Sermon for 4th Lent 2014

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on March 30, 2014
Scripture text: John 9:1-41

In my experience, human beings have two general responses to tragedy: “how can I help?” and “who or what is to blame?” Take recent events for examples. We have two sad events dominating our news cycle right now: the disappearance of MH370 and the landslide in Washington state. If you listen, you can hear and see both of those responses at work in these stories.

“How can I help?” Well, you can see people from all those different countries pitching in to search for the missing airliner. You see all those volunteers digging through the muck trying to find survivors. You see people acting out of that frantic energy to do something useful and helpful in the face of calamity.

“Who or what is to blame?” Was it terrorists? Pilot error? Pilot suicide? A failure of the aircraft? Was the landslide caused by global warming? God’s wrath? What is the reason these things happened? You hear people asking those questions, trying to make sense of the cause-and-effect of how these catastrophes has taken place.

Both of these are valid responses in the face of evil. And we all do them, sometimes both at once. But like many of these questions, our Holy Scriptures will make the definite claim that one response is better than the other. It is, in fact, the central question of our Gospel lesson today.

Jesus and the disciples are walking along and they come upon a blind beggar. The disciples ask a question “Whose sin is the reason for this man being born blind? His own or his parents?” In other words, who is to blame for this man’s condition?

That’s where our story begins, but I want to step back for a second to make sure you recognize how utterly ludicrous that question is on its face. Of course, that’s precisely the reason John includes this story. “Who’s to blame?” is for him and for Jesus, a ridiculous response. Let me break that down further so as to be perfectly clear here.

The disciples are basically asking one of two things. The first is does God punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty? That would be the case if this man was blind due to his parent’s misdeeds. And certainly others have laid the same claim at times. According to Pat Robertson, hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the debauchery of New Orleans. Funny that the hurricane wiped out the 9th ward and most of the gulf coast while leaving Bourbon Street pretty much intact. God has either bad aim or is exceedingly unjust. Neither is true.

The second thing the disciples are asking is this. Did God look into the future at this man’s life and see that at age 14 or 25 or 50 or whatever, he committed some heinous sin, so bad that God has to punish him in utero, decades before he’s even committed it? But if he’s blind, maybe he can’t commit it so there’s no need to punish him if he...okay, my head hurts already. This is starting to feel like one of those “if I go back in time and impregnate my grandmother, can I be my own grandfather?” time paradoxes that leads to a lot of bad science-fiction stories. This doesn’t make sense either.

Jesus cuts through all this crap, all this blame, and says simply. “This isn’t about sin. It’s about opportunity.” And to prove that, he reaches down to the man and heals him of his blindness.

What follows in the rest of this story is an object lesson to us all. The man is passed around the city, encountering various folks who are astonished at his miraculous healing. In each case, this man’s proclamation of Jesus Christ as his salvation grows bolder and bolder. Like so many who have been granted the gift of true grace, he cannot shut up about the one who restored his life.

Blaming is always backward looking and as this story points out, often pointless. Why did I get cancer? Well, you were born with a genetic disposition for this kind of disease. What good does that do to know that now? Why was there a landslide? Well, the mechanizations of local weather and global climate...again, what good does it do to know that now? More often than not, we find out the reasons for some calamity or tragedy are things that truly cannot be avoided or controlled.

But that’s a hard truth for many, too hard in some cases. We don’t like knowing that life is out of our control. So we pretend otherwise, for ourselves and for others. Very often, “who or what is to blame” is used as an excuse for us to NOT respond to people in need. I’m not going to help those poor people; They’re just lazy worthless drug addicts, ghetto queens and welfare moochers. Who’s sin caused this? Well, even if there isn’t one, I’ll make up one based on my own prejudices and need to maintain the illusion that what happened to them could never happen to me.

Jesus calls us not only to recognize this hard truth, but he also calls us to a harder path. It’s not about the why, it’s about the what now. Those people need help, so what are YOU going to do about it? What am I doing to do to help them?

Jesus shows us in the blind man what people do when they are the recipients of graces undeserved. This blind man, beggar, poor, of no account in that society, becomes a vocal and unceasing voice for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. By our kindnesses to our neighbors, we may inspire the next MLK or Billy Graham to shout from the mountaintops “God saved me.”

After we ate of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden, we came to think we’ve got this whole blame thing down pat. But we’ve seen ample evidence that we don’t get it at all. We find evil where there is none and we are blind so often to good even when it is right in front of us. God sees things clearly, which is why his plan of salvation is not the destruction of evil, but its redemption.

God isn’t worried about the blame. Whose sin...? Irrelevant. For God, it’s about what can I do now? That’s why he sent his son, come to earth to save sinners and to redeem the unworthy.

As Paul wrote in our lesson last week, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” While we were evil and enemies of God, God reached down not to destroy us, but to save us and reclaim us as his own. The man born blind was reborn by that grace. We, in the waters of baptism, are likewise renewed. And we are called to do likewise with those around us. Amen.