Blinded by the Light

4LentA, Sullivan Park Care Center, March 30, 2014 by Sr Annette Fricke, OP

            William Temple writes, “The man born blind from birth is every man.  For it is a part of that sin of the world which the Lamb of God beareth away that by nature we are blind, until our eyes are opened by Christ the Light of the world.” Jesus is the light of the world and in him there is no darkness at all or as put in this story, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  This story is a story of contrasts: the bright light of Jesus and the darkness of blindness.  Jesus addresses both physical and spiritual blindness.  He also addresses the notion that sin is connected to physical defects.  Some of us have a tendency to feel abandoned by God when we are ill and we say to ourselves, “Why me? Why has this sickness come to me?  Why must I be the one to suffer?  What will become of me?”  That last question in particular is one asked by people who have been severely ill more than one time. The biggest worry for them is, “What if I die this time?” It is important to note that much of the discourse in the gospel text is when Jesus is not present.  Some say this story is a reflection of the early Christian community. Many people were believers in Jesus, but were hiding in fear of the Jewish community.  This account appears to be a story about the early community’s struggle to be a witness to the world around them.  At the same time, the stories of Jesus are continuing to circulate and become a source of comfort in the midst of suffering.

But bringing us further in time into the 21^st century, just what might this story mean to us? Words are used to describe what a person is thinking or doing.  Sometimes we say them to ourselves and sometimes we say them out loud.  We are taught from childhood what is proper in our language and behavior.  We hear people say things like, “That man is fat.”  “That woman is ugly.”  “That person is deaf.”  “That person is blind.”  We also hear meaningless descriptions like, “He has white hair and uses a walker or wheelchair.”  That is meaningless if you live in a skilled nursing or assisted living facility where that describes most men living there.  The problem with descriptions either used to your face or behind your back is that they can be interpreted negatively.  We are aware that in the time of Jesus, there were people who were physically impaired or less able that were not only social outcasts, but were also not allowed to worship in the temple.  Because of their so called deformities, according to the law of Judaism, they were truly seen as somehow less than other people.  If society deems certain groups of people as somehow not worth as much, those people and sometimes their families as well, also learn to feel lesser than others.  Some women feel insecure without a man.  It comes out in conversation when they project that value onto other women by trying to set them up with an eligible male relative or they constantly ask if you have a boyfriend.  They feel that is what makes them happy, so it should also make other women happy.  Other women will say things like, they have always been fat and people never knew when they were pregnant, because they were always fat.  They become preoccupied with being fat to the point that it becomes their whole identity and way of relating to the world.  They become preoccupied with being with a man that widowhood never quite feels right.  The same happens when a person who was fat becomes skinny. 

            That is one of the things this text tells us.  The man born blind, blind all his life has his whole identity, his whole sense of self tied up in what it means to be blind.  As a result, being a beggar is a way of life.  In my line of work, as a nurses’ aide, I don’t like to tell people that I was once a mental health counselor for this very reason.  People know what psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors do.  It’s something deeper than being the one who sees only your outside body, cleans you from top to bottom, and watches out for your hydration and nutrition.  But if you treat someone as a person, as Jesus did the blind man, they can respond; and that is deeper than accepting the status quo. You are not your diagnoses. That is deeper than an aide who is paid only to do the physical work of an aide. The occupational hazard of being an aide is that people want to know who you are. Residents do not accept a mere robot to care for them even if that is all they are paid to do.  However, I have been counseled by my supervisor to not share personal things, because of the reason that is in this text; it causes arguments and controversy.  Relationships are messy no matter how one goes about it.

            The picture of God we have here in Jesus is that God knows who you are, accepts who you are, and expects you to be the best human you can be. On the surface, we may only see that the man born blind is simply asserting his belief in Jesus’ healing.  He asserts emphatically, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

            To demonstrate how profound a change it is to go from not seeing to seeing, I offer a true story about a woman who was deaf from birth.  The woman’s name is Joanne.  She is 40 years old and she is from the United Kingdom.  She was born with Usher’s Syndrome, a genetic mutation inherited from her parents. She never heard anything until she had an operation that gave her cochlear implants.  A week after her surgery, she had the implants turned on. Joanne, in a video shot of her sat across from a hospital employee who cautioned that her new sense of hearing might be overwhelming at first. As the worker begins to recite the days of the week, Joanne is moved to tears. Even though after the surgery she was still blind, she reacted further with verbal outbursts of joy when she continued to hear with her own ears another woman’s voice.  After that, she listened to John Lennon, a famous Beatle, singing a popular song.

