1Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 58-14
John 9:1-41
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
I believe in action. I believe in living faith. This is why I believe our sacraments are important to who we are as Christians. Sacraments are the visible signs of God’s invisible grace. This is why when I share the invitation to the table I will say, “This is the Lord's table. It is our Savior Jesus the Christ, not I, nor this congregation, nor this denomination, who invites those who trust him to share the feast which he has prepared.”[1]
The invitation is open to all who have faith in Christ as their Lord and Savior. It is for those whose faith is in Christ; not just those who ascribe to Presbyterianism. This is why I will also say:
Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup,
you proclaim the saving death of the risen Lord,
until he comes.
Remembering God’s gracious acts in Jesus Christ,
we take from your creation this bread and this wine
and joyfully celebrate his dying and rising,
as we await the day of his coming.[2]
We can’t see God’s good grace, we can see instances of grace and we can see the effects of grace, but we can’t see grace. It’s like the old Billy Graham saying, I can’t see the wind; I can see effects of the wind but I can’t see the wind. And of course, we have no more control over where God’s grace blows than we have over the wind. Our gospel reading is the glorious story of how this wind of faith blows.
Jesus was going along and saw a man who was blind from birth. So the apostles asked “Who sinned; this man or his parents that he was born blind.” Short of anything resembling grace, this question is couched in traditional Jewish speculation about the relationship between illness and sin.[3] In this time and place, being born blind was considered more than a physical malady; it was seen as a spiritual malady too. But Jesus’ response tells the disciples that their question, shrouded in rabbinic tradition and Jewish history, isn’t the question.
Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be displayed in his life.” John’s gospel offers sin differently from Jewish tradition. Sin is not a moral category; it is a theological category about how we respond to the revelation of God in Jesus.[4] Jesus teaches that this man was born blind for God’s glory, not as a punishment for sin.
So Jesus took a step back and spit on the ground making a poultice of wet clay that he placed in the man’s eyes. He then told the man to go to the Pool of Siloam to wash. When he did, he came home seeing.
By the way, notice that after Jesus told the man to go, the Lord isn’t in the story until its very end. Hold that thought.
Now, if you think I used a lot of water on Cindy’s baptism in January, imagine walking through town from wherever Jesus found the man born blind to the Pool of Siloam. There always seemed to be a crowd around the Lord, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to imagine that a bunch of people saw him spitting on the ground, rolling it around into a paste, and packing it into the man’s eyeballs.
Anyone who isn’t saying “Ick” right now has gone to the end of the story. I want us to pause here for a moment. I’ve made my fair share of mud pies, but none of them with my own spit. I’ve thrown some mud, but I’ve never packed it into anybody’s eyeballs. I’ve been dirty before, but I’ve never had anybody’s muddy spit ooze down my face. Friends, let’s admit it, as the miracles of Jesus go, this ranks up as one of the grossest. Glorious, yes, but still, it’s gross.
It’s said that Jesus could have done this miracle without all of the spit and mud, and that’s true. He healed Peter’s mother in law. He healed the little girl saying “Talita, cum.” He saved the Centurion’s slave with a word; Jesus wasn’t even in the neighborhood for that healing. So Jesus didn’t have to make the balm they wouldn’t make in Gilead , but he did.
To say that I know why he did this is beyond arrogance, it’s ignorance. Still, I’m going to give it a guess because it’s a part of my vocation to ponder the things of God. I believe Jesus finds value in symbols. I believe God finds value in symbolic action. Jesus didn’t have to create the saying “Here’s mud in your eye,” but he did. There was something of value to him creating the pumice and the man wearing it until washing it off in the Pool of Siloam.
Was it the man’s obedience that cured him? Was it Jesus making magic mud? Was it something else? I don’t know. What I do know is that Jesus asked a man to participate in his miracle when it could have been done with a snap of the fingers. Jesus wanted him involved in his miracle.
This is the point of the story when we go from icky sloppy to sloppy because of what happens next. We’re not half way through with John’s gospel and the Pharisees are coming at Jesus with both barrels. Of course like any good mobster movie, they don’t go at him directly; they go after the one he cares about. They dissect the man so recently given sight.
The neighbors ask the man who now sees “Where is he?” Where is Jesus? His relpy: “I don’t know.” I love that. “No, I don’t know where he went, I was blind, hello!”
This is where his newly blooming Christian bud is tested. The Pharisees quiz one another, is this healer a saint because he can do such miraculous signs or is he a sinner because he does them on the Sabbath? The man who now sees really doesn’t have an opinion on the learned matters that belong to the scholars; he just knows that the one who can do such healing is a prophet.
