March 6, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
William Willimon, the chaplain at Duke University tells a story that happened a number of years ago of a fellow pastor. The pastor’s furnace in his parsonage malfunctioned. Someone came to check it out. The furnace got a clean bill of health, but it was not in good working order, as things turned out.
One Saturday in January, this pastor woke up early and tried to get out of bed. But he couldn’t get fully awake. He thought he was simply tired from the night before, so he went back to sleep. He woke up later, in a stupor, looked at the alarm clock. It was almost noon! He tried getting out of bed but his head was throbbing and he could not move. He fell back to bed.
At that moment, he saw a small child, a little girl, dressed in white. “How did you get here?” he heard himself ask. “What is a child doing in my house?”
The little girl gestured toward him, pointing him toward the door. She said something to him like, “You must get up and get out, or you will never get out.”
He struggled out of bed at her urging, crawled through the bedroom door and out of the house, collapsing on the front steps. The child was gone.
Heating experts were called. The house was full of carbon monoxide.
According to Willimon, his friend, a pastor and a theologian who never gets caught up with the fancy of unusual appearances told him, “I think that “child” in my room was some sort of angel. I think God sent her to warn me.” Willimon told him he was skeptical and told him to be careful to whom to tell this story.
But the pastor friend said, “All I know is, a few minutes more, and I’d have been dead.”
Instead of this pastor, most of us identify with William Willimon. We are often skeptical about seeing angels and miracles happening around us. We tell ourselves that we better be careful about what we tell others because they may not understand.
When the unexplainable happens, we are more apt to say, “What a coincidence!” or “That’s just being at the right place at the right time.” or “The gods are watching out for us.” or “What good luck or bad luck!” For Chinese, we call it “fate.” When bad things happen, we make this linkage between the unfortunate situation and sin. What is happening to you today is because someone in your past has done something to cause you to be this way.
Man Born Blind
In today’s gospel, Jesus meets a man who was born blind. With some spit and dust from the ground, Jesus made some mud, spread it on the man’s eyes, and sent him to wash in a pool of water. When he did this, he was able to see. Hallelujah!
You would think that everyone would be happy and rejoicing. But it wasn’t so. Controversy, debate, questions and answers, interrogations, and giving affidavits were the case. Was this man really healed? Is he the same man we once knew as the beggar? If Jesus really healed him, what are we to say about this Jesus?
Fortunately, a group of Pharisees, religious scholars, appeared on the scene to help sort things out. First, the Pharisees asked, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Being born blind can be explained by blaming it on somebody else’s sin. It’s why bad things happen to bad people kind of thinking.
Then the neighbors who have seen this blind man for a long time can’t believe it. Some even said, it’s someone who looked like the blind man. When you were born blind in those days, you stay blind for the rest of your life.
So the religious leaders launched a full investigation into this matter. They sequestered the man and asked him how he had received his sight. The man said, “All I know is that he put mud on my eyes and when I washed it off, I could see. I think he’s a prophet.”
Although the man was standing right there before the Pharisees, nobody believed him. So they questioned his parents. “Is this your son?” the authorities asked.
The parents said, “All we know is this is our son but we have no idea how he regain his sight. Afraid to get caught in some kind of theological controversy, the parents said, “Hey, he’s an adult, why don’t you ask him?”
So the authorities recalled the man to stand in the witness box again. This time they questioned him with more difficult questions assuming that Jesus was a sinner so how can a sinner heal the blind? The man could only say again, “All I know is that though I was blind, now I see.”
The man became frustrated by such repeated interrogations that he wondered if the Pharisees wanted to become Jesus disciples too. This really got the authorities irate and they told the man that they only follow Moses and then threw him out of the courthouse.
When Jesus heard that the man was driven out, he went to look for him. After Jesus found him, Jesus asked him to believe in the Son of God. Jesus revealed to him that he has been speaking with the Son of God all along. He confessed his belief in Jesus and worshiped him because all he knew was that he was once blind but now he sees.
Modern World
What a great story that John has preserved for us to enjoy today! But isn’t that a part of the problem? We read the story of the man born blind who receives sight and say that it’s a story frozen in the past. It has little relevance for us today in our modern world.
In our mind, we’re thinking that Jesus must have made one of those eye drop lubricants that washed away whatever was causing the man not to see. Or perhaps, the man was psychologically blinded from birth with some traumatic event and when Jesus took a little spit and some dust and spread it on his eyes, the man was shaken out of his mental problems to be able to see once again.
Lots of us see ourselves as open-minded and intellectual people eager to receive facts and follow the evidence, no matter where it leads. But sometimes, if the facts or the evidence challenge our modern worldview and don’t fit into the preconceptions of what can and what can’t be, we simply reject it.
