10 March in the year of our Lord 2002
4th Sunday after Lent Year A
Morning Prayer and Sermon at Christ the King
Mortals look on the outward appearance,
God Looks on the Heart
How human Samuel is in today's reading! His story begins with him grieving over the disobedience of Saul, over the loss of a great king to selfish interest and, if we read further in the story, ultimately to madness. Just as we so often are in our spiritual journey, Samuel reluctantly agreed to God's call to set aside being tied to the old ways and to set out in search of something new. But, as the story suggests, Samuel is called to seek a new king for Israel in the most unlikely of places, and at some personal risk, he believed the king would kill him if he discovered what the Lord wanted him to do. The psalm for today is a favorite of believers facing fear: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me [23:4]. The Lord shepherds and protects his people. Nothing could happen to Samuel unless the Lord allowed it to-a prophet should know that; but then again so should we.
Samuel found himself being asked by God to look differently, to see the world in a new way. Everyday the Lord invites me to this, and how cautious and reluctant I am. When Samuel began reviewing Jesse's sons for the new king, he found himself confronted by a God who kept telling him again and again, "Not this one." Samuel was probably looking for someone tall and handsome like Saul. Even his father Jesse had determined not to bring David, the chosen one, to meet the prophet; perhaps because of his age and perceived immaturity. God’s warning to Samuel was that he should not judge by appearances alone. When we judge people in this mortal way, we often overlook quality individuals who lack the particular physical characteristics society currently admires. Fortunately God judges by faith and character, not appearances. The Lord told the prophet that he judges by the heart. God sees our inner person and that inner person is his greatest concern. That inner person is our true self, more so than the external self we spend so much time trying to beautify. When David came before the prophet he was seen as an attractive man, but he was God’s choice because of his heart. David had met God in wild places as he cared for his father Jesse’s flocks. And while in those places he had sung songs to his sheep and hymns of praise to God. Although young and unknown, he was already as one writer called him “a great lion of God.” The anointing of David as king was divinely confirmed because the Spirit of the Lord came upon David in power [I Samuel 16:13]. In the church, our leadership choices should be confirmed in the same way. They should be men and women of faith and character and spiritual authority.
Today's Gospel is also about divine insight. At the center is a beggar, a man born blind, whose restoration to sight reveals the blindness all around him, from his neighbors and family to the religious authorities and even Jesus' own disciples. The disciples are caught up, like everyone else, in the perspectives of their own day. To them and to their contemporaries, blindness, like all physical disorders, must indicate some sort of sin. On this day Jesus and his disciples had just fled the temple to avoid being stoned. But they were in a theologically inquisitive mood and thought to get a simple answer from Jesus. The disciples asked our Lord whose fault it was that this man was blind, his or his parents'? Disabilities were seen as the result of moral flaws in those days. We may still find ourselves treating ill or disabled people differently. Jesus responded to his followers in an uncharacteristic way: It is no one's fault. This happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. He is blind so that I may heal him and be seen as the light of the world [John 9: 3,4]. Jesus then made a salve from dirt and his own saliva and rubbed the man's eyes with it, and told the man to rinse his eyes in the Pool of Siloam. The man did as he was directed, and he returned, seeing.
What follows next is the playing out of an ancient drama for anyone who has ever undergone seemingly inexplicable conversion, healing, or restoration outside the boundaries of convention. First, the man's neighbors and acquaintances questioned him in wonder and more than a little suspicion about his healing. But he couldn't tell them who the agent of his healing had been, because he had not yet spoken with Jesus about who Jesus was.
The religious authorities also questioned him, but could not see the power of the blind man's experience because they were too focused on the proper keeping of their religious tradition. For them, the only thing that mattered was that Jesus had violated the Sabbath by working a miracle of healing.
For the blind man's neighbors, his healing meant the rupture of a social order they had grown accustomed to. They were, in fact, so comfortable with it; they could hardly recognize him after his sight was restored. He is not the same man he only looks like him. We as enlightened people of the 21st century, might be tempted to think that we know better. But do we? Despite our medical advances and a culture that prides itself on its "tolerance" and sensitivity, we, just like the neighbors and the religious authorities, have our own limitations of sight. How much of our time do we give to people who are ill? How comfortable are we around people who are confined to wheelchairs? Do we treat sick or dying people as though they were objects rather than persons? I have learned a great deal about this in the last several years, as my lovely girl has had to cope with one malady or another. Yet I still am often foolish in that I continue to have an inclination to not seek out the “blind beggars” of our age. We still need to be admonished as St. Paul said so that we might endeavor to be what Christ has through salvation made us: children of the light. Every day there are new opportunities for us to take the light of Christ into the dark places. Every day we can welcome those we find in the dark to the Apostles call to
Wake up, O Sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ shall shine on you. [Ephesians 5:14]
Are we not caught in the same conventions that Samuel found himself in as he reviewed Jesse's children? Samuel's first inclination was to see a potential new king in the tallest and strongest of the boys. The Salt Lake City Olympics concluded recently. We were for a time immersed in the tremendous skill, the victories and heart-rending losses of profoundly talented and hard-working athletes. We humans have always exulted in this kind of heroism. The ancient Greeks in their city-states carved into stone life sized images of their Olympic champions, and maintained them at public expense for the rest of their lives. Today their managers negotiate contracts that place their images on cereal containers. Perhaps we can make time to give greater consideration to athletes of the human heart: To Jesus, the prophets and apostles, to the lives of saints living and dead who are appropriate peer aspirants for us. We have no chance at the Olympic goal but we do have the opportunity to win crowns of gold that our Lord has promised to his faithful servants.
This Sunday, our Lenten journey reaches a place where we are called to acknowledge our own profoundly deep attraction to human beauty and physical prowess more than our love of faith and character. We are called to acknowledge as well our own areas of spiritual blindness and seek Jesus' healing touch. But this kind of seeking is risky, because it has the possibility of turning our neatly ordered worlds upside-down. The man born blind in today's Gospel found himself immediately with the responsibility to live a different life. Before, he was a beggar, scraping out a living on the fringes of society. After encountering Christ, he became unrecognizable to his neighbors and bold enough to witness to the divine sanction of Christ’s ministry in the very court of the religious authorities.
Lewis Hine, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century spent most of his career photographing children working in factories and mines and immigrants working endless hours at low pay in unsafe conditions. His heart was crushed by what he witnessed in this so-called gilded age. And he battled the indifference of the robber barons and the general public with his images of what it cost millions of children and immigrants to support the conveniences and luxuries of the industrial age. “When there is great darkness,” he said, “what is needed is light, light, great beacons of light and more light.” How would the world look if we allowed Jesus to heal our blindness? We might see leadership emerging in strange and unexpected places. We might hear God speaking through the voices of unsung heroes and those who have been residing on the margins of our communities. We might find new ways of relating to God and each other - ways that we had not imagined before, and ways that might bring new life to our ministries, to our communities, and to the lost and hurting peoples around us. Cynthia and Joe Yates have helped us see this. We might even dare to lift the veils of our own conventional ways of thinking and see that God is greater than we are. We might even discover a Spirit of hope that we thought we had lost, a Spirit that might bring us to new ways of witnessing to the light and power of Jesus Christ.
Glory, glory glory
To the Lord God Almighty,
Who was, and is and is to come!
Joseph J. Muñoz
Quincy California