This sermon was preached at Union Congregational Church in York Beach, ME
on Sunday March 19, 2023
It draws from Psalm 23 and John 9: 1-5
Whenever God chooses to do a new thing…there is a time of great turmoil. When God–the Creator of Heaven and Earth–chooses to do a new thing, it generates a lot of controversy and conflict between the way things have been…and the way things need to go. This goes on until there are a faithful few who learn how to walk with God, guided by Christ’s light…and a new world is born.
That’s what is happening in our Gospel story this morning. There’s a blind man who serves as the perfect canvas on which the disciples, the Pharisees, every person in Jerusalem can project their own attitudes and feelings about human frailty. He is just living his life, minding his business, and everyone assumes he is the evidence of a sin. Either his parents sinned before he was born, or he did some foul deeds in the womb…and that is why he was born blind. This was the common thought of the day: sickness and disability were punishments from God for sinning. This was believed so deeply, that certain people could be identified just by what was wrong with them. Can you imagine? They believed that sin was God’s punishment, and that sin was immutable, unchangeable; and they also believed sin was contagious. As soon as Jesus healed the blind man, they start accusing him as well, “He’s a sinner too! Healing on the Sabbath!”
For Jesus, this man and his blindness were the exact right metaphor to describe his larger mission (1): As God’s Word in human form, the Light of the World, Jesus was sent to illuminate God’s ultimate plan for humanity. This had never happened before, The Divine taking on the form of a human, and demonstrating for all who are willing to pay attention the fullness of human life…living as One with God, with one another, with our whole selves. John’s entire gospel plays with this imagery of light and darkness. The way he tells the story, God’s new thing in Jesus was not new at all…but a continuation of the work that had begun at the dawn of creation…a work that will continue until the final days of the earth…the work of grace healing, forgiving, redeeming, uniting all of Creation.
And the people could not get on board. The signs of light done through Jesus just kept leading to controversy and conflict. And who can blame us? Human beings have earned our place in the world through the use of particular tools that are unique to us in the Animal Kingdom: problem solving, logical argument, scientific experimentation. This is our primary way through the world as a species. This is how we learn to tie our shoes, it is why we choose to live and work in the ways we do, it is also why so many of us in our later years continue to struggle with memories and traumas that occurred in our youth. We see what has come before and we use that as a basis for what to expect in the future.
In this particular story, Jesus challenges this way of seeing. He tells everyone that their basic understanding of sin is wrong…they are not seeing the full beauty of the world as God made it to be. He invites them to give up their regular eye sight to begin seeing by the Light of the World. When seen through the Light of the World, sin is not permanent, it is not a disease, you can’t even say it’s a bad thing that humans choose to do…the Light of the World reveals the ultimate meaning of sin is to contrast with God’ grace.
What do we mean when we say contrast?
I invite you to close your eyes…and imagine your favorite sunset. Make it as vivid as the evening you saw it. Picture the various colors…the shape of the horizon…where earth and sky begin to connect…maybe there were clouds…maybe there was water or a mountain…picture the fullness of that wondrous sunset…and then consider…what made it so powerful to behold?
A sunset is a natural wonder in contrast…earth, sky and sun…light and shadow…below and above…a sunset is composed of many unique, diverse things standing alongside one another at the same time…and as each individual component shapes and highlights the others…we are bowled over by God’s abundant glory.
What if we could see sin in this light? What if we no longer thought of sin as a threat to God’s grace…but as the contrast that allows us to see what grace looks like in human life?
I learned this teaching from Paul Tillich, a German theologian who was active before, during and after World War II. In the wake of the atrocities of the war, Tillich was called by God to question everything we thought we knew about humanity, the Divine, and cosmic justice. He wrote vital works like “The Courage to Be” and “The Shaking of the Foundations.” In one of his most powerful sermons, “You Are Accepted,” he brings deep wisdom to the conversation of sin and grace (2). “Sin and grace are bound to each other.” Tillich suggests a helpful clue in the interpretation of the word sin, “separation. Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone…to be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation: separation among individual lives, separation of a [person] from [themselves] and separation of all [people] from the Ground of Being.” That is how Tillich articulated who God is…the Ground of Being…that without which nothing would exist.
Which of these experiences of separation resonates most for you?
For me…separateness from myself…that has been a state I’ve been in for too long.
Tillich invites us to see sin and grace as bound together, informing one another, defining one another like light and shadow in a sunset. He goes on to preach, “We do not even have a knowledge of sin unless we have already experienced the unity of life, which is grace. And conversely, we could not grasp the meaning of grace without having experienced the separation of life, which is sin.”
This is what God revealed to us through the life and light of Jesus. Sin is not something we do…it is a natural, temporary, state of being. It is not a permanent stain, it does not contaminate God’s good creation. To see sin in this way is to be blind to God’s ultimate power. The Light of the World casts the shadow of sin in sharp relief against the backdrop of God’s unifying light…demonstrating the beauty and wonder that await us when we learn to live with the Divine, rather than seeing our blessed lives as being against the Divine.
In Psalm 23, we find powerful teachings about God’s power to be with us in our lives. This beloved psalm…the one we most often turn to in times of grief and mourning, depicts God as a Good Shepherd…someone who allows us to live our lives as we see fit…someone who knows there must be times of separation, for us to go out to grow and explore, to make our mistakes, to forage for food and build families…and this Good Shepherd is willing to wait for the perfect season to come out and scour the country side to find us…to walk with us…to lead us beside cool waters, to lie us down in green pastures…to protect and nourish us. We remember the meaning of Jesus’ name, Emmanuel, “God with us,” and we remember the promise of the angels, “with our God, nothing is impossible.” When we are willing to accept that God is not resting far away from us, casting down judgment upon the wicked, tossing small pieces of mercy to the deserving…when we are willing to accept that God walks through this world with us…we begin to see brand new possibilities for how we might live with God…and we begin to envision brand new hope for the world.
So…why do I feel called to teach you this today?
Because it’s happening again. The sun is setting on a particular era of the world…God is doing a new thing…and those of us who like to look to the past to try and live into the future…we find ourselves coming up short.
So there is conflict and controversy as we try to name what is good and who is valued and how we care for one another. We are mired in countless cultural, political, scientific and economic struggles as we try to use our old world tools and understandings to map a course for a world that God has yet to birth.
This is just what the season of Lent is intended to do…to give us a liminal space…a place in between the known and the unknown…where we might see a little more vividly what God is doing around us and through us. Your congregation has been in an extended liminal space, these last years as you’ve wrestled with the realities of the pandemic, while searching for a new pastor, and determining a new course to travel as God’s Beloved People in York Beach.
So as the sun sets on a world we once knew and understood…let us take time to prepare for God’s New World…the new dawn to come. Let us see one another, not as threats or enemies or competition…but as partners on the journey. Let us stand together, united…not pretending to be the same, but allowing our many gifts and passions to contrast with one another. Let the sun set on a long season of separation, so we might learn to walk with God by the Light of Christ, and illuminate for others the promise to be found in the unity of all life. Amen.
BENEDICTION
There are times we are separate from one another…there are times we are separate from God…there are even long stretches of time we are separated from ourselves…and as Tillich teaches, “Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belongs to life.”
(1) From Adele Reinhartz’s commentary on John 9:5, “Jesus is viewing the man’s blindness and later the restoration of his sight as symbolic of the spiritual journey from darkness to light, from unbelief to belief.” The Jewish Annotated New Testament, p. 177
(2) “You Are Accepted” is one of the many works collected in Paul Tillich’s book The Shaking of the Foundations, first published in 1948
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