Lent 4 A  1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

 We are mid-way through Lent.  In many ways it has been an odd beginning.  In some ways it’s hard to do Lent in California.  When I was a child growing up in central Washington, it was dark and cold when we went to the early Eucharist on Wednesday mornings.  We had metal chairs and they were cold.  Here we have sun and warmth.
 Well, this year the first three weeks coincided with Black History Month; we hosted a service and reception for the Urban Caucus and then 10 days later we hosted a diocesan visioning event.  We have been busy people!  And I thought Lent was a time for quiet reflection; at least I hoped that Lent would be a time for quiet reflection.  If you haven’t really got into Lent yet, there is still time.
 I have found useful a short paragraph that I keep rereading and thinking about. I’ll share it with you:

 Lent invites us to step off our mental treadmills, take a breath, and look around. Lent invites us to ask:  Where are we demanding solutions?  Where can we risk staying in tension?  Where are we blind—or just not noticing?  What do we thirst for?  Where are we bound or stuck?  What will we risk doing—these 40 days of lent—to clear a space in which Easter can break through?

 I keep reading it, and asking, “How do I get off the treadmill?”  “Am I demanding solutions?”  “How am I blind?”  “For what do I hunger and thirst?”  “What constraints am I feeling—what risks am I afraid to take?”  A simple paragraph can raise a lot of questions.
 This morning we started our service with the Penitential Office, beginning with the Ten Commandments.  This way of beginning is designed to remind us what those commandments are; if we are honest, we cannot fail to see where we have fallen short.   We are invited to confess our sins and repent, that is, turn away from our self-centered ways and turn toward God.  We get a fresh start and a new way of seeing.
 Today’s lessons are all about seeing.  The Lord reminds Samuel that God looks at the world differently:  “For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”  This is an important passage and one we should take to heart as we are looking for a new rector.  I share with you a cautionary tale, a true one.  I know a church outside of a large city that considered itself to be in the mold of country gentry.  They called a man as their rector—he looked every inch the part of a country gentleman, right down to his tweed jacket and cap.  The problem was that he wasn’t a spiritual leader, he wasn’t a good administrator and he abused his wife, who fearing for her safety fled in the middle of the night.  He left shortly after that and the church was back in search mode.  Samuel was tempted to chose several of Jesse’s sons, but the Lord had chosen the least likely.  We may see candidates who look good, but God may be calling someone else.  God sees in a way different from us, and God invites us to see differently than we do.
 Let’s look at today’s gospel, the story of the man born blind. It is a familiar story, and therefore the temptation is to say, “Oh, I know that one.”  It is also a very complex story, not to mention humorous, and certainly worth another look.  In addition to telling us about the nature of God, this story tells us a great deal about our human nature.
 Right at the beginning the disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?”  In essence, Jesus answers, “No one sinned, but it’s an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed.  And we have to do that work now because time is getting short.” We know that when he says “night is coming,” he is referring to his death, but his disciples probably don’t pick up on it. They are focused on why this man is blind.
 We are often like the disciples.  We want to know whose fault it is that something has gone wrong; we want to blame someone or something else and absolve ourselves of responsibility.  We all do it.  We hear it all the time: The favorite at my house is “Who ate all the cookies?”  “It’s all your that the basement flooded.  If you’d done what you said you would do…” and so forth.  It’s all too familiar and not very pleasant.  Almost always such blaming oversimplifies a complex situation and doesn’t help the situation.  Jesus’ response is a much better approach.  Let’s name the problem and move on to doing God’s work of restoration.
 The problem in the story is blindness. There are TWO kinds of blindness in this story.  One is the physical blindness of the man at the beginning of the story; the other blindness is the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees. 
 The Pharisees have a funny kind of blindness.  Once the man returns from the pool of Siloam with his sight restored, they’re not sure it’s the same man.  “He’s the one; no it’s someone like him.”  It is the blindness of believing that God will only work in the ways we expect God to work, and we get caught in that box right along with the Pharisees.  The blind man who was healed KNEW the healing was from God, but the Pharisees couldn’t quite buy it because Jesus did this healing on the Sabbath.  How could a sinner, one who broke the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, work this miracle?  It didn’t occur to them that God has freedom to work outside THEIR system.  They were confused, and the more confused they became, the more they held on to their system. 
 Later on when the Pharisees were questioning the man for the second time, asking the same question, the humor of the story emerges again.  At least it would be humorous if we weren’t right there in the story with the Pharisees.  The once-blind man taunts the Pharisees.  He says, “I have told you already, and you would not listen.  Why do you want to hear it again?  Do you also want to become his disciples?”  They got mad at him and said, “You are his disciple, but we are the disciples of Moses…as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”  They are sure of their tradition, which is a good and true one, but they can’t imagine that God can do and is doing something new.
 At the end of the story, after the blind man has professed his faith in Jesus, which tells us that not only does he see physically, but now he also sees spiritually, Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”  The next implied phrase is “so that I may give them sight.”  Until we recognize our blindness, we probably are not open to Jesus healing us. But something or someone has to tell us we are blind, because we think we see.
 Lent is the season we set aside for addressing our blindness with some intentionality.  That’s why we start with the Decalogue, which is our basic checklist.  It’s also why we are using the story of the Prodigal Son as part of our Lent series; it offers us the paradigm of restored sight and repentance.  When the son is in the field with the pigs and “he comes to himself”, he loses his blindness. 
 During this interim time we as a congregation need to “come to ourselves,” our authentic selves as followers of Jesus Christ, to walk in the ways of discipleship.  I don’t mean just as individuals, which would leave us with a kind of myopia.  Kathleen O’Connor, who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary, says “…we Christians in the United States suffer from spiritual myopia, from a near-sighted view of God’s world.  We find it hard to see our lives in relation to life on the planet.  What happens when Christians focus on the repentance of the individual is that our collective sin never appears before our eyes for repentance.    Our violence, our assault on the environment, our social bias, greed, exclusion of the poor and the different, our arrogance toward other peoples, our overarching consumerism—these things remain invisible, out of sight, out of mind.”  How much are we involved in the issues of Oakland?  Our insularity is a collective sin.  What would redemption look like?  What kind of community would we have?
 We like the Pharisees have inherited a tradition, but we don’t need to be caught in the same kind of little box.  We can know that God is always about creating, employing both spirit and material creation.  We need to repent of our narrow vision.  A Canadian theologian, Douglas Hall, writes, “Repentance, when it is genuine, means for Christian individuals and churches, risking the Christian future on the grounds of faith alone…
 It’s scary to think about such radical trust…yet the call is there.  With such faith we open ourselves to God’s transforming power.  We are not alone in facing the future in faith.  That’s what Bishop Marc is calling us to in this visioning process.  With reference to today’s gospel, I think we as a congregation and as a diocese can say we are being called out of blindness into what is most true about what God has created in ourselves, in our church and in the larger world.
  Do not fear repentance or transformation; they are gifts of God and the source of all that we can do as disciples.

References:
O’Conner, Kathleen M., Repentance in First-Person Plural, in Journal for Preachers, p. 9

Hall, Douglas John, Preaching Lenten Repentance to a Nation and a Church  in Journal for Preachers, p.20