            Our gospel text is a conversion story to be sure.  It is important to observe that as the blind man who now sees, continues to tell others about once being blind and now seeing.  Notice that each time the man talks about his healing experience and encounter with Jesus, his faith in Jesus grows.  As we draw near to the cross, our stories from the gospel of John get longer and more involved.  We come face-to-face with the arguments for and against Jesus.  Some support Jesus and others mock him.  The healing is there for all to see, it seems beyond denial.  There is a stark contrast between Jesus as the light of the world and the blindness of the Pharisees, those who dare to ask Jesus, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”

            In spite of opposition or the blatant indifference of neighbors, members of the Jewish faith, parents, and the Pharisees, the man is persistent in telling the story about how a man named Jesus brought him his eyesight.  He takes no heed when the emotions of all involved are stirred.  He is vocal about what he sees and hears about Jesus’ action on his behalf.  Jesus intervenes at the end and elicits a simple statement of faith from the man, another who has no name, like the Samaritan woman at the well.

            By nature, we are all blind.  The blind man had never seen just as Joanne had never heard.  To become a Christian is not to recover what was lost, but to receive that which was never possessed, namely, the grace of God. Jesus, Son of God, have mercy. Amen.

Confession in Reverse

Third Sunday, Lent, Cycle A: Sullivan Park Care Center: March 23, 2014“Confession in Reverse”

Last Sunday, we talked about a man named Nicodemus.  Today we will talk about an unnamed woman.  Nicodemus and this woman may or may not have been real people since the other gospels do not mention them.  Nicodemus seems to represent the people of Judah who are Pharisees, strict observers of the law; whereas, this woman is representative of the Samaritans.  The Judeans worshiped in Jerusalem whereas the Samaritans worshiped in a place called Mt Gerizim.  I would guess that you, like me, are more familiar with the Judeans, the worshipping community from which Jesus came.  These stories follow one another in the gospel of John and are quite the opposite of each other.  Nicodemus comes to see Jesus at night, Jesus sees the woman in the middle of the day.  Several people have observed that the darkness seems to represent not believing in Jesus as the son of God, and light represents those who do believe in Jesus as the son of God. They have very different responses to Jesus.  Nicodemus seems to have a minimal belief in Jesus although later, he is actually involved in procuring spices for Jesus’ burial.  We don’t hear anything about the Samaritan woman beyond this immediate encounter with Jesus, although we are told here, that she is pretty certain that he is the Messiah, an idea that Nicodemus only vaguely accepts.

The worship of the Judeans was burdened with a group that insisted on following laws regarding purity and being set apart.  The Samaritan woman shows an intimate knowledge of the purity laws of the Jews.  Jesus’ disciples were often ridiculed for not following those laws, especially when they were disregarded on the Sabbath.  The Samaritan religion was one that allowed the worship of other gods or idols.  They frequently adopted the religions of the people they conquered.  Both groups were at odds with Jesus.  What did Jesus want?  Jesus talks to a Samaritan woman—breaking the rules again.  She, in fact, points out the differences between the Samaritans and Judeans to Jesus.  But maybe that is just the whole point after all.  We all break the rules, the commandments of God.  We like the Samaritan woman, all struggle to live our lives and manage to disappoint our own expectations as well as the expectations of those around us.  Yet despite the disappointment of this woman’s many relationships, she is willing to dive in again, once she understands that Jesus is not really talking about the water in the well, but spirituality and relationship.  How many of us would have the response of the woman after Jesus basically told her everything about her?  Isn’t this like a confession in reverse? For those of you who have ever made a confession to a priest or to another person, you soon realize a pattern.  The first few times are really difficult because you realize that this person is not God and it makes you nervous because you really don’t want this person to know the bad things about you.  After you get over that, you realize that you seem to commit the same sins over and over.  Sometimes things will be better for a while, then the same sorts of sins pop up again, like a bad dream.  You realize that what Paul said is really true: the good I want to do, I don’t; and the evil I don’t want to do, I do.  What is it about humanity that no matter what we do, we can’t escape our humanness?  Why can’t we extricate ourselves from our need for control, our need for power, our need to look good in the sight of others?  As one of my professors put it, “It is not possible to be without sin.”  We all have our dark side and we all want to hide that dark side from others because we do not want people to think poorly of us.  And yet, sometimes people see more of us than we think they do. 

