Come home to Calvary
Sermon Text
Today in worship we’ll be exploring the journey of our call. How God has brought us through particular experiences to be where we are today. And how God is even now, dreaming for us a future that will be loving. It is a journey that requires awareness of the past and hope for the future. But ultimately, it can only be lived in this present moment.
I invite you to be truly present here, right now, in this moment. I invite you to set down, if only for this hour, the regrets you might hold about the past and the anxieties you might have about the future.
As you are able, I invite you to put both feet on the ground and plant yourself in this space, for this time.
We are on land that has been Calvary’s home for over 100 years, but many years before we built here, it was the home to the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula.
We lament the centuries of injustices committed against and endured by Indigenous peoples and recognize that injustices continue in the present.
We seek a deeper understanding of our relationship to the land and with the Bay Area peoples, one that promotes healing and justice within our faith community and the world beyond.
The process of learning the history of a place guides us into what is needed in the future. The first steps toward healing and right relationship are telling the truth and acknowledging the harm.
So it is with our faith journey. This is a place where we can speak the truth of our experience and share our stories with each other.
Let us worship the God who has called us, and called us here today.
I want to begin this morning with a disclaimer. The gospel of John often uses blindness as a metaphor for people who do not understand who Jesus is. My father was blind, and I am aware that using a condition that so profoundly affected his life as a metaphor for faithlessness is problematic. And yet the people with the worst vision in this story have perfectly functioning eyes. So I hope we’ll recognize the vision related language in this story and then do our best to use different language when we tell our stories.
For Jesus in John’s gospel, everything in the world is a sign that points to him, helping us see and hear him more clearly. In John’s gospel, there aren’t miracles as we have in the other gospels. There are signs.
And the signs aren’t big deals on their own. Jesus spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes? Not much of a miracle. Spit. Mud. No, this story isn’t about the ingredients of the sign. It is about how the sign points to Jesus. Signs are events and actions that make our vision clearer and make our hearing sharper.
Unless they don’t.
For some people in this story, the signs on’t improve their vision. This sign, of the man having his sight restored, doesn’t in any way, fit with the world they know and can explain. And as such, even though they are asking questions, they seem to be standing there like this: with their hands over their ears and their eyes closed, singing “la la la la la. Not listening!”
What do we see when we look at Jesus? That’s the question for John.
How do we make sure we don’t only see what we’re already looking for?
And I think that second question is part of the problem with our current state of American culture. I think in both politics and in religion, the grand American experiment has been reduced to, and again, excuse my language, blind faith. We have mistaken what belief could mean and have reduced it to an agreement with authority about truth.
In Greek, the word for faith, and the word for belief are the same. And so faith, which should involve a level of mystery, is reduced to asserting your allegiance to your belief system.
It’s the shadowy side of belief—belief systems require you to be against the belief systems, or the people, that are different than yours. You can see it functioning clearly in this story, and in John’s gospel.
That kind of belief helps keep a group together. For John’s gospel, the followers of Jesus were being kicked out of the synagogues. The power of saying, if you aren’t for us, you’re against us can feel helpful to people under assault from outside forces.
A generation ago, the United States was united around our hatred of communism. It brought us together, partly in fear, partly in patriotism. Then the Berlin Wall fell and we lost a clear enemy. I don’t think we realized how much we had defined ourselves in opposition to communism. It shaped our identity.
There are still threats in the world today, but they are more amorphous. It is easy to say we hate terrorism. But who counts as a terrorist is very much up for debate.
Our belief systems put us in conflict with each other.
We see it today. In religion. Y’all have seen this play out in real ways in the past month, when protestors yelled at you as you came to worship. We may all be Christian in name, but our belief systems are very different.
We see it today in politics. Where people say “I’m all in” for their candidate, even if he were to shoot someone in the middle of a crowded street.
It is easier for us to see the blind faith and belief in our political opponents, but the tendency is there for us all. Because we’re worried that if we don’t show complete loyalty to our party, flawed as it may be, we’ll lose the election to the other guys. And when you’ve decided the other guys are everything that’s wrong with America, you have to fight to the death for your guy, even if he may be what’s wrong with America.
You can see how it is a bad cycle to be in, right?
Listen to me now. Each and every one of us is wrong about something we’re certain we’re right about. We just don’t know what it is. Also, I don’t tell you that so that you can go tell everyone else what they are wrong about. Our work is to figure out our own error. What is the belief we’ve been stating as fact that we’ve gotten wrong?
In the public square, and too often in religion, our state of believing has ceased to be about common understanding and personal experience, and has become a discordant, clanging chorus where the loudest voices seem to win.
Our story of the man born blind suggests clear vision doesn’t come from allegiance to a belief system. It doesn’t come from being fixated on the HOW or WHY questions that try to quantify, explain away, or control the mystery of faith.
