First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

John 9

“Believing is Seeing”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

March 2, 2008

I wasn’t a quick convert to the church. It didn’t come easily to me. My slow conversion wasn’t over the image of the church. I wasn’t offended by the history, the bloodshed, the seeming injustice that contradicts a benevolent God. I have never felt the need for everything to work out. The idea that God would be complicit in the taking of the Promise Land or that Christians marched to Jerusalem crusading in the name of Christ doesn’t outrage me.

Neither was my hesitation a failure to believe the doctrines. I am not bothered by doctrines that seem fantastic or farfetched. I have said it before, the Garden, the Flood, the burning bush, fine with me. I find the persistent attempt of the Enlightenment to weed out the miracles from the Bible to be of no value. Walk on the water, heal the leper, resurrection: all fine in my book. But these are doctrines and the historical context giving them birth; they are not the church.

It may be that I grew up playing tennis and golf and so team sports are not my strong suit. Maybe I am not a joiner or at ease in the crowd. This is true, but the church isn’t a club or a team.

The church and I had a rocky start. I was baptized Lutheran, taken to the Mass, and then sent to Sunday School in the Wesleyan Church. So I went from severity to popery to revival. That sort of mishmash of religion could have created a sense of indifference or repulsion, yet, it did just the opposite I love them all. I love their rites and rituals that is. But the church is not the sum of ritual.

The rocky start came when I watched the church I grew up in divide. They grew too fast and a faction who felt disenfranchised voted out the senior pastor in a move that should be considered a textbook blind side. He was a good man and he never saw it coming.

It was then I lost my faith in the church. It was also the first two years of college so there wasn’t a real chance such an event wouldn’t leave a mark. I have spoken to many people over the years that have left churches, been kicked out of churches, or found their church kind of left them along the way. There is emptiness to their souls, a deep sense of loss. I spoke to a woman this last week that was a bit upset. She was upset when she realized she was no longer welcome because they changed the locks to the church and found someone to take her place on the session. Now we are talking church.

It was during college, though, that I began my slow conversion. The conversion began with Kathy taking me to her church. Presbyterianism it turns out promotes intellectual curiosity and philosophical rigor; this is a place of reflection more than emotional fervor. That there was a church that was closer to what it meant for me to be authentic was a big first step.

The second step of conversion was reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The small treatise was written from an underground seminary in Germany, in the town of Finkelwald (I love German words, they always sound a bit earthy). Bonhoeffer was trying to define the church to a group of would-be pastors; he was trying to define it as a life together. The irony of his book is that their life together was a result of the German church following Hitler and kicking the confession church out. So his definition of the church had a rather significant critique built into it; it was edgy. It wasn’t a rosy, happy picture of the church. Given my recent experience this helped.

A tough picture of the church, a kind of church on the margins, church without pretense appealed to me. The edginess of Bonhoeffer though was smoothed by listening to the sermons of Rev. Paul Pulliam. I truly admired him. This was the man who married Kathy and I and I can remember listening to his sermons and finding them a kind of gentle invitation to believe in the church. I realized just how much I held him in esteem when we returned to First Pres San Diego a number of years ago. The pulpit in my memory of his sermons seemed enormous, vaulted almost. Standing in the sanctuary I realized it was just one step higher than the one here. In my mind though it was as high as my esteem.

The conversion step here was important because it was balanced. On the one hand I had the radical voice of Bonhoeffer writing as a pastor who would soon be imprisoned and executed. Bonhoeffer was putting forth a picture of the church that was extreme, sacrificing, risk taking. But it was not the stuff of generations. To my knowledge the underground seminary of Finklewald is no more, just as Hitler is no more.

The other side was Paul Pulliam preaching a church that is living, pedestrian even. It was about families and soup kitchens and missions in Pakistan and trying to blend the desire for pop music with opera. One story from his sermons I will never forget was when he described his guilty pleasure of buying an ice cream machine while serving the church as a missionary in Pakistan. He had never over come the guilt of spending so much money in such a poor place, yet, he loved the ice cream it made.

My progress toward conversion next came with Calvin. John Calvin that is. I spent three years of my life reading, digesting, tearing apart his works. It the end I came to see that the key to everything he wrote after leaving France was the church. He was made a fugitive because he penned an introduction to a French New Testament and then was thrust into a pasturing a church by the ominous predictions of his friend Farel (Farel told him if he didn’t pastor the people of Geneva God would strike him dead). It was his unlikely role as pastor that shaped everything he wrote as he offered it to the church.

Spending three years in his works I began to see how the church was for him a radical embodiment of Christ- a transcendent Lord come to earth, but also a group of unwieldy folks who liked to name their dogs after him. At one moment Calvin would wax poetic about our being engrafted into Christ and made one in a mystical union and then he would have to slug it over something happening in the town. Yet, whatever he did it all came down to the church and what a surprise this was to him. As a young reformer he had the zeal to give his life for God, as a young pastor he found this meant giving his life to the church.

