Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“God’s Last Hope”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, March 2, 2008
John 9:1-41; Ephesians 5:8-14
I read a sermon months ago by Peter Gomes. He’s the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard College. And in one of his sermons, Gomes suggests that we are God’s last hope. I’ve struggled with that ever since—that notion: “We are God’s last hope.”
I struggled with it so much that I quoted that charge in the sermon I offered at Trent Williams’ ordination last month. I figured I could get it off my plate and let him struggle with it for a while. “Here you go, buddy. You’re God’s last hope.”
I struggled with it because after taking in that notion—You are God’s last hope—I felt like I had an itch I needed to scratch but it was out of my reach. I felt like there was something strange about that charge; like there was something wrong with me and I needed to figure out what my problem was before I could do anything about it.
But that kind of thinking gets you nowhere. Don’t you hate it when there’s something legitimately wrong with you, but people want to figure out how it happened before they can actually do something about it? Don’t you hate it when you’re hurting in some way, and people just want to figure out what’s wrong with you? It’s as if by figuring out how you got into a rut that will help you get out of it. Not always true.
William Willoman is a renowned preacher in Methodist circles, and he remembers a time when he was in this kind of situation. He woke up with a terrible sore throat, and he had to go to a meeting. So he starts by saying to everyone there, “I’ve got a horrible sore throat. I can hardly talk. Don’t know ho much good I’ll be able to contribute to this meeting.”
And immediately two people launch into an energetic conversation about the origin of sore throats. One guy says, “I heard that if you don’t take enough vitamin C you get lots of sore throats.” And another guy says, “People just don’t take good care of themselves anymore. At this time of year with the weather changing all the time, people should be more careful or they’ll get sick a lot easier.” And on and on the conversation went.
All he wanted was an ounce of sympathy from his peers, but what he got was a debate over how he’d failed to take good care of himself, and how he had no one to blame but himself for his predicament.
Jesus’ disciples come across a blind man and they say to Jesus, “Rabbi, there’s a guy over there who was born blind! Do you think it was because of his sins or because of his parents’ sins that he was born with that disability?”
That’s the lens through which the disciples see the man born blind. All they want to do is figure out what went wrong. But Jesus doesn’t care about that. Jesus wastes no time reaching out to him. Jesus transcends that kind of judgmental thinking.
Jesus reaches past our desire for explanations and says, “He’s blind, plain and simple. And all you need to be concerned with is what that has to do with God being glorified.” And with that, Jesus makes mud out of dirt and his own spit, rubs that mud on the blind man’s eyes, and he’s miraculously healed. He can see.
The disciples want to know what the man did wrong to inherit the misfortune of his blindness. And after Jesus heals him, the Pharisees want to know if the man was indeed blind before, so that they can confirm the miracle; and they want to know the details of what happened so they can get to the bottom of this guy, Jesus, and whether he committed the sin of working on the Sabbath by healing the blind man.
Basically, the whole story is about details, red tape, bureaucracies, doubts, fears and social obstacles; and about how Jesus reaches through all of this to heal one man born blind so that all of us would learn an important lesson.
And the lesson is this: Someone who is spiritually blind but willing to be taught gains spiritual vision. But someone who claims to know all they need to know about spiritual vision and refuses any help (in this case from Jesus), they are spiritually blind.
In other words, when the lost person says that they are lost, they start being found. But the lost person who thinks they’ve got it all figured out will continue to wander in ignorance. And the blind person who says they need help to see things in a new way is given sight, but the blind person who thinks they’ve seen all they need to see to have an informed and perfect worldview is doomed to perpetual blindness—doomed to repeat past mistakes: blind.
So, this morning we might want to figure out who we are in this story: Are we the blind man healed by Jesus? Are we the disciples, or are we the Pharisees? Where are you in this story?
I’ve told you about the mission trips our youth group would take to Mexico when I served a church in Austin. We took lots of those trips together. But there was one girl in our group named Sam, and Sam kept a really busy schedule with school, extracurricular activities and a job. I like to think that I wasn’t a teenager very long ago, but I can say that teenagers in this generation are busier than ever before. It’s exhausting just to hear about their schedules.
But I digress. Sam could rarely attend so much as our weekly Sunday School, let alone camps or mission trips. So, for her senior year, I made it my goal to persuade her as much as I could to hop in the van and join us on just one trip to Mexico.
Now, you have to understand that Sam was and is one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous souls I’ve ever known, but as her youth minister I would have been remiss if I didn’t try to get her to share in this experience with our group. So, by way of instant messages, emails, phone calls and positive peer pressure, I managed to talk Sam into joining us on our trip to Miguel Aleman, Mexico.
One day of the trip was spent at a landfill where we had started some relationships with the families who lived there. The government runs the landfills, not corporations or businesses, so impoverished families literally live in the garbage dunes left behind by their community. They share living spaces that are not more than ten feet by ten feet, and the walls are composed of cardboard, cinderblocks and any junk they can find. They make their living selling the recyclables they uncover and peddling the forgotten wares of others. It’s all at once inspiring and awful.
The day came for us to go to the landfill with supplies of food, water, personal hygiene items and school supplies for children. And when we drove into that place, the look on Sam’s face was just as hesitant as that look at child gets when the doctor enters the room with a clipboard and asks, “What’s wrong?”
