Believing Is Seeing
Sermon
Living Vertically
Gospel Sermons For Lent/Easter Cycle C
I attended graduate school at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland, where the Sulpician fathers still believed in some old time virtues: discomfort and hunger. One night when I discovered that supper was gruel with a few slices of smoked sausage mixed in, I decided it was time for some finger-licking good food.
After dining at the Colonel's in downtown Baltimore, I went over to a pharmacy to make a quick purchase. As I walked in the front door, I noticed that it was unusually quiet in the store, but didn't think much about it. I stepped up to the counter and asked where I could find what I was looking for. The clerk just stared at me and said, "You're standing in the blood!" After a day of theological thinking, this sounded like some metaphorical statement and I pondered it for a minute. Again he said, "You're standing in the blood!" This time I looked down and realized, to my horror, that I was literally standing in a pool of blood. Suddenly things began to fit together. There was a side entrance to this store where a knot of people was gathered around some police cars. It suddenly became clear that the eerie silence in the pharmacy was due to the fact that I had walked in just at the conclusion of an unsuccessful robbery attempt. The clerk, menaced with a gun, had pulled out his own weapon and shot the would-be thief. And here I was, standing in the blood.
How in the world, I asked myself, could I have wandered into the place where such dramatic and dangerous events had taken place and been unaware? But then, on the other hand, how could I have known? The gunshot must have not been very loud -- at least not loud enough to be heard over the normal din of the inner-city. It doesn't take much imagination to understand how innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire.
How in the world, generations of Christians have asked, could Thomas -- the one called the twin -- have not believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead? How could he have doubted the other disciples? Some commentators have even come to the far-fetched conclusion that his nickname, "the twin," meant that he was "double minded" and doubted about many things, that he was not really a good disciple. But the other side of the coin is, how could he have possibly really comprehended what went on that night? After all, we might say in his defense, he wasn't there.
And it is what Thomas missed by not being present that first Easter night that is really crucial to understanding the dynamics of this story. It is not primarily that he missed seeing the resurrected Jesus. After all, in the great sweep of history, only a handful of Christians ever had that experience. More basically, he missed receiving the Holy Spirit, the indwelling presence, that agent of God that enables us to see beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, that allows us to comprehend how God is working in our lives and what is really going on the in the world.
One of the characteristics of Jesus' ministry was his keen perception of what was really going on in persons' lives and in perplexing situations. Think for a few minutes about four individuals -- two women, two men -- whose stories I hope are familiar from the pages of John's Gospel. All needed something that Jesus was able to supply, but more fundamentally, all yearned for their needs to be recognized.
There was the Samaritan woman Jesus met by the well in the city of Sychar. They had the famous dialogue about living water: the woman clearly thought he meant fresh, flowing water from some source other than the well, while Jesus was speaking of spiritual refreshment. "I am the living water," he said.
But at the very heart of this story is the simple fact that this woman's life was just a mess! She had had five husbands and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. Jesus knew that she was searching for something -- for intimacy, for acceptance, for affirmation -- in all the wrong places. What she needed was some time devoted to her inner being and her spiritual hunger. He was the one, he told her, who embodied God's unconditional love in a way that could give her life real focus and fulfillment. And she seemed to believe it. She went and told the townspeople about this man who really focused on her. Could he be the Messiah?
There was another woman whose relationship problems had become very public: the woman who had been caught in the act of adultery and who was about to be stoned to death. In that dramatic confrontation Jesus shifted the focus away from the woman, who seemed to have clearly been guilty as charged. He turned the spotlight on the self-righteous attitude of her accusers: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." "Woman where are they?" he asked after the accusers had filed away. "Has no-one condemned you?... Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." In contrast to his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus focused attention away from the guilty woman to her accusers. Unlike them, Jesus was more interested in redemption and rehabilitation than in punishment and death.