Of course the Pharisees decide to check their facts. Was he blind from birth? Really? If he wasn’t then there was no miracle. So they go to his parents who confirm blindness. But they know that this sloppy bit of religiosity can blow up in their faces. They could be put out of the Synagogue and cut off from their faith and social lives and that won’t do. They throw their son under the bus instead. Hey, you want to know what happened to him, ask him. He’s a man. He’s responsible for his own actions. In effect they say “Leave us out of this.”
They try to get the man who now sees to throw Jesus under the bus this time and this time he wades head long into the slop of his new faith. He doesn’t know who was a saint and who was a sinner, but he does know he was blind but now he can see. He doesn’t know who the Pharisees are or what they want, but he knows that Jesus has done what no other prophet has ever done, give sight to a blind man.
Finally, the Pharisees can’t take his disrespectful behavior another minute. By disrespectful I mean earnest, honest, and loving. They throw him out of the Synagogue for no doing of his own. He was thrown out because he did something foolhardy, he was healed.
Well, as the old song goes, if loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
This is when Jesus reenters the story. He shares his identity with the man who now sees in front of the temple rulers who are blinded by their own inflexible faith. The man believed and worshipped. Those whose neck remained stiff rested in their own sin.
The man who now sees is living in the sloppy faith where he is healed with spit and clay on the Sabbath. He is thrown out of the Synagogue, which was the center of his faith. He is evicted from the community that he had called his own; thrown out into the muck and mire of the world without the faith of his fathers. The faith taught that his blindness was the result of sin, now we discover that the removal of blindness leads him to the new way God is working in the world.
Faith is often sloppy. Often faith is not always easy and straight forward like we want it to be. Often it’s like this man who now sees. The glory of God reigns making our old way of life impossible, and that gets sloppy. Often it’s like David’s kingship, established in danger over seven older brothers.
People want a good solid list of things we can be for and things we can be against. It makes sense, yet no matter how we rebel against it, we long for structure. Unfortunately, life in Christ doesn’t always lead us down the straight line we want. Sometimes like with David and the man born blind it puts us at odds with our own families.
Frankly, it’s easier to stand against something than it is to stand for something. The Westboro Baptist Church has made a mission out of standing against America
I guess this is where I should apologize to Cindy. For a denomination renowned for baptism by “sprinkling,” I used a lot more water than she expected, than anyone expected. Now, I’m not apologizing for using a lot of water, I won’t ask to be forgiven for that. I do pray Cindy will forgive me for not warning her or having a towel ready. That was bad form on my part and I apologize for that. For everyone else who was surprised about the amount of water I used, don’t worry. It’s alright in the eyes of the Book of Order and the Directory for Worship. The amount of water I used is Presbyterian kosher.
What’s true is that water is the symbol we use in baptism. Baptism itself is the symbol that represents the grace of our Lord who was himself baptized. We are baptized for remission of sins. Baptism also represents a bath, a bath that cleans our skins and our lives. The waters of our baptism also represent the fluids of our first birth. In our birth into faith we are reminded of our birth into life. The sacrament of baptism in the Presbyterian Church represents a welcoming into the community of faith; this is why it is as proper to baptize infants and children as it is to baptize adults. Since one of the responsibilities of baptism is that the community helps care for and instruct all of the baptized, it is actually good for children to be baptized as soon as the parents desire.
So if water is a symbol, then the amount of water used is also a symbol. We can use as much or as little as we want. We can dunk or dab people. The symbolic action God wants is represented either way. But there is a reason I choose to make people drip with water when we are baptized, and that’s that our faith can be sloppy. Since our faith can be sloppy, our baptism shouldn’t be a dainty little affair, it should be sloppy too.
We live a faith that can be sloppy, a faith where God says yes. Yes gets us healed on the Sabbath, even though every stitch of the faith tells us just to wait until after sunset. Yes introduces us to people we wouldn’t associate with in a million years. Yes puts us in situations we never dreamed to imagine. Yes puts David on the throne. Yes puts us outside the Synagogue with Jesus and the man who now sees.
No puts us with the heroes of the orthodoxy, which isn’t always bad but often lacks elbow room for the Holy Spirit. No gives us the Alcoholics Anonymous definition of insanity, “When you do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”
Our God is the God of “Yes.” Our faith should be the faith that says “Yes.” Say yes to God, say yes to the sloppy faith that is faith in Christ, and let us remember the waters of our baptism, and the sloppier the better.
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