Emily Schaming
I was watching TV a couple of weeks ago and happened to come across the biggest choir I have ever seen. There must have been 4000 people singing. Wondering who these people were, I kept watching, and it turns out it was a show by television evangelist Benny Hinn who was preaching in Bangalore, India on his ‘World Miracle Tour'. I was riveted as I watched dozens of people come onto his stage and say they had been cured of deafness, of disabilities that had prevented them from walking, of brain damage from strokes. The pastor would then do a little test, get someone to respond to a noise, jump, or speak, then he would gesture at them and they would fall into the arms of the enormous men in suits who were standing there to catch them.
My first reaction was skepticism. I couldn't believe this guy was serious. He reminded me of Steve Martin's fraudulent traveling evangelist in the movie Leap of Faith. In fact, I think he might have learned some moves from that movie.
But I kept watching. And soon I was in tears.
I cried because there were three million people gathered there, worshiping together. I cried because I realized that the theatrics on the stage were nothing compared to the outpouring of prayer in that place. I cried because I didn't believe that God was bigger than a man on a stage who knocks people over with his jacket.
If I am skeptical that God will not answer the prayers of three million ordinary people, how can I believe that he will listen to me? Am I simply another one of the Pharisees, demanding to see proof and looking for right and wrong answers?
A Blind Man and His Critics
But here I am starting at the end of the story. If we go back to the beginning, we find a man in the book of John, who has been blind from birth. Now, there is a lot written about blindness as a metaphor for larger problems in the world. For example, John Wyndham's 1951 sci-fi novel, The Day of the Triffids is about everyone in the world going blind as a metaphor for the British role in the Cold War. But the Biblical story does not begin with a metaphor; it is simply the story of a man who is not able to see. When Jesus encounters the blind man on the side of the road, he immediately perceives the problem at hand: this man can't see! So Jesus decides to help the man, heals his physical problem and sends him home. The man's sight is restored within the first paragraph. But the story has hardly begun.
Now we come to the skeptics.
The religious leaders come and question the one who was healed. "Who healed you?" they ask. "Someone named Jesus," he replies. "How?" "By applying mud to my eyes." "He must be a sinner, because he doesn't keep the Sabbath," they respond. The formerly blind man's answer to this charge is the key to this story: "I do not know whether he is a sinner, but one thing I do know: once I was blind, and now I see." But this is not enough for the Pharisees.
What is the problem? The blind man was healed on the Sabbath and most of the conversation that follows is about the difficulty that his neighbors had in accepting this man's healing and a dispute over the observance of the Sabbath. Wonder and awe over God's grace and power are lost in the confusion. From our contemporary, scientific world view we are quite familiar with this perspective- miracles don't just happen!
The Pharisees in this passage have spent so much energy figuring out how God's justice and God's compassion operate in the world, and through whom they operate, that they've got very little left to receive the reality when it's in front of them.
But for the formerly blind man, it is almost as if his vision has kept on improving, so that he sees more and more clearly who has given him his sight. Meanwhile, his inquisitors keep colliding in the dark.
I think one reason these temple leaders are so disturbing to us is because they remind us of ourselves. Although we might prefer to be cast as the blind man, we are not naturals for the part. We are not outcasts, most of us. We have not been set outside the community for our supposed, or actual, sins. We are consummate insiders -fully initiated, law-abiding, pledge-paying, hymn-singing members of the congregation of the faithful- in short, Pharisees.
Contagious Blindness
Jose Saramago's novel Blindness is about a society that experiences an outbreak of contagious blindness. In the contagious blindness of our own religious society, we are certainly capable of working up our own anxiety about whether or not a mighty act should be ascribed to God. We debate about small things. We debate the details of baptism, immersion or not, adult or infant, font or river. We argue about religion's place in government and schools. We deliberate and divide over women preaching, inclusive language, and drums in the sanctuary. As a sighted person comments in Saramago's novel,"we are [all]…blind people who can see, but do not see." We wear our skepticism as a protective mantle against people we disagree with on the smaller things and in doing so fail to see God in the larger things.
And there is the challenge— if we see evidence of a miracle right in front of us, do we want to be the people who flatly deny that God is still working in the very world that God created?
What blinds us to the truths that we should be seeing?
All of the texts assigned for this week speak of God leading people to true perception. Themes of seeing and not seeing, light and dark predominate. In the story about Samuel choosing David as king, Samuel is unable to discern that Jesse's handsome son Eliab is not king material. But Samuel one of the lucky ones to whom God speaks clearly. He is told, " the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." And in fact, the text uses different verbs to contrast God who "sees" with Samuel who "looks." (16:7)
Lenten Sacrifice
During Lent we often sacrifice something we enjoy as a way of preparing ourselves for Easter. I know that giving up chocolate is no small thing for many of us, and it can be a worthwhile physical discipline. But I can't help wondering if it what it really prepares us for is eating a lot of crème eggs on Easter morning. Easter is a day of joy and miracles, a day of wonder, a day of promises fulfilled. If Lent is the time that we take to reflect and prepare for the miracle of Easter, perhaps we should use it to sacrifice the things that prevent us from truly seeing the miracle of God's son raised from death.
How can we even begin to get past our everyday obstacles, tiredness, despair, cynicism -- obstacles that work together to cause our inability to focus on the will of God? Acknowledging our own spiritual blindness can be embarrassing, painful, and threatening. To confess our own areas of darkness, our frustrations, fears, and failures, is unnerving. And as unsettling as that confession is to make to oneself, there is the added anxiety of what others might say, think, or do.
Four hundred years ago, John Milton wrote a sonnet on his own struggles with physical blindness. (language purists please forgive me for starting in the middle)
He said, "God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts: who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait."
They also serve who only stand and wait. Samuel said to Jesse, "Send for him; we will not sit down until he arrives." and as he stood and waited, God sent him David, who would become the greatest king in Israel's history.
But the Psalmist promises us much more than just waiting. We are told that God will lead us beside quiet waters, guide us in paths of righteousness, and restore us so that we may dwell in the house of the LORD. We do not need to know exactly where we are going because even in the shadows there is a mighty Presence who is there to lead us, to guide us, to be the eyes through which we see the world.
Earlier I briefly mentioned Steve Martin's phony evangelist character in the movie Leap of Faith. In the movie, he befriends a teenage boy who has lost the use of his legs in an accident. The boy comes regularly to the tent meetings, but Martin's character always stops his fake healing just before the boy makes it to the stage. But at the end of the movie the boy makes it all the way forward and, to everyone's astonishment, he is able to walk. All of the showmanship and pretense of this theatrical revival is stripped away by a boy who experiences God's healing. The fake preacher knows the game is up and decides to leave town. The boy catches up with him and asks why he is leaving. He replies that the one thing you can't compete with is the genuine article. "And you, kid, are the genuine article." Sometimes God sends us the genuine article. In a man who was healed, in King David, in Jesus.
This Lenten season, I hope that we may sacrifice our skepticism and reflect on God's genuine ability to lead us ever onward into new possibilities of happiness, fulfillment and joy. For if we do not believe that in through Jesus' death and resurrection God brought forth from nothing the possibility of everything, what do we believe? If you ask me, that is a miracle worth believing in.
1 All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.