The two men who come to mind each had physical problems: one could not walk, the other could not see. In Jerusalem, Jesus came upon a man who had been ill for 38 years. He was at the pool of Bethesda with a crowd of invalids waiting for the waters of the pool to be troubled. The belief was that the first one in the pool when the waters were troubled would be healed. Seeing him, Jesus asked what at first seems to be an odd question: "Do you want to be made well?" But the man's answer revealed that the question was right on target. Instead of giving a straight answer, he began to complain that over the years he had always gotten the short end of the stick. No one ever helped him into the pool, he whined, and so he was never healed. We have no way of knowing what other disappointments had embittered this man over nearly four decades of infirmity. Since it was commonly assumed in the ancient world that illness was generally punishment for sin, he may have been abandoned by his family and spurned by friends. But whatever his personal history, the fact was that his lameness could not be cured until he wanted things to be different: "Do you want to be made well?" As in the case of the Samaritan woman, nothing could change until there was a change of heart.
The man who had been born blind was quite another case. As Jesus and the twelve encountered him, the disciples asked a question based on that common assumption about illness: "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus said that they were barking up the wrong tree -- sin wasn't a factor at all! But his unfortunate condition did provide an opportunity for showing God's loving care. As the story progressed, the restoring of the man's sight really became secondary to a convoluted series of events where the religious authorities tried to find fault with Jesus. There were accusations of the man and his parents that the blindness had been faked, enabling him to panhandle without really deserving it. There were disagreements over whether the healing should have been done on the Sabbath day. All the bewildered young man could do was state the obvious: "One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see." Unlike the woman caught in the act of adultery, there is no hint whatsoever that this blind man had any responsibility for his condition. But as in that case the religious figures of his day -- whom one might think would be interested in his welfare -- had a totally different and absolutely destructive agenda.
In each case we are struck by Jesus' ability to focus on the most important issue: the inner turmoil of the Samaritan woman; the self-righteous zeal of the adulterous woman's accusers; the underlying guilt of the lame man; the misplaced zeal of the blind man's antagonists. "Of course Jesus knew what was going on," someone is thinking, "he was the Messiah." But the point of today's Gospel Lesson is that Jesus promises to those who believe in him the gift of the Holy Spirit which enables us to see, as he did, and to act, bringing forgiveness, wholeness, and healing to persons.
As the resurrected Jesus spoke with the disciples, he gave them both a promise and a challenge: He breathed on them, just as God had breathed the breath of life on the lifeless Adam, and he said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" (John 20:22-23). You have the power, Jesus says, to discern when forgiveness is needed, and to speak the words of compassion and mercy to the blind man, the troubled soul, the one needing help. You also have the power to challenge inappropriate, self-damaging and sinful behavior: to force the woman at the well to look again at her life, to require those who would stone the adulterous woman to examine their own motivations. And not only do you have the power, you need to do it. "Very truly, I tell you," Jesus said in his farewell discourse, "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these" (John 14:12). If you have been empowered by God through the Holy Spirit to continue the ministry of Jesus and don't, then who will?
During the season of Lent and especially around Easter, many people think about the life and times of Jesus, thanks partly to the glut of biblical epics on television. But the truth is that many of us bracket the biblical narrative off from our everyday life. "If I had lived in Bible times ... if I had seen the miracles...." We make the Thomas mistake of imagining that seeing is believing. Today's Gospel Lesson turns that idea on its head. The Holy Spirit enables us -- no it compels us -- to see as Jesus saw and do as Jesus did. Believing is seeing: the gift of the Holy Spirit allows us really to comprehend what is going on around us and understand the positive role God wants us to play.
The December 6, 1992, Manchester Guardian carried the story of Black, a two-year-old sheep dog. The dog was left by its master, a French artisan, with a cousin in northeast France while he went to work as a traveling construction worker. After working jobs in a number of locations, he ended up in Avignon, some 500 miles from where he left Black. As you are probably guessing, he heard reports about a stray dog behaving oddly. Sure enough when the worker arrived at the pound, he was almost bowled over by Black, who had finally caught up with his master. Ralph Whitlock, the Guardian writer, gave this explanation for Black's ability to follow his master over a long, unpredictable, and erratic route: "The dog's sense of direction was not centred on any geographical location, but was locked on his master."
