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Seeing With New Eyes

"Seeing With New Eyes"

Gospel: John 9: 1- 41

When I was a little girl, there was a game I used to play. I would tie a bandanna around my head, covering my eyes, and try to imagine what it would be like to be blind. I would lose all sense of space, and would stumble around my room, crash into things. I read a novel about a girl diagnosed with glaucoma, how she lost her vision. It made a big impression on me, and I would blindfold myself, trying to get inside her experience.
I want you to play the game with me. I invite you to close your eyes, enter that inner world. Now, just sit with it for a little while. What do you see, in temporary darkness? What would it be like to be blind, from birth? We have memories of color. We think spatially. What would it be like to have no concept of color, no idea of 3-dimensional depth, no comprehension of the infinite variety and texture and hue of God's palette? Can we imagine having no idea what our mother's smile looks like, the twinkle in our father's eye? No orchids. No sunrise over the ocean. No butterflies or breaching whales. No stars silhouetted against night sky. No fuschia, lime green, or any other colors in that big box of Crayola crayons. Now ... open your eyes! Isn't it beautiful! Look at each other. Aren't you unique and lovely?! What would it be like to be blind since birth, and suddenly see? I think we would we be blinded by vision, overwhelmed with ‘technicolor' glory! I imagine we would be humbled by our own insignificance against the depth of the sea, the enormity of space.

The man at the center of our drama today felt this radical amazement. He was singing that line from Amazing Grace, "I once was blind, but now I see!" He was blown away by things we take for granted - birds and clouds and faces. He didn't see Jesus; Jesus disappeared. Jesus spit on the ground, made mud, and smeared it on the blind man's eyes, told him to go and wash. ‘Spit and mud' mercy and grace. It doesn't get any more basic and earthy than that. Jesus works his miracles in the muck and brokenness of our daily lives. And then he vanishes. He doesn't stick around to take the credit. It's not about his ego, or how great he is - he just wants to open our eyes to the power of God.

The man looking around in wonder like a newborn ... suddenly it's the Inquisition. It's like he's on Larry King, interviewed by nosy neighbors, religious authorities. They don't care what it's like to see for the first time - they just want to know who/what/when/where and why. Their sense of order and expectation is shattered. They see things in rigid categories of right and wrong, sin and rules and disobedience. This drama is about seeing with the eyes of judgment versus seeing with the eyes of the Spirit. The eyes of judgment have narrow, limited vision. The eyes of judgment are blind to the miracle. They get hung up on Jesus healing on the Sabbath. He must be a sinner! The man's disability must be from sin, his own or his parents. And when the man with new eyes challenges the eyes of judgment, they throw him out. Jesus shows up again to claim his new disciple, and says: the eyes of judgment are blind, and sinful; the eyes of the Spirit see the presence of God.

Seeing with the eyes of judgment. How often we do it. It is so easy for us to be like Pharisees, preserving order, keeping things in a box, missing the miracle. Judging each other is the worst sin. When someone doesn't fit into our categories ... our Confirmation Class heard a story last Sunday, when we visited the Islamic Center in Wayland. We heard about a high-school student, a US citizen, born and raised here. And in the days following 9/11, as this young man went to school and parties with kids he had known all his life, he was harassed and threatened, for being Muslim. The eyes of judgment. 15-year-old Lawrence King, an 8th-grader in Oxnard, CA recently came out to his classmates, told them he was gay. He liked to wear makeup, boots with high heels. Another boy brought a gun to school and shot Larry in class; he died on Valentine's Day, a victim of homophobia and hatred. At his funeral, the Presbyterian minister said: "God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex. Larry was a masterpiece." Seeing with the eyes of judgment; seeing with the eyes of the Spirit.

A character in the classic children's story The Little Prince says: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." At the end of today's drama, the man born blind recognized Jesus - not with his new eyes, but with his heart. He had never seen Jesus before, but, somehow, he knew he was in the presence of God. There is a kind of vision that has nothing to do with human eyes. Writer Anne Lamott has a very earthy spirituality, and she writes of a ‘spit and mud' mercy and grace that resonates with today's Gospel. She tells of a dark night, in a dark time in her life, when she was drowning in substance abuse, addiction and despair: She says: "After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, in the corner ... the feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there - of course, there wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond a doubt that it was Jesus." Seeing with the eyes of the Spirit.

Poet Reynolds Price had a devastating cancer of the spine. He writes about an encounter he had, with Jesus, in his essay Letter to a Man in the Fire: "In the first weeks of my return from radical surgery and ensuing depression, I experienced what I can only call a vision. It came on a morning just before my five weeks of scalding radiation began, and it took the shape of an utterly real dawn encounter with Jesus on the shore of the Lake of Galilee and then waist-deep in its water. As his disciples lay sleeping around us on the shore, Jesus silently beckoned me into the lake and, with handfuls of water, washed my ugly spinal wound and said "Your sins are forgiven." ... Since I was so obviously in the hands of a known miracle worker, I wanted my ten-inch tumor out of me and gone .... So I dared to push past forgiveness and to ask Jesus if I were healed - "Am I also cured?" ... after a pause ... Jesus said, "That too" and walked away from me." Seeing with the eyes of the Spirit.

Blessed are we who can learn to see with new eyes, eyes of the Spirit. Because there is a vision to see; Jesus, giving us what we need. This is a Savior who washes our wounds with his hands, a baptism of healing in a murky lake. This is a Savior who comes and sits with us in the darkest night of our soul. This is a Savior who gives sight to the blind, ‘spit and mud' mercy and grace. Thanks be to God, Amen.