March 6, 2005
By Jack Price

Composer Donald Beattie also taught a 4-6 grade Sunday School class.  They helped him compose a prayer for peace at the time of the first Gulf War.  So it was that some fifteen composers together wrote the words of the song Please Grant My Wish for Peace.  This song premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 1991, sung by the World Children’s choir.  Some of that prayer is as follows:

“Dear God created all, entrusted to our care,

When something’s done to make things better,

May I be there.

Dear God we’re out of hand, there’s war upon our land.

If you bring peace unto the world, may I be there.

Giving to others is what we must do.

Friends in all nations, we’re singing for you.

If I could change the world, all the people sing

All the people smiling. 

Dear God please grant my wish for peace.”

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus heals the man born blind.   Such an example of healing is remarkable in itself, but this story is about so much more.  It’s about the way the church relates to the world, the challenge of Jesus’ message, and how we live together as a community of creation.

We’ll do three things in this sermon.  First, we’ll listen and, hopefully, really hear the story itself.  Second, we’ll discover what it means.  Third, we seek its meaning for our own lives and for our congregational life.

Jesus had a gift for healing.  Beyond that, and the knowledge that diseases were understood in that culture to be spiritually based and morally charged, there is b. no way to know for sure what happened.  This is true of all the miraculous experiences told in the gospels.  That means you and I are pretty much free to understand the facts of those events as we choose.

There was probably some historical memory behind the story of Jesus healing a man of blindness.  For the purposes of the gospel of John, however, this story is told to convey the meaning in the faith experience of John’s community.  It serves to illustrate their experience of the living Spirit in their lives and in their community read back into the life of Jesus.  So, as we read this story, our task is to look for meaning in our own faith experience.

Jesus is walking down the street, in the course of living his life, when he saw a man.   By this, we are meant to understand that he really saw this man, in  contrast to the story of the rich man who failed to perceive the plight of the beggar Lazarus at his gate.

Jesus encounters a man who has been blind from birth.  This is a very clear statement that he was really blind and, through no apparent fault of his own, came into the world that way.  His disciples asked and it is not clear from the context if these are the twelve named disciples or another group of his followers.  What is clear is that these are not religious leaders trying to set Jesus up.  Theirs is an honest inquiry.  They assumed that somebody human is to blame for the man’s blindness

            “Rabbi, who sinned:  this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?”  After all, bad things don’t happen to good people.  In the mind of that culture, there was a direct causal link between sin and sickness.  For the Jews, this belief was based in Ex. 20:5 -- “I, the Lord, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation.”

            Jesus responded to their question with what seems to have been a frequent theme of his:  Jesus said, “You’re asking the wrong question.  He did not respond to the question about the cause of the blindness, but answered in terms of its meaning.  If life indeed is a pilgrimage, then our vision always seeks meaning.

Jesus continued:  You’re looking for someone to blame.  There is no such cause-effect here.  In other words, neither option is acceptable.  Bad things do happen to people not related to their badness or goodness.  The rain does indeed fall on the good and bad alike.  He said, Look instead for what God can do.  The experience of suffering and evil provides an opportunity to “see” God’s presence at work.

We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines.  When night falls, the workday is over.  “Working while the sun shines” was probably based on a proverb familiar to Jesus and his disciples.

Then, Jesus concluded, for as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light.  I am the world’s Light.” This  “light of the world” theme comes from John’s prologue and connotes for us the ability to see, to perceive, and to apprehend (not just intellectually) what Jesus represents.

Jesus did a curious thing next.   He spit in the dust, made a clay paste with the saliva, rubbed the paste on the blind man’s eyes.  Using spittle left Jesus open to charges of using magic according to Jewish law.  The mud, made with spittle, formed clay and was an image of the creation of man from “the dust of the earth”.  This was an anointing for healing. 

Jesus again spoke, this time with instructions and said, “Go, wash at the Pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “Sent”).  This is a reference to our Old Testament and Elisha’s direction for Naaman the Syrian to wash in the Jordan to be healed from leprosy.  Jesus doesn’t heal on the spot but sends the man to perform a task as a way of participating in his own healing.  The man went and washed – and saw.  Healing comes when we go, enter life, and discover and use our gifts toward our calling.