All of us live in what we call an “assumptive world.” This world of ours tells us what can and what can’t be. We assume truth. When something happens, we rush to fit it into our assumptive world. It’s like we have a set of boxes, each one is a cause that explains why something happened. When something happens, we rush to file it away in one of those boxes. This caused that and that caused this, and so forth.
What happened to the man born blind did not fit into any of the boxes that his neighbors, his parents or the Pharisees had.
Believing Out of the Box
We all have heard about people who have had something terrible happened to them. It may be a difficult and disfiguring surgery; lost of a dear loved one; a major disappointment at school or at work; a family member who was born blind. But these people who have had these difficult things happened to them would say that they have found new life even in the midst of such challenges. They have discovered inner strength, a new dignity, and a sense of mission. These people would say that what happened afterward was rather miraculous.
In fact, that’s what it is—a miracle.
One time a person had serious surgery that disfigured her. She said, “God gave me the hope and the strength I needed to go on.”
But then one of her friends said, “You have always been a strong person.” The other friend said, “I don’t know anyone who has a stronger sense of self than you.”
What is wrong here? We say those kinds of things to our friends all the time. But what’s wrong here is that the woman who had this serious disfiguring surgery gave God the credit to miraculously giving her hope and strength to go on. We are often threatened to acknowledge in someone or in a situation that God is working a miracle here.
When God works miracles, they don’t fit into any of our boxes. So we explain it away by saying that surely this woman has always demonstrated strength and courage.
Here was a man who was once blind. Now he can see, and nobody takes the time to wonder, to give thanks, to celebrate with him. The whole event is turned into an intellectual problem. Let’s all get together and explain this in such a way that we can reassure ourselves that nothing new, nothing that doesn’t fit our reassuring modes of explanation has occurred here. God forbid that we see little girls in white dresses!
Because if something truly new had happened, and if it had happened by the hand of Jesus, then we might have to go back to our “assumptive world,” and rethink a few of our cherished assumptions like, “if you are sick, you must have sinned,” or “people born blind stay blind for life,” or “there is nothing new under the sun,” or “can this really be the Messiah who has come?”
Miracles
Some of you already know that when I was growing up in Boston, I had three brothers. Our older brother came to America with my mother in 1947. And once arriving in Boston, my mother had three sons all within 3 ½ years. When these two brothers close in age to me became young adults, without warning and anything to suspect, each of them died from sudden heart failure. My mother as you can imagine was in shock. She kept on saying, “I must have done something bad in my past to deserve such tragedy.” The conventional wisdom was to explain the unexplainable by linking sickness to sin. This was a box that my mother had to file away an explanation to what happened to her two sons.
What happened to me was nothing short of a miracle. After many tests and examinations, I am pretty certain that I will not succumb to the same fate as my brothers. All I know is that I have a miraculously strong heart!
I think about how dangerously close our friend Jayson Gatdula was to death. The quickness that he went into surgery or the need to resuscitate his heart leaves us wondering and confused about what next might happen. But today his amazing recovery is a miracle. God is healing Jayson just as Jesus made the blind man see. All Jayson knows is that his heart is working on its own and that he’s getting better.
I think about how John and Lana were sharing pictures of his grand-nephew Baby Jeremy last week at Sojourners and the sadness that you can hear in John’s voice. When Jeremy was born, they didn’t expect him to live more than just a few hours. But Baby Jeremy lived longer than anyone imagined possible. Although grief and sadness are with us, it was also a miracle—a miracle that Baby Jeremy was a son even for a few weeks. All we know is that he lived.
As human beings, we want so badly to make sense of our world. We need answers to our questions, solutions to mysteries, and file boxes to explain why something happened. This caused that and that caused this.
There is a story of a recent convert to Jesus who was approached by an unbelieving friend.
“So you have been converted to Christ”
“Yes.”
“Then you must know a great deal about Him. Tell me what country was he born in?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was his age when he died?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many sermons did he preach?”
“I don’t know.”
“You certainly know very little for a man who claims to be converted to Christ.”
“You are right. I am ashamed at how little I know about him. But this much I know:
Three years ago I was a drunkard. I was in debt. My family was falling to pieces; they dreaded the sight of me. But now I have given up drinking. We are out of debt. Ours is a happy home. My children eagerly await my return home each evening. All this Christ has done for me. This much I know of Christ!”
The man said, “All I know is that once I was blind, but now I see.” All I know is that God has a plan for my life when he gave me a strong heart. All we know is that miracles are happening all around us and we can thank God for his tender mercies.
Let us pray.
Precious God, thank you for helping us see and experience miracles happening all around us. Reassure us that not everything needs to be explained and made plain but that you have invited us to trust you with our lives and promised us that when we believe in faith, all things are possible. All we know is that Jesus Christ died for us so that we may have everlasting life. Amen.