This was the way I came to my first congregation. I had very high notions, but also suspicions that the church was somewhat, shall we say, earthy. My conversion to the church didn’t really occur at any given moment during my first pastorate, nor was it complete. It’s still going on. I am converted enough to say I believe in the church. Rites, rituals and guffaws- the whole shooting match- I believe. Having said that I am mindful that it wasn’t a quick conversion. It took me quite some time to see what the church really was.

The best way I know of reading the Gospel of John is that it is the struggle of the people to become the church, to believe in the church. John’s gospel, I believe, was an attempt to build the church, understand the church. To do this John filled with irony and thus contradictions; he put within it cryptic sayings around every corner to slow us down, and, most importantly, he put forward the outcast as the disciple. All of these were to make a group of people consider what it meant; how it was that they were the church. John chapter 9 is like a masterpiece of all of these.

John 9 is the Mona Lisa of the Bible. It is an image of the church that is engaging and fleeting; it is strong but soft; there is clarity and confusion that mystifies without being mystery or riddle. On one level it is about one man who was blind seeing; on a second level it is about the church seeing Jesus; and then in the end, it is about the church seeing itself.

By the time John was writing his gospel the church was almost free of the synagogue. Acts tells us that the synagogue would put up with the Jesus people for a short time and then suggest they find their own place of worship. When John was writing, this generation of Christians was struggling with the next generation, the people who grew up in the church, who were different from them, who were not yet ready.

John took all the stories of the first three gospels and recast them to foster a place for these two generations to find a common ground, to find what it meant for them to be the church together. John is caustic in this. He wants the church to see how easily it can become self-serving, self-preserving, or simply what it wants to be without ever being what God intended.

The blind man healed in John 9 is best understood as the story of Peter’s confession retold. It’s about seeing and believing. Peter believed Jesus was the Christ but he didn’t quite understand what that meant. John took this story and recast it for the church to say, you believe in Christ and Christ has called you to be his church but you are not quite sure what that means.

The man who is healed doesn’t know what this all means, his parents don’t either; the Pharisees kick him out of the synagogue for suggesting their interest in his healing is a kind of passive-aggressive belief. The bottom line is that no one gets it.

“No one gets it” is not something I like to say in sermons. It’s dismissive and unreasonable. But what John means is that being a disciple, and more importantly, being the church is all about saying I don’t know, I can’t see it, show me. This is exactly what the blind beggar says after being thrown out of the synagogue, “show me.”

It’s a harsh critique in a way. But it is a critique born of belief. The reason why I love the Gospel of John is that he loves and believes in the church. He believes that somehow, by some strange divine reasoning God has chosen to make us light. We are supposed to be the light of the world; we are supposed to be the embodiment of Christ’s will and mercy to the world. And sometimes we are really that. Sometimes we come to blows over furniture or carpets.

The Gospel of John, and the ninth chapter in particular, are meant to embody this tension. We are an exalted body, a transcendent image, a kind of celestial occurrence that fights over brochures and funding and policies. We are supposed to be heaven and earth co-mingled, made one, without confusion.

In John 9 everyone is confused. The disciples ask about sin, but it’s the wrong question. The Pharisees ask about the truth, but they want falsehood. The man who is healed is given the gift of sight, but then he is given the revelation that Jesus is the Christ and it eclipses his physical sight. Then all of sudden Jesus says, “being blind is the best!”

Let me take a different tack. I was not a quick convert of the church. It came slow. Each step though was made from confusion. It came when I realized I didn’t quite get it, I was just a bit . . . way off. In this confession, John would say, there was grace lifting me up.

Let me put in a different way yet again. Every time I go to Africa I believe in you more and more. Every time I sit in a mud hut and sing words I don’t understand, I understand our life together more. This happens because I realize how little I understand, how much I don’t get it. It’s at this moment that I believe; I am converted.

It should be the opposite. Conversion should come from clarity, but it doesn’t. Mercy is meant to be given to the broken not to the whole. That is all John wanted to say. If you are broken there is healing. If you can’t see you are broken it’s a waste of love. And love should not go to waste.

I love the church. I love that you are the church. And, I know it sounds strange, but I love that we are broken. We know we are. All John wants to say in chapter nine is don’t let go of this, because if you believe this you will see. You will see other people as beloved; you will see yourself in need of grace not affirmation; you will know to give is better than to receive. You will see life this way because you believe.

I look forward to the next chapter of conversion. There have been others I didn’t mention- as this is a sermon with only 17 minutes of playtime. But I am longing to know what comes next, what the church will be next, how I will see you and know the body of Christ. Looking out from a pulpit I am ever mindful that I don’t get it. But I want to. I want to see. The words of the blind man are on my lips, “show me this man!”

If you want to see Christ all you need to say, to pray, to plead, is that you don’t yet see.

Pray with me that we see. Pray that we are courageous and fearful enough to say, I can’t see. Open my eyes! I believe, let me see. Amen.