Looky! (sermon draft 3/02)

Warning: the following sermon illustration involving table manners is rated PG (pretty gross). Parents may want to close their eyes, and cover their ears, and hum loudly during said illustration, while children of all ages may want to stop coloring, eating cheerios or text-messaging and pay attention so that they may enjoy it in all its grossicity.

This illustration goes under the heading “Amusing Things Your Favorite Uncle Taught You To Do at the Dinner Table.”

• Number one: the napkin trick. Take a paper napkin, unfold it thusly, add some music, and… ta-da!
• Number two: the mashed potato extruder. Take a mouthful of mashed potato, pretend that there’s a crank attached to your head—crank it while pursing your lips and pushing mashed potato through the opening. Always amusing!
• Number three: the coffee creamer trick. All you need is a coffee creamer of this variety (non-dairy is just fine), and a fork. Take creamer in one hand, fork in the other and BAM. (Turn creamer over cup and “milk” it through fork holes.) Just like nature intended.
• Fourth and final: “Looky.” Announce loudly, “Anyone want to play Looky?” Treat all takers with a view of your wide open mouth containing an assortment of half-chewed food.

Okay, kids, you can poke your parents and get them listening again, since the grossness is over for the time being. It’s “looky” I want to talk about this morning—although not the dinner table variety. This one is related, but different. It’s not gross at all. It is the looky as in “Looky, looky, looky!” The kind of looky you use when you’re a kid and you want your parents to take notice of you. Like when you learn to ride a bike (Looky, looky, looky). It’s also the kind of looky you use as an adult—as in “Looky here!” Looky here, I just won the megabucks!! Looky!

Looky—that’s basically the stance that the man born blind takes with the people who question him incessantly about the miracle he had experienced through Jesus’ intervention in his life.

The neighbors and locals started it. They couldn’t understand how this sort of thing could have happened, right in their own backyards! We never did it that way before. They wondered if he was even the same blind beggar who sat there each day trying to part them from their loose change. They asked, “Is that really you?” And he said, “Looky here, it’s me—I can see!”

They took him to the Pharisees Those guys asked him all kinds of questions. Where he was sitting, and how deep was the pool of Siloam, and how exactly he was instructed to wash. Then they asked him about the man who gave him his sight. He said, “Looky here, he put mud on my eyes, told me to wash, and now I can see!”

The Pharisees even dragged his parents in—hoping to prove that he wasn’t born blind by squeezing mom and dad. (You see the Pharisees could chuck you out of the synagogue—and if that happened, well—you might as well have gotten thrown off the face of the earth if you weren’t part of the synagogue in Israel.) But the parents dodged that bullet by deferring the question to their son. “Looky here, he’s old enough—ask him yourself!”

So the authorities go back to questioning the son. “You say this man gave you back your sight. Isn’t that man a sinner? Didn’t he heal on the Sabbath?” “Where does he come from?” “How did he do this?”

The formerly blind from birth man finally can’t take it anymore and he bursts out, “Looky here, all I know is I was blind, but now I can see! Can’t you see that?”

And that’s what this story is all about—seeing and not seeing. But not in the physical sense, as much as there is of that in the story. No, it’s about spiritual sight—seeing Jesus for who he is, seeing others for who they are, seeing ourselves for who we really are. This story shouts out, “Looky, looky, looky!” Let those who have eyes see! Really see.

“Looky here,” says Jesus, “this man is not a textbook case study for who sinned. He is a man. A child of God. Period. He is not simply a blind man—as if that sum totaled his existence. In fact he is who he is so that God may be revealed in him.”

If only we could look at each other and see each other as God and Jesus see us. In the first lesson today God tells Samuel not to look at Eliab’s good looks and height when discerning who God has chosen for king. “For the Lord doesn’t see as mortal see; they look upon outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

And isn’t that so about people? Anyone who’s been picked last for a dodgeball team can attest to it. People are caught up in appearances—first impressions. That’s why George Clooney gets the cover of Time magazine, and I couldn’t even make the cover of our newsletter. What you look like, what people see on the outside, colors their opinion of what’s on the inside.

There’s even been studies done with children on this phenomenon. Researchers showed children pictures of attractive people and “unattractive” people and asked them which people were “good,” and which were “bad.” Overwhelmingly they said the good looking people were good, and the homely, bad.

So, somehow, we are hardwired to make these assumptions. And that means, as followers of Jesus, we must override instinct to act in a way that treats people equitably. Equitably in the sense that we look into their hearts, not their faces or bodies for their character. And equitably also in how we treat others who “cue” certain responses within us.

For instance, as a part of my Synod anti-racism training we watched a video on an all white youth group’s plan to go to a black neighborhood and “help them by cleaning up the neighborhood.” What they learned in the course of the program was that this was a very patronizing plan. That, if they truly wanted to be involved with the people there, they should enter into an equal relationship, and wait to be invited to help in some way—while also receiving knowledge and help from them.

The homeless also cue behaviors within us. Part of the greater Nashua Interfaith Hospitality network’s training is meant to restore the dignity the residents lose by being homeless in our eyes. We instantly feel they are spendthrifts, or they have a drug problem, or something must have been flawed in them—because otherwise that could happen to me! Volunteers are trained to see the residents as just people.

But this lesson on seeing is also about how we see ourselves. How do you see yourself? Like me you’re probably fooling yourself in some ways. I see myself as young and thin—when actually I’m slightly middle-aged, and carrying a few extra pounds. But again that’s a human way of seeing oneself. We have to examine our hearts to see ourselves as God sees us. What is in your heart?

In the story, the man born blind sees that he can see—but he has already “seen” the contents of his heart. He is a man without recourse in the world, a sinner, one solely dependant upon what only Jesus can give him.

As “holy men,” the Pharisees, by contrast, see no need for this Jesus. In fact they would just as soon be rid of him. They already have a religious system that works for them, thank you very much, and the Nazarene is simply getting in the way, with his healings and feedings and forgiving sins and whatnot.

Where do you and I fall? We’d like to think in the blind man’s court. But truth be told we may be closer to the Pharisees than we’d feel comfortable being. We may think that we have things “covered” with our own religiosity, our own piety, and our own practice of religion. So much so, that we may begin to see Jesus more as a moral guide and great philosopher and teacher, and less as the one who can heal us, feed us, forgive our sins, and give us a future with God.

That’s the kind of blindness Jesus came to remedy. Fortunately for us, we need only admit blindness to our own hearts and others for Jesus to come to us with mercy and grace and open the eyes of our hearts, so that we might truly “see.” The danger is in saying “I can see!” when the depth of that sight is only skin-deep.

But even then, I don’t believe that Jesus gives up on us. He’s always there, waiting for us to admit our blindness, waiting for us to beg for mercy, waiting to reveal God, through us, to others whose blind seeing prevents them from looking upon the face of the Christ. Yes, Jesus is waiting with spit and dirt and instructions on how to use them to gain your sight.

Which by the way, is perhaps the origin of that toast your favorite uncle taught you to use only on special occasions:

RYAN: “Here’s mud in your eyes!”

Amen