- 1 Samuel 16: 1-13
- Psalm 23
- Ephesians 5:8-14
- John 9: 1-41
Have you noticed how many popular songs address the topic of Light?
There’s “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
“Bright Lights, Big City” by Sonny James.
“Starlight, Starbright” by Madonna.
Perhaps the first song you learned in Sunday School:
“This Little Light of Mine”.
The opposite is also true – there are plenty of songs about Darkness.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancin’ in the Dark,”
Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,”
Cher’s “Dark Lady.”
Truth be told, I found far more songs about darkness than about light.
But I digress. We’re not going into deep theology today.
This is supposed to be a “light” topic for a sermon – and I hope we will
all leave this service enlightened.
For those of us blessed to have sight – we can experience light.
It helps us to see our way around – and to avoid hazards. It enables
us to get our work done – unless the work involves developing film and
printing photos in a darkroom.
It allows us to watch our children and grandchildren and great-
grandchildren grow up. To enjoy the beauty of God’s creation,
the majesty of mountains, and the power of waves on the sea.
To admire beautiful buildings and the changing colors of the leaves.
To watch parades, sports, plays, movies, TV programs and the news.
Darkness is different. It makes seeing difficult. That’s why we need
streetlights, security lights, and headlights on our vehicles.
Nightlights in our bathrooms. Flashlights for power outages or working
or walking in dark places.
The man in our Gospel Lesson for today never experienced light.
He was born blind. He had never seen anything. He couldn’t work,
so he had to beg for a living.
Until Jesus came along. The disciples saw him – and they
immediately assumed that his blindness was God’s punishment –
either for something he had done wrong or for something his parents
had done wrong.
Jesus immediately corrects their “blame the victim” thinking: “Neither
this man nor his parents sinned.” Jesus understood that all of God’s
creation has been affected by humanity’s sin. Including this poor man.
Remember how God responded to the fruit incident in the Garden of
Eden? God told Eve that she would experience great pain when giving
birth to her children. On top of that, Adam would be the boss.
As for Adam, God told him that he would have to work hard to raise
crops to feed himself and his family – and when all his work was done,
he would die. Ever since, the curse has followed – as though it were in
our DNA – until today, and it will continue until Jesus returns.
Hard work, pain, sickness, sorrow, and death are inescapable parts of
being human. And we must remember that Jesus understood that –
and had compassion on the blind man. In fact – Jesus took a page out
of Genesis in the way He healed the man.
We probably all know that God created Adam out of the dust of the
earth. Jesus used a mixture of His own spit and the dust around Him
to re-create the man’s eyes. To give him eyes that could see.
Of course, the man was thrilled with his new, working eyes. But his
neighbors and others who were accustomed to seeing him begging
were skeptical. “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?”
You can almost hear their inability to believe their own eyes:
“No, he only looks like him.”
The man sets the record straight by telling them what Jesus did to
restore the man’s sight: “He made some mud and put it on my eyes.”
When I was in college, I spent one summer working as a counselor at
Camp Crestfield in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. We had our campers
re-create this scene – playing the roles of the blind man, Jesus, and
the onlookers. The boy who was playing Jesus spit on the ground,
pretended to mix it with dirt, then pressed his fingertips on the eyes of
the boy playing the blind man, and said … C’mon, someone say it.
“Here’s mud in yer eye!”
However – this story from John’s account of the Gospel does not end
with a punchline. It ends with the Jewish leadership accusing the man
of staging it all. His parents arrive and affirm that their son was born
blind – but then started tap-dancing around the truth: “We know he is
our son, and we know he was born blind, but how he can see now, or
who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him.”
So the religious leaders start grilling him – in an effort to silence him.
They suggest that Jesus is an imposter – but the man out-argues
them. Exasperated, they effectively excommunicate the man –
throwing him out of the Temple, telling him: “You were steeped in sin at
birth. How dare you lecture us!”
The man finds Jesus – who explains to him that He – Jesus – is the
Messiah. And the man worshipped him.
We see here some stunning irony: the man accused of being a “sinner”
comes to believe in Jesus, while the supposedly righteous religious
elite take a hard pass on Jesus. To their own detriment.
The blind man had spent his entire life – up to this point – in darkness.
But Jesus filled his life with light – not only by restoring his sight, but
also by enabling him to see who Jesus was and to trust Him.
The Apostle Paul uses the same kind of imagery in our reading today
from Ephesians 5: “…once you were darkness, but now you are light in
the Lord. Live as children of light.” Before coming to faith in Jesus,
we were not merely living in darkness – but darkness was living in us.
We were darkness.
Without Jesus, we could not generate our own light. But with Him, we
can shine with His light – sharing His light with a dark world – and
giving them hope for a very bright eternity. Amen.