Scripture: John 9:1–41
On Sunday mornings we learn about Jesus because he is the beginning and high mountain-top of our faith. And to talk about him and remember him is to draw closer to what is best inside of us.
In 1785, Newman church’s eighth settled pastor arrived and within the first year of his ministry here, John Ellis drafted a document called the Articles of Faith of the First Church Rehoboth1 — remember that Newman Church has stood in three countries, two states, and three towns without ever having moved. And this place was called Rehoboth until 1812.
You can take a trip up to Boston and go find this old document of John Ellis’s at 14 Beacon Street with its messy, swirling handwriting — it’s a beautiful vantage point into an eighteenth-century old expression of the Christian faith. You would find there seven articles of faith that Ellis believed everyone in the congregation at the time should all believe.
Ellis drafted this document because there was a divide in the congregation at the time between Baptists and Congregationalists — which is a topic for a different sermon. But John Ellis’s articles of faith seemed to have been a good-faith effort (pun intended) to find common ground among a divided people in his first year of ministry.
And the seventh and final article in his document that caught my eye this week. Ellis wrote, We believe in our hearts that all true believers being united to Christ by the spirit, do make up one mystical whole, which is the body of Christ, the members always having fellowship with the Father, son, and Holy Ghost by faith, and with one another in love; and do receive (here upon Earth) forgiveness of sin, their life of Grace, and at the resurrection of the body, shall receive everlasting life.2
We believe all these things today too. But we often use different language to talk about these theological points, to connect to our world and culture in ways that make these truths come alive for us — and I think we can feel the connection to this article of faith so strongly in John’s Gospel, which we are traveling through over the course of many months.
John Ellis was trying to bind his community by giving them a vision of Jesus, just as John the Gospeler was trying to bind his second-century community together by writing the Gospel and giving them a vision of Jesus.
Jesus is in John’s telling is preaching a new ministry of MYSTICAL BELONGING, by which Jesus’s healing, and calling-in, and feeding people, and loving expansively are all meant to bring us all together into the knowledge that we are connected to each other through these same things. John is a mystical Gospel. When we take part in Jesus’s ministry of care we are part of the miracle — where we can live with hope and reject the powers that would derail us. But being part of the body of this mystical wholeness also means that we feel the impact when the BELONGING in this wholeness is wounded, like through the loss last week of Irina and Stanislaw Kozav outside Miriam Hospital, two unhoused people lost to us in our society where to many are left without means of security, or sustenance, or a foundation. We feel it when others and the world are hurting, but we don’t carry that hurt alone. Our faith gives us a pathway into a world of purpose, into a world of love, into a world of possibility — or so says, John’s Gospel.
And John’s Gospel has served up another delicacy for us today. Of the seven miraculous moments of Jesus told by the writer John, Jesus giving sight to a man born without sight is the sixth.
He’s doing all these miraculous things so that people would know that he was the Messiah, establishing a beloved community and offering humanity a different trajectory from that of empire and power over others. And today we’ve seen him offer literal vision for an individual, and purposeful vision for all of us.
How many of us have been watching the seemingly miraculous skill of the athletes at the Winter Olympics this week?
How many people have watched any skiing over the past week?
Any speed skating?
Hockey?
Curling?
I’ve watched a fair bit of curling myself. Every four years I have to learn again the rules and the language of the beautiful game.
Teams “throw” or “deliver” stones from the hack to the target end.
Teammates sweep with a broom in front of the stone to manage its path as it curls across the pebbled ice.
In our scripture reading plan, we see this scripture story from John 9 only once every four years, and like curling, I have to spend a little time to reminding myself how it works, and what the language means.
The reading says that as Jesus passed by and walked along, he saw a man born blind.
The game that they start playing is a question-and-answer game — opening with the question of why does God do what God does?
Jesus’s disciples make the first play of the game by asking who is to blame for the man’s blindness — did he or his parents sin?
It’s a bad throw. Their curling stone misses the target.
Jesus says in response, neither of them sinned. “The man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
This is also a clumsy play, too. God creates difficulty for people so that God’s goodness can be revealed? And Jesus, just like the Canadian curler this past week who tries to double-touch and finesse his throw right after making it,3 Jesus adds a few words to try and smooth over the roughness of what he has said:
“Work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.”
This is the type of comment we’ve come to expect from Jesus.
There’s an irony to the fact that the Sunday before Ash Wednesday is often celebrated as Transfiguration Sunday, when Christians around the world read the story of Jesus taking three disciples to a mountaintop and revealing his divine glory to them in flashes of light and transformation. Yet in John’s Gospel, there is no Transfiguration as there is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The disciples in John have already seen Jesus for who he is — he is the light to shine through the night. Their belief does not change in one flash, but in many small miraculous moments.
Jesus spits onto the Earth and spreads a muddy paste onto the man’s eyes. Everything is different. People in the community begin to talk.
This is how it works: Jesus performs a miracle, people ask what it means, and Jesus offers an explanation, and then the religious authorities try to discredit him — every time.
This time the powerbrokers go to the transformed man and they say, we know that Jesus is not a good person because he healed you on the Sabbath, which is clearly a sin and amoral. And they ask how the treasonous, ungrateful, reckless, and not-a-nice-person Jesus REALLY pulled off this little trick.
Twice they interrogate the man. And twice he tells them that Jesus is divine. The authorities blame the victim. They try to gaslight him. They tell him that the miracle is not real.
But the truth is stronger.
For me this story underscores the importance of telling your truth clearly. Don’t reduce your truth to what is acceptable, whether theologically or politically. This is the truth that we carry with us into Lent. We cannot prevent the night from coming, as long as we can we can do the right thing as the body of Christ.
As Ash Wednesday comes this week and Lent begins, take time to see the world as it really is, pace yourself in your love for the world, listen to where God is sending you. And through our work, the world will be transfigured.
Thanks be to God,
Amen.
- http://nehh-viewer.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/#/content/Rehoboth/viewer/ArticlesOfFaith1785/1 ↩︎
- This was the best I could do interpreting the handwriting of this document. It’s not a 100% accurate transcription. ↩︎
- https://abcnews.com/Sports/wireStory/curling-controversy-winter-olympics-canada-center-allegations-130184433 ↩︎