            What does story mean?  A blind man, sitting in darkness, is brought to see the light while the Pharisees (later in story) who thought they could see, were blinding themselves to the light and plunging into darkness.  The blind man is touched by Jesus at his point of his infirmity.  Through dialogue and reflection, he later comes to confess Jesus as “Son of God”.

The meaning for John’s readers probably involved encouragement to be true to the light they had come to see in Christ despite the world’s condemnation and persecution.  The question to anyone seeking wholeness and healing is, “Do you want to be healed?”  To participate in their own healing was to cooperate with the Spirit’s movement in their individual lives and their life together.

The washing was a baptismal image to the early church.  It was a sign of dying to old life and being born to new.  The healing was a sign of the new order, the new creation, becoming visible in Jesus and in all the blind being made to see.

What is the meaning for us in this story?  One point of meaning is to value our wounds, our handicaps in the broadest sense of that term.  We don’t have to like them and we don’t want to cling to them, but we can value what they mean for us.  Helen Keller once wrote, “I thank God for my handicaps, for through them I have found myself, my work, and my God.”   The places where we feel less than adequate, broken and handicapped, and unable to cope become the point of access for us to God’s healing.  Blindness was why and how the man in the story met Jesus.

Meaning in all the gospels’ living parables comes when we find ourselves in those stories.  Where do you desire healing in your life?  What would that healing be if it involved other than the cure of disease or the alleviation of symptoms.  Author Jim Cotter encourages us to, “Listen to the language of your wounds.” 

Experiences of healing in the gospels always represented something larger – the manifestation of God’s new creation in the world through Jesus.  How will the healing you seek serve as a sign of God’s new creation?  How will it change your life? 

“We all fear our symptoms and want to heal them.  We go to all kinds of healers, not realizing that our worst problem is not the sickness, but that we are hypnotized by culture into believing that what we experience is bad and has to be repressed and healed instead of lived and loved.”     --Arnold and Amy Mindell (Riding the Horse Backwords)

In terms of the gospel message, individual healing always holds the promise of God’s realm, God’s truth, breaking into our experience both individually and collectively.  It is not enough to be thankful for healing.  Healing needs to move us more in sync with God’s Spirit in the world.  Our individual experiences of the holy will only have meaning beyond ourselves when they help us move into a cooperative partnership with the Spirit who is working to bring wholeness (Shalom) in this world today

The big picture of healing is changing the world, transforming social order, even when that social order doesn’t want to be transformed.  The Apostle Paul wrote that creation itself is in the process of transformation and new birth.  It is groaning in travail awaiting the appearance of the children of God.  Jesus gave sight to the blind man as a sign that he is the Light, the vision, of the world.  The church exists to continue to point toward this goal of Shalom, of wholeness, and to be an active partner with the Spirit in bringing this about.  Such transformation does not come about by coercion or by force of arms.  It comes by our being an open space for the Spirit’s work.  The creation is waiting for the Spirit to show up in us. 

What can we do to change the world?  What can this congregation do to transform the social order and help to mid-wife the birth of new creation?  The most potent force for Shalom, true peace, is our own inner capacity to be at peace and to be peace.  For this, we can well learn from other faiths.  The Buddhist Thich Nhat Hahn, author of Living Buddha, Living Christ and Being Peace, has shared a simple and profound exercise for being peace by being present.  The first step is to breathe in and relax.  The second step is to breathe out and smile.  Do this throughout the day and hear his words as the truth of gospel.  They will help us transform society in the Spirit.

Children understand very well that in each woman, in each man, there is a capacity of waking up, of understanding, and of loving.  This capacity of waking up, of being aware of what is going on in your feelings, in your body, in your perceptions, in the world, is called Buddha nature [we call it Christ nature] the capacity of understanding and loving.  Smiling is very important.  If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace.  It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace.  It is with our capacity for smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

“If we could change the world, all the people sing, all the people smiling, dear God please grant our wish for peace.”  Amen.