Healing the Blind Man
By Tom Reiber
July 28, 2002
Scripture Readings
New Testament:
Acts 9:1-19a
Old Testament: Psalm 40:
I trusted you, Lord, and waited,
And you came to answer my plea.
You lifted me from the pit,
You pulled me out of the mire,
You set my feet on firm ground,
You made my steps unshakable.
You put a new song in my mouth
and gave me the power to praise
you.
You opened me to the truth;
Suddenly my eyes could see it.
And I knew you don't care about
rituals
or the mummeries of religion.
The only thing that you want
is our whole being, at every
moment.
Hold me in your embrace, Lord;
Make me transparent in your
light.
Grant me awareness; keep
My gratitude fresh each day.
Let my song give blessing and
insight
To those who can't see for
themselves.
And let your compassion always
Shine forth from the depths of
my heart.
—
(the Stephen Mitchell translation)
Today's sermon is about religious conversion. That's something you don't hear about too
often in churches like ours that lean a little to the theological left. In more conservative churches, you hear
about it all the time. People want to
know if you're saved. As most of you
probably know, that term refers to the idea that everybody is headed for hell
unless they accept the free gift of salvation made available through
Jesus.
Things are a bit less clear out here on the religious
left. We don't talk about sin all that
much and the idea that anyone needs to be saved is rarely taught or
stressed. There's often an implicit or
explicit assumption that we're all in this same mess together, that nobody's
perfect, that we could all stand to be a little more like Jesus. Of course that's true, we could all stand to
be a little more like Jesus. But Jesus
came that we might have life and he had some pretty powerful ideas about what
that life ought to look like. So
powerful, in fact, they got him killed. I think Jesus was interested in bringing about spiritual
transformation. The question is, what
did he have in mind and how are we to go about seeking out that experience?
Let's start by taking a look at today's text about the
conversion of Saul, or Paul (his post-conversion name). On the surface, what we have here is an
account of Saul's entrance into the Christian faith. A devout Jew, a Pharisee no less, he starts out negatively
predisposed toward what must have at the time felt like a cult. Then he has a powerful religious experience
that convinces him that God is really at work in this new movement. And he goes on to devote the remaining years
of his life to it, martyred, as legend has it, in Rome, by the Roman Empire.
Because Paul went on to be such a champion of the faith,
writing much of what went on to become our New Testament, we tend to overlook
his early experience, focusing instead on his later spiritual and literary
achievements. No doubt we're all more
familiar with his treatise on love, which gets read at most Christian weddings,
than we are with his early role as a persecutor of the faith.
Yet there is a profound anthropological and cultural
insight in Paul's transition from a persecutor of Christianity to its chief
defender. The author of the book of
Acts is well aware of this, making sure to note that Paul is there when they
kill Stephen and that he gave his consent (Acts 8:1). That Saul had a
major role in the persecution is made crystal clear. The text states that “…Saul laid waste [to] the church, …entering
house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison”
(8:3, RSV).
Here's the guy who wrote the most beautiful treatise
we have about love, and yet he starts off rounding up Christians and hauling
them off to jail. What are we to make
of that? What we're being shown, I
believe, is a model of spiritual conversion that moves from the top down. When you think about it, Jesus came up from
the bottom and primarily healed those on the margins. But in Paul's case, we have an educated Roman citizen. In short, we've got someone like us.
We need to experience
conversion because, like Paul, we're blind to much of the violence in our own
time. Take the war in Afghanistan. We hardly even notice it anymore—except for
glaring atrocities, such as the “collateral damage” that occurred when a
wedding reception was attacked. Can you
imagine, your daughter's or son's wedding reception being bombed, children
running for cover outside in the bushes. Do you think an official apology would suffice? It's hard for us to wrap our brains around
the brutality and horror of what's being done in our name, in part because,
like Paul, we are embedded in a system in which violence is the norm.
Though Paul can't see it at
first, the reader of the Biblical narrative can see the injustice of violence
plain as day. Look at the Gospels
themselves. Early on we have the execution of John the Baptist, killed on
a whim by a political leader. Then there
are the early attempts on the life of
Jesus by angry mob after angry mob, followed by the crucifixion itself, the
archetypal instance of scapegoating violence. The entire Biblical narrative builds toward this climax: an instance of
wrongful death.