I would suggest that you have heard many sermons on this passage and many times, the interpretation of the woman was that somehow she was very immoral for having had five husbands.  But what if none of those broken relationships were her fault?  There is nothing in the text before us to suggest that she had any sin to be forgiven, nor does Jesus say anything about forgiving her for her sin, either past or present.  I would suggest that Jesus is the one here who breaks the law by not only talking to a woman in public, but a Samaritan woman to boot.  Jesus does not say in this case as with the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.”  We are not told the details, but I would suggest that if there were details, it would be more like death of husband, husband left her for another woman, and brother of husband refused to marry her, husband divorced her for something other than adultery.  Regardless of the reasons, women in that society were always dependent on males, usually husband or relatives, to be a provider.  I would suggest that her life was one of abandonment and struggle, far from being an easy one of leisure.  She has suffered many losses in her life and it was far from the stability of some whose marriages lasted a lifetime, which in those days was not all that long.  She probably figures that since Jesus spoke to her first, she will entertain the notion that she could at the very least engage Jesus in what we would term “chit chat” in which the conversation is about mundane things, like drawing water from a well.  After all, everyone needs water, especially on a particularly warm day.

Water is a life-sustaining force for all creatures of the world.  She understands that, but the conversation soon shifts to a different level and we are suddenly no longer talking about the water at the well. Jesus actually asks very little of the Samaritan woman, “Give me a drink.”  It’s like saying, “Give me an opening.”  Jesus is asking her for an entry point to engage in conversation, because immediately after that he is talking on a whole different level.  Jesus then shifts to giving to her something that is far better than the water in the well that only satisfies for a while and then you need more water.  The water Jesus gives will well up to eternal life. 

What we confess before God or another person doesn’t consist merely of a recitation of all our past sins or sins since our last confession.  We confess our struggles in life.  These are struggles that Jesus already knows about because Jesus is the Son of God and we are all made in the image of God.  We all come from God.  God knows about our struggles and accepts us anyway, just the way we are.  It doesn’t matter if we think we are not lovable or that we think we have committed some sin that is not forgivable.  God knows our concerns.  God knows everything about our lives, even all the bad things.  God knows all the good things as well.  God knows the whole bundle, the whole package that is our selves, our persons, our lives. And yet, God still accepts us and takes us in.  God’s love for us, for the whole world, is unconditional and will always be.  There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  When we finally understand this or understand this again and again in our lives, we realize that it is good news; and it is that good news that will transform our lives into excitement.  When we realize God’s all encompassing love for us, it is exciting and we will burst over with joy, just knowing that.  The Samaritan woman is so excited by God’s love and care in Jesus, that she tells the whole village.  She is truly the first evangelist.  May we also find the strength and power of the Holy Spirit to witness as she did.  Amen.

            

Loved to Love

Lent2A, March15 and 16, 20014, Sullivan Park Care Center and St John the Evangelist Cathedral, by Sr Annette Fricke, OP

A prayer by Soren Kierkegaard: Thou who hast first loved us, O God, alas!  We speak of it in terms of history as if Thou hast only loved us first but a single time, rather than that without ceasing Thou hast loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through.  When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul toward Thee---Thou art the first---Thou hast loved us first; if I rise at dawn and at the same second turn my soul toward Thee in prayer, Thou art there ahead of me, Thou hast loved me first.  When I withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn my soul in thought toward Thee, Thou art the first and thus forever.  And yet we always speak ungratefully as if Thou hast loved us first only once.  Amen.

            I contend that what we miss most in life is usually right in front of us.  At the risk of being hard on Nicodemus, this is his problem.  He is a teacher of Israel, a Pharisee and maybe even a member of the ruling body, the Sanhedrin.  He’s up there, sort of like the dean of Harvard.  He should know all about what he is teaching and telling others about God and how God works in the world.  And yet, he doesn’t quite get it.  I will give him credit that he is at least somewhat open to what Jesus has to say.  He does seek Jesus out.

            The Gospel of John, which is full of the images of dark and light, has Nicodemus coming to him in the darkness.  If we recall that in John, Jesus is the light of the world, we might make the assumption here that Nicodemus only has a partial understanding of just who Jesus is, thus the darkness.  This is confirmed by his conversation with Jesus. In fact, Jesus seems rather annoyed that Nicodemus is a teacher of Israel but seems so far from understanding who Jesus is and what a relationship with God should be.

            God so loved the world—the entire world, everyone and everything in it, not just yours and my favorites.  God gave us the trees, the flowers, our neighbors, our families, our friends, our co-workers, our supervisors, our dogs and our cats, the snakes, birds, and lizards; everything—the whole she-bang.  God loved it all and continues to love it all each and every day.  This is not a past tense event in time and space, but an on-going, undying love, a love that will not quit.

