WORSHIP

Selected Sermons

“Optical Illusion”
By Rev. Mary Louise McCullough
Fourth Sunday of Lent - March 2, 2008

I Samuel 16: 1-13

John 9: 1-41

Today we can really see how Jesus is a chip off the old block.

In the Hebrew scripture reading God is looking at a situation with one set of eyes and Samuel has a different set. The prophet Samuel had begged God to let him anoint a king over the ancient Hebrews and finally God said, okay, and then Saul had not worked out. He got all tangled up in ego and lost his way.

God’s reaction is to show that there is no divine commitment to leadership or power arrangements that are bankrupt, that have failed. We see God abandon what does not work for God’s purposes. God says to Samuel, we’re starting over and here’s how it’s going to be this time. Go to this tiny little nowhere village, Bethlehem, to this ordinary family, and I’ll tell you what to do. Samuel gets not even a whisper of a hint from God about how this will work. He figures he’s on a wild goose chase as the sons parade by, but then he says, are there any more? Jesse says, yeah, our youngest – he’s out knee deep in the mud with the sheep. David. The good looking runt of the family.

The Lord does not see as mortals see. God saw something in David that neither Jesse nor Samuel could see. And that is how this loosely knit history of the ancient Hebrews began to find its center around a king who, flawed though he was, felt this deep personal relationship with the God of his ancestors. A relationship he nurtured through his entire life, remaining king until the day he died.

The Lord does not see as mortals see.

In the gospel of John, Jesus is also confronted with a power arrangement that is bankrupt. It’s a religious arrangement, a temple “monarchy” if you will, a way of seeing the world, of seeing each other, a way that does not see what Jesus is about. When Jesus enters this power arrangement, all these leaders start spinning around like little tops because they don’t know what to make of what he does. Healing the man born blind does not fit their narrow vision of the universe.

As is so often the case in the gospel of John, the physical healing in this story does not stand alone but is part of a larger healing that Jesus’ presence always suggests – a healing of social and religious structures that are disabled, diseased, dysfunctional. Jesus’ presence always challenges and puts on notice the social and political structures which disempower the ones he comes to liberate.

John, who is such a poet, uses the senses to suggest larger issues around seeing, hearing, thirsting, hungering. We will not see the significance of this story if we approach it as a discrete event, a colorful show of Jesus’ healing power. It is so much more.

Just before this episode, Jesus was confronted by the religious authorities who bring him a woman caught in the act of adultery. You may remember the scene. They deposit her at his feet and ask him if they should follow the law of Moses and stone her. Jesus draws or writes something in the dirt at his feet, then says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he writes in the dirt again. One by one, the men walk away.

What comes into view here as we consider these two episodes is a new way of viewing our lives, a new way of viewing God’s intention for creation. It’s not lawless. It’s not a free-for-all. It is an overturning of the assumptions that hold up our old way of seeing. – It overturns our institutions such as those that define themselves with morality codes that deny dignity and personhood; social codes that hold marginalized people responsible for circumstances over which they are powerless; that sort of thing. All these assumptions which most social systems, including ours, are built upon are overturned by Jesus because they are bankrupt.

God shows no loyalty to what works against bringing about the reign of God on earth.

Looking at this story is kind of like looking at a Rubin vase-face. A vase-face is one of those cognitive optical illusions developed by the Danish psychiatrist Edgar Rubin early in the 20th century. When a person first looks, she may see an image of a vase or a goblet. Another look and the perspective shifts and you see two human faces in profile.

Rubin demonstrated that “we do not automatically ‘see’ anything: our brains shape what our eyes observe. In this case, the positive image – the vase – and its negative counterpart, the dark faces, are both available to our perception but initially one is difficult to recognize.” 1

We realize through the story of the man born blind that our perspectives are limited. Jesus says it: we are blind and do not know it. We believe that we see. We are mistaken.

The great theologian Paul Tillich talked about this. About what it means to see in the gospels where we realize, seeing has nothing to do with optic nerves but with insight, intuition, with what Tillich calls the seeing that unites the one who sees with ultimate reality. An intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped, a seeing shaped by love.