Immediately following the
four Gospels we get to the book of Acts, where today's text is found, along
with the stoning of Stephen. It's
worth noting that Stephen incites the rage of the mob by pointing out that people
have always shown a propensity for killing. Stephen says to the mob, “As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not
persecute? And they killed those who
announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now
betrayed and murdered….”
The narrator adds that “…when they heard these
things they were enraged, …they ground their teeth against him. …They cried out with a loud voice and
stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him; and the witnesses
laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul” (vs. 57-58).
So this is the legacy being laid at the feet of
Paul. Paul's conversion can serve as a
touchstone for us all. He is the
archetypal insider who comes to a new level of consciousness concerning his
collusion in the domination system of the world. The period of blindness is a profound symbolic expression for the
challenge to let go of the terrorist out there in order to go inward and meet
the terrorist in here. This is what Jesus
tried to help people see: before we can do anything of lasting value out there
in the world, we must first venture into our own inner darkness.
I know a little bit about this kind of conversion because
I've experienced it first-hand. My
first taste of it came as an undergraduate in survey class on religion by Dr.
John Carey. Dr. Carey was a big,
blustery teddy bear of a man who still had the capacity to unnerve you. He'd walk up to an unsuspecting student, get
about an inch from the students face and ask, “Who's telling the story?” Dr. Carey wanted us to see that white
Europeans, mostly men like himself he readily admitted, had commandeered the
Christian tradition, shaping it to reinforce the status quo. In the course we would be looking at some of
the more significant and modern responses to that theological tyranny. Dr. Carey explained that the tumult of the
Civil Rights movement and the horrible abuses of power in Latin America
produced new theological voices, voices calling for justice and liberation. This was the crucible that produced Dorothy
Day, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Arch Bishop Oscar Romero.
Black Liberation theology questioned the meaning of
salvation and redemption in a world characterized by racial injustice. It questioned the veracity of an ethic that
turned a blind eye to the suffering of a whole class of people. Dr. Carey had us read James Cone, but I
could only take in so much. The full
scope of what Dr. Carey was trying to convey was beyond my reach. It was only later, while at Union Seminary,
where I took a class with James Cone—while working in Harlem—that I began to
understand that the Gospel was calling me to face my own inner attitudes about
race and power and the value of human beings.
At the same time Black
Liberation theology was emerging Feminist theology came into its own. Women began to question the implications of
the Gospel in a male dominated world. Dr. Carey had us read Rosemary Radford Ruther's Sexism and Godtalk
and again, it was too much for me. It
wasn't until later, as I began to grasp the nature of the domination system
that I came to glimpse my own sexism. I'll say more about that in an upcoming sermon, though I have to mention
a news show I caught on television while on vacation this past week.
It was about the big
religious youth gathering in Canada. During the question and answer period an adolescent girl asked a Bishop
about the ordination of women and the Bishop said flat out: “It will never
happen.” There was an awkward silence
as an entire auditorium of people tried to wrap their brains around what had
just been said. I wanted to step into
that TV, into that auditorium and scream out “It has got to happen!” Can you imagine someone telling Julie that
she's not ordainable because she's not a man? It's ludicrous. That's the world
talking. That is the mindset we need to
be converted from.
We need the scales to fall
off our eyes so we can see the roots of injustice more clearly, so we can name
them and begin to transform
them. We need to perform CPR on our
understanding of the Gospel so that it comes back to life. The Trappist Monk Thomas Merton wrote that
“the greatest temptation that assails Christians…[is to think] that the Gospel has
ceased to be news. And if it is not
news it is not Gospel: for the Gospel is the proclamation of something
absolutely new, …not a message that was once new but is now two thousand years
old. …The message of the Gospel when it
was first preached was profoundly disturbing to those who wanted to cling to
well-established religious patterns, the ancient and accepted ways, the ways
that were not dangerous and which contained no surprises.
