Sermon for the May 21, 2002, Commencement of the Seminary of the Southwest

The Rev. Dr. Roger Paynter, Adjunct Professor of Homiletics at the seminary and Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church in Austin.

John 9:1-11

The ninth chapter of John is pure drama. It's comic and tragic with all these characters coming and going. The whole chapter can be laid out in seven scenes, dripping with irony according to scholars. But mostly it just refuses to stay in the book or be pinned down in long ago Palestine. It keeps jumping off the page, insistently saying to us, "Watch this story unfold in your own time and space."

It's all about what happens to this person who had never in his life been able to see. His eyes had not failed him somewhere along life's journey. They were dead in his skull from the beginning. At his birth, the midwife held him in the light and yet all was black fog to him…and black fog is all it has ever been. His world consists of sounds and smells, tastes and touch…but not one drop of color… no sense of a sunset, not a single memory of a human face. He sits by the street with a bowl and he begs. Along with the occasional coins, he catches threads of conversation as people pass by. And on this particular day, he overhears something cruel from this little klatch of men soon to be known as the "first Christians." They are talking about him as if he cannot hear. They are speculating about his moral failure…or his parent's moral failure as cause for his blindness. He can surely hear their little theological seminar being held at his expense. "Teacher, who sinned…this man or his parents?"

I hope he knows the reason they do it…and I hope he knows better. You see, they need for the world to be neat and tidy. They need it all balanced between cause and consequence. God must rule with a complete set of laws and all of them must be fair. There can't be any room for random, senseless suffering. I mean, we can't have a universe birthing monstrous unexplainable evils on its own, God forbid!! So, let us save our sense of the neat and tidy and let us do it by rushing to cast blame. Let us comfort ourselves with somebody else's fault. "It's the evangelical's fault. It's the liberal's fault." "Well, what can you do? It's their OWN fault!" "Oh…it's ALL my fault!" How dreadfully efficient we are in the ugly art of blaming. "Teacher, who sinned?"

But now comes another voice into the dark space of his life. It's a truer voice. And it says incredible words. "No one sinned. Quit the blaming. It's only about what we can do with this. Will you really stand there, spouting theories on why there is suffering when we might DO something for his good and God's glory?"

And the next thing the blind man hears is the sound of spitting.

And then he is startled feel a warm, gritty paste being smeared across his eyes, applied by very firm fingers. The Voice, now right in front of his face says, "Now, go and wash in the pool of Siloam."

That's it. That's all the Voice says. No promise that this will result in the man's eyesight. None. Just this: "Here's mud in your eye! Now go wash off."

And oddly, oh so oddly, the blind man goes off to do it….goes tapping along the way, feeling his way through the crowds, down city streets, aimed in the direction of the famous pool. And when he gets there, so as not to fall in, he crawls the last few feet. Then he pulls himself over the edge and plunges his face into the cold water. He washes the mud from his useless eyes…eyes which now suddenly, wonderfully HURT by the light glaring on the water. And in that light, the man is stunned see reflection of his own astonished face.

Now, I don't know Hebrew word for "Woo-Hoo!!" but I am just sure that is what he said! Surely he hollered and laughed and shot tears out of those new eyes as he ran from person to person to person, saying, "I see you and I see you and I see you and you and you." And like a small child he said to a tree, "Oh, your green is gorgeous!" And he shouted to the sky, "So THIS is blue! Oh my!"

And then he made his way back his old begging station, looking (he can't believe it, really) for ONE who had sent him into sight. But no such person was there. The man with the new eyes doesn't get to see his healer. He learns his name. He recalls the voice and the touch. But just like you and me, he now proceeds "absent a memory" of Jesus' face.

But now, here's the big question. If you have been blind every day of your life and all of a sudden you have been given new eyes, AND, if you have family and neighbors and folks from the synagogue who all get the news, how do you expect them to respond? Isn't it obvious? Somebody should throw this man a party! There should be hugs and kisses and "high fives" all around. People should swarm him with words like, "We're thrilled for you" and "we praise God for this" and "Man, tell us how it feels to see the world through brand new eyes" and "Look, we call this purple-'whatcha' think?" and "Have you gotten to the baby yet? Come over here and look at this baby. Isn't she lovely? And look your eyes are younger than hers."

