To Shoot Through Darkness With Unexpected Light

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Passion Sunday, the Fifth Sunday in Lent

March 24, 1996

John 9: 1-8

When we confront that blind man at the side of the road and witness his healing we find ourselves tempted to ask some up-to-date questions. Do we witness here the first corneal transplant? Is this a case really of some psychosomatic condition, with Christ present as a skillful psychiatrist dissolving a psychological smoke screen releasing the man to integrated wholeness?

 Well, it is none of this! Not on your life! That roadside blind man is no simple individual craving sight. As a person blind from birth, he is the symbol of a divisive and virulent synagogue struggle between the Jews who confess Jesus as Messiah and those who don't. But more, John understands that man blind from birth as you, as me, as our churches, our nation, our world blind from birth apart from Christ. Jesus understands our natural existence as blindness. Within his own time, John attacks his orthodox antagonists as blind, the world without Christ as blind, but his

accusation reaches all of us who seek to build our lives apart from grace, magnanimity, generosity, love. Looking out on our world today, John understands the obsessive pursuit of profit, the aggressive clamoring to be number one, the eagerness to manipulate others for sexual, commercial or narcissistic advantage as the world: BLIND! John perceives communities fragmented by national arrogance, religious exclusivity, ideological rigidities, class aggrandizement, egregious economic disparity as the natural world--a world blind from birth.

And as our world sits figuratively at the side of the road crippled by blindness, John sees Christ healing our blindness, Christ dissolving the barriers we build to wall out others, the love of Christ wiping out distinctions of language, nation, race, religion, sexual orientation we use to assault one another. Christ, says John, poured into our lives and societies as love and justice creates fairness, equity, mutuality. Christ subverts all claims to status based on title, seniority, political muscle, property rights, bank balance, bloodlines--any of these human claims we use to identify ourselves, to find our niches, to put others in their place. Christ reorients us, offering an identity rooted simply in the solidarity of human community. When John describes Jesus daubing earth soaked by his spittle into the eyes of the man blind from birth, and then sends that man to bathe in the pool called "Sent," John offers us a figure who not only gains sight, this figure embodies a new creation. He becomes a new community bound by love, a domain which in a dark world can only be described as light, which in a blind world illustrates dramatic and true sight.

How shall we describe this light? How do we grasp the dimensions of this promised sight? Well, let me illustrate with a word from Helen Keller. In a Helen Keller, blind and deaf, truly one of the great spirits of our century. In a little reflection by Rufus Jones, we learn of Helen Keller attending a Quaker Meeting.. It was her first Friends meeting, says Jones, and in addition to the delight in this unique manner of worship, Helen Keller commended the Friends over their stance during Word War One and their relief work "in the long period of agony following the war." The thing touching her most, writes Rufus Jones, lay in the Friends' persistent pursuit of love and community, the new way of life and spirit of reconciliation. And Jones continues, "With Extraordinary effect, but with uttermost simplicity she referred to her own life as an illustration. Once there was little girl, she said, who was shut up in utter darkness and unbroken silence with no real life, no world, no hope, no future. Then someone came, who with patience and tenderness, brought her into contact with the world out there beyond her, and opened in her undreamed capacities of intercourse with that new world of life and thought. Even with closed eyes she learned how to look out on a world full of beauty, hope and possibility. So you," she continued, addressing the Friends Meeting, "so you have had the privilege of helping men, women and children to discover a richer life and a deeper love and sympathy than they knew before. They have found through you a world before unknown. You have shot through their darkness with an unexpected light."

"You have shot through darkness with an unexpected light." That is the way Helen Keller describes the impact Annie Sullivan, her patient and tender teacher, had on her own life. And even more vividly, that is the way she describes the impact of the Friends on the terrible human catastrophe of the First World War. And I wonder, isn't that the way John describes the impact of Jesus' presence on that blind man wasting away by the roadside? Isn't that what we are called to do as the Gospel affirms, "while it is still day?" Are we who claim discipleship called to a ministry no less dramatic?--to shoot through the darkness with an unexpected light?

I think so. And what brings light to this world more than any other source resides in the manner we choose to treat each other. To be light to the world is a matter of ethics and service. To shoot the darkness with unexpected light means taking the case for those who are weak, vulnerable, on the outside. It means pitching in for those who do not vote. It means joining in the struggle with those who bear stigma, those who have no friends in high places, those who get the short end of the stick, those who live in fear. And this Lenten season reminds us especially, it means doing it at risk--risk of failure, risk of foolishness, risk of rejection. In this season of the Cross, one of the Cross's most courageous twentieth century witnesses, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu insists, he is not kidding, that "the heart of the Christian Gospel is precisely that God the all Holy One, the all powerful One is also the One full of mercy and compassion. This God is not a neutral God inhabiting some inaccessible Mount Olympus. This is a God who cares about his children and cares enormously for the weak, the poor, the naked, the downtrodden the despised. This God takes their side not because they are good, since many of them are demonstrably not so. God takes their side because God is that kind of God and they have no one else to champion them."

In this shadowed world, friends, where the politics of the nineties is filled with contempt, rejection, and punishment for the downtrodden and despised, where walls get built almost daily between "them'' and "us," this mission of justice and reconciliation would be, in our world, "to shoot through the darkness with unexpected light." On this Passion Sunday, as the Gospel ordains, I pray we work the works of One who sends us into the world while it is still day. I pray you, I, this church amid the darkness, may be luminous, resplendent, radiant lights in this world. Yea, God grant it may be so.