The Gospel is
handed down from generation to generation but it must reach each one of us bran
new, or not at all. If it is merely
tradition, it has not been preached [nor] heard” (Conjectures of a Guilty
Bystander, pp. 126-127).
So our challenge is to
preach and hear the Gospel in a new way. I believe the good news of the Gospel for us today is the realization
that God's love is not reserved for any one nation or group of believers. It floods the cosmos. We need to start thinking in terms of a
collective human family and our common home, the Earth. And sure enough, one of the cutting edge
fields in the religious academy today is the merger of environmental thought
with religious ethics.
One of the first modern day
prophets to awaken us to life's interconnections is the late great John
Muir. Muir came to maturity in the wake
of the Civil War and saw all too clearly that the way of the world is a
treacherous thing. Yet there weren't
environmentalist as we think of the term today and, because of that, he felt
like a fish out of water. He wandered
here and there across the American landscape, noting the Earth's beauty while
lamenting his inability to fit in.
At one point in his life he
tried to buckle down and find his niche, taking on a job in a machine
factory. He was bright and innovative
and actually had a knack for the work. But just when he was starting to think that his love affair with Nature
was kids' stuff, he suffered an injury to one of his eyes. His other eye went blind for a time as well
in a sympathetic reaction to the injury, plunging Muir into a Pauline like
blindness which forced him to contemplate the deeper meaning of his life.
During this time of soul-searching he came to see
that his appreciation for the natural world, his ability to see into the
mystery and communicate it to others was his life's work. A close friend who regularly wrote to Muir,
Jeanne Carr, understood the significance of Muir's injury and helped him
embrace it. Biographer Frederick Turner
offers this account:
“As ever, [Jeanne]
understood [Muir] better than anyone, perhaps even better than he himself. [She wrote to] him that God had given him
the ‘eye within the eye, to see in all natural objects the realized ideas of
[God's] mind.'
“…Lying in his bed and
slowly recovering amid flowers, the voices of readers, visits of his Sunday
school children, he began meditating: not [on] a return to the factory, …but
[on] a final escape. Little by little,
the blinds had been raised, admitting more and more light, into his eyes, into
his mind.
“The slow regeneration of
his sight was wonderful, and it was also mysterious. Who knew whether it would continue or …fail again. He feared future blindness, feared also the
prospect of the life he would then be forced to lead amid what he [referred to
as] … the ‘shadows of civilization's defrauding duties.'
“His tentative excursions
into April's fields decided [the matter for] him: his work was not in the
factory; with what remained of his sight he would escape into nature and there
store up enough …flowers and sunlight and wild landscapes to last him the
remainder of his life…” (John Muir: Rediscovering America, pp.127-128).
What was Muir saved
from? Yes, he was saved from the
world's incessant march toward production and profitability, from its
exploitative spirit. But most
importantly he was saved from himself, from that part of him that had
internalized the logic of the world. Like Paul, it took a traumatic blinding to shut out the outer world and
its noise so that he could hear the still small voice within.
I'd like to suggest that
religious conversion is still possible, that the idea of grace, of God reaching
down to rescue us from our situation is still utterly applicable. As a newly evolved species of life on the
planet, just coming to understand the vast scale of the cosmos, the beautiful
intricacy of the natural world and the dark forces that drive us to hurt and
kill each other, we need to open to the life force pulsing out from the heart
of it all. We need to be transformed,
healed. The world is in need of
transformation.
As I was rumbling along on
my gas-guzzling hog of a motorcycle—yes, with a big smile complete with bugs in
teeth—I thought about this sermon, about my own long journey toward healing my
spiritual blindness. I realized that a
motorcycle trip across New England wasn't the most environmentally sensitive
choice—a clear indication of a lingering spiritual myopia. But at the same time, I was able to see
those green, rolling hills, and the rivers, and the blue sky, as a living thing
of beauty, a “numinous presence.” And I knew, in that moment, that I would
never be completely blind again.
In the words of the great visionary, Rilke:
Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
Without feet I will make my way to you,
Without a mouth I will say your name.
Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you
With my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I'll feel you burn in every last drop of my blood.
Amen.
© 2002 .
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