Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

John 9:1-41

Last Sunday, Avery one of our fourth-grade singers in Schola came up for communion so enthusiastically that she forgot to get a little cup from the usher.  (I asked her if I could tell this story, and she said that I could.) As soon as she popped the bread in her mouth and moved to the cup, she realized, as did the assisting minister, that she didn’t have one.  We often have extra cups on the little table, but they weren’t there, so after a bit of confusion, Kate, the assisting minister for the service, said, “I’ll come find you.”  After everyone had communed, Kate took the chalice, found a little cup, and headed down the side aisle searching for Avery.  Scanning the crowd, she couldn’t see her. As it turned out, the choir was in the balcony.  Anyone else might have thought, “Oh well, she’s too far away,” or “Everyone else is finished; we don’t have time,” or even, “I bet she’ll remember her cup next time.”

Not Kate.  She kept looking until she saw her and gestured for her to come down. Avery pointed back at herself, “Me?”  Kate gestured back, “Yes, you.”  The rest of the assembly was finished at this point, even all the communion assistants. We were singing, “Eat this bread.  Drink this cup,” again and again.  Avery maneuvered her way out of the pew, climbing across several of her friends, then disappeared down the stairs, reappearing in the side aisle as Kate went to meet her.  We kept singing, all of us waiting.  We waited for that one to be fed.  “I once was lost by now I’m found.”

To me, it was the most powerful moment in the service, a miracle really.  Not one left behind.  This one seen, noticed, found, and fed.  I feel like we were all healed in that moment. The gospel answer to, “Who me?” is always, “Yes to you.”

It reminded me a United Methodist pastor who ended every Eucharist by looking out at the assembly after communion to say, “Has everyone been fed?”  And she would scan the crowd looking for a raised hand or someone yet to come forward.  It always seemed as much a part of the promise as “The body of Christ given for you.”

The entire gospel story turns around this notion of seeing.  Who do we see?  What do we see?  Who sees?  Who doesn’t see? Now there’s a risk in this metaphor of sight versus blindness.  We often stereotype “blind people” and make assumptions about what they know or have access to; that somehow their awareness is less. I suspect that’s not true. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about Jacques Lusseyran, a blind French resistance fighter who wrote about his experience in a memoir called And There Was Light.

The problem with seeing the regular way, Lusseyran wrote, is that sight naturally prefers outer appearances. It attends to the surface of things, which makes it an essentially superficial sense. We let our eyes skid over trees, furniture, traffic, faces, too often mistaking sight for perception—which is easy to do when our eyes work so well to help us orient ourselves in space.

Speed is another problem. Our eyes glide so quickly over things that we do not properly attend to them. Fingers do not glide, Lusseyran points out. To feel a table is a much more intimate activity than seeing it. Run your hands across the top and you can find the slight dip in the middle of the center panel that you might otherwise have missed, proof that this table was planed by hand.

Taylor says, “At the very least it makes me wonder how seeing has made me blind—by giving me cheap confidence that one quick glance at things can tell me what they are, by distracting me from learning how the light inside me works, by fooling me into thinking that I have a clear view of how things really are, of where the road leads, of who can see rightly and who cannot.[1]

Every religious tradition suggests that “paying attention” is essential to the spiritual life.  The man born blind turns out to be the one who knows how to pay attention to what’s happening.  He’s not bound by the views and perspectives of the traditions that govern the religious leaders.  I bet he heard the tone of Jesus’ voice, felt the spit and mud on his eyes, the coolness of the water in pool, all making him see with his inner vision that Jesus shimmered with a light that changes the way we see what is in front of us.

My friend Beth, a pastor in on the west side of Minneapolis, always says, “It shimmers to me.”  It could be a comment in a conversation, the look on a face, the taste of melted cheese, the sound of the breeze.  She always has this sense that God is right there ready to be seen, to be experienced, to meet us, to beckon us from the outskirts–from the balcony–to the feast.

We all stand in this gospel story in all the places, simultaneously born blind and born with the wide eyes of the heart; born with a space that holds God; and an ability to let it shine.  We shimmer.  The question is never who carries light and who does not.   This is the miracle that Jesus came to help us see.  Incarnation.  Light in bodies and time.  In piles of snow that seem higher than any we can remember.  In experiences of loss and grief, change and unrest.  Light.

The question is will we perceive it.

Perhaps Lent is nothing more than the gesture, pointing at us, “Hey you.  Yes, you!  Come, Come to the pool, the bath, the miracle, the feast.

The service begins with us asking, “Who me?”

And for the next hour (or more), hearing the answer, “Yes, you; all of us.”

That shimmers!

[1] Christian Century, online, March 24, 2014.  “Light without sight: Seeing has fooled me into thinking I have a clear view of where the road leads,” Barbara Brown Taylor.  https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-03/light-without-sight?code=tWccJtJm7YzoMpUz4xpP&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=179489864c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2023-03-13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-179489864c-82381019