she had carried back and forth from the well day after day, she left behind.  She left it behind because she didn’t need it anymore.  Jesus had given her a spring of living water within her, so that she wouldn’t have to go back to Jacob’s well.  Jesus not only gave her a spring of water, but she herself shared that living water with those in her city.  May we, like her, come to the water and be refreshed and renewed.  May that fount of living water spring up in our lives, to refresh us when our journey is hard.  And may we, like the Samaritan woman, share this living water with all we meet.   May Emanuel Church be a place of renewal and refreshment, for ourselves and our neighbors, and all who pass this way.  Amen.