            Nicodemus saw a glimpse of that love and wanted to learn more about it.  But Jesus says to Nicodemus and to all of us that love is all around us.  We must be born again, anew, from above. The spirit of God is here all the time and yet it is not something we can grasp.  It is like the wind, it comes and it goes.  It is here and it is gone.  And yet, Jesus says we cannot enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the spirit.  Genealogy has nothing to do with it, nor knowledge of God.  Even belief in God is secondary.  We must be born of water and the Spirit. 

            Now some interpreters would say that this is a clear allusion to baptism.  Many in the early church thought of this passage in this way.  Just as the baptism of Jesus is always associated with the Spirit’s descent, the working of the Spirit and baptism continued to go hand in hand. We see that several times in Paul’s writings and in the book of Acts. If you are to watch the 700 Club on TV, you will see testimonies about people who claim to have been slain in the Spirit.  This is what they describe as being born again.  A woman was on who said that she was baptized at age 13 in an Episcopal Church, then right after she took her first communion, she fell to the floor. Some would have us think that we need a dramatic experience such as this or speaking in tongues---that would indicate that we have the Holy Spirit.  However, that is not the sense I get from this text.  This text seems to point to something that is ongoing.  Even though the first disciples after the physical Jesus left this earth experienced the Holy Spirit as something quite extraordinary, even supernatural, it was an empowering presence which enabled them to do the work of God in the world.  It was their transformation and strength of will to spread the good news of the gospel to all people.  And it helped them step by step, gradually to understand more and more the universality of God’s love for all people. They also began to see that God’s love is unconditional.  You do not earn your way to heaven.  You do not earn God’s love.

            What does it mean to be born from above or to be born anew?  We all know, just as Nicodemus, the obvious; no, we cannot go back into our mother’s womb and be born a second time.  Just imagining that scenario is rather hilarious.  But notice that Jesus also never gives a definitive answer either.  He talks about the Spirit like that of the wind.  You can’t pin the wind down.  There are times in the history of the church when we can clearly see the working of the spirit and there are other times when it’s quite difficult to pinpoint where and how the Spirit is working in our lives as the church, the body of Christ.  And to complicate things further, what we see as the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, someone else will see it at as something entirely different. We see humanity around us as well as the church doing a mixture of good, bad, and something in between.  There are good and not so good intentions behind those deeds.  It is sometimes mind-boggling to try to figure out a direction both as an individual as well as a church or a small part of that church.  Should we do things the way we always have or should we consider something a bit different?  Just how open are we to the working of the Holy Spirit?

            Nicodemus appears to be an objective man who wants to remain objective.  His perspective is that of one who is on the outside looking in.  Jesus intrigues him.  He sees Jesus and recognizes him as being with God.  After all, he passed the litmus test of Judaism, Jesus performed signs. Where Nicodemus’ footing becomes unsure is that his understanding is incomplete.  He does not understand that Jesus is God incarnate.  He does not understand that Jesus and God are one.  He sees Jesus as a great teacher, but his understanding takes him no further.  Nicodemus does not understand what Jesus is talking about, at least that is true for this story about him. 

            God wants us to be sharers in the divine life!  God is not to remain aloof and transcendent, off somewhere in a book we leave on a shelf or somewhere in our intellectual minds. Like the Old Testament lesson from last week, we were made for God to till God’s garden.  We are to be God’s children who care for all that God has created. In order to do that, we must get it through our heads, hearts, and minds that God loves us and cares for us every single day.  We must put God’s love into action in our lives, daily.  We must act on behalf of God in order that God’s love may be made known to all.  We belong to God. “Thou who hast first loved us, O God, alas!  We speak of it in terms of history as if Thou hast only loved us first but a single time, rather than that without ceasing Thou hast loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through.”  Let us walk in that love.

Original Goodness

First Sunday in Lent A, March 9, 2014, Sullivan Park Care Center, by Sr Annette Fricke, OP

            “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”  I cannot help but hearken back to the words so plainly stated in last week’s gospel text.  Almost a direct parallel is found in today’s Old Testament lesson.  Here, it is God in the garden who is expecting Adam and Eve to listen.  God commends a pure and simple obedience; that is all.  But what do we do with that?  The beginning of the world starts out with trust and obedience in God and a relationship of intimacy with God. 

The relationship between God and humanity is a perfect one, unblemished, but then something happens.  The serpent and Eve have a conversation questioning what God said and the serpent even tries to get Eve to misquote God.  What did God say?  That you couldn’t eat of ANY tree in the garden?  Eve actually defends her relationship with God when she says, “No.  God did not say we couldn’t eat of ANY tree.  We can eat of any tree EXCEPT the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  This is a test of logic.  If you only know good, how can you know what evil is?  Wouldn’t you like to know so you know the difference?  In the image of God, God made them.  The image of God was that of goodness.  If you look closely at this passage which is the quoted source of the doctrine of original sin, you can also see that it is also just as plausible to see it as a story of original goodness.  If humanity was made in the image of God and we say that God is good, we were born in original goodness.  This story is descriptive of what humans are like.  It is not proscriptive, that from then on we are to be cursed to live a life of suffering by the tilling of the soil and childbirth.