Clear vision arrives at the point where the man says, “I do not know.”
They ask him, and they ask him again, about how he was healed. They want him to confirm what they think they already know. They aren’t interested in the idea that God could be at work in a way they don’t understand.
How did it happen?
Who did this?
What do you say about him?
For the formerly blind man, when he acknowledges that he doesn’t have a single clue, that’s when he gets clear sight, when he understands.
Yes, Jesus restored his vision, and you’d think being the recipient of one of Jesus’ signs would be enough to bring him to faith. But that is rarely the experience of people in scripture. For this man, it required his willingness to trust he didn’t have to have all the answers so he could see who Jesus truly was. “Lord I believe”, he says to Jesus at the end of the story.
So, even when we really have no answers to other people’ questions, our faith is strongest when we can claim our doubts and questions and say what we’ve experienced.
And we need to expect people’s questions and their anxiety that rise up when we invoke mystery. The crowd is so befuddled, it doesn’t even recognize the man when he first comes back with his sight. He has to keep telling them, me. Hi. I’m the blind guy. It’s me.”
So then they ask him, ‘fine, if you’re the blind man, how can you see now?’
Notice his answer.
“The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.”
He testifies to his experience.
He doesn’t say that everyone needs to have the same experience he did.
He doesn’t claim that his experience is more valid than someone else’s.
He just says what he knows about what he experienced.
He doesn’t say that everyone needs to go to Siloam to be healed.
He doesn’t say that if you go to Bethsaida instead, your healing will be inferior.
He doesn’t try to market the mud and sell the Siloam experience so that everyone else will have the same healing he had for the low price of $49.99.
He shares what he knows and acknowledges what he doesn’t know.
The crowd keeps asking him for facts and data.
I wish the crowds had instead asked him, “What did the mud feel like when he put it on your face? What is it like to see? Do dogs look like you imagined them to look? What do you think of sunsets?”
Wouldn’t that be great, if instead of trying to quantify else’s experience, we could just enjoy it with them? What could our faith communities be with more of that?
But instead they take him to the Pharisees, who sadly get blinded by the technicality of the sign. Jesus made mud on the Sabbath.
The mud business doesn’t seem like a big deal to us, certainly not a hanging offense, but Pharaoh had the Israelites make mud into bricks, remember. Victor talked about it last week when he preached about Moses. Slavery in Egypt was a life ending experience, not a learning experience. There is great value in knowing your history and learning from it. There is no value in forgetting the parts of history you’d like to pretend didn’t happen.
But no matter how useful and beneficial those rules had been at the beginning, once the religious leaders have reduced their faith experience into only rules and restrictions, they missed the opportunity to see God at work making someone’s life better.
Our traditions are important. And we shouldn’t let them close our eyes to the presence of God in our midst.
Through the interrogation with the Pharisees, the formerly blind man doesn’t get sidetracked. He keeps telling them what his experience was and acknowledging where he doesn’t have answers.
And, when pressed, he makes a claim about Jesus. “He is a prophet.” His awareness of Jesus seems to be getting clearer for him as it gets more muddied for the religious officials.
The man born blind continues to speak of his experience and how the sign of Jesus’ healing helped him to see.
And he is quite impassioned in his own testimony.
Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.
PREACH, preacher!
And then he’s driven out of his community. The neighbors, the religious authorities, and his own parents decide that they don’t want to trust his experience because it doesn’t match their belief system. Their belief system is more important than the man’s experience of being healed by Jesus.
The story ends with some positive outcomes for the formerly blind man, more or less. He’s gained his sight. And Jesus comes and finds him and gives him the opportunity to make his confession of faith.
“Do you believe in the son of man?”
“Lord, I believe.”
That’s all we can do.
We can’t explain away the troubles of the world.
We can’t explain away the mysteries of the faith.
We can’t open other people’s eyes and turn their heads, saying, “there he is. Jesus is right there. Look!”
All we can do, everything we can do, what we’re called to do, is point to where we’ve encountered Jesus.
Now, I realize that in this story, this doesn’t seem like such a good deal. He loses many of his friends, his faith community, and family.
“One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
Seems like a simple statement to cause such disruption, doesn’t it?
Change, as we know, is a four-letter word. And when the change is at opposition to the people in power, expect trouble.
It also reveals the sad truth that the working of Jesus, and the truth of the gospel is often at odds with the people in power. I’m not speaking of one political leader, or one political party, although you might guess I have some opinions. I’m speaking of the way power is often self-promoting and self-protecting, and not gospel promoting. I’m speaking of the way we tend to take the power we grab and then use it to harm others while we benefit.
As this story in John’s gospel begins, right as the previous chapter ends, we’re told, “So they picked up stones to throw at Jesus, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.” (John 8:59) And that’s where he finds the man born blind.
