"Surely We're Not Blind, Are We?" (Lent 4, March 30 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Lent 4.  March 30 2014.  St. Albans

Readings:  1 Sam 16.1-13; Ps 23; Eph 5.8-14; Jn 9.1-41

“Surely we’re not blind, are we?"  Tales of inconvenient truth and disorienting grace.

This week, the federal government released a report called “Invisible Women:  A Call to Action.  A report on missing and murdered Indigenous Women in Canada”.  In this document it was reported that Aboriginal women and girls are three times more likely to be the target of violent victimization than non-aboriginal woman and girls, and that the number of known cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women and girls in Canada is 668.  The report highlights “the silence that is part of the on-going trend of mainstream society with respect to aboriginal people” which has rendered these women “invisible”.

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

This week, on Monday, World Vision USA announced a change in its hiring policy to permit the hiring of Christians who are in same-sex marriages, as a symbol of Christian unity.  Within forty-eight hours, after relentless criticism from Christian groups and an organized campaign that caused 2000 child sponsorships to be withdrawn in 2 days, World Vision reversed its decision, apologized and asked for forgiveness from its supporters.

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

This week, thousands of people, including Fred Hiltz, the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, are gathered in Edmonton for the final national Truth & Reconciliation Commission event.  The TRC was established in 2008 in the wake of the Canadian government apology to indigenous peoples on behalf of all Canadians for the Indian Residential School System.  The Residential Schools System operated in Canada for over a century beginning in the 1870s. The two principle objectives of the Residential Schools System were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.  

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

This week in our gospel reading, Jesus heals a man born blind.  When the man who was blind but now sees refuses to criticize Jesus for breaking the Sabbath law, the leaders of the community, the Pharisees, condemn him for being born entirely in sin and drive him out of the community.  Then they say to Jesus,

Surely we’re not blind, are we?

In John’s gospel, Jesus is the light which shines in the darkness, the light which has come into the world, the light that enlightens all people.  This is not in doubt.  What is in doubt is our response.  When we see the light do we turn towards it, or do we turn away and persist in our blindness?

John uses the story of the healing of a blind man as a dramatic parable of what happens when light comes into the world.  Jesus is the light which has come into the world, full of grace and truth.  But as we see in today’s gospel, the encounter with Jesus is a disorienting grace and an inconvenient truth.

Grace is revealed in the healing of a man who was blind from birth.  It’s a gift of God, an act of goodness.  You would expect the response to be joy, thanksgiving and wonder.  But apart from the man himself, no one in this drama seems to be happy about it.  There is no cry of “how wonderful” or “thank God”.  Rather, the response to grace is confusion, division and suspicion.  I’ve often thought that the confused responses and interrogations would make a good Monty Python skit, that is until, I get to the part where the parents are so afraid that they can’t even celebrate the restoration of sight to their son, and then I get to the part where the man who was formerly blind is driven out of the community by the angry leaders.

Truth is revealed when Jesus gives sight to the blind man.  This healing is a sign that Jesus is from God.  Sometimes it takes a while for the truth to sink in.  The man who is given his sight at first refers to Jesus as “the man called Jesus”, then a bit later as a prophet, then in the second interrogation as a “man from God”, and finally he acknowledges Jesus as the “Son of Man” and worships him.  His is a journey of recognition.  Of learning to see.

For the Pharisees the response is very different.  For them the truth signified by the healing is too inconvenient, too disruptive, because it involves a violation of the Sabbath law.  To truly see what this healing signifies they would have to let go of their understanding of the Law.  They would have to let go of their understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Moses.  That would be hard.  These are understandings which provide comfort and meaning and coherence to their lives, understandings which guarantee their positions of power and privilege.  And so faced with a truth which is too inconvenient, too painful, their reaction is both tragic and predictable.  First, they try to deny that the healing ever happened.  But when that doesn’t work, when it is clearly established that this man who can see is indeed the man who was blind from birth, they shoot the messenger.  The bearer of the inconvenient truth is discredited, demonized and expelled from the community.  The grace was too disorienting, the light that comes into the world is too painful to look at.

This story is after all not so much a story of the blindness of the man whose sight is restored.  It’s much more a story about the blindness of those around him, of the Pharisees, who are not able to see what is really going on. 

But it’s also our story, and that’s troubling.  Like the Pharisees, we have a great need for security, for comfort, for making sense of things, for certainty.  We need to impose order on a world that sometimes seems chaotic.  We need to make meaning out of events that sometimes seem random, we need to feel we have control of our lives.  And in order to meet all these very human needs, we and our communities and our culture wrap ourselves in strand after strand of understandings and assumptions and rules and conventions and philosophies and conveniences until, strand by strand, we’ve wrapped ourselves into a cocoon within which we think that we see very well, but really we’re blind to the greater reality which lies beyond the silk walls that surround us.

And just when we feel safe and secure, something or someone comes along and rattles our world.  It might be that moment that your spouse tells you she is thinking of leaving when you thought that you had a good marriage.  It might be the call from the school that our kid is doing drugs, when we thought we had everything under control as good parents.  It might be that first allegation of abuse at the residential school system that we thought we had set up for the benefit of aboriginal children.  It might be the scientific evidence that the economic system that we thought would lead us to prosperity is actually destroying the planet.

It might be the dawning realization of a man like John Newton, the captain of an 18^th century slave-trading ship, that the slave trade is an abomination. 

How often are we comfortably wrapped up in our cocoon when all of a sudden, someone pokes a hole in our covering and lets light shine into our darkness.  It’s disorienting.  The light hurts our eyes.  At first we may feel that we can’t see anymore because of the glare, and we may react by attacking the one who poked the hole in our cocoon and trying to patch up the hole as quickly as we can.

How do we respond to disorienting grace, to inconvenient truth, to light that reveals the darkness?

I think that the message of this gospel is that the most dangerous place to be spiritually is to live in the delusion that you can see, that you are fully-sighted.  We have a great need to feel that we can see, to make sense of the world, to impose order on chaos and to feel that we have a grasp on things and are in control.

But the problem for us as spiritual beings is that we are called to be in relationship with others and with the one we call God.  And when we are in relationship we’re never completely in control.  Our way of seeing is never the last word. 

Especially when we’re in relationship with God, who is ultimately a mystery to us.  To be in relationship with God is to live in a constant state of disequilibrium, to be a pilgrim on a journey, not someone who has finally arrived.  We don’t have everything figured out and under control.  If we think we do, we’re blind.

But if we can acknowledge our condition as journeyers, as people who are not fully-sighted, as seekers, not possessors of the truth, then we can journey towards the light, knowing that it can enlighten our path and provide guidance on our way.  When we encounter Jesus, when we encounter disorienting grace in our lives, we can receive it as a gift, even if that means we need to let go of other things to free up our hands.  When we encounter inconvenient truth, we can rejoice in the truth, even if that truth is cause for lament as well.

It took John Newton the slave trader five years after he first encountered Christ to give up the slave trade, and another twenty before he started to campaign against it.  He wrote of his encounter with grace in the hymn which we know well.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. 

I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.

It took John Newton 30 years to write that hymn.  It has taken Canadian churches and Canadian society an even longer time to journey out of the blindness of the residential school system that we imposed on our aboriginal peoples.  Today in Edmonton is the final event of a process which was launched six years ago with the hope of healing the wounds and the blindness that were the consequence and cause of the residential schools system.  People will tell their stories.  It will be a time of inconvenient truth and disorienting grace.

Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.”   The light has come into the world, full of grace and truth.  May those of us who acknowledge that we are not fully-sighted turn towards that light and learn to see.

Amen.