Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer

By The Reverend Dorsey McConnell

The Fourth Sunday of Lent

March 6, 2005

Text:  John 9: 1-38 

I always thought I saw pretty well until I tried to see fish.  Trout, specifically, in Western streams where God has made them the same color and size as the little melon shaped balls of granite that form the river beds they call home.  On this particular morning, on the Roaring Fork of the Colorado River, my guide pointed about twenty feet ahead of me and said, “Put your fly there.”  And I said, “Where?” and he said, “There.  About six inches in front of his nose.”  He might as well have been pointing to angels.  I couldn’t see this fish for the life of me, and as I stared through the skin of bright water rippling forcefully from the horizon to just above my knees, I suddenly was so disoriented, I could not stand, swamped in blindness and vertigo.  I was falling over, for no good reason except that I just couldn’t make the connection between what he was telling me and what I saw, and this was the price of it.  In that long, weightless moment of freefall, at the threshold of unconsciousness, I suddenly felt myself seized around the arm by a titanium grip, dragged back up through my confusion into the clear air, and made to focus on the grinning face of this young man. “Steady, sir,” he said. “It’s just a different kind of light.  It takes a while to get used to it.  Trust me.  I won’t lose you.” 

            I discovered that day, that seeing must be learned.  It isn’t something natural.  You can have the best vision in the world and be completely blind.    It isn’t true just on a trout stream, but in life as well. You start to see the truth about yourself, about your world, and about God, when you allow your senses to be awakened, when you are taught this reality by someone who knows it.  It is a lesson so important that it ranks with the half-dozen or so other lessons God insists we learn on our way to becoming human.  

            The story Saint John uses to get this across is one of the most intricate and moving narratives in the whole Bible.  There once was a town, John tells us, named Jerusalem, in which just about everybody thought they could see.  There were a few exceptions, of course, among them a man who had been blind from his birth, a man everyone loved having around as much as they loved holding him in disdain and contempt.  By the counterexample of his lifelong blindness this man was living proof, not only of everyone else’s vision, but of their virtue as well.  This was what a sinner looked like, they told themselves; born in sin and doomed to sin, he was an enormous comfort to those around him who, because they could make it off the curb without stepping in front of a bus, were able to conclude that God had blessed them and that they were basically good people.  They even enjoyed speculating what it was this man (or his parents) had done wrong to fall so far from grace.  So when Jesus heals the man, he sets into motion two journeys that move irrevocably to their appointed end.  

            The first is the journey of the man from darkness into light.  It is true that he “comes back seeing” but at first he really doesn’t know what he sees.  Like me that day on the river he hasn’t made the connection between what is in front of his eyes and what his guide is telling him.  However, the connections soon begin to dawn on him, and grow as the story progresses.  Initially, he thinks the man Jesus has simply given him his eyes.  As he wrestles with this new reality, he is moved to declare Jesus a prophet.  And finally he claims him as Savior and Lord.  This would all be more comforting if his healing, and his growing knowledge and insight were accompanied by the joy of his friends and family and the support of his church, but in fact the reverse is true. This is the second journey in the story, a deeply ironic and sad one, for as the man progresses from blindness to sight, his community moves inexorably from darkness to deeper darkness.  His parents desert him.  His clergy upbraid him.  His testimony is so gentle and winsome (Is there a finer moment in the New Testament than when he innocently asks his judges if they also want to become disciples of Jesus?).  Yet the authorities cast him out as the reward for his purity and integrity.  That is the last and darkest irony.  In the end, the man does not know where he will live or what he will do, but he knows who he is.  He sees God clearly and is safely in the company of Jesus, whereas his community has sealed its own judgment, turned off the lights for good, all the while telling itself it was doing the right thing.   

As with the blind man, so it is true for us that seeing must be learned.  But since getting there means first admitting that you don’t know what you’re looking at, most of us settle for blindness.  We don’t like the humiliation, the vertigo, the danger of falling that comes with confessing how much we cannot see.  We prefer to live in a world where we persuade each other that we see quite well, thank you very much, given the circumstances. And here is the most terrible thing:  we help each other stay blind.   We don’t love one another across the wounds we have suffered at each other’s hands.  We neither challenge nor bear with one another in the ways we should.  We negotiate a kind of contract around our diminished expectations of God, of one another and of life; we agree we will not probe too deeply into those daily, small evasions, desperations, and dishonesties that together add up to so much of our lives, as though we all were slogging through a quagmire but had together agreed to call it ice-skating.  Of course there will be those who can’t manage this game, who try it for a long time, but in the end just can’t get the hang of it.  Sometimes, that is more than a little sad.  