Plato whose visions and words deeply influenced not only the gospel of John but also the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. Plato spoke of the love which drives us to a genuine intuition about our own poverty, our want, our own need for unity with what is real and quenches our thirst. 2

The Lord does not see as mortals see. But Jesus sees both ways and shows us the difference.

As he walked along, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. He stopped. He looked deeply at this man, he saw this man, saw the lifetime of hardship and suffering he had endured, saw the personality traits this man had – we can see each other so well if we stop and take each other in – maybe that’s why we don’t – maybe we don’t really want to see all that – but Jesus did. He wanted to see the true self.

Why was the man born blind? He says, the same reason the rest of us are born however we are born … that God might be revealed through him, that God’s revelation might be made known through him to the world. It is the same with us. God reveals the divine self in many different ways. We are each a part of the mosaic of God’s revelation. We are not simply to match ourselves to something that already exists and see only through its eyes – Jesus pointed toward God’s way of seeing. The Lord does not see as mortals see, said the ancient writings, the Lord looks on the heart.

Recently Mike and I were given tickets to a Pittsburgh Symphony concert where we heard Dame Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf, perform the world premier of a concerto written entirely for strings and percussion.

Part of the magic was watching Dame Glennie move among three sets of percussion instruments – wood, metal and skins. – It was as though she was so fused with the instruments, so fully a part of their being that the sounds they made were in her entire body as she created more sounds, absorbed them in her skin, anticipated them.

It was astounding, but she said, “If the audience only wonders how a deaf musician can play percussion then I have failed as a musician. Hearing is a specialized form of touch. Touch can pick up the vibrating air that creates sound.”

So might we say with sight. Seeing is a specialized form of connecting and receiving. If we see God’s creation, God’s world, our neighbors, ourselves, wondering only at what they look like, we have failed as human beings.

Perhaps you are blind, but that is good news, Jesus says. It is when we think we see it all that we are in trouble.

It is when we shield our eyes that we do not see truth. It is when we enclose ourselves in laws and institutions, thinking we will be safe and righteous, that we are in peril.

Last week we talked about how Jesus works along the edges, sees people there like the woman the well, the man born blind, and moves slowly toward the center.

The tension of Lent is the tension that builds as what is illuminated this way begins to challenge the false center – the power structures of empire and temple. The power structures of the ego. All of this must be dismantled for God to be revealed at the center.

What if we started at the edges, with the intuition that the people we see there at the edges are the ones where we need to focus instead of the ones we usually focus on – the one who pay us, make us wealthy, the ones we buy things from, the ones we want to influence, the ones who give us grades to keep moving through school. The ones we call family. … What if our focus shifts just a bit? It all begins to change. We begin to see things differently.

I was talking to Rev. Eugene Blackwell the other day, the pastor of Bethesda Presbyterian Church. One night recently his car was stolen from in front of his house. The stolen car had the keys to Eugene’s church van in it. A week later, when Eugene and his wife were coming home from Bible study in the van, a car drove by and a young man leaned out the window holding a set of keys in his hand and pressed the alarm to Eugene’s van that Eugene was sitting in – clearly, he was the person who had stolen Eugene’s car and now it seemed he was saying the van would be next. Eugene and his wife began to see this person walking back and forth on the street in the neighborhood. They began talking to their neighbors about the incident. Through their prayers and determination to be led to handle the situation God’s way, their fear did not get the better of them – after a while the police were able to identify the young man and find the car, which had been totaled.

The point of my telling you all this is that the police are still trying to get Eugene and his wife to press charges against the young man. They’re having none of it. They are so convinced of God’s presence in this whole experience, including helping them with their own fear and sense of vulnerability, that they know that pressing charges is not what is most likely to bring transformation to the situation.

The young man is waiting. He knows he’s been caught. Can you imagine what he is thinking now, as he waits, as he tries to figure this out. Why aren’t they pressing charges? What is up? Do they know they can press charges, that anybody else would press charges?

The Lord does not see as mortals see.

May we be a people so bathed in prayer, so surrounded by the desire to let God’s vision be revealed through us.

Thanks be to God.

Copyright 2008 Rev. Mary Louise McCullough

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1 Deborah Smith Douglas, “Thanks be to God”, Weavings, March/April 2008

2 Paul Tillich, The New Being,

   http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=375&C=30