Faith and Testimony
By Rev. J. Mary Luti
March 02, 2008
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Lessons: John 9: 1-39
At one point, the blind student said that if Jesus came and offered to do this miracle for her, she would try not to hurt his feelings, but she would say no. This shocked everybody. “How could you say no?” somebody asked. She said that there were gifts in her blindness that she wouldn’t want to lose. Among many other things, being blind helped keep her bigotry in check. Not once in her whole life had she ever judged a book by its cover.
She said that with a wry smile, and the other students thought she was kidding. So they kept insisting that she would be better off sighted. But she kept insisting that there were worse things than being blind. “Like what?” one of the testiest students demanded. “Like getting worked over by bunch of know-it-all seminarians,” she replied.
The man in the story would have understood her. He gets worked over by a bunch of know-it-all PhDs in theology. The very first thing he sees after washing the mud off his eyes is their disapproving faces. The first thing he learns is that when religious experience contradicts religious doctrine, things get ugly.
A friend of mine was teaching in a Jesuit seminary in the late 80’s. She was eating lunch with her colleagues in the faculty lounge when the name of a respected professor at a neighboring university came up, and somebody mentioned that he was gay. “He’s not gay!” one of the Jesuits said sharply, “He’s known to be Christian.” Silence descended on the pb&j.
In a similar vein, Preacher Richard Lischer writes:
In a church I served, one of the pillars of the congregation stopped by my office to tell me he'd been "born again."
"You've been what?" I asked.
"I visited my brother-in-law's church, the Running River of Life Tabernacle, and I don't know what it was, but something happened and I'm born again."
"You can't be born again," I said, "you're a Lutheran. Chairman of the board of trustees." He was brimming with joy, but I was sulking. [S]piritual renewal is wonderful as long as it occurs within acceptable… channels and does not threaten my understanding of God.
In her novel Revelation, Peggy Payne writes about a Presbyterian minister who, while grilling steaks in the backyard, hears God speak to him. Lischer comments: “It's [a] revelation that changes his life... The rest of the story is about the price he pays [for it]. Do the leaders of his congregation rejoice with him? Not exactly. They do provide free psychiatric care and paid administrative leave.”
You can’t be known to be Christian and be gay. You can’t be born again and be a Lutheran. You can’t have a revelation while grilling steaks and be a fully-functioning pastor of a local church. You can’t be a Sabbath-breaker and perform a miraculous healing. You can’t be blind one minute and see the next.
You can’t. Can you?
“You’re asking me?” the newly-sighted man says to the Pharisees. “You guys are the PhDs. You know all kinds of things. I know only one thing—I was blind, and now I see.”
There was a time in the history of the Church when if you wanted to be baptized, you had to submit to a process of preparation that could take up to three years. It was spiritually grueling, and very mysterious. Your own baptism would be the first one you’d ever seen. And not until you were baptized would you be permitted anywhere near a communion service. Exclusion heightened the anticipation.
You were taught that baptism is like God putting you in Noah’s ark to save you from the waters of the great flood. Baptism was like being tossed overboard and swallowed up by Jonah’s big fish, then being coughed up again, safe and sound on the shore. Baptism was like passing through the parted waters of the Red Sea with Moses and the Israelites, or like crossing the Jordan River into the Land of Milk and Honey. And when you come up naked out of the baptismal waters, you would be like a newborn, innocent and pure as paradise, shiny with the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Then from the darkness of the baptismal pool, where you’ve left your old life behind, you’d emerge into the light of dawn. Clothed in a white garment, a lighted candle in your hand, you’d be led into the church where all your new sisters and brothers would be assembled with their own glowing candles, singing Alleluias. And there you’d join them in holy communion—your first time taking the medicine of eternal life, the bread of heaven, the food of angels, the wine of joy—the body and blood of the crucified and risen Christ. When you eat and drink of him, he who became human for your sake would make you divine for his.
