Do We Want To See?
a sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers

1 Samuel 16:1-13
John 9:1-41 

Both our scripture passages today are fascinating stories of seeing and failing to see.  Of being blind and of having eyes opened.  Both also work on a larger level in practical application for us today.  For as much as we would like to believe that we are so far beyond the primitive people of David’s time, and the internal squabbles between the Jewish factions of ancient Rome, that we in our super informational, fast-paced, hyper-scientific age have got it all figured out, the fact of the matter remains that in many ways we are the Pharisees at the end of the story of the blind man that Jesus heals, saying with their same smug assurance, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”

In our first lesson, Samuel is grieving.  The first king that Israel has ever had, the king that Samuel himself anointed, King Saul, has been found wanting by the people and the Lord.  Samuel has boldly taken the word of Saul’s rejection to him, but is nonetheless brokenhearted that this is the way that things have turned out.

What follows is a great story – a story that Hollywood could love in much the way that it did the story of Moses and the freeing of the Hebrew slaves, or Jesus and his life on earth – except for one problem.  Most of the action takes place in Samuel’s head.  The two main characters in this piece are Samuel – and God!  Not exactly a great casting opportunity.

So here we are, in Samuel’s head, mourning over the failure of Saul as king and the Lord breaks in, “How long will you grieve over Saul?”  He goes on to tell Samuel to get over it and sends him to Bethlehem to meet the one the Lord has chosen as his new king.  Well, Samuel is terrified.  He knows that Saul will kill him if he gets wind of this.  So what does God tell him to do?  Lie!

God says to take a heifer to Jesse and tell him that he’s come to sacrifice to the Lord, and while he does that God will show him what to do and who to anoint.  So Samuel does it.  He gets to Bethlehem, he lies to the elders of the town who are really worried about seeing him there, and goes out to meet Jesse and his sons during the sacrificial ceremony.  He keeps up this façade throughout the passage, but meanwhile we hear this conversation go on in his with God the whole while.

Basically, it goes like this, “Gee, this one is handsome.  Is he the one, Lord?”

“No, no.  Don’t look at his appearance or how tall he is or any of that stuff.  I don’t look at that.  I see things differently.  You look at men on the outside; I look on the inside at their hearts.”

This goes on, son after son after son, until there aren’t any left.  At which point, Samuel, like the prince in the Cinderella story searching for the one whose foot fits the slipper talking to the stepmother, says to Jesse, “Is this everybody?  Are there any more?”

“Yes, there’s one more,” Jesse replies, “but he’s out keeping the sheep.”

Essentially, you see, this means the one who is missing is really unimportant.  He’s just a young kid who’s charged with watching over the stupid sheep.  You know sheep are stupid, right?  And that they don’t require anyone with great brains or skill or speed to watch over them?  That’s why people of ancient times would send out their youngest children and sometimes old men who had outlived all their other usefulness to watch over them.

Well, Samuel tells Jesse to send for David and as soon as he shows up, the first thing the author does is go on and on about how handsome he is.  As a matter of fact, David is described as “ruddy.”  The only other place in the Bible where this word is used is in reference to Esau and it means he has red hair.  It is likely, then, that David, too, was a redhead, and therefore had a kind of unusual beauty for those people in those times.  So after the Lord tells him not to worry about physical beauty, it turns out the kid has got it after all.

The Lord tells Samuel to anoint David and the spirit of the Lord comes upon him with the anointing.  He is beautiful, inside and out, and filled with God’s spirit before he becomes king.  Everyone was blind to David.  Blind to his value, to his potential, even perhaps to his physical beauty until God showed them who he was and their eyes were opened.

The second scripture lesson is one that is even more overt in its description of blindness being given sight.  We have a story in three stages; the first stage is the healing of the blind man.

Jesus and his disciples are walking along and become engaged in a theological argument.  An argument that centers around the Pharisaic belief of the times that the sins of the parents were visited on the children.  Jesus and the disciples come across a man who has been blind since birth and the disciples ask if the man was born that way as punishment for his parents’ sin.  Jesus immediately dismisses this explanation and offers another instead – that the man’s blindness is an opportunity to show the graciousness of God’s purpose.

Jesus then stops and spitting on the ground, he makes mud out of a mixture of his saliva and the dust and spread it on the man’s eyes.  Our first reaction to this is probably: Gross!  However, there was a strong belief in the ancient world in the healing virtue of saliva, so people Jesus’ day would not have found his actions unusual.  And in the tradition of John and his multiple layers of meaning, Jesus may have also been symbolizing the creative act of Gen. 2:7.  This is the scripture passage where God makes the first human man out of dust, and now we have Jesus making a paste of his own spit and dust which essentially brings a man to life who has not been a meaningful part of society up to now.

