"What is Expected?: Listen and See "
Joan Riebel
Sunday, March 2nd 2008

We are the Body of Christ! Christ has no body now but ours. We may be the only Gospel our neighbor ever reads!

I think I could sit down now and silently reflect on these words for the next 10 minutes. We are the Body of Christ! Christ has no body now but ours. We may be the only Gospel our neighbor ever reads! But you know I won’t. We have a ritual here, a way of doing things that requires me to talk with you for about ten minutes and then sit down, making way for Father Jim to come up to the alter and preside at Eucharist. It’s a ritual, it’s the way it’s done.

We have many rituals in our daily lives. We have alarm clocks, drives to work, meal time rituals. We have so many rituals they become routines and we seldom see the difference. In fact, we often don’t see at all – just go about our days in some kind of fog and at the end of it crawl into bed for once again another ritual of love making and/or falling off to sleep.

Today’s scripture readings challenge us to wake up, be alert and really see what’s going on around and within us. Christ has no body now but ours. Christ has no eyes now but ours. The Gospel reading is about the curing of the blind man. As Jesus went along, he saw a man blind from his birth. And the disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" It’s a bit like our routine responses. We see someone on the news - or perhaps even a next door neighbor - enduring one hardship after another - and hear ourselves talking about the situation and saying things like: "Well, it is very unfortunate, but if the family only knew how to budget better they wouldn't be in that mess" – or "it's sad, but what can you expect, their parents were just the same" – or “North Minneapolis is so violent”. We experience yet another murder of a child, and are quick to demonize anyone who would do such a thing.

Labeling and assigning blame is so routine we seldom stop to think. Assigning blame is in fact so popular that we all know:

• sexism is caused by men. We don’t even need to ask who sinned!
• poverty is caused by capitalism – or communism if you live in China or Yugoslavia.
• welfare fraud is caused by cheating mothers looking for easy living
• violence is caused by too much leniency, and so we imprison more people than any country in the world and we have more guns

These can be good questions. These can help us to see what we can do. But the temptation is for us to search for solutions, the right recipe for “magic” mud; magic mud that will fix things. I’d like to find it.  I’d like to know where the mud and spit is for our schools, I’d like to know the quick fix for drug addiction in our cities, the right formula for swapping poverty for living wages, or the way to keep all of our children safe.  But the vision that Jesus offers isn’t about fixing people.  It’s about giving new eyes to the Body of Christ.  It’s re-ordering our lives out of the routine.  It’s about looking beyond our routine ways of seeing. It isn’t very dramatic.  Jesus didn’t march through town or give a prophetic sermon on this day.  He only made sure that when the blind outcast was driven out of the community, he was there for him.  Jesus was there to welcome him into a different kind of community, just as he did for the woman at the well – a community that does not need to put others down in order to raise themselves up.  That kind of community brings deeper healing that any magic mud mixture. 

In the Gospel for today the disciples ask Jesus who caused this man to be blind, “Who sinned?” Jesus says, “Neither he nor his parents sinned. It is so the works of God might be made visible through him.” In the reading from Ephesians for today we hear, “Live as children of the light, for light produces every kind of goodness.” We may be the only Gospel our neighbors ever read. Jesus calls us to see the works of God in our world, to see goodness. This message is another in the theme of Jesus turning the imperial values of the day upside down, challenging us to carefully examine how we look at things, what our culture values and yes, even the values of our church. C.S. Lewis writes, “What you see….depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.” We make choices all the time about what our eyes see. We can learn to see grace, God’s goodness, in all things.

Let me give an example. The sex abuse scandals in the church have awakened us, helped us to see, the hierarchical, secretive leadership in the church. In the face of these scandals the messages we receive from our official church have been messages of blame; blaming the individual priests and blaming our cultural milieu. And, we continue to get negative messages about our sexual nature – at best an ambivalence towards marriage and certainly a censure of divorced persons, a condemnation of any form of unmarried, non-heterosexual love making, a rejection of any form of birth control or methods to prevent the transmission of the HIV virus or sexually transmitted infections and an on-going discounting of women.

We, the faithful, the Body of Christ, must be the mud and spit necessary to direct the power of our sexuality away from negativity and division toward the healing of hearts and the goodness inherent in all of God’s people. We must be the eyes that move us from the violent, destructive messages of sexuality to the joy filled, grace filled, sacred messages of love that we all know. Our children need different messages about sexuality, and it is a part of our covenant to them to make sure they get them. Our children need to see non-violent, affirming ways to resolve differences and it is a part of our covenant to them to make sure they get them.

As I become older, I am more and more accepting of the mystery of life. Sure, I still look for answers, I still try to diagnose, but more and more often, my search comes up empty. I have fewer and fewer solutions to most of life’s challenges. But what I have become more convinced of is our need for one another, not only for affirmation, but in our brokenness, in our blindness. As a mother and grandmother, as a professional working with children for over 40 years, I have witnessed and experienced God’s goodness and love in more ways than I could ever recall. The single greatest gift has been their accepting me and loving me as I am, a woman with every human weakness, a searcher looking up many blind alleys, a believer with many times of darkness. In this great mystery of human living, I have found that the mud and spit of human love heals our brokenness and brings us together. In the healing, we create a new reality, a reality in which brokenness becomes wholeness, in which sadness turns into dancing, in which darkness turns to the light. It is all part of the mystery. It is God made visible.

Last fall I was walking with a friend, reflecting on a newspaper story of the priests who have been ostracized by the sex abuse scandals and live quarantined at St. John’s. I was talking about how their secrets are out in the open. The whole world sees them. In thinking about them, I said to my friend, “I wonder what the world would think of me if they knew all my secrets.” My friend looked at me with the compassion of friendship and said, “I think the world would be moved by what you have done with your struggles.” She is the mud and spit that helps me see God’s goodness in the world and in myself. Last Sunday’s Pioneer Press ran a story of a woman from Shakopee prison writing to the woman who is accused of the murder of 4 year old Demond. She wrote, “You are not alone. I am here for you.” From her prison cell, she is the mud and spit that helps me see God’s goodness in the world.

Emily Dickenson says in one of her poems, “I dwell in possibilities!” We can see the Holy in the world. It is full of God’s goodness. But we have to get out of our routine ways of looking, of seeing, and pay attention to the love in our hearts. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes in The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It is the power of authentic selfhood. The world can be transformed if we truly see it and respond with the eyes of our hearts. As faith filled people who listen to the teachings of Jesus, we know that Christ has no body now but ours. Today, during our ritual of Eucharist, water and wine, broken and spilled in memory of Jesus, will be mixed just right to open our eyes, to heal us of our blindness, and open us to the works of God made visible in the world.

I want to close with words from Thomas Merton:

Life is this simple

We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent

And God is shining through it all the time.

This is not just a fable or a nice story

It is true.

If we abandon ourselves to God

And forget ourselves,

We see it sometimes

And we see it maybe frequently.

God shows Godself everywhere,

In everything,

In people and in things and in nature and in events.

It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and

In everything and we cannot be without God

It is impossible.

The only thing is that we don’t see it.