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.