​22 March 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
IV Lent
 
“As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.” (John 9)
 
PART I
 
            We return to scripture over and over again, because depending upon the circumstance, it always has something new and different to say to us.
            So it should come as no surprise, given our current situation of isolation and distance from one another, that in today’s gospel of the healing of the man born blind, the theme of relationship jumps out.
            We’re reading the story, which is quite lengthy, in four episodes, by way of highlighting the layering of relationship and healing that takes place within it. So in this first segment, what has happened so far is this: Jesus has come upon what we might now call a dysfunctional family system. There is a man who has been blind from birth, who is saddled with a sense of guilt that either he or his parents must have sinned, for him to have been born with this condition.
            Meanwhile the parents, as we shall see, have effectively disowned their son, and want nothing to do with him. As a result, he has been reduced to begging in the streets to survive. His status as a beggar also indicates that he is alienated from the community, for it too has washed its hands of responsibility to him.
            So it is into this fragmented human situation that Jesus comes, announcing that despite its apparent hopelessness, out of it will be revealed the works of God. From separation and alienation, something new is going to come that will not just reconcile the all-too human situation of familial estrangement, but redefine those very relationships in light of Jesus’ presence within them.
            And so what happens first? Quite simply, Jesus heals the man of his blindness, which is not only a physical restoration of sight but also a spiritual release from his debilitating sense of guilt. But then, rather than making a big deal of it—Jesus just quietly slips away to let the people to sort out for themselves what happened. And needless to say, confusion reigns—in fact, the degree of the man’s continuing alienation from the community is shown by how the people disagree whether he is even the same person. So let’s go back to the story and hear what happens next … 
           
PART II          
 
            In this second episode, the people have brought the man before the Pharisees, asking for their reading on what has happened. But now, yet a further degree of alienation is brought to light: focusing on the requirements of the Sabbath, the Pharisees are themselves blinded to the power of God that has been at work in their midst: they are alienated from the very God they think they serve.
            So uncertain of what to make of it all, they put the question back to the man himself: What do you say? And he responds, somewhat innocently, that he thinks Jesus is a prophet—that is, someone who is able to bring the ways of God and the needs of the community together in a single thought.
            Now, you might expect that the response to such a provocative assertion would be, “Well, then, what is his meaning?” But instead, the controversy only deepens as the Pharisees lapse into disagreement, and the people decide to draw the man’s parents into the inquiry. Let’s listen in …
 
PART III.
 
            So instead of sticking up for their son, the parents wash their hands of the whole situation, and leave their son to fend for himself—as they have always done. The man tries to reason with the now restive crowd, explaining yet again how it was that he was healed.
            But they now put themselves into the same boat as the Pharisees. The god they know, is the god of Moses—and to them that is a closed system that admits no change. And so, they demonstrate their own alienation from the dynamic power of God, by denying its legitimacy. The man tries to point out, that if Jesus were not of God, then he could not do what he does. But the people merely try to reassert the same old spiritual alienation from which the man has been healed, accusing him yet again of having been born in sin, and they drive him away …
 
PART IV.
 
            Jesus, having let the consequences of the people’s alienation play themselves out, returns to find the man whom he has healed. It’s a very touching moment, not unlike other crowd scenes where, when all the others have gone, Jesus is left with one individual: the fearful woman caught in adultery, or the one leper out of ten who returned to give thanks for being cured.
            The healing that Jesus has worked in the man was to reveal that where he thought he was spiritually isolated by guilt, he has been made free; and where he could not see because of physical impairment, he has been made whole. Jesus has in other words turned his world upside down, and it turns out that inside of it, Jesus has revealed to him another world in which isolation is replaced by relationship, loneliness is overcome by community, and self-reliance is transformed into interdependence. The man is now poised, having been healed himself (having been given this new vision) to work those larger miracles of healing within his family and community.
            So the meaning of this healing story, as I read it today, is to recall for us the multiple layers of relationship by which we in fact all live, and to remind us of the power we have be agents of reconciliation. At a time when we are all too forcefully reminded of the private, individual dimension of our lives, it is good to be prompted to remember that in Christ, we do not live in isolated huts, but instead inhabit a vast terrain that is the life Christ shares with us, because it is also the life he shares with God, where he gathers us all into one human community.
            Let me leave you with an image to ponder: while most of us are closed in at home for the next days and perhaps weeks, it would be a healing thing for us to do, to call to mind the immense desert landscape in which we live, thinking of it as a metaphor for the spaciousness and grace of the life into which God invites us to live together in Jesus.      
            We have, for years now, been told that we must protect our culture from the outsider; that it is right to put ourselves first; that we have no need of the other; that division and anger are to be cultivated rather than remedied and overcome. As a Christian community, however, we live by a fundamentally alternative vision: a conviction that in Christ, God has cleared a place where we come fully to know who we are individually, only by knowing fully who we are as a human family.
            If this is a time of rediscovering that fundamental truth—that we are all one—then perhaps these days will have been worth the price, for they will be in their own right, a great awakening of the Spirit.
              
At the announcements:
 
Lockdown
Br. Richard Hendrick, OFM Cap
 
Yes there is fear.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
 
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
 
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sounds of family around them.
 
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know
is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighbourhood
So that the elders may have someone to call on.
 
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.
To Love.
 
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
 
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
 
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
 
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
 
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
 
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
 
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
Sing.    

