"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after relentless criticism from Christian groups and an organized campaign that caused 2000 child sponsorships to be withdrawn in 2 days, World Vision reversed its decision, apologized and asked for forgiveness from its supporters.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.

Near Life Experiences (Lent 3, March 23 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Lent 3, March 23 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 17.1-7; Ps 95; Rom 5.1-11; John 4.3b-42

Near Life Experiences

It’s good to be back!  Last week, as many of you know I was away on holidays.  And for me it was a fascinating week.  Right around mid-February, like many of us, I was getting tired of this long, cold winter we’ve been having, and so I said to Guylaine, “I’d like to go somewhere warm for a week.”  And she told me, “I’ve got the perfect place.  There’s a yoga retreat right on the beach in the Bahamas, let’s go there.  Now, I’m not much of a yoga person, I don’t actually bend very much, but I’ve done a bit of yoga, so I figured, why not?  She booked the trip.

When we arrived, it turned out that not only was this a yoga place, it was a full-blown ashram, basically a Hindu monastery with a priest and monks and disciples and a couple of temples.  There was a strict discipline that we were expected to follow:  morning bell at 5:30, meditation and chanting at 6, morning yoga at 8, then finally we get to eat our first of two daily meals at 10am.  The diet was strictly vegetarian, no caffeine, no eggs, certainly no alcohol allowed.  A second session of yoga followed in the afternoon, then the evening meal, and finally evening meditation, chanting and lectures on various spiritual topics.

Now most of the people at the ashram were more interested in yoga than the Hindu religion.  You might describe many of the people there as seekers, and certainly most would fit into the ‘Spiritual but not Religious’ category.  And they were definitely into the spiritual.  There was a lot of talk about mystical experiences.  People would talk about their memories of past lives, of encounters with dead relatives, of their out of body experiences while in deep meditation, they’d talk about these things almost as easily as in this place we talk about the weather and the gas mileage of our cars.

And, I have to admit, for me some of it started to get a little weird.  When I’m told I can’t eat garlic or onions because they overstimulate the brain and prevent me from meditating, or when I’m told that my big toes have to touch each other in a particular yoga posture so that my prana or life-energy doesn’t drain out of my body, well sometimes for someone like me with a science background used to living in our practical, even skeptical world, sometimes it all started to sound, well, a bit “fluffy”.

I was ready to come home after a week.  And one of the first things I did when I got back on Monday was pick up my bible and have a look at last Sunday’s gospel, the one that I missed, and the gospel for this Sunday that we just heard together.  And you know what I get?  I get Jesus the mystic.  The guru.  The clairvoyant.  Saying fluffy stuff.

“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again”

“What is born of Spirit is spirit”

“The water that I will give will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”

“God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit”

This is the Jesus who has visions, who takes Nicodemus up to the roof top to have a vision of the Spirit, who looks around and sees what his disciples can’t see, fields ripe for the harvest.

This is the Jesus the clairvoyant, who can tell a woman everything that she has ever done without ever having met her before.

This is the Jesus who is so in tune with the Spirit that he knows that he must go to Samaria to meet this woman even though Samaria isn’t on the direct route from Judea to Galilee.

This is the Jesus whose brief encounter with Nicodemus renders him speechless and awestruck,  the Jesus whose encounter with the woman at the well transforms her life, the Jesus who transcends centuries of division between Jews and Samaritans with a few words.

This is Jesus the mystic, who tries to open our eyes to a whole new way of seeing that goes beyond, way beyond, the limits of our physical and material understanding of this world.

As it happened, the week that I spent on the ashram they were holding a conference on near death experiences.  Perhaps you’ve heard of this sort of thing, where someone’s heart stops, or they are in a coma, but they recover and when they come to they talk about something that happened to them while they were apparently dead.  Often people will speak of being out of body, sometimes they’ll talk about a tunnel, or a bright light, of their life flashing before their eyes.  For this conference the ashram had assembled a number of experts on near death experiences, or NDEs as they call them.  There was a psychiatrist who has spent the last 40 years interviewing thousands of people who claim to have had these near death experiences.  There was a neurosurgeon who claimed to have had his own near death experience while in a coma induced by meningitis and he’s written extensively about it, including a best-selling book called Proof of Heaven.  There was a rabbi from the Jewish Kabbala tradition and academics from the Jain religion, all of whom had their own take on NDEs.

