SERMON: What do you say about Him?

 10:30 am, 4^th Sun in Lent, March 19, 2023 - J G White / FBCA

(Eph 5:8-14; Ps 23; Jn 9:1-41)

 I heard a very interesting talk the other day, on radio. Author Thompson Highway spoke, in his fifth Massey Lecture, about death, from the perspective of monotheism, Greek mythology, and indigenous spirituality. In the Q & R after, he confessed he finds Jesus of Nazareth lacking in humour.

He's a wonderful man; I love him very, very much. But, I've never heard him laugh. A laughing deity he was not. And I've never heard the Christian God laugh either. And that's my point; there's something missing there.

What do you say about Him? About Jesus? Perhaps your presence here now speaks for itself, though we each would say something unique if we put it into words. I could ask you to speak of Christ now – and one day I will have a proper ‘dialogue sermon’ – and open up conversation. One day...

The story of John’s Gospel, chapter 9, is a well-told story, as stories of Jesus go, in the Bible. An unnamed young man is healed of blindness, and no less than five times is asked who or where the man was who performed the miracle.

Actually, there are also a few questions here about who this fellow is who claims to have been healed. Perhaps that makes us shy today – churchgoers often do not want to talk directly about the Son of God as Someone we know personally. Others may ask for explanations from us; we simply say what we know. Our best conversation is not to explain, to give a mini-sermon: the best is to tell our experience. Don’t try to make up what you don’t know: say what you know, and confess what you don’t.

Look at this scene again. 10 But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

Where is this Jesus for whom we sing today? In whose name we pray? To whom we dedicate the finances we share? About whom the preacher should speak? Often it is in His absence that we speak of Christ. He is gone, after all, and we await His return, right? Yet we also say the Spirit of Jesus is always available. It is both/and. To my mind comes the image of a banner in the chapel of the Springhill Penitentiary.

INVOKED OR NOT

GOD IS PRESENT

I also remember well that, just the way that banner was hanging, with some waves in the fabric, it looked like it said (believe it or not) SMOKED OR NOT  GOD IS PRESENT!

Perhaps the onlookers in Jesus’ day thought the man who claimed to be healed of blindness was on something. ‘Is it really that blind guy?’ they asked. But it was him, and he was only under the influence of vision in his eyes, for the first time. The miracle worker had left, so the young man kept getting asked the same questions. 17 So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”

Who is Christ? What do we say about Him? When we speak of meeting God, so often in ‘churchland’ people default to the dramatic, evangelical experience. And a few people, some of you, have had such a happening, or more than one.

Some people tell their stories, and in great detail. I think of folk like Eugene (not his real name) who in his younger years had a terrible marriage, and as he was getting to the end of it, was getting into church, simply because he could sing. He got recruited into a local United Church choir, before he even believed in God or anything! Then, he did have a series of dramatic, spiritual experiences, his ‘born again’ experience, he calls it. Eugene even can tell of an evening when he was at home, saw a bright light, and had an ‘out of body’ experience, looking down upon himself. He met God quite dramatically.

That did not mean he knew all about Jesus, suddenly, or understood what happened to him. He did feel some healing and help on the inside, and he started a journey.

 Whatever our experience, whatever we have learned about, or not learned, we are where we are. & we say what we know. Look at what the healed blind man said about Jesus of Nazareth. 25 “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” ...If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

Like the healed blind man, other people have a dramatic life experience – a miracle, perhaps? – and that becomes a touchstone for them. I remember, years ago, Lorne coming in to speak with me. He was thinking about being baptized, and has an idea to do it while his elderly and very devout parents were still alive. The one thing Lorne told me, at length, was a near death experience he’d had, working up north, years before.

 One spring day, Lorne was out on his own, driving a huge excavator across the white, wind-swept muskeg. The land was starting to thaw, and any time of year has its dangers. Suddenly, it became obvious he was crossing a pond, when the ice broke and the excavator went down, down, down, into the black, mucky water. In those icy seconds of darkness that seem like an hour, Lorne scrambled to open the cab and get out. Hitting his head on the top of the doorway, he scalped himself. He managed to climb or swim up on top of the excavator cab, and could just reach the surface. He got out. He climbed out. Soaked and freezing, and bleeding, he got back to camp and to safety.

He survived! This, for him, was a near death experience, a miracle, a rescue by the Almighty. I guess it was his one big religious experience. He did not explain anything else about faith – he simply felt he had been spared to live his life, by God.

 Lorne never did get baptized, as far as I know. Baptism is one clear way to obey Christ in the Bible, but plenty of Christians never seem to go through with this. They follow some other ways of being disciples of Jesus, but don’t quite get to that beginning step, that initiation, that declaration.

I noticed that the healed man in John chapter 9 speaks about becoming a disciple of Jesus. He makes a rather brave defense when the Jewish club called the Pharisees interrogate him. They kept at him, and 27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”

Of course, the Pharisees did not! They are Jews, ‘disciples of Moses,’ as they put it. The more the healed man is questioned, the more he seems to be headed toward trusting and following Christ. He’d just had the most amazing day in his life – he gets to see with his eyes for the first time – and he is responding. Even while this man, Jesus, is absent, and then a topic of conversation. The dramatic moments of our lives, when we think we meet the Spirit, transform us, after the miracle moment is over.

I remember the story Iris and Ron told me, years ago. I got to know them early on when I became the Senior Pastor of their church. In fact, the Search Committee interviews with me had happened in their den at their house: Ron the Chairperson, Iris making us tea and cookies. 

They told me how they formed a very strong bond with the Baptist Church, years before. They had three sons. Once the boys grew up, the first one got married, and the young couple had a baby. But next the young father got ill. Seriously ill. Terminally ill. It all ended in hospital, as these situations often do. In those final, critical moments, the young man’s parents, Iris and Ron, found the presence of God to be very clear, and the visits of the local Baptist minister to be very timely. No wonder they served God in that congregation ever after – they could never forget how the Good Shepherd had walked with them through their Valley of the Shadow of Death. 

For me, this was a real story of death and resurrection. And a real story of meeting God. ‘What do you say about Him?’ About Jesus?’ At the end of the story of the healed blind man, Jesus goes to talk with him. This healer, who had be absent, is suddenly back. Christ uses one of the titles for Himself he used quite a bit, ‘The Son of Man.’ ‘It is I, speaking to you now.” “Lord, I believe,” the man said, and worshipped Jesus.

I wonder what that was, his worship of Jesus there, standing around, outdoors. Even more, I wonder what your worship of Jesus looks like, when you see Him on the street.

And my worship, out there?

We say what we know how to say, and bow in the ways we know how. We get silent, and pay attention. We laugh when we feel joy, and when life humbles us. We answer others with our own answers, our experience.

Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.