John 9:1-41
In the name of God.
Amen.
Sometimes I think these miracle stories of Jesus’ might
sometimes make us feel more distant from him.
Later in John, near the end of the book it says, “Jesus did many other
signs, which are not written in this book.
But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the
Messiah…” So that, the writer says, is
the point. The stories of these signs
and wonders are written and shared “so that you may come to believe”.
The problem, however, is that sometimes they can seem to
drive a wedge. Rather than making us
feel closer to God, in the light of our everyday experience, they may make us
feel more distant.
Not many of us can point to examples of times when we’ve
seen blind people who were made to see as turning points in our faith journeys. Not many of us know people who were raised
from the dead.
I remember, as a child, one of the questions that came up
from time to time when I was in Sunday School was, why aren’t there miracles
anymore? As an adult, of course, I’ve
learned that there are still miracles.
Most of us can see them everyday, if we train ourselves to recognize
them. But it’s true, that miracles don’t
tend to be as dramatic as the kinds of things we see in the gospels.
The other difference is, we’ve gotten pretty good at
explaining and understanding our miracles.
Or at least we think we do. We’ve
probably all seen videos on YouTube of people hearing for the first time after
activating cochlear implants. Just
earlier this week I saw a particularly sweet video about an engineer who had
developed a hobby of modifying children’s electric ride-on toys as a
cost-effective way of offering increased mobility to children with physical
disabilities. If that wasn’t “miracle”
enough for you, he not only does this free of charge, but after he’s mastered
each creation, he posts the plans for each project online for anyone else who
might need it to download for free and to build their own.
There are most certainly still miracles. It would be hard to deny that.
But as much as the miracle plays an important role in the
story we read today, I would argue that the story of the man who was blind from
birth receiving his sight isn’t so much about a miracle - the physical change,
as it is a story about a conversion - the spiritual change.
That’s the point that I think most of us can relate to. We may not have seen very many physical
miracles in our time - at least not physical miracles that we couldn’t explain
away through the miracles of science, medicine, and technology. But we’ve all seen and known conversion
stories, both in ourselves and in others.
One question that people love to ask me is: how did I know
that I wanted to be a priest. I think
I’ve talked before about how that’s really the wrong question to ask - it’s not
so much that I “wanted” to be a priest, it’s just that I am, and in some ways
always was. I only needed to figure out
how to live into it.
But what people are usually asking for, when they ask that
kind of question, is they want to know about my conversion experience. They want to hear about how I saw a burning
bush, or heard the voice of God, or experienced a miracle.
I have a few “stock” stories that I tell that get at the
story of my sense of call. They hit some
of the highlights, and recount some of the bigger moments in my
development. But like all of us, those
“highlight reels” don’t really tell the whole story.
Like your story, my story is one of nearly countless
conversion experiences. Some were and
are bigger than others. Some were
explicitly about my relationships with God or the church, but many more
weren’t. Sometimes they’re stories of
moments of clarity that accosted me out of nowhere, but very often their
stories of dim half-understanding peeking through heavy clouds of confusion,
ignorance, and self-doubt.
There is no one great moment that made me follow Jesus. Instead, there is a lifetime of
conversions. And they didn’t end in that
moment when I became a priest. That was
a big moment, to be sure, but I still need to be converted into a follower of
Jesus almost every day.
In that old gospel song it says, “I have decided to follow
Jesus. No turning back. No turning back.”
If only that were true!
It is true that there is “no turning back” from conversion
experiences. They always leave us
changed, and we can’t go back to being the people we were before. Those people are gone. But there are always moments when we could
just as easily turn away from following Jesus - sometimes more easily. That’s why we keep needing those conversion
experiences - to keep us from turning back.
To keep us turning forward.
We don’t know much about the man who was blind from birth,
but who was made to see. We can infer
what his life might have been like before that conversion experience, but we
can’t really know what it was like after.
If he went on to live a long life after that moment, I
wonder what he must have experienced. I
wonder if he forgot what it was like before.
I expect, at some point, there must have been occasions where doubt
crept back in.
I wonder, if he, as an old man, had written an
autobiography, how much this story would have played into his whole story. Did everything that he saw get interpreted
through the lens of the moment he came to see?
Did he come to resent it for defining him more than he would have
liked? Did he gain new insights, or did
he simply become too distracted by all the new stimuli to notice?
One thing I would bet is that if he lived long enough,
meeting Jesus and being made to see wasn’t his only conversion experience. I bet smaller conversions came in rapid-fire
succession in the days that followed, as he saw the world around him with new
eyes. And I’d bet that sometimes it
wasn’t easy for him to see the things he’d previously been missing. I’d bet there were even times when he wished
for his earlier blindness.
If he didn’t turn back, he probably needed to keep having
conversion experiences to keep him turning forward.
In our own journey together through this year as a
community, we’re a little more than halfway through Lent. There’s less left than what we’ve already
seen.
There almost certainly have been miracles among us - but
probably not like the kind that we heard about today.
The question is, how have we been converted?
Have we decided to follow Jesus? Will we turn back?
It takes a lifetime of conversions to follow Jesus. The experience of Lent attempts to give us a
framework for that. There certainly have
been and will be big, defining moments - moments when we stop being blind to
some things and see the world with new eyes.
Those may be the moments we tell about - the big ones - but all of the
other little conversions are the “no turning back” moments. Those are the moments that shape our lives, a
little at a time, into lives lived for Christ.
There is no turning back.
May we always be turning forward.
Amen.
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