It was remarkable.  To be honest, I don’t know what to make of it all, not having had a near death experience myself, but it was fascinating to hear about other people’s experiences and how they interpreted them.

But, you know, to be honest I’m much more interested in Near Life Experiences than I am in Near Death Experiences.  Because I think a lot more of us, in fact maybe all of us, have had near life experiences.  And in our gospels, from last Sunday and this Sunday, I think both Nicodemus and the woman at the well have an NLE, a near life experience when they encounter Jesus.

Let me explain.  When I talk about life here, I don’t mean mere biological life, the fact that we’re breathing and our hearts are still beating.  No, I’m talking about much more than that.  I’m talking about real life.  Life as God intended it to be for us.  The life that Jesus calls ‘life in the Kingdom of God’, or sometimes he calls it Zoen Aionion, the ‘life of the ages’ which we usually translate as ‘eternal life’.  It’s the life that Jesus is talking about when he says “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”.  It’s a life that’s available to us here and now, indeed as Jesus says, the ‘hour is coming and is now here’.

When I say that Nicodemus and the woman have a near-life experience when they encounter Jesus, that’s the sort of life I’m talking about.

Nicodemus is a teacher, a leader of the Jews.  But he’s looking for something, he’s a seeker, even if he is afraid to let anyone know it.  He comes to Jesus secretly, at night.  And I find it fascinating to watch Nicodemus’ progression as Jesus tries to open him up to the things of the spirit and tells him that he needs to be re-born.  Nicodemus goes from making a statement about Jesus, “we know that you’re a teacher”  to asking a specific question, “how can anyone be born after having grown old?”, to simply asking “how can these things be?” and finally to being rendered totally speechless in the presence of Jesus.  For Nicodemus, this movement from statement to question to speechless, this is actually progress!  This is a near-life experience.  But you also get the sense that something is holding Nicodemus back, something is preventing him from entering into this new life, from being born again.  Is it his need to be in control?  Is it his desire to be the teacher rather than the disciple.  Is it his fear of what will happen to him if his fellow leaders find out what he is doing?

When Jesus arrives in Samaria, he encounters the woman at the well.  Their’s is an unlikely, boundary-crossing, rule-breaking conversation.  Jews hated Samarians.  Men were not supposed to talk to women in public settings.  But Jesus has come all this way for this encounter and so he is the one who initiates.  She doesn’t initiate.  She’s something of an outcast, coming to the well in the noon heat of the day when she expects no one else to be around.  She is, in all likelihood, burdened with a deep sense of rejection and shame.  We don’t know why she’s had five husbands and now is dependent on a man who isn’t her husband, but surely her story, divorce, being left a widow, whatever the details are, surely her story is one of rejection and loss.

Their conversation dances around the subject of water.  And water is one of the strongest metaphors there is for life in the Bible.  This woman thirsts, but the well of her life has run dry.  Then she encounters one who reaches across boundaries to engage with her, who sees her, who knows her, and whose response to her life story is not the mocking and rejection that she has encountered in others but rather is compassion.  He knows her secrets but doesn’t turn away.  She recognizes him as a prophet.  She trusts him with the burning question about where to worship that has divided Jews and Samaritans for centuries and he transcends this division.

This woman too is having a near life experience.  Her thirst has suddenly and surprisingly been satisfied by a spring of water within her gushing up to eternal life.  And unlike Nicodemus who holds back, she crosses the threshhold into this new life, she leaves her water jar behind and runs and tells the people of her village “Come and see.” 

She leaves her water jar behind.  It is perhaps a symbol of whatever it was that was holding her back from life.  Was it her sense of shame?  Her isolation?  The drudgery of having to come and get water every day but never feeling that her thirst was satisfied?  Whatever it was that was holding her back, she left it behind.

My guess is that if you’re sitting here today, it’s because you too know what it is to have a near-life experience.  Maybe you’re having one right now.  Maybe as we read and reflect on these encounters with Jesus, we too hear the call to new life, to life in the kingdom of God, to abundant life, to life as God intended it to be.

So what’s your water jar?  What’s holding you back?  Are you going to hang onto it as it seems like Nicodemus did, or are you willing to take the risk of leaving it behind like the woman at the well?

We’re all having a near-life experience.  Jesus calls us into life.  What’s holding you back?

Amen.