When we "lock" on Jesus Christ -- when we are spiritually and mentally present as Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on us -- our sense of direction will get us where we need to be. Believing is seeing.
After dining at the Colonel's in downtown Baltimore, I went over to a pharmacy to make a quick purchase. As I walked in the front door, I noticed that it was unusually quiet in the store, but didn't think much about it. I stepped up to the counter and asked where I could find what I was looking for. The clerk just stared at me and said, "You're standing in the blood!" After a day of theological thinking, this sounded like some metaphorical statement and I pondered it for a minute. Again he said, "You're standing in the blood!" This time I looked down and realized, to my horror, that I was literally standing in a pool of blood. Suddenly things began to fit together. There was a side entrance to this store where a knot of people was gathered around some police cars. It suddenly became clear that the eerie silence in the pharmacy was due to the fact that I had walked in just at the conclusion of an unsuccessful robbery attempt. The clerk, menaced with a gun, had pulled out his own weapon and shot the would-be thief. And here I was, standing in the blood.
How in the world, I asked myself, could I have wandered into the place where such dramatic and dangerous events had taken place and been unaware? But then, on the other hand, how could I have known? The gunshot must have not been very loud -- at least not loud enough to be heard over the normal din of the inner-city. It doesn't take much imagination to understand how innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire.
How in the world, generations of Christians have asked, could Thomas -- the one called the twin -- have not believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead? How could he have doubted the other disciples? Some commentators have even come to the far-fetched conclusion that his nickname, "the twin," meant that he was "double minded" and doubted about many things, that he was not really a good disciple. But the other side of the coin is, how could he have possibly really comprehended what went on that night? After all, we might say in his defense, he wasn't there.
And it is what Thomas missed by not being present that first Easter night that is really crucial to understanding the dynamics of this story. It is not primarily that he missed seeing the resurrected Jesus. After all, in the great sweep of history, only a handful of Christians ever had that experience. More basically, he missed receiving the Holy Spirit, the indwelling presence, that agent of God that enables us to see beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, that allows us to comprehend how God is working in our lives and what is really going on the in the world.
One of the characteristics of Jesus' ministry was his keen perception of what was really going on in persons' lives and in perplexing situations. Think for a few minutes about four individuals -- two women, two men -- whose stories I hope are familiar from the pages of John's Gospel. All needed something that Jesus was able to supply, but more fundamentally, all yearned for their needs to be recognized.
There was the Samaritan woman Jesus met by the well in the city of Sychar. They had the famous dialogue about living water: the woman clearly thought he meant fresh, flowing water from some source other than the well, while Jesus was speaking of spiritual refreshment. "I am the living water," he said.
But at the very heart of this story is the simple fact that this woman's life was just a mess! She had had five husbands and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. Jesus knew that she was searching for something -- for intimacy, for acceptance, for affirmation -- in all the wrong places. What she needed was some time devoted to her inner being and her spiritual hunger. He was the one, he told her, who embodied God's unconditional love in a way that could give her life real focus and fulfillment. And she seemed to believe it. She went and told the townspeople about this man who really focused on her. Could he be the Messiah?
There was another woman whose relationship problems had become very public: the woman who had been caught in the act of adultery and who was about to be stoned to death. In that dramatic confrontation Jesus shifted the focus away from the woman, who seemed to have clearly been guilty as charged. He turned the spotlight on the self-righteous attitude of her accusers: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." "Woman where are they?" he asked after the accusers had filed away. "Has no-one condemned you?... Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." In contrast to his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus focused attention away from the guilty woman to her accusers. Unlike them, Jesus was more interested in redemption and rehabilitation than in punishment and death.