The funny, though, is that while Jesus’ act makes a man who is blind from birth able to see, Jesus himself doesn’t actually see this happen.  Instead he sends the man down to the River Siloam to wash the paste off of his eyes.  The word Siloam actually means “sender.”  The author of the gospel of John makes a point of saying it means “sent,” and maybe he’s referring to Jesus as the one who has been sent by the Creator.  On the other hand, Jesus is also the “sender” of the man to the river, so once again we have meaning inside meaning.  Jesus, the one who has been sent by God, sends the man who is blind from birth to actively participate in his own healing.

I wonder how many of us are blind today.  Obviously not in the literal sense of being blind, but in the figurative.  In the sense that we all have “blind spots” where we cannot see.  I would guess that every single one of us has places in his or her life that need a healing paste from Jesus.  And I would also guess that his expectation for each of us is that we also actively participate in our own healing process.  I ask each and every one of you now to think back on the past week or month.  Can you think of a moment where things got out of hand and you didn’t get what you expected?  A time when you thought everything was going along swimmingly but all of a sudden you felt out of your depth?  A time when you felt anxious or angry or jealous or afraid?  A time when you simply couldn’t see a solution to a problem or weren’t aware of how your actions were affecting others or when you just wanted to give up?

The famous preacher and theologian Fred Buechner tells a story of a time when he was going through a dark period in his life.  A time when he was full of anxiety and fear and uncertainty.  A time that the world inside himself seemed as filled with shadows as the outside world.  He was sitting by the side the road one day, anxious and alone.  As he sat there, he spotted a car coming down the road toward him.  As it came closer, he realized that the car had vanity license plate.  And that vanity license plate spelled out a message for him.  Of all the words it might have had on it, the word that was there was T-R-U-S-T: TRUST.  As it came close enough for Fred to read, it became suddenly for him a word from on high.  A word whose importance in the moment was unparalleled.  For he realized that the world is indeed full of shadows, both without and within, and the road is long and hard and often even hard to find, but that the Word is Trust.  Above all else, he was to Trust God.

This is the message that the blind man is given first.  He is sent off to be a party in his own healing.  Off to the river Siloam to wash away the mud from his eyes and ultimately open them without Jesus in his visible sight.  But he knows who is responsible for the miracle and he trusts in him.

But then we come to stage two: the Pharisees response to the healing.  The Pharisees are mad about this healing.  Yet even among themselves they are divided – there are those who angry because they interpret the strict letter of the law and say that making clay on the Sabbath even for medicinal purposes is forbidden; then there are those who recognize that if this is indeed a miracle – even one done on a day of rest – it still proves Jesus as a prophet worthy to be received.

They argue back and forth and then decide that the man must not have been born blind.  They call his parents in to question his identity.  You see, if they can show that he was never blind, the whole question of the miracle can be dismissed.  But there is no help from that quarter.  The parents testify that he is indeed their son.  They say that was born blind but refuse to go any further for fear of being put out of the synagogue, and tell the Jews that there son is of age – if they have further questions, they should be asking him.

So the Pharisees summon the man himself, but he is not afraid like his parents.  He is told to “Give glory to God!” which was sort of the “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God” of its day.  He doesn’t back down in the face of authority, thought, but is clear and courageous in his responses.  The battle goes back and forth between the two parties – the resilient healed and forthright man and the Pharisees who do not want any part of him or his Jesus.

The man continues to tell the truth in the face of great opposition from the powerful people in town.  He says to them, “Here is an astonishing thing!  You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.  We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will.  Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.  If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

The Pharisees answer him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?”  And they drove him out.

How infuriating, huh?  Clearly, the man whose eyes have been opened is in the right here, and he’s being treated outrageously shabbily.  He’s driven out of town and the bad guys win!  He’s been cut off at the pass, thrown out of the only community he has ever known, denied the miracle of his healing.  Doesn’t he have a right to be angry?  But wait, here comes Jesus to save the day.

In the third stage of our story, Jesus finds out that they have driven the man out and he goes to find him.  He goes to comfort him and to show him who he is.  The man responds, saying, “Lord, I believe.”

Some Pharisees are standing by and they ask, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”  Jesus answers them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin.  But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”  This sounds like doublespeak – it’s a tricky speech and we’re not sure what he’s saying.  But the crux of it is that Jesus is not condemning honest doubt here, but self-satisfied prejudice.  Jesus is letting them know that the Pharisees’ inability to examine their own sight leaves them more blind than those without physical sight.  Even the way the Pharisees word their question shows their blindness because it reflects the expectation of a negative response.