The story states that humans lived well; they thrived in the Garden of Eden.  If you wanted to eat, you simply plucked off fruit from a tree. A stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground.  Adam, before Eve was there, would till the ground.  This was the purpose of man: to till and keep God’s garden. Individual parts of creation are declared good, but the whole of creation is very good.  The trees were pleasing to the sight and good for food.

The purpose of humanity is to live in relationship to God: to till the ground, working in God’s garden.  God provided for the man creatures of all kinds as well as a woman to be his partner.  We were not created for ourselves.  We were created for God and for all of God’s creation—to till it, to keep it, to take care of it.  We are to take care of the animals as well as the environment. We are to preserve and protect all of God’s creation, without exception, because it is all God’s and it is all very good.

But all of this is more than a purpose.  It is our mission.  We are God’s servants and living our purpose fulfills God’s intention for us as the people of God.  We are the instruments or the tool of God’s created order.  Our mission is to do God’s work in the world.  This is not a leisurely activity or a never-ending getaway.  God’s mission through us is to work in the garden, to care for it, to plant, to nourish that garden.  If we sustain the garden, it will sustain us for our journey through this life.

The problem comes when we get distracted.  People will tell us to do other things.  We will pass the day being idle and talk about doing foolish things.  We will actually do foolish things.  We will drink wine and do foolish things.  We will become jealous of our neighbor’s possessions or success in life.  We will talk badly about people we don’t even know.  We will use our brain to rationalize doing things that are not part of God’s mission.  We will even repeat the same wanderings from God, all to pursue what looks good to eat or good to indulge our cravings, only to be disappointed, depressed, and dejected.  We will go along with the crowd even though we strongly disagree with them because we don’t want to stick out.  We will be proud of our accomplishments to the point of giving only ourselves credit, and not God.  We will be charming one moment and mean the next.  We will say, “Let the young people do it.  I’m too old.  I can’t do anything.”  We make up excuses for all kinds of behavior and words that fall from our mouths.

In all of this, our disobedience to God comes in the form of wayward desire.  Our erosion of trust leads us into temptation.  Our estrangement becomes alienation from God, between humans, between humans and animals, between humans and the environment.  All of this happens because we do not want to listen to God. 

Anyone who has ever tried to parent or babysit children knows what this is.  The very thing you tell a child not to do is what he or she does.  It happens all the time.  Emily, don’t stick your fingers in the cake.  What does Emily do?  I don’t even have to answer that.  So you call Emily in to talk to her and you say, “I thought I told you to keep your fingers out of the cake.”  Emily confirms by saying, “You did.”  “Then why did you do it?”  “I don’t know.”  The child knows that nothing he or she comes up with will be accepted. The next time you bake a cake, you better figure out a better way to hide it because you know it is likely to happen again. Either that, or make another cake.  The same thing happens with all food prepared for a picnic or pot luck. There’s always an excuse.

So why do we insist on being contrary and giving in to our temptations?  For some of us, that little kid in us never goes away.  I guess the rational answer to that question would be that we somehow think that we are smarter than God.

Never forget that we are to be in relationship to God and each other. When you truly love someone, it is your passion, your mission, and your calling to do that which is tending God’s garden. Oswald Chambers has this to say, “If we do something simply out of a sense of duty, we are trying to live up to a standard that competes with Jesus Christ.  We become a prideful, arrogant person, thinking we know what to do in every situation.  We have put our sense of duty on the throne of our life, instead of enthroning the resurrection life of Jesus.  We are not told to “walk in the light” of our conscience or in the light of a sense of duty, but to walk in the light as He is in the light.  When we do something out of a sense of duty, it is easy to explain the reasons for our actions to others.  But when we do something out of obedience to the Lord, there can be no other explanation---just obedience. 

The beginning of the world starts out with trust and obedience in God and a relationship of intimacy with God.  God invites us every day to live that life once again through our union with Jesus Christ, God’s son.  What are you going to do with your time today?  Resist that temptation to sit and watch TV hour after hour.  Do something different, like reaching out to a neighbor or a new resident.  Make that person feel welcome, just as you would welcome a relative---because that person is a relative, he or she, just like you, is a child of God made in God’s image. Amen.