The two men who come to mind each had physical problems: one could not walk, the other could not see. In Jerusalem, Jesus came upon a man who had been ill for 38 years. He was at the pool of Bethesda with a crowd of invalids waiting for the waters of the pool to be troubled. The belief was that the first one in the pool when the waters were troubled would be healed. Seeing him, Jesus asked what at first seems to be an odd question: "Do you want to be made well?" But the man's answer revealed that the question was right on target. Instead of giving a straight answer, he began to complain that over the years he had always gotten the short end of the stick. No one ever helped him into the pool, he whined, and so he was never healed. We have no way of knowing what other disappointments had embittered this man over nearly four decades of infirmity. Since it was commonly assumed in the ancient world that illness was generally punishment for sin, he may have been abandoned by his family and spurned by friends. But whatever his personal history, the fact was that his lameness could not be cured until he wanted things to be different: "Do you want to be made well?" As in the case of the Samaritan woman, nothing could change until there was a change of heart.
The man who had been born blind was quite another case. As Jesus and the twelve encountered him, the disciples asked a question based on that common assumption about illness: "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus said that they were barking up the wrong tree -- sin wasn't a factor at all! But his unfortunate condition did provide an opportunity for showing God's loving care. As the story progressed, the restoring of the man's sight really became secondary to a convoluted series of events where the religious authorities tried to find fault with Jesus. There were accusations of the man and his parents that the blindness had been faked, enabling him to panhandle without really deserving it. There were disagreements over whether the healing should have been done on the Sabbath day. All the bewildered young man could do was state the obvious: "One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see." Unlike the woman caught in the act of adultery, there is no hint whatsoever that this blind man had any responsibility for his condition. But as in that case the religious figures of his day -- whom one might think would be interested in his welfare -- had a totally different and absolutely destructive agenda.
In each case we are struck by Jesus' ability to focus on the most important issue: the inner turmoil of the Samaritan woman; the self-righteous zeal of the adulterous woman's accusers; the underlying guilt of the lame man; the misplaced zeal of the blind man's antagonists. "Of course Jesus knew what was going on," someone is thinking, "he was the Messiah." But the point of today's Gospel Lesson is that Jesus promises to those who believe in him the gift of the Holy Spirit which enables us to see, as he did, and to act, bringing forgiveness, wholeness, and healing to persons.
As the resurrected Jesus spoke with the disciples, he gave them both a promise and a challenge: He breathed on them, just as God had breathed the breath of life on the lifeless Adam, and he said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" (John 20:22-23). You have the power, Jesus says, to discern when forgiveness is needed, and to speak the words of compassion and mercy to the blind man, the troubled soul, the one needing help. You also have the power to challenge inappropriate, self-damaging and sinful behavior: to force the woman at the well to look again at her life, to require those who would stone the adulterous woman to examine their own motivations. And not only do you have the power, you need to do it. "Very truly, I tell you," Jesus said in his farewell discourse, "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these" (John 14:12). If you have been empowered by God through the Holy Spirit to continue the ministry of Jesus and don't, then who will?
During the season of Lent and especially around Easter, many people think about the life and times of Jesus, thanks partly to the glut of biblical epics on television. But the truth is that many of us bracket the biblical narrative off from our everyday life. "If I had lived in Bible times ... if I had seen the miracles...." We make the Thomas mistake of imagining that seeing is believing. Today's Gospel Lesson turns that idea on its head. The Holy Spirit enables us -- no it compels us -- to see as Jesus saw and do as Jesus did. Believing is seeing: the gift of the Holy Spirit allows us really to comprehend what is going on around us and understand the positive role God wants us to play.
The December 6, 1992, Manchester Guardian carried the story of Black, a two-year-old sheep dog. The dog was left by its master, a French artisan, with a cousin in northeast France while he went to work as a traveling construction worker. After working jobs in a number of locations, he ended up in Avignon, some 500 miles from where he left Black. As you are probably guessing, he heard reports about a stray dog behaving oddly. Sure enough when the worker arrived at the pound, he was almost bowled over by Black, who had finally caught up with his master. Ralph Whitlock, the Guardian writer, gave this explanation for Black's ability to follow his master over a long, unpredictable, and erratic route: "The dog's sense of direction was not centred on any geographical location, but was locked on his master."
When we "lock" on Jesus Christ -- when we are spiritually and mentally present as Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on us -- our sense of direction will get us where we need to be. Believing is seeing.