One by one, we hopped out of the vans and took in the stench of reality. We saw dogs and horses wandering freely through the hills of trash. We heard bottles exploding like a guns shot in the burning garbage. And we saw the smiles on the faces of the women, men and children who received us as if we were the very angels that the Psalm speaks of when it says that “the Lord will send his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”
And that’s when I noticed Sam. She was sitting in the door of one of the vans with her face in her hands. When she looked up I could tell that she was crying. And she looked over at me and just asked, “These people live like this?” I said, “Yeah.” And as helpless and shocked as she was, Sam just got up and started helping out however she could in that moment. Her eyes were opened, and she’d never be the same.
Here we are in our fourth Sunday of Lent. We’re following Jesus all the way to Jerusalem; all the way to a cross at Calvary; all the way to a tomb; and all the way into the world. We’re following Jesus. But along the way our Savior is going to introduce us to some things. He’s going to rub that mud on our eyes and we’re going to suddenly see something we haven’t seen before. Along the journey of faith our eyes are opened…and once they’re opened we can never be the same.
Yesterday a few folks from our church, Stacy and I attended a remarkable event in Dallas at the Meyerson Symphony Center. It was a concert sponsored by the Hope for Peace and Justice Institute that commemorated the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. Did you know we’ve been at war for five years?
I’d love to tell you more about the experience, but for now I just want to share with you some things that I and the 2,200 people gathered in that concert hall learned. Since the inception of the Iraq war, there are 1.7 million refugees displaced from Iraq. There were a lot of other telling statistics, like there being over 88,000 civilians killed over the last five years in Iraq at the hands of this war.
But I share these specific statistics with us so that we will as one people have our eyes opened, and so that we might have that much more discernment today as we take up our mission offering. Remember that the One Great Hour of Sharing mission offering works to provide resources to refugees misplaced from their homes and dying of starvation, thirst and disease.
I know that at times it has been a subject of tension or controversy to talk about the war in Iraq in our social circles. And certainly these days with the political winds picking up speed over the Iraq War, making it more of an issue than a reality, it seems more important to choose a side or take some kind of position than to take any kind of action.
But, Friends, we can try to make sense out of war, or we can heed the words of Jesus, who says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are children of God.”
Our eyes are open, and there’s a time to talk and there’s a time to act. This mission offering, One Great Hour of Sharing, is one small way to reach out like Jesus reached out to the blind man and act.
To be like the disciples were, debating over what the blind man had done wrong to be in that mess, is a waste of God’s time. To be like the Pharisees, questioning people on whether Jesus’ actions were appropriate, is a waste of God’s time. Thinking that we’ve got it all figured out and we’ve seen all we need to see in this small world is a waste of God’s time.
Did you know that there are churches in our community, Christian churches, who refuse to contribute to Habitat for Humanity in any way because they assert that Habitat builds homes for families with single parents and gay parents? That’s spiritual blindness, and it’s a waste of God’s time.
When someone comes to the Church, to the House of God, the Body of Christ, the community of faith, and they say, “I’m recently divorced and I’m all alone,” do we first say, “Well, let’s figure out why they got divorced first. If it was because of an abusive marriage or something like that, then I guess we can provide some assistance.”? Who’s really lost: the divorcee or us? Jesus would love that person, no questions asked.
When a homeless person reaches out for assistance, it’s tempting to first ask in our minds, “I wonder how they got in that rut. Maybe they made some poor decisions. Maybe they’re too lazy to get a job. Maybe this. Maybe that.” We’re trying to figure out how they became blind to doing the right thing, when really we’re blind. Jesus would reach out to that person, no questions asked.
Back at that landfill in Mexico, I walked around those mountains of trash. And I told the youth group how to be respectful, and I explained to them how their efforts were specifically helping these impoverished families. I was confident in what the group was doing. I was proud of them. I was sure. But in the back of my mind, I have to admit that I also took comfort in knowing that when our work was done, we would get back in our vans and go home. This situation was here and home was there, and this was simply an experience that we could learn from. I was so sure.
But then we gathered in a circle, all of us: teenagers and adult chaperones from Austin, Texas, and men, women and children residing in the garbage of Miguel Aleman, Mexico. The pastor and I explained to the group in English and in Spanish that we would pray together. And so everyone began to join hands. I grabbed hands with a guy from our group on my left, but then I looked to my right and I had to look down.
There was a 7-year-old boy who lived in the landfill, covered in dirt, wincing in the sun, reaching his hand up to me. His hand was so filthy that when he opened his hand to me, I could see the white lines of his palm revealing his skin color.
So, I took his hand and my eyes were opened. I had been so blind. We belong to each other no matter who we are, where we are or what our situation.
You might ask yourself this morning, am I the disciples, am I the Pharisees or am I the blind man? You might be thinking in your heart, if even in a small way, “I am lost. I am blind. Who am I?” Who are we?
Peter Gomes, offers this answer in a simple poem:
Who are you? Let me suggest that you are
Formed by God
Nourished by His love
Preserved by His mercy
Open to His promises
Expectant of His future
You are the human expression of the Divine hope
You are God’s best and last chance in the world
You are the means for hope and for love in the world
Who are you?
That is who you are
You are all of that, and more
And for that, we praise God
We are God’s last hope. The question is will we spend a lifetime trying to figure out why this burden has fallen on our shoulders, or will we spend today doing something about it?
Will we spend the next however many years trying to make sense of this charge, or will we use today to change God’s world by one act of love—just one?
Will we spend our days trying to figure out which interpretation of God’s will is right, or will we do our best this day to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God?
If we are God’s last hope, what are we going to do?