So… imagine your disappointment when after all that anticipation, you finally get to the baptismal pool and the water is grim, smelly and freezing cold, the tiled bottom oozes with algae, and you come up out of it dirtier than when you went in. And when you get to the communion table they serve you a teensy-weensy crumb of bread soaked in vinegary wine. It doesn’t taste like angels’ food. You don’t feel divine. And you wonder if you’d been sold a badly-built townhouse in one of those developments called Ocean’s Edge and Bella Vista that are nowhere near the ocean and whose vistas are about as bella as the local landfill.
Grungy water cannot convey the saving power of God. Can it? A soggy crumb of bread cannot convey God’s pardon, healing, and peace. Can it?
Enter the man born blind.
His story was routinely read at baptisms in the ancient church—it’s a baptismal story, after all—a man who once lived in shadows goes into the water, is washed clean, and emerges with new light and new faith. But his story was read for another reason too. Early Christian pastors understood that converts might feel a letdown when they finally got to participate in the holy mysteries. They worried about the disillusionment that the unassuming and ordinary nature of those rituals might cause. They might end up questioning everything. If this is what faith looks and feels like, who wants it?
The story of the man born blind was the church’s reply to this dilemma. It was used to teach new Christians that faith is about acquiring a new and different way of seeing, about going beyond what cannot be to what is. A way of seeing that perceives the divine presence and power in the unlikely, the unlovely, the inarticulate, the inadequate, and the illicit.
Faith also unmasks the deep fear behind the knee-jerk orthodoxy that demands that we conform our experience to what it says is true. It uncovers the spiritual laziness behind pious convention, so good at ostracizing those whose feel for God is different. And so it is a dangerous thing as well, this new way of seeing. It suspects—no, it knows—that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
And faith dares to say so. For it is also a way of seeing that is intimately linked to a way of speaking. Faith’s twin is testimony, the urge to tell the truth about what you have seen and heard, to tell it like it is and let the chips fall where they may.
The formerly blind man did not have any sophisticated religious language for interpreting the mercy he received. He had no theological categories for it. He was not even pious in the traditional sense. He sure didn’t respect his elders. A person like him is not supposed to know anything at all, let alone the one thing he knew. But he knew it anyway.
And so he gives his testimony, and the more he tells his story, the more he grasps what happened to him, the more wonder he feels. He’s been shunned by his parents and kicked out of the synagogue. He’s almost worse off than he was before. He still has no name and no place, but he does have a healer, he does have a savior and friend. By the time Jesus enters the scene again, the man born blind is wide open and ready to receive the gift of faith in him.
Since the day this gospel was written (as Lischer says), this stubborn, truthful, fearless man “lingers just offstage whenever someone discovers that there is more to life than meets the eye.” He’s lingering there whenever somebody dares to name the love that changes everything. He’s there whenever one of us testifies courageously to the implausible run-ins we ourselves have had with divine love and mercy. As we hear him tell the one thing he knows, “we realize that he has a multitude of daughters and sons—all of us who have our own stories to tell.”
What is the one thing you know and that only you can tell?
What is the secret, the challenge, the fear, the pain, the regret, worry, rage, anxiety or crying need, the weakness or inadequacy, the dashed hope or the impossible dream that God’s mercy has changed from shadow into light for you?
Where in your life is a light shining today where there was none before?
It doesn’t matter if you can say how it happened, or why. No PhD in theology is required. You don’t have to be able to cite chapter and verse. But you do have to speak. You have to trust what you know. You have to tell your story. You cannot keep it to yourself even if experts frown, or your neighbors look down their noses, or your co-workers think you’ve lost your marbles, or your family doesn’t want to hear anything about it.
There are depleted people waiting to hear it. People who’ve been begging too long outside the gate. People who want to save and change their lives, not just spruce them up. People languishing in the shadows out there, and in here too, for whom your story is the one thing they really need to hear, the one thing nobody else can tell them.
You may not know a lot. You certainly do not know it all. But you know something. You know something about God that you can and must say for the sake of your neighbor, for the sake of the world—something you can say in your own words, in your own way.
Won’t you speak? Maybe you could say, “Faith brings a light.” Or, “I once was lost but now I’m found.” Just say, “I wouldn’t be making it today without the mercy of the one who loves me.” Just say, “God is good. Let me tell you a story of how I know.”