​8 March 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Lent
 
Jesus said, “No one can see the kingdom of God
without being born from above.” (John 3)
 
            We continue today with our Lenten theme of healing and reconciliation. Last Sunday, JP set out the parameters of those ideas in reference to Jesus’ own temptation in the desert.
            And so today, I want to focus in on one specific wound from which many of want to be healed: numbness, or that state of feeling overwhelmed mentally and spiritually by the current state of the world, and a feeling that there is nothing any of us can do about it.
            I’ve heard many people, over the last several months, speak of just such a numbness. It comes from the accumulated sense of ennui that has built up over the last several years — the sense of inescapable corruption and self-dealing on the part of our nation’s leaders, the distortion of truth, and most especially, the real human cost that these impulses exact on the most vulnerable among us. And I hasten to say, that the words I have used here could equally be applicable to persons on either end of the political spectrum. The sense of numbness affects us all.
            So, enter Nicodemus, the Pharisee who by virtue of his status as a religious leader must officially oppose Jesus, but who surreptitiously comes to Jesus by night, confessing that there must be something to what he is doing, since no one could do such signs apart from the presence of God.
            Jesus responds with one of the most often quoted verses in the Bible: “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (or “born again,” as some would have it). Now, in the Greek, the word here can equally mean either born “from above” or born “again,” so I just want to just set aside that latter reading, and focus instead on what it might mean to say that we need to be born “from above.”
            Nicodemus, of course, hears Jesus’ words in a literal sense: “How can anyone be born,” he asks, “after having grown old?” So then Jesus tries to push his imagination beyond the literal, saying that the birth of which he speaks is of “water and the Spirit.”
            And the introduction of the word “Spirit” here is the key to the whole dialogue. We are all born, in some sense, as a lump of flesh—biologically needy, and emotionally unformed. So the critical issue, as we grow and mature, is to what degree we allow the Spirit to inhabit that flesh, so that, as Rowan Williams has put it, our “flesh is made to be something more than a dead lump of untenanted material which lies around for other people to fall over.”[*]
            What Jesus is trying to help Nicodemus to see, I think, is that he is in need of healing—a healing that would open him up to being inhabited more fully by the Spirit so that he would be in real relationship with God and his fellow human beings, beyond being being held hostage by the pharisaical exclusivity in which he is trapped.
            And this notion of being inhabited by the Spirit gets to the very heart of the matter: in Nicodemus, Jesus is attempting to bridge the gulf between self and community that is the fruit of Nicodemus’ own alienation from the spirit of inclusion which is God’s way of being in the world. Only if Nicodemus allows himself to be gifted with the reconciling Spirit of relationship which is “from above,” will he find that which he truly seeks: eternal life—which contrary to popular imagination is not some sort of prize for right believing, but an integration of the self into the animating creative Spirit of all creation. That is what it means to be “born from above”: to become one with God’s loving purposes for creation, by letting God’s spirit inhabit our soul.
             And this is where the story of Nicodemus connects with our current sense of spiritual and mental numbness. That feeling of helplessness is something from which we, too, need healing, not unlike Nicodemus’ own captivity. It is easy, in these times, to fall into a certain despondency that is itself a form of “fleshiness,” where we struggle to find the strength within to resist the pressures without. Yet perhaps these pressures can themselves become the catalyst for us to open up to the indwelling grace of the creative, energizing, reconciling Spirit of God, rather than trying to rely on our own interior weakness.  
            Then these days of spiritual numbness will lead us into a deeper awareness of how our own flesh can give voice to the Spirit, which is first and foremost about building networks of relationship that speak of the underlying unity that is given to us in creation, rather than of the bitterness and suspicion that divide us.
            In fact, it might be said, that in all the stories of healing by Jesus, that is exactly what he is up to: the restoration or extension of relationship in community. We will see this played out time and again in the lessons for the coming Sundays of Lent: next week, in the woman at the well; then in the man born blind; followed by the raising of Lazarus. In short, this is a time not to back away from community and relationship, but to embrace it as the only place in which we human beings will ultimately find God’s Spirit at work among us.
             I was struck, reading this week’s obituary in The Economist, by the shear value of staying in the game, of letting the spirit inhabit our daily life. The obit was for Katherine Goble Johnson, a mathematician for NASA in the 1950s and ’60s, who as an African American—and a woman—and so encountered considerable opposition to her work. In 1953, as a fresh recruit, she faced the difficult task of challenging the accuracy of a senior engineer’s calculations, which she discovered were wrong because he had made an error with a square root. Very carefully, she asked her question. Was it possible, that he could have made a mistake? He did not admit it, but (as the obituary writer described it), “by turning the colour of a cough drop, he ceded the point.”[†]
            We are all in a time when raising the question, “Have we as a nation made a mistake?”, is hard to do. The numbness we feel from the volume of the negative response is overpowering. Yet we are still met with Jesus’ challenge that we must be born from above, that is, animated with the Spirit that raises us from the mendacity and divisiveness of our day, to a place where we know ourselves to be motivated by a God who draws us toward nothing less than wholeness, healing, health, truth, and reconciliation.
            John’s gospel does not tell us what happened to Nicodemus after his encounter with Jesus. He simply vanishes from the narrative—but later we do get a hint of what became of him when he defends Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and then again at the end of the gospel, when he assists Joseph of Arimathea with the burial of Jesus’ body. So evidently he was someone who took to heart Jesus’ teaching that he be born “from above,” and himself became a follower of Jesus through welcoming the habitation of his Spirit. For as Jesus says, that is what it means, to see the kingdom of God. Amen.


[*] Rowan Williams, “Health and Healing,” in Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (2017).

[†] “The Girl Who Asked Questions,” The Economist (February 29th – March 6th, 2020), 74.