“GLORY MINUS THE GLITZ AND THE GLOOM”
How would you react? A man blind from birth now can see. He notices the cobalt blue of a clear sky, the persimmon red of glowing embers, the dandelion yellow of saffron in the market for the first time in his life. How exciting would that be?
But everyone around him wants to make his disability and cure into a theological test case. Jesus’ disciples won’t rest until they assign blame for why he was born blind in the first place. The Pharisees want to discredit him as a theological moron because he gives glory to God through Jesus as he ponders the miracle.
I have a feeling for the blind man. From age 20 until about age 42, I had migraine headaches two or three times monthly. If you have ever had one, you know that each episode takes days from beginning to end. I had seen umpteen specialists. My immediate family all had their pet theories. Acquaintances and friends would chime in with ideas about my pain. You are too intense, you need to relax; use cold packs, not hot compresses; you’re not taking your medication soon enough.
I reached the point where I hid my struggle with this condition rather than subject myself to their various conjectures about my failings to be a non-migraine person. What was amazing was how few people to whom it occurred simply to look me in the eye and say, “Wow, that is really rotten luck. I am sorry about your suffering.”
Now if I felt like that about inheriting my grandfather’s migraines for two decades, imagine how this poor man born blind felt. The disciples were getting out their Bibles to locate verses explaining the moral origins on why the blind were doomed. Imagine how he felt about becoming the rope in the Pharisees’ nasty tug of war.
What is it about the suffering of human beings that brings out the very worst and the very best in other human beings? We see all of that in this story from John.
We see it in daily life also. I got a call from a reporter wanting a quote last week. Usually, they call after tragic events like the tsunami in Indonesia. “How do you as a person of faith explain such a thing?” they ask before my deep breath and long pause. Now, the wry, sarcastic, teenage part of me wants to answer with the tidbits I gathered from the Discovery channel: “the earth’s crust cools, the tectonic plates shift, earthquakes result, and the tremors broadcast massive waves across the ocean. Didn’t they teach science in the schools where you grew up?”
Of course, what they really mean is by virtue of my calling, I must believe God is good. “So how could a good God allow a horribly tragic tsunami to happen?” Last July at the Craigville Colloquy on Cape Cod, precisely this was the theme and I was the pastoral reflector. That is, after lofty theologians lectured I was supposed to bring it home for people on the ground groping for answers. Lucky me, right? One day I responded by describing my pastoral rounds that
morning. A woman had approached me because the father of her two teenage daughters had died. Her girls were walking and talking with their dad as part of their universe one day, then the next he was gone. But was I dodging the issue of the tsunami with such an answer? No, I attempted to offer a context for such a free-floating question.
What I was saying is that in the church we’re aware everyday of human suffering. Everyday we see examples of undeserved pain, loss, and tragedy that simply comes from being human and living in this world rather than another ideal world.
Is it all right if it bothers me that reporters never call as teenage girls lose a dad? Why wait for a tsunami? Because it is a bigger event and it sells newspapers? It’s the same thing. At church we deal in human suffering up to our elbows every day: grandchildren of DUC barely hanging on who, without miracles of prayer and science, would have been gone long ago. I can name a handful of families like that right now. Why don’t reporters call and ask about those grandparents? Now that story would strengthen their usual weak angles on this subject. I can see the headline, “Church Claims Huge Amount of Undeserved and Unrelieved Suffering Is a Part of Life. God Is Present and Cares Deeply.” Film at eleven.
Our story of Jesus’ miraculous healing reminds me that God didn’t send Jesus to end human suffering. How many blind, lame, and mentally-ill people did Jesus pass and not heal on a given day. Plenty. God did not send Jesus to end human suffering. God sent Jesus to make our suffering more like his suffering. Redemp-tive. Transformative. Leading to places of hope rather than despair. So let’s face it, to live is to suffer. But the good news is God has made the transformation of human suffering into something more Christ-like the daily business of the church.
Do people ever ask you impertinent questions, like those that floated around the blind man and Jesus as holy miracles were practically slapping them in the face? Maybe they’re aware you go to Church. Maybe they know you are a Christian. It could be after a hurricane, a jet hits a high-rise, or a young mother’s heart stops.
“How could a good and loving God allow something like this to happen?” Beware of such questions. For they’re rooted in an arrogance that if I, the asker, were God, the world would run differently. I’d always do good with my power. How insulting. More like arrogance in the face of God. We moderns are good at that.
Can you see the problem? Their image of God is a two-dimensional cardboard cutout rather than an actual complex living and breathing and loving relationship. To them God equals power to do anything you want to do, whenever you want to. Never mind how the terms of creation were established hundreds of millions of years ago. Never mind how God chose free fellowship with us, giving us choice, rather than making us automatons to blankly do his bidding. Never mind how in the beauty and wonder of that, a door was also opened to ugliness and hurt. Never mind it is people rather than God who are enamored with raw exercise of power. Never mind God’s power is more of a quiet authority and what God does in Christ is working its purpose through love and persuasion, patience and prayer.
Some will stubbornly accuse you of dodging their question. “How could a good and loving God allow something like this to happen?” Remind them that there are other, better questions. Paul said as much to Timothy, advising his protege: “avoid the profane chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.”
In this, as in all matters, we look to Jesus to find our bearings. And Jesus doesn’t answer their questions either. But neither does he remain silent. He treats the occasion of the man’s blindness as an opportunity. An opportunity not so much for theological debates, but rather than “God’s works might be revealed in him.” Then healing unfolds, allowing God’s light to shine through the man’s darkness.
Jesus refuses to engage their pointless speculations. He is there with the man. He touches the man. And he heals the man. Thus he reveals the glory of God. It is not a close-up action glory like the glitz of the Oscar red carpet where celluloid superheroes tread. Neither is it the far-away glory of a distant, large, inscrutable Oz-like God who says, “I’m all powerful. Go away and just accept your lot in life”.
It is the glory of the compassionate God who reaches out and touches our need. So the glory of our God is tied up in the cross, the one symbol we insisted on bringing with us in our move, making our Fellowship Hall into a sanctuary. And because God entered our lives in Christ not so much to explain, not so much as to disclose, but to make war on evil, maybe symbols speak louder than words. So turn with me now to our holy emblems. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen.
“Glory Minus the Glitz
and the Gloom”
Text: John 9.1-41
Rev. Dale B. Rosenberger
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Communion Sunday
March 2, 2008