Jesus completely undercuts their expectations by inverting their definition of sin.  There is no link between physical blindness and sin.  Sin is defined neither by the presence of an illness nor the violation of the law, but by one’s resistance to God in Jesus.  In their immovable insistence on their own rectitude, the Pharisees demonstrate their own blindness and thus judge themselves.

Let’s go back a step to what Jesus tells the blind man.  He says that he “came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”  So get rid of your milquetoast Jesus who only loves everybody without evaluating their behavior.  Jesus says right here that he came into the world for judgment: those who received him became children of God; those who rejected him and persisted in their spiritual blindness were doomed to perpetual separation from the light of the world.  In this third stage of the story, the focus shifts from the healing miracle itself to the purpose of Jesus’ ministry as revealed in that miracle.  And ultimately, that purpose is revealed not so much in the miracle, but in our response to it.

After all, Jesus told us that “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  But do we really want to know the truth?  Do we choose to see or do we remain blind?  When faced with a situation where everyone is telling us we need to take a look at our behavior, do we take that look or do we remain in our own sin?  Do we think about change, and thinking, then enact it or do we stay the same?  When faced with a loss, with a mistake we’ve made, with a situation in which we’re suffering, do we blame and complain, or do we take the walk to the river Siloam and wash the mud out of our eyes?

The film director John Cassavetes one told a young director, “In order to catch the ball, you have to want to catch the ball.”  In other words, stop complaining about the lousy curves you get thrown and stretch, move, change your behavior to reach for new possibilities.

For we all need to make decisions about what values we want to honor, what spiritual practices we need to engage in, what kind of friends and neighbors and husbands and wives and daughters and sons we will be.  But decisions alone don’t cut it.  It’s not enough to walk to river and have our eyes opened.  We then have to commit.  We have to stand up to the Pharisees and proclaim to Jesus, “Lord, I believe.”  We have to take actions and be accountable for those actions.

This is a fundamental truth that organizations like Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous are structured around.  It’s not enough to say, I will lose weight or I won’t have a drink.  These groups and those like them are made up of people who’ve faced up to the fact that they can’t do it by themselves and have committed to help each other behave differently one day at a time.

David Watson writes, “Anything that is subject to human limitation or error requires the collegial presence of another person to ensure responsibility.  It is a fact of life.”  He further writes that in the movement associated with John Wesley, people met together in little communities to help hold each other accountable for their deepest values and most important decisions.  Wesley called it “watching over one another in love.”  Isn’t that beautiful?

But with beautiful came responsibility.  Before you were allowed to enter the community, you would be asked a series of questions to see if they were serious about living in mutual accountability.  Imagine if I were to ask these questions of you as you join our church community today:

·        Does any sin, inward or outward, have dominion over you?

·        Do you desire to be told of your faults?

·        Do you desire to be told of all your faults – and that plain and clear?

·        Consider!  Do you desire that we should tell you whatsoever we think, whatsoever we fear, whatsoever we hear concerning you?

·        Do you desire that in doing this we should come as close as possible, that we should cut to the quick, and search your heart to the bottom?

·        Is it your desire and design to be on this and all other occasions entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart, without exception, without disguise and without reserve?

Can you imagine honestly answering yes to these questions?  Yet thousands of people in Wesley’s day did!  Because they knew they could never grow into the people they wanted to be without help.  Without help from those in their Christian community who loved them and they loved in return.  Yet somehow over the years, the desire for being held accountable, for being told the truth about our behavior and our tendency toward sin has been weaned out.  Even if we are told that our behavior is inappropriate or unacceptable, we tend to slough it off and think the problem is with the teller and not with ourselves.

So I ask you today – do we want to see?  Or do we want to remain blind?  Do we want to stretch ourselves and reach for that ball?  Or do we want to remain in the comfortable, thoughtless, simple lives that we have?  Do we want to consider ourselves, as the Pharisees did in our scripture lesson, good and proper people of God because we show up in church every week and do what we’ve always done?  Or do we want to grow into the people, the sighted, exciting people that God intends us to be?  Because if we do, it means the whole world is going to change for us.  It means we can’t stay the same as we’ve been for 17, 42, 65 or 92 years.  It means that we look, we listen and we walk a new walk.  Because the story wasn’t over on the day that the blind man was healed.  No, folks, the story was just beginning…and if we choose to open our eyes to our own blind spots and take the steps in faith to amend our ways, then it’s just the beginning of the story for us, too.  No matter how old or how young we are, no matter how good or how bad, how sinful or sinless, there is always room for improvement.  So I leave you with this thought today – do you want to see?