You would think they would have said and done things like that…but none of them did. First, the neighbors gossiped about him, then quizzed him on how it was done. Then the "keepers of the faith" turned on the inquisition. "How was this done? And who did it? And when did he do it? On the Sabbath?!! This can't happen on the Sabbath. It's bogus. Therefore he was not really born blind. We'll just go and ask his parents. Oh, you say the parents say he WAS born blind. All right then, it's a different kind of trick. And this Jesus…this Jesus is 'out-of-bounds.' He is an unauthorized, non-ordained, irreligious, non-seminary graduating, law-breaking sinner, don't you agree?"

And the man says…the man says, "I don't know." He says it more than once. They asked him, "Where is Jesus?"
"I don't know."
"Well, this Jesus is a sinner."
"I don't know. I don't know whether he is a sinner. You ask me all kinds of stuff, which is so odd since you know so much and I don't know anything you're asking for. I just don't know. But I do know one thing. I was blind…and now I can see."

Okay, I'm beyond the boundaries of my text. But in this drama there are too many of the wrong kinds of experts. The disciples are experts at sniffing out gossip. The man's parents are experts at non-involvement. And the Pharisees, just like the disciples, are experts on how God is supposed to work. They speak the language and have degrees and hold all the memberships and are quite sure they know the ways and means of God.

Yet, from all these kinds of experts, the man keeps himself brilliantly ignorant. He is fine with all he doesn't know because he standing solid on the only knowledge that finally matters…the expertise of actual experience. And the expertise of true experience will trump the expertise of theory every single time.

Without a doubt, one of the hardest things in the world is to make room for true and fresh experiences that revise our working assumptions. One of the saddest ironies of the church is that we who were launched by the most astonishing explosion of radical, wildly liberating experiences of God in Christ and the Spirit fell so fast and so far into being analytical or cynical or cautionary or worst of all, moralizing. Even the most faithful among us can be so terrified by new revelation, perhaps even dreading new forms of the Spirit's power.

Richard Lischer teaches homiletics at Duke Divinity. He writes that years ago when he was pastor of a Lutheran church, one of the pillars of his congregation stopped by to share the news that he had been "born again." Lischer said, "What?"
"Yep" said the man. "Last week I visited my brother-in-law's church, the Running River of Life Tabernacle, and I don't know what it was, but something happened and I'm born again."

And Lischer said, "You CAN'T be born again! You're Lutheran and you're Chair of the Board of Trustees!"

There is an old prayer out of Scotland that goes, "O God, we pray that we will never find ourselves in battle on foreign soil. But if we do and if our maps do not match the terrain…Lord, help us believe the terrain."
In this text we have witness a drama that has repeated itself for centuries. It is a drama in which religious people, confronted with unexpected terrain, cling all the harder to inadequate maps. "God doesn't work on the Sabbath. Jesus is wrong because he breaks commandments. Look, it's written here on the map and we don't have anything else."

Thinking then that they are serving God, Jesus, whose very hands formed the clay of new life, is rejected. And in the process, the man with new eyes is excluded because his life contradicted their assumptions.

Listen…as you leave this place and this chapter in what I hope is an ongoing process of formation and education, will you agree to this one thing? Will you agree to stay open to fresh experiences of Christ? Will you stay open to the revision of old assumptions of what Christ may do or ask or give? Will you stay open to all the ways the Spirit may yet shape you as a disciple? Will you stay open to all the places the Spirit may take you as a radical witness of this faith?

And, will you stay open to each other's experiences as well, no matter how different they are from your own. You see, it's quite all right not to understand how someone found new sight, but it is crucial to ask them what they are seeing now. It's part of the homework required for the faith…to listen and to learn from the expertise of someone else's experience.

But above all, be expert at the experience of your own faith, your own life, your own thinking, and your own heart. Far too many of us, ordained or not, can have the most liberating experience of God only to lose it under the awful barrage of inner voices, saying to us, "Be careful…don't upset the vestry…remember your weaknesses…oh, you'll make a fool of yourself…this could hurt your career…who am I to say such things?…" And on and on and on and on….

And then there's the equally difficult fact of facing all the people around you who simply cannot understand or who will not go with you and thus, will make you wonder, "Am I crazy?…am I on the right path?…. is it worth it to keep on going this way?" And maybe your best answer will be to say, "I don't know...I don't know…I don't know….I don't know…but this much I do know…where I was once blind, now I see."

Stay true to this desire you have this day to love God and follow Christ and be stretched by the Spirit. Live into it. Let it make you as sharp-eyed and sassy and trusting as the man in the story.

And then notice one thing more. When the "know-it-alls" gave him the boot, and when he came sliding to a halt from their "heave-ho", he discovered that they had thrown him into the very Presence of Jesus, whose face he could finally see.

May you be just as true to your own eye-opening experiences ….