It is a great pleasure to be with you here in the cathedral this morning and to be reunited with my longtime friend and colleague Tim Safford. Tim and I did two tours of duty together—we both worked for the late, great George Regas at All Saints, Pasadena in the 1990s and then, in the following decade, served as rectors in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. My work has brought me into close contact with hundreds of clergy over the years, and you won’t be surprised to hear me say that Tim is at the very top of the list of priests whom I both love and admire. He is the real deal—prophetically visionary, pastorally authentic, passionate about the church and its mission-- and I am so glad he has brought his considerable skills and wisdom to you during this interim (and centennial) period in your common life.
Well, here we are together in Paris, surrounded by political chaos and mountains of trash. The Americans among us should at least feel at home amidst the chaos: everywhere you turn, it looks like January 6. The trash, though not part of anyone’s normal routine, serves as an apt epitome of the perceptual problems featured in today’s scripture readings. One of our Lenten antiphons asks that God “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless;* give me life in your ways.” You might say that having to make our collective and personal ways through all this garbage is very much like navigating all the bad ideas, perverse priorities, and toxic misinformation that wants to claim our attention. At least during these strikes I have an excuse for keeping my eyes squarely focused on trash. How am I to explain my priorities in all my otherwise distracted moments?
We have two readings this morning, all of them centered on the idea of true perception and the lack of it. Searching for a new king, Samuel naturally looks first to the bigger, older brothers rather than to the young David. [The Letter to the Ephesians reminds us, “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light-- for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” [Ephesians 5:8] ] In the seemingly endless Gospel reading for today [John 9: 1-41] Jesus heals a man blind from birth, and this miracle provokes a storm of moral and spiritual misperceiving ignorance in the minds and hearts of his detractors. How, these scriptures ask, do we turn our attention from the false to the true? In a world of beautiful distractions, how do we focus on what really matters?
Today’s Gospel reading (Don’t worry—I’m not going to reread the whole thing!) ends with this interchange between Jesus and the Pharisees:
Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.’ [John 9: 39-41]
The very length of this morning’s Gospel makes it hard to take in the story all at once, but essentially it’s John’s highly ironic account of Jesus giving sight to a blind man as that action becomes the occasion of the Pharisees becoming morally and spiritually clueless themselves. The blind man knows his limitations. The Pharisees are blissfully unaware of their own. For John, Jesus is “the light of the world”, and the tragic part of his story centers on the increasing inability of the religious and secular authorities to perceive the truth he represents. The Pharisees and the Romans think they understand everything. But, like Samuel in the David story, they judge with conventional criteria; they do not see as God sees. They are trapped in their own self-congratulatory narrative. They are not open to what God is doing now in the world around them.
I once attended a retreat where the leader announced, as the theme of his addresses, the following proposition: “We become what we attend to.” He wasn’t talking about today’s readings, but what he said seems connected to what we’re thinking about together this morning. “We become what we attend to.” If we attend solely to the junk and glitter and glitz of our 21st century developed-world, then over time that is what we become. As Pope Francis said in an early encyclical, “technological society has succeeded in multiplying occasions of pleasure, yet has found it very difficult to engender joy”. The attractive gadgets that claim our attention keep us addicted and slightly depressed. If we shift our attention to Jesus, we can become both joyous and free. That is because if we keep our eyes on Jesus, we might just over time become like him.
When Christian people are baptized, one of the promises we make is that we will “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.” This is essentially a promise to go to church—to hear the Bible stories read, to participate in the Eucharist on some kind of regular basis. We’ve made this a part of our agreement with each other principally because if we are all to become more like Jesus we will need each other’s help to get there. That is what going to church is about: hearing the story of Jesus and then coming together around his table in a way that gently but forcefully reminds us of what really matters. “We become what we attend to.”
The goal of the Christian life is to become, over time, like Jesus. For us, Jesus represents the authentic good life that the things we falsely gaze at promise but never deliver. Jesus is just and loving and compassionate. He cares about the poor. He is a healer. His table fellowship gathers everyone—even the outcast and the disreputable—into a community of wholeness and blessing and love. Jesus lives an abundant life in the midst of scarcity. He knows who he is, what he needs, and how to live creatively with other people in God’s world. What we want to be, when we’re honest with ourselves, is like him—joyously alive in the life God offers and intends for us all. And the best way to be like Jesus is to direct our attention toward him—as he is revealed in the Word (our scriptures) and in the sacrament (the bread and wine of communion), and in our life together. Looking at and listening to Jesus are lifelong endeavors. Over time, they make us into our authentic selves, the people God created us to be.
The Pharisees in today’s story are blind, not only because they don’t see Jesus. The Pharisees are blind because they don’t see the man Jesus heals. This story is true on many levels, but at least one of them has to do with the paradox that systems which claim to see us don’t, while the One those systems claim to honor actually does. Jesus sees the man born blind because God sees him. The Pharisees—and read here the representatives of any political, religious, or economic system that wears an otherwise friendly face—only see that man’s plight as proof of their own self-righteousness.
Jesus sees, knows, and loves the man born blind. And God sees, knows, and loves you. Not as you think you need to present yourself, but as you really are—with all your gifts and talents, with all your failings and flaws. Lent—the season we observe now—is our opportunity to examine ourselves in all our complex and challenging fullness. It is a time to know, accept, and love ourselves as Jesus does. It is a time to get ready to take in the wonder of Easter, our great celebration of God’s validation of Jesus, and through Jesus, of us.
Having lived as long as I have in the church and world, I know that you and I will always find it difficult to turn our eyes away from the shallow and pointless, and that we will always need the help of God and each other to center our attention on what is true and valuable in life. The way we do that is to keep our eyes on the one who came into the world that we all might be open to God and each other in the here and now.
Jesus healed the man born blind because he both saw and valued him. We turn our attention to Jesus in part because it is Jesus—not the world’s systems of power, prestige, or influence—who sees and values us. The message of Jesus—that you matter, that your life has value, that your story has meaning—this message will always be revolutionary and countercultural. The world’s systems pretend to be the source of all value. Jesus knew otherwise. He knew that the man born blind was worth everything to God, and that you are, too.
As we walk together toward Easter, let us try to stop and simply attend to the one who offers us true and abundant life both here and now. Let us hear that one remind us of the love on offer and the justice for which all of us are called to stand. Like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, we will always be drawn to false explanations of how the world works. But like the man healed by Jesus, we will, over time, be given grace to become open to the beauty and wonder of ourselves, each other, and the world. For God’s ongoing gift to us of Jesus, for Jesus’s example of what it means to be human on God’s terms, and for grace to so point our gaze in his direction that we become the one we attend to, let us proceed in this meal together to pray and give thanks. Amen.
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