E-mail: lowell“at”revlowell.com

“Wake Up, Sleepy Head”

 Date:      Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A

                 Texts:

1 Samuel 16:1-13

Psalm 23

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9:1-41

 Theme:      Jesus the Christ brings light, that in the darkest depths of despair he is the light, and that what he is we may be also.

 Subject:      Suffering, handicaps

We are all handicapped. We are all limited. We are all impaired, disabled, challenged.

We are all born blind. I felt this when I was a teenager and wrote a poem, “My Son Born Blind,” to express the conviction:

My Son Born Blind

His eyes are blue

as airless space

Where dust bands breathe

their gloomy sigh.

 

And yet how can

such joy be told

by one who has

not seen the sky?

How can his never

seeing eyes

reflect the

morning light

 

when all that they

will ever know

is emptiness

and night?

 

This poem has been published a number of times over the years. Once it was record-ed as the introduction to the rock song, “Snow Blind.” And inevitably I have been asked if my son were really sightless. The poem, written when I was about thirteen, is, of course, about neither physical blindness nor a biological child. It is about spiritual blindness and the child of its title is the poet himself.

In the story of Jesus’ healing of the man born blind, blindness is a metaphor. Yet, like all metaphors, it is based on something real, something that we experience every day of our lives—pain and suffering.

It would take a very naive human being to insist that there is a direct means-end, causal connection between sin and suffering. If life teach us anything, it teach us that suffering is not meted out as punishment for sin. Life is unfair. There are two biblical views of suffering: Deuteronomic and Jobian. The Deuteronomic view says that obedience to God’s will produces health, wealth, and long life; while sin produces illness, poverty, and early death. We read in the Book of Deuteronomy that shortly before his death, Moses exhorted the Hebrews as follows:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.

For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in his

ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live

and increase, and the LORD your God Will bless you in the land you are

entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedi-

ent, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship

them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You

will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and

possess (Deuteronomy 30:15-18).

The Deuteronomic theory seems to work best when it is applied to social realities. Nations that forget their roots, heritage, values, and traditions can lose their reason for existing, soon decay, and die. The same thing can happen to the building block of society—the family. When society no longer fosters and nurtures the family, the family no longer fosters and nurtures society.

The second view, which may be called realistic or even pessimistic, is found in such biblical books as Job and Ecclesiastes. It describes life from a highly individualistic point of view. When life is considered person by person, it is grossly unfair. Faith, the realists of the Bible tell us, is no talisman to ward off tragedy. Good men can fail and evil men prosper. Listen to the eloquent but despairing words attributed to King Solomon:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. . . . . All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:2-9).

Or as Job demands of his comforters:

Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?

They spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace.

Yet they say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We have no desire to know your

ways. One man dies in full vigor, completely secure and at ease, his

body well nourished, his bones rich with marrow. Another man dies in

bitterness of soul, never having enjoyed anything good. Side by side

they lie in the dust, and worms cover them both. . . . the evil man is

spared from the day of calamity, . . . he is delivered from the day of

wrath. Who denounces his conduct to his face? Who repays him for

what he has done? (Job 21:7, 8, 13, 14, 23-26, 30, 31)

Jesus subscribed to both theories. He exhorted the nation Israel to return to its calling. Israel, he taught, is God’s fig tree. If it fails to produce, God will tear it up by its root. And Jesus recognized that the world in which we live as individuals is not what it ought to be. He was bold enough to acknowledge that God is not in control of the present world. If he were, why would Jesus have taught us to ask our heavenly Father:

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. . . “? The prayer makes it clear that it is not so already.

A few years ago, I wrote of a friend of mine, who was dying. I remarked:

The therapy which is extending [Jerry’s] remaining months is painful

and exhausting. He is in his forties and has a wife and three children. He

is a minister of the gospel. And his parishioners, attempting to comfort

him, are always telling him to accept his lot as the will of God. He

becomes angry and tells them that he cannot worship a God who would

allow him to suffer and would leave his family without a husband and

father. Jerry tells them: “Disease and death are not the will of God. They

are the consequences of a world out of control, a world which shunned

the will of God in the beginning and which continues to shun it at every

moment. And as it drifts its meaningless way like some great machine

run amok, it is killing me, afflicting me with pain, and denying me a

future with my loved ones.”

