Lent 4A
April 3, 2011
1Samuel 16:1-13 * Psalm 23 * Ephesians 5:8-14 * John 9: 1-41
Rev. David M. McNair
On New Year’s Day, 1773, in a small Anglican church in the village of Olney, England, the congregation gathered for worship. Typical of most Sundays since their new priest had arrived, the building was packed with people who enjoyed the priest’s vibrant personal style of preaching and were fascinated by his checkered past as a slave trader. Among other things, he had gained notoriety for the original verses he and his Associate wrote each week for congregational singing. The composition he debuted this Sunday was entitled “Faith’s Review and Expectation.” One might hope the song would be more lively and exciting than its title!
The priest, John Newton, wrote the song to describe his conversion experience twenty-five years earlier. He had been a notorious slave ship captain. While crossing the Atlantic on his way home to England, he and his crew encountered a terrible storm. Assuming all was lost, the irreligious Newton cried out, “Lord, have mercy on us!” The crew survived, and Newton never forgot that moment. He eventually gave up the slave trade, studied for holy orders, and became a leading voice in the movement to abolish slavery.
This song did not stand out for its earliest audiences and was soon forgotten. It was only after it crossed the Atlantic that it became probably the most beloved hymn in the English-speaking world.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
Newton drew on Biblical stories for imagery and language. From the parable of the prodigal son: “I once was lost, but now am found” (1) and from our gospel lesson today — the story of Jesus’ encounter with the man born blind: “Was blind, but now I see.” (2)
I know some of you are familiar with the Enneagram. We had a few classes on the Enneagram here in our church last year, and there are plans to have several Enneagram workshops here in the fall. The Enneagram is an ancient teaching that describes nine distinct and fundamentally different personality types and their interrelationships. Nine different archetypal patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. Each of the nine types is based on a set of perceptual filters that determine our worldview. The power of the Enneagram as a system is that it reveals that the patterns of our personality and the habits of our hearts and minds which we tend to dismiss as neurotic are, in fact, access points for higher states of awareness and consciousness — or in the language of the Spiritual life — our neuroses are the access point for spiritual growth. (3)
Several years ago, soon after Lynn and I were introduced to the Enneagram, we attended a weekend workshop entitled “Enneagram: Love and Power in Relationships.” I was fairly sure I was a Type Seven on the Enneagram. Sevens are fun-loving, good planners, dreamers, and always in search of a new adventure. Who wouldn’t want to be a Seven? Partway through the weekend, Lynn and I had a quiet conversation. She said, “I don’t think you’re a Seven. I think you’re a Four.” As she said it, I felt an unpleasant burning sensation down in my gut. Externally, I wasn’t willing to admit she was right, but in that deep place of knowing inside, I knew it was true. I could only see the negative sides of the Four: to fixate on what is what is distant — what is missing — what is not present. Fours can easily see the glass half empty and be caught up in the emotions of loss and longing. Worse still, Fours tend to feel fatally flawed and can be self-absorbed. Ouch! My first reaction to Lynn’s observation was to deny it. Enneagram teachers say that one way to help figure out your Enneagram type is pay careful attention to the personality type to which you feel most resistance – the one you’d least like to be. Sometimes those persons who know us best can clearly see truths about us that we are blind to see.
This experience helps me to understand the rather enigmatic punch line of Jesus that concludes the Gospel lesson for today: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” When some Pharisees then asked if they themselves were blind, Jesus responded, “If you were blind, you would have no sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
According to Jesus, it seems, the most dangerous spiritual place we can be, oddly enough, is in the deluded notion that we are a fully sighted person. Conversely, the healthiest place to live is not only to acknowledge our spiritual blindness, failure, complicities, contradictions and ignorance, but to embrace that place as the place where we live. In acknowledging our blindness, we see. By insisting that we see fully and rightly, we remain blind.
The gospel story we heard this morning recounts the healing of a beggar who was blind from birth. The details of the miracle itself are recounted in only about a third of the narrative. Most of the story revolves around the disputes that the miracle provoked, followed by Jesus’ punch line.
Typical of the gospel stories, the professional clergy and religious people made all the wrong moves in this story. First, they ignored the victim. (I had a theology professor who said, “The greatest form of hatred, is to ignore another.”) They ignored him; passed him by day in and day out without noticing him; they refused to believe the eyewitness accounts of the miracle. They were more concerned to maintain ritual righteousness about Sabbath keeping than to love another human being and rejoice in his wholeness. They blabbered pious clichés. Then, when they could ignore the victim no longer, they scapegoated him and hurled insults at him. They condescendingly claimed a spiritual elitism that intentionally humiliated him. They demonized him as a “sinner.” And, as they threw him out of the synagogue, their rage exploded, “How dare you lecture us!” At that, their own tragic blindness was confirmed, and we learn that it was their spiritual blindness, and not the physical blindness of the beggar, that forms the central plot of the story.
Of course, acknowledging our own spiritual blindness can be painful, embarrassing, and threatening. To confess our own groping darkness and howling demons, our frustrations, fears and failures, unnerves us. And as unsettling as that confession is to make to our selves, there is that added anxiety of what others might think, and say, and do. We know from our own experience — and not only from the religious people and clergy in the story — just how cruel and condescending, how derogatory, and dismissive, people can be towards the blind. Some people will kick you when you are down. We shoot the wounded. We banish the broken to non-existence.
Jesus teaches us in this story that people on their way to wholeness embrace their fallenness and somehow makes peace with it. This is far different than using brokenness as an excuse, or self-loathing or self-pity. Those who can see spiritually recognize that acknowledging one’s blindness is not a confession of bondage but an act of liberation. This is part of the great wisdom of the AA and NA model. Each meeting participants introduce themselves: “Hi my name is ______, I am an alcoholic.” Only when we identify our illness and symptoms can we experience a cure.
George Herbert’s poem Affliction is a masterful confession of one’s own blindness and inner struggles. It is a perfect prayer for the Lenten season.
Broken in pieces all asunder,
Lord, hunt me not,
A thing forgot,
Once a poor creature, now a wonder,
A wonder tortur’d in the space
Betwixt this world and that of grace.
My thoughts are all a case of knives,
Wounding my heart with scatter’d smart . . .
All attendants are at strife,
Quitting their place unto my face . . .
Oh help, my God!
Let not their plot kill them and me,
And also thee,
Who are my life: dissolve the knot,
As the sun scatters by his light
All the rebellions of the night.
Then shall those powers, which work for grief,
Enter thy pay,
And day by day
Labour thy praise, and my relief;
With care and courage building me,
Till I reach heav’n, and much more, thee.
This Lenten season we can confess our blindness with confidence and no longer fear our fears. This is because — in the words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich — before God our “sin will be no shame but an honor.” How so? “For [God] sees sin as sorrow and pain to His lovers to whom, for love, [God] assigns no blame . . . Our failures do not prevent [God] from loving us.” Thanks be to God.
Notes:
2. Matthew Myer Boulton, Christian Century, March 22, 2011,
p. 23.