            Yesterday, I heard again the story of a man named Tony.  I heard it from Carol Anderson, Rector of All Saints in Beverly Hills.  (Nearly twenty-five years ago, Carol was my rector, a wonderful teacher and mentor.  She also sponsored me for ordination; it was an act of blind faith, and I have always been grateful).  Carol had been the curate at Saint James Madison Avenue.  During her ministry there she met and got to know Tony and his wife.  They were there in their pew almost every week, among all the other polished people of that very wealthy parish, and Carol dined in their home.  She remembered them as pleasant and attractive, but beyond that she couldn’t say that she knew them well.  A couple of years after she had left Saint James, she received a phone call informing her that Tony had taken his own life.  He had simply walked out of a 15^th floor window, falling to his death.  He left behind a note.  It read, “I just couldn’t make the connections.”  

Hearing this forced Carol to ask herself a devastating question.  She wondered whether she had ever said anything from the pulpit that might have given Tony a reason to live one more day.  She thought of the adult education program at Saint James, some of which she herself had taught, for example the class on the liturgical year.  Was there anything in the liturgical year that might have kept this man going?  She doubted it.  So she resolved from then on to preach to the Tony’s of this world, to see the task of proclamation as something a person’s life might depend on, to take that seriously in what she did and what she said.  

            As I heard the story again yesterday, I recalled the first time I had heard it years ago. And I remembered that I had some unfinished business.  The first time I had heard it, it so moved me that I wanted to write a letter to Tony.  But I never got around to it, and eventually it passed from my mind, until yesterday.  So I came home and finally wrote the letter.  I am enough of a high churchman to believe that we are joined in prayer with those who have gone before us, not in a spooky or occult way but trusting that, in the providence of God, the hearts of the living are mysteriously connected to the souls of the dead.  I don’t know how it works, exactly, but I trust that God can get the message where it needs to go, to do what needs to be done with this, even as I share it with you now.   

Dear Tony;  

I am writing this because I know that all time belongs to God, that in him what is past is not past, and the future is as intimately known to him as an old sweater.  So I don’t think it’s ever too late to pray, for you or for anyone else.  The bonds of the most terrible things any of us has done, our most crippling fears, our most tragic wounds, shatter like glass under the power of the Resurrection; and if time bends (as Einstein pretty well showed it does), then I think the eternity of God can wrap every moment of it around the globe of his mercy, no matter what you did or when you did it.  

That’s, in the first place, why I am writing: to assure you of this.  You said, in your note, that you just couldn’t make the connections.  I understand, a little at least, what that looks like.  Half the time I can’t make them either, and a lot of the rest of the time I just try not to think about all the sense I can’t make of the world.   If I thought my life depended on my making the connections then I know I’d be done for.  What keeps me going is having some evidence that God has made the connections for me, and that he then invites me to see my life the way he sees it, connections and all.   

Across all the chasms, he has thrown bridge after bridge.  I don’t get how he can connect my sin to his glory, but he has; my despair to his hope, but he has; my pride to his innocence, my greed and hate to his love, my anger and envy to his mercy and peace, but he has bridged all these things.  I believe that in the body of Jesus he has thrown himself across the immeasurable gaps that separate all these mysteries, has grasped both sides and asked me to cross over by literally walking on him.  So, I do, day by day.  By degrees I am learning to do this, learning to see my way, as though for the first time.   

I am a slow learner, Tony, but I have found that as a guide this Jesus is endlessly patient, endlessly kind.  And though I know you are no longer in the body, I believe that the soul has eyes, and that even now, if you haven’t already, you can say to Christ, “Give me my sight,” and he will.  So I pray that God will give you grace to see the connections he has made and by means of them bring you safely to him, across the same bridge we all need and long for.   

I also write to ask your forgiveness.  I know you never knew me, but when Carol spoke of her own question over whether she had ever preached a word that might have given you a reason to keep going, I saw my own sin.  We preachers are sometimes timorous animals, Tony, and the churches we lead often follow suit.  For some reason we like to believe that the stakes around what we say and do are not so terribly high, really, that sin isn’t all that bad a problem, less like death than like a neglected garden gotten a bit out of hand, and that God will sort it all out in the end.  But I know that sort of silence about enormous things is exactly what makes people feel they have no choice, sometimes, but walking out a window, so I promise you from now on not to teach what won’t save, not to preach what won’t give comfort, not to postpone for some lesser business the opening of people’s eyes in Christ that may help them see the way from death to life and give them a reason for one more day, and one more after that, until they see the glory of Jesus face-to-face.  

Finally, Tony, I ask you to pray for us here at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill.  In our inmost hearts we really do want to look more like the community the blind man found, than the one he left.  But we are human as well.  We lose our moorings.  We forget what’s important.  Pray that we will become more and more the kind of place where we can always find the eyes God wants to give us, and where others still stumbling through the world can stumble through our doors and find the same.  We know that means we may feel like falling, may experience all the humiliation and vertigo that goes with suddenly seeing things aright. When we take that step, pray that God will grant us grace to believe his promise that he will catch us in his grip, and help us to hear his voice saying, “It’s just a different kind of light.  It takes some getting used to.  Trust me.  I won’t lose you.” Amen.