4 Lent A
March 2, 2008
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
After experiencing
I had a wonderful distraction from the season of Lent this week looking for a dog. Kevin and I recently decided to get another dog. We sent Max back to our son last November. As much as we complained about Max, life was never boring while he was with us. We realized we sort of miss the chaos and spontaneity he brought to our lives. Then we had to think about what kind of dog we want. We discussed different breeds of dogs that we are familiar with. Like Samuel looked at Jesse’s sons we looked at several types of dogs. And in the same way after looking at each of Jesse's sons Samuel said none would do until he saw David, none of the dogs we were familiar with would do until I found the one that made me want to stop looking. I read everything I could find on the internet about that breed of dog.
I have to tell you I am completely surprised at myself about this but I have fallen in love – I mean head over heels in love with the picture of that dog. I saved it on my desktop here at the church. Every now and then I just stop working and look at that picture. The more I looked at that dog the more I loved it. I might have worried that I’d lost my mind except truth be told I’m the same way with the pictures of my grandchildren.
Seeing is not just something our eyes do. What we see and how we see has to do with our experiences. We choose to see through the lens of experience. For instance, if you haven’t experienced anything that could be called a miracle you might say miracles don’t exist. Even if you did see one you’d be sure there was some logical explanation. Like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel. In their way of seeing, that man couldn’t have been blind from birth and now all of a sudden he can see after that man named Jesus used his own saliva to make mud from the dust of the earth and smeared it on the blind man’s eyes. That could not have been a healing miracle from God because no godly man would have attempted such a thing on the Sabbath. It was all outside the experience of the Pharisees so it just didn’t happen like that in their eyes. In their eyes Jesus was a sinner. The blind man and his parents were sinners too. And of course they were confident in their ability to see sin. They conditioned themselves to see through the lens of Mosaic Law. That was their experience. They had perfect vision. Or so they thought.
One of the breeders I talked to tried to talk me out of that particular dog. "You DO have a fence" she said. "Yes" I said, "but not a very big fence." "It has to be at least five feet tall or they’ll climb over it. And if they can dig under it, they’ll do that too. You can never, ever let them off a lead. They’ll run off." "Well, we nicknamed our last dog Houdini because he always found a way to get free and go to the river for a swim. Then he’d come back soaking wet." I said. "These dogs won’t come back" she said.
She told me not to think about getting one until I spent some time with that kind of dog. At first I was a little bummed about that. Then I thought if anyone had approached me saying they were considering becoming parents when my children were teenagers, I’d have said, "Don’t do it! Resist that temptation with all your might. Babies don’t stay cute and cuddly. They turn into teenagers and no one in their right mind would ever want to live with one." My experience influenced the way I saw parenthood back then. But I don’t see it the same way now that the kids are grown and have children of their own. The breeder was speaking to me about how she saw the dogs through her experience. I certainly don’t discount her knowledge, but I talked to other breeders. I read personal stories written by people who had the same kind of dog as a pet. From their experience they didn’t see them the same way she did.
At any point in our lives what we’ve experienced so far influences the way we see. We’re comfortable looking at what is familiar. We don’t have to strain to see it, but if that’s all we ever look at our eyes will get lazy. We squint to look at what we don’t really want to see hoping to block out some of it without closing our eyes. So we can see and not see at the same time. We open our eyes as wide as possible to take in something that surprises us, something new that we’re seeing for the first time. We open them just as wide to see something we believe we’re seeing for the last time.
In Eucharistic Prayer C we pray, "Lord God of our Fathers; God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us…" If it has not been our experience to see ourselves as sons and daughters of God, if it has not been our experience to see the hand of God at work in our own lives then more than likely we cannot see God at work in the world about us. We may see many things and see them clearly, but we will be blind to that.
It seems to me all of us who have the use of our eyes are sighted in some ways at the same time blind in others. To be able to see Christ in each other, in bread and wine, in stories of healing, in faces of all colors and shapes, to readily see God interacting with people and with the earth, we either need an experience of God or we need to admit our blindness and ask God to open our eyes so that we can see. To do our job as witnesses to the truth of the Gospel of Christ, we need to see with our own eyes what God is doing now, in our own lives and in the lives of others. A few weeks from now we will see again what God has done, what Jesus has done for us in the name of love. We will want to squint at the sight of the cross and we will want to open our eyes as wide as we can to see our risen Lord on the day of his resurrection.
You see, looking for a dog wasn’t really a Lenten distraction after all, not with the scriptures I carried inside me last week. It was mud on my eyes so I could see once again how God uses the simple, ordinary things in our lives, like dirt and water and bread and wine, and our relationships with creatures not like ourselves, to show himself to us, to restore the created order and open our eyes to life in the world about us.