Jerry decided that the pain with which he paid for each day’s continuation of his life was not worth it. He discontinued his treatment and died.

Evil is real. Life is unfair. Sometimes nice guys finish last. Hard work is not always reward-ed. And we all make mistakes. We all cause harm and grief even when we try to make things better for our friends and loved ones.

If God is loving and all-powerful, why does he tolerate evil? If suffering is punish-ment for sin, why is it that the righteous are afflicted while the unrighteous prosper? Why does he let us make mistakes? Why do Christians suffer when they are doing the best they can? Why do so many of our decisions turn out to be disasters? Why do we still feel that we could have done better even after we have made a decision? The only basis for affirming the meaningfulness of life in the face of the insurmountable evils of human existence is the recognition that our tribulations are also the sufferings of God, that our struggle to realize good despite all that opposes us is at the same time God’s ongoing creation of order out of primal chaos. Unless God himself participates in the heart-ache and sorrows of our earthly state, then all striving is in vain. Why do Ethiopian children starve while our children flourish? Because God does not intrude to take away our freedom even when we mismanage his creation. If he intervened every time we were about to act selfishly, violently, or heedlessly, we would have no real freedom and no responsibility. Why is life unfair? Because it is, because it expresses our basic alienation from nature, from one another, and from our true selves. God did not create it that way. He does not want it to be that way. And according to the Christian gospel, he gave what was dearest to himself to do something about it. Partnership with God is costly. To worship God as God means that one must be open to respond without ever knowing if one is doing the absolutely right thing. To live is to be guilty of inflicting pain and committing injustice. We cannot even breathe or eat without destroying life. We make mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. We live in a confusing and evil world—confusing because we project our own confusion on it and evil because it is not yet redeemed, because it is not yet created. The creative spirit which works in each of us enables us to become instruments of peace for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for our world. But the process of creation is filled with pain, contradiction, confusion, and suffering. In this suffering we are not alone. For what we experience mirrors the struggle of the divine with us and with our world.

It is through crucifixion and death that God in Christ reconciles the world to himself. And it is through our courage, our affirmation of life, our turning of chaos into meaning, our suffering and pain, that we are instruments of the divine purpose. For, as the story of the man born blind informs us, every life is an opportunity for God to be glorified. Consider Helen Keller—blind and deaf, a major force in the struggle for human rights.

Think of Christy Brown, almost totally paralyzed, whose contributions to the arts and literature are the subject of the recent Irish film, “My Left Foot.” Regard Franz Rosenzweig—Jewish theologian, who wrote his major work, The Star of Redemption, while his entire body was immobilized with the exception of the muscles in his eyelids. By blinking in code, he “dictated” his book to his wife, one letter at a time. We are rediscovering the humanity of the handicapped, the worth of the physically and mentally challenged, the value of those who are not normal according to our conception of normality.

Even if the man born blind had not been healed, his life could have glorified God. For it was his recovery from spiritual blindness that really counted. In contrast with the religious authorities who rejected Jesus because he did not conform to their stereotype. What blinded them? The same things that blind us: prejudice and self-righteousness. The real message of the story is that Jesus the Christ brings light, that in the darkest depths of despair he is the light, and that what he is we may be also.

As Paul says in Ephesians, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” Not “you are influenced by the light” or “you are full of light” or “you are bearers of the light” or “you are enlightened,” but “you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” We are all born blind and crippled and limited and handicapped. And we are born with the smallest spark of the divine in us, a spark that may be fanned into a conflagration. We are born to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. When I was a child, my father would wake me on Sunday mornings so that we could have breakfast together, listen to the radio, and read the Sunday funnies. “Wake up, sleepy head. Open your eyes,” he would urge in his gentle voice. “Wake up, sleepy head,” says our heavenly Father. “Open your eyes.”

Amen.

--LDS

[2000 words]

[20 minutes]