"Putting People First"  San Williams, UPC

John 9:1-41

I’ve heard homeless people complain because they are often made to feel invisible.  “What bothers me,” one was heard to say, “is not when a person doesn’t stop to give me money but that they won’t even look at me.”  Well, not so with Jesus.  This long, rather convoluted story that we just read begins, “As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.”  That little verb saw tips us off to the whole ministry of Jesus.  He came into the world seeing the world through God’s eyes.  He saw the blind man, just as he saw the lepers, tax collectors and prostitutes.  He saw the poor widow in the temple, the Samaritan woman at the well, Zachaeus in the tree.  Jesus sees what God sees:  he sees people and his compassion goes out to them. 

It’s popular these days for churches to hold seekers services.  Seeker services are aimed at folks who don’t know much about church, so the music is all singable and the ideas are simplified.  These services are designed for people who are seeking something better in their lives.  Certainly the church should reach out to people who are seeking something better in their lives, but most of the stories we read about in the Bible are not about how we seek God, but rather about a God who does the seeking.  When people demanded of Jesus, “show us God,” Jesus responded:  God is like the shepherd who doesn’t sit back and wait for the lost sheep to wander back home; God goes out, seeks, risks everything, beats the bushes night and day, and finds that lost sheep!  Or God is like the woman who turns the house upside down sweeping under every piece of furniture in every nook and cranny until she finds the coin and finding it rejoices.  Or again, God is like the father who can’t contain his joy when seeing the prodigal return and so he runs shamelessly to greet the son.  This is the God Jesus brings to light--an outgoing, unrestrainedly, impulsive  God whose compassion is forever seeking and finding, healing and helping.  So we’re not surprised that as Jesus walked along he saw the man born blind, and seeing him reaches out to heal. 

So why aren’t people thrilled to hear this good news? Why isn’t this healing followed by cheers, hugs and rejoicing?  Instead our reading today tells us that the healing of the man born blind prompted confusion, fear and outright rejection. Today as well, the good news of God’s seeking love in Jesus Christ is as likely to evoke a yawn, a shrug or even hostility as unrestrained joy.

 You may have seen the front page story in Tuesday’s Austin American Statesman.  The article reported the findings in a recently released study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  This extensive study surveyed 35,000 Americans about their religious beliefs and practices.  A few findings:  Nearly half of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another religion or no religion at all…One in four young adults claims no affiliation with a religious institution… Confidence in organized religion, especially in the traditional religious forms, is dropping, and so on.  Of course, new books come out each month telling pastors and congregations how to turn this trend around. They describe how to be an “Emergent” church, how to do contemporary worship, how to brand our share of the church marketplace.  But if we want to get to the heart of the issue, we need look no further than the responses to Jesus that are presented in today’s reading.

Consider first the response of Jesus’ disciples to the man born blind.  In this episode, their faith seems all in their heads. While Jesus sees the man born blind and moves forward to help, these disciples turn his misfortune into a theoretical abstraction.  Where Jesus sees a person in need of help, the disciples see him as a theological problem.  “Rabbi,” they ponder, “who sinned, this man or his parents?”  But Jesus will have none of that reasoning.  He consistently rejected a direct correlation between sin and suffering and saw instead that each moment was an opportunity to reveal God’s compassion.  Perhaps one reason many people today, and especially young people, are ho-hum about religion is that they see more talk than action.  At our recent adult church school class on young adults and the church, Ben reminded us that most young adults today don’t come to worship to hear about God, they want an experience of God.  Neither will they be inspired by theoretical discussions of misfortune.  Rather they need to be challenged to join this exciting, risky work of demonstrating God’s compassion for a hurting world.  Could it be that part of the problem with the church is, like those first disciples, we’re better at talking   about God love than we are at showing it?

Or consider the neighbors in our story.  These neighbors were stuck in the past.  They simply couldn’t be jarred out of their old perceptions.  They had known this man for years. They remembered him as a child: blind. When he was a teenager:  blind.  He’d always been blind. They couldn’t imagine him any other way.  So when he appeared before them with open eyes, some of them stuttered, “No, that can’t be him, it must be someone who just looks like him.”  If the church is missing many people, perhaps it because we’re reluctant to see the new thing God is doing.  Are we slow to imagine new forms of ministry? Are we reluctant to embrace alternative modes of communicating the overflowing love of God that Jesus demonstrated?  

And what about the man’s parents?  the parents of the man aren’t able to celebrate their own son’s healing because they are gripped by fear. We read how the religious officials grabbed the boy’s parents. “This your son, Lady?  This your kid running round saying he’s been healed by some unofficial rabbi with no credentials?  If your boy won’t shut up about this Jesus we’re going to have to kick the whole bunch of you out of the synagogue.”  “Er, well,” says his father, “Now that you mention it, we just can’t be sure this is our son.  Better ask him.”  The scripture says they acted this way because they were afraid.  Fear is a kind of spiritual blindness that afflicts the church in every generation.  It’s tempting for us mainline protestant churches today to respond to the reports of decline by retreating in fear, which only leads to cynicism and despair.  A fearful church is a dying church, because it can’t embrace and celebrate the abundant goodness and compassion that Jesus brings to light.

Then again, consider the response of the Pharisees. Did you notice how the Pharisees in our story didn’t seem to care about the man who had been healed.  They uttered not one word about the man’s welfare.  They could not celebrate or share the joy of man who had been healed.  No, their primary concerns were all about Sabbath observances, rule keeping and strict adherence to the law. These Pharisees represent an obsession with observance that can become associated with religion, including Christianity.  In the article on the Pew Survey I mentioned earlier, one person commented:  “Denominationally affiliated places seem to have figured out a way to fight about ordination and authority and orthodoxy…” One person in the study noted that his 20 year-old daughter “is so fed up with church infighting that, although she considers herself a spiritual person, she doesn’t want to join any church.”  Such criticism is not always fair, but it reminds us that people today, especially young people, are not likely to be drawn to a place where internal issues take precedence over the well-fare of people.  Only a church that puts people first can share in the joy and excitement of God’s compassion.

Friends, we don’t have to believe or understand everything in order to be effective at sharing the gospel.  Maggi Dawn, who teaches theology in the United Kingdom, tells of a time when she grew uncertain about her beliefs.  In graduate school the faith of her childhood began to come apart. She asked one of her professors how it was possible for faith to survive this kind of intense intellectual scrutiny.  He thought for a while, then said, “Once upon a time I believed in a great many things.  Now I believe only in a few things, but I believe in them more deeply than I ever thought possible. That God exists, that God is love, and that Jesus is the son of God—these things I believe.  Everything else is up for debate.”

Similarly, the man who was healed didn’t have everything figured out about religion, or faith or even Jesus.  When pressed he simply said, “One thing I know, that though was blind, now see.”  He knew he had been helped and he knew that it was Jesus who helped him.  On that premise:  he believed in Jesus and worshipped him.  Here at University Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, let’s run with that!