Tag: Sermon

He picked up his hammer and saw

A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 22, 2020: Jn 9:1-41

Kittens are born blind, essentially. (Puppies too, but let’s not mix apples and oranges, to coin a phrase.) Baby felines’ eyes and ears are sealed for the first week or even weeks of their lives, to allow their senses to develop and their sensory organs to strengthen before they’re exposed to the strong stimuli of the world.

And once their eyes are opened, cats famously can see in near-total darkness, which makes them superb nocturnal prowlers, as anyone who’s ever heard a tchotchke go flying off a dresser at 3 a.m. can attest.

In the darkness, cats can see what most other creatures can’t, especially the humans who serve as their personal assistants … uh … are their pet owners.

Think about all the times you plodded down the hallway barefoot at night with the lights off to check out some creaking noise in the kitchen or bathroom. Stubbed your toe, didn’t you? Whacked your shin, right? Humans aren’t built to see in the darkness.

Which is why we got the ultimate gift of a Messiah, the bringer of true light.

In today’s Gospel, St. John goes into specific detail about the man’s blindness. He was born blind. We’re not completely sure how old the man was, other than he was an adult, or at least past his bar mitzvah — “he is of age.” He was reduced to begging for his daily bread, however much or little there was of it. Everyone knew him as a blind man, the man born blind, sightless from birth.

Let’s take a second to look at some details of this man’s life through more modern eyes, no pun intended. If he had been born without eyesight, we know from our current science that his other senses likely were heightened. Acute hearing, taste and smell. Fine touch. His mind and memory would know family and friends by their voices, their scents, by the shape of their faces as traced by his fingers. He’d know them in the dark that was his normal.

So when Jesus gives him sight — a new normal, but an extraordinary one — the man is astounded. Does the desert sunlight hurt his eyes? Does the glory of God, shining through the Son?

The Gospel says the man is grateful, but that’s debatable. Everything he knew is gone: the map of the city he stored in his head, the faces he knew by touch, even his livelihood, as dodgy as it was. He has no skills or trade, because those in the 1st century A.D. were sight-dependent. He can’t read.

He has to build a new life from scratch, which nonetheless he seems willing to do.

Like a kitten, perhaps this man was born blind because he needed all this time for his eyes — both his physical eyes and, more significantly, the eyes of his soul — to mature enough that he could see.

See the truth.

St. John makes clear — in this, and in all chapters of his Gospel — that Jesus is the Way and the Truth and the Life, that Jesus leads all of humanity out of the darkness. John uses the man born blind to illustrate the radical transformation, the total shedding of a prior life in exchange for an everlasting one in the Kingdom of God, needed to follow the trail Jesus is blazing.

For the man born blind. For all of us.

We all are born blind, more in the way kittens are, perhaps, than in the way this man was. Each of us has an eye-opening experience of faith in our own time, in our own way. Some of us open slowly, carefully, deliberately, delicately: an awakening at dawn, as our spiritual lives dawn and grow brighter through the days of our lives. Some of us — BAM! — get a flash, a lightning bolt, a cardiac shock that leaves us bug-eyed and mouths agape, and with the rhythm of our lives topsy-turvy like the man who could beg no more.

Our common challenge, regardless of how our eyes are opened to the Word of God in Jesus, is to acknowledge that once our spiritual eyes are indeed opened, we must continue to grow in our relationship, mature in our relationship, treat our relationship with God as one that deserves the kind of attention we lavish on any loved one.

We have to build a new life, maybe even from scratch. Is that something we’re willing to do?

We may never be able to see through the darkness the way cats can. But we always will be able to see the light if we allow Jesus to open our eyes.

 

Places, everyone. Places!

A homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Feb. 9, 2020

Isaiah 58:7-10, 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, Matthew 5:13-16

In his play “As You Like It,” William Shakespeare gave us a familiar quotation:

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

But as we look at our own lives, especially framed in today’s Gospel from St. Matthew, where do we find ourselves on this stage?

Downstage center, closest to the audience, with the white-hot spotlight on us?

Farther back, upstage center, with a significant role, but not the so-called star?

Off to the side, stage right or stage left, part of the crowd or chorus?

Do we have a walk-on role, arriving at a critical point in the plot and, quite often, leaving just as abruptly?

This play, as we experience it, is called life, and its cast of characters is us. All of us. Every man, woman and child on every continent. Every living creature, plant or animal, on this fragile earth.

And because God created us with vast – yet vastly differing – talents, everyone, every thing God created has a role to play.

And the first rule of our role is to use those talents – all of them, all of them fully – to bring about God’s Kingdom. For ourselves. For everyone.

Now, it’s true that not everyone is cut out to take on a starring role, to lead or to teach or to preach or to prophesy. Each of us does have different gifts. Different, but all of them valuable, especially in the eyes of God.

Those whose talents put them in the spotlight must follow in Jesus’ footsteps and act with humility like his: thanking God for their gifts, thanking other people when they acknowledge those gifts, but always being matter-of-fact about them.

People who deserve to be in God’s spotlight know there are many people following them, that even though they are in the spotlight, they themselves are servants, to serve and not be served, as it is written in the Gospels.

The featured characters and the crowd or chorus upstage can support the leader in a variety of ways. Everyone in this cast is part of the Body of Christ, and very often a task God needs us to do requires a group effort. Many hands make light the work. United we stand. Joy and love are best when they are shared.

We are a community in communion.

Nowadays, in this interconnected world, and especially in a home like ours at the Jersey Shore where we see so many visitors, we will encounter many walk-on characters in our lives. How do they fit into the plot the divine playwright has written?

If we keep our eyes open and our ears primed, we may experience God’s love in unexpected ways. We can learn from strangers who become acquaintances and friends, learn about different cultures, learn about different ways of life, learn about different ways to see God. High-level stuff.

On the flip side, a chance encounter may offer us the opportunity to lend a hand to one of the least of Jesus’ sisters and brothers, pleasing the Messiah and Judge immensely. Because it’s the right thing to do, because it benefits the giver and the recipient, because we will find ourselves with the sheep and not the goats on Judgment Day, but not solely for that last reason. Or even consciously for that reason.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Um, sorry, Will, you forgot some people.

For someone to be in the spotlight, for someone to be that shining light in the city on the hill, someone else has to be operating the spotlight.

We need people to build the stage, to design and construct the set pieces and the costumes, to raise the curtain, to write the music … and so on and so forth.

Ah, our Creator’s wisdom. Our God-given talents meshing together. The heavy lifting that makes the play we call modern life come to life.

Today, Jesus and Isaiah both remind us that we all are in God’s cast of characters, and that everyone deserves a share of the applause, whether it’s literally hands clapping or, more importantly, hands outstretched to help or feed or carry or lift.

Today, Jesus and Isaiah remind us that everything is a group effort, even the living of an individual life, because of the lives of the people who touch us and because of the lives of the people we touch. Even when we don’t realize it.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

And, finally, Will, you forgot the most important person in a play: the director.

For us who have been touched by faith, that director is our triune God.

The Father who created all the world and all of us, the players, as a gift of pure love.

The Son whose death and resurrection blasted away the darkness and put all of us in the light.

The Spirit whose grace keeps us performing at our absolute best, day after day after day.

God is the perfect playwright. God is the divine director. God even operates that powerful spotlight as we climb onto that stage we know as our precious and fragile world.

When God gives us our cue, let’s pray we remember what to say and do.