If the temples we build in God’s name are used to throw stones, God’s gonna leave the temple.
If we want God to be in our temples, sanctuaries, and denominations, we better pay attention to the stones we’re hurling at others in God’s name.
As we think about what God is calling us to do and how God is calling us to be in this world, I invite us to remember the different meanings of the word belief.
It can be trust in someone or something, based on knowledge and experience.
I believe the sun will rise tomorrow.
It can be hopeful trust about someone or something, based on optimism and hope.
I believe the Warriors will win the NBA title this coming season.
It can be adherence to the authority of a belief system.
I believe the only way to God is our way.
And it can be faith in God, who created the world, who created us, and who we have never seen and who we can never fully commodify or comprehend. We see this last kind of belief in this man’s story.
Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, Jesus said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ The man answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, “Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him.
Belief systems tend to put up borders and walls. To keep the right people in and to keep the wrong people out. My prayer is that American Christianity will spend less time worrying about walls and boundaries and spend more time considering horizons.
Horizons are not fixed points. They change as we move. They don’t pretend to be the final answer about anything. They are just the limit of what we can see right now, from where we stand. And the horizon looks different to those standing in a different space.
What if we are called to gently guide people away from the walls of their own certainty and toward the horizons of God’s mystery?
The Confession of 1967 begins with this line: “The church confesses its faith when it bears a present witness to God’s grace in Jesus Christ. In every age, the church has expressed its witness in words and deeds as the need of the time required.”
When faith, when belief, has been life giving for me, it has been when people helped me understand faith as a mysterious horizon business.
It’s a community job. It’s work we each have to do, but we can’t do it alone. It’s why we are called here, to support each other, to speak of our experience so that others might possibly just recognize where God is working in their lives too. Because we’ve all had different instructions in our faith upbringing. Some of us have been pointed to horizons all along. Others of us have been told to build walls.
Sarah Bessey is a Christian author. She had to leave her church to follow Jesus and has been working to re-construct her faith. When you see people doing that hard work, support them. It is, perhaps, easier just to walk away from faith entirely. She said that when she was in the beginning stages of her faith deconstruction, her father told her:
“I’m not afraid for you. If you’re honestly seeking God, I believe you will find what you’re looking for even if it looks different than what I have found.” [1]
That’s faithful horizon work, friends.
I’ve seen God more clearly through the love and care and testimony of others then I have from someone telling me I’m doing church wrong.
I once was blind, but now I see, as the song goes. And I see God because of love, not because of judgment.
I was just in Dallas to take an enneagram class this past week and I got to see my granddaughter when I was there. And that’s pretty great. But if you had told 20-year-old Marci, as she was about to place her son for adoption that in 34 years she’d still have a relationship with her son and would get to visit her granddaughter, 20-year-old Marci wouldn’t have believed you.
It was too far beyond the horizon of what I could see or imagine at the time. I had hope for good things, but I couldn’t see what they would be when I was in the middle of my grief and loss. Not even my dreams were as good as what the truth has been.
Think about your life. I bet none of us thought we’d be who or where we are today when we were children. Today was too far beyond our horizon then. If our faith has journeyed with us on the way, I suspect it’s been because of horizons more than walls.
All we can do is get out from behind our walls of certainty, and journey with others toward God, ever just beyond the horizon, to journey by stages to where God is calling us. We don’t know what’s beyond the next horizon. And sometimes that’s anxiety-producing for us. But we don’t need to be afraid. If we’re seeking God, we believe we will find what we’re looking for, even if it looks different than what we have known.
Friends, instead of belief that limits your dreams, I hope you will experience the doubts, the questions, and the experiences of belief that will point you on your own journey, by stages, horizon to horizon, so you can see God, and so you may believe.
Amen.
[1] https://sarahbessey.substack.com/p/someone-elses-deconversion-dbf?fbclid=IwAR0dntpyTkPx0nXHOAbqvEBzw3oA1IHlieClcD4kfp_4fg3PNikVwqy1A-Y
Scripture
John 9
Jesus Heals a Man Born Blind
9 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
8 His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some claimed that he was.
Others said, “No, he only looks like him.”
But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”
10 “How then were your eyes opened?” they asked.
11 He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”
12 “Where is this man?” they asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The Pharisees Investigate the Healing
13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. 14 Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. 15 Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.”
16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”
But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided.
17 Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.”
The man replied, “He is a prophet.”
18 They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. 19 “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?”
20 “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. 21 But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” 22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. 23 That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
24 A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”
25 He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”
26 Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”
27 He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”
28 Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! 29 We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.”
30 The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. 32 Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
34 To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.
Spiritual Blindness
35 Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
36 “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.”
37 Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.”
38 Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.
39 Jesus said,[a] “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”
40 Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”
41 Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
Come home to Calvary
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