St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
There’s a sermon in every episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and it is a testament to my self-control that this is only the second time I’ve preached on it. In case you don’t know this TV show, Ty Pennington and his crew of carpenters and designers are in the business of building new houses for especially deserving families and pulling it off in the space of just one week. So maybe it’s just a coincidence that last Sunday they built a house for the Hughes family of Louisville, or maybe it’s not. I had already looked ahead to this Sunday’s reading from John. It’s another long and complicated passage, this one about Jesus’ healing of the man who had been born blind. By the time I turned on the TV at 7:00 I was as tired as I always am on Sunday nights and my brain was on auto-pilot, but I woke right up when I was introduced to Patrick Henry Hughes. He is the first son of Patricia and Patrick John Hughes, who were anticipating his birth with the giddy excitement of all new parents. Patricia had done everything the doctor told her and she had had all the right prenatal care and, as parents do these days, they had already seen their darling baby on ultrasound, and so it was a total shock to everyone when Patrick Henry was born without eyes and with a condition of his muscles that would keep his arms and legs from ever being fully extended. His dad says that their hopes were crushed. Patricia said she hid away and cried all night long. All they could think of was everything he would never be able to do. Their child – the one they expected to be perfect – would never see their faces, would never run and play with other children. But then they decided they were going to give him every advantage they could, and little Patrick Henry had lots of surprises in store for them as well. By the time he was two he could play tunes on the piano, and now at age nineteen he is an extremely accomplished musician. He says, “God made me blind and unable to walk. Big deal! I know I can do anything I set my mind to.” In John’s gospel this morning we read the story of the healing of the man born blind. Jesus and the disciples were walking in Jerusalem when they spotted him. Now we’re not told that he is a desperate beggar who cries out to Jesus to have mercy on him. He is not groveling in the crowd and grasping at the hem of Jesus’ cloak. As far as we can tell, he is oblivious of Jesus. But right away the disciples want to know why he is blind. Who is responsible for his handicap? Don’t you imagine the Hugheses wanted an answer? They couldn’t think of anything they’d done wrong and they wondered why they deserved a child with no eyes, a child who would never walk. Jesus’ answer to the disciples is immediate: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned;” – this part of the answer is easy to swallow, but the part that follows, maybe not so – “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that God singled out this one man for misfortune so that Jesus might come along one day and make a poster child of him, but I don’t think that is what the story is about. Yes, Jesus does heal his blindness, but if you’ll notice, that is when the trouble starts. Just about everybody has issues with the upheaval of the status quo. People were used to him being blind. His neighbors had a hard time accepting that now he could see. They thought maybe he wasn’t really the same person, but he said he was. Now the question became, who did this? It is messy business, this healing, and pretty soon the Pharisees get involved and they are immediately bent out of shape because the man was healed on the Sabbath. Everybody has got their issues because Jesus has tampered with the way things had always been. This man was born blind. Why didn’t Jesus leave well enough alone? I guess I should have heard of Patrick Henry Hughes before. When I did a little research I found out there had been a number of TV specials about him and that he had received the Disney Spirit Award. He goes to the University of Louisville and is a trumpeter in the marching band. His dad wheels him around in formation. Actually, his dad works the graveyard shift at UPS so he can spend his days with his gifted son. The temple authorities simply cannot handle the fact that Jesus has healed the blind man. And by the way, where is Jesus? He’s gone off somewhere. Even the man’s parents don’t want to get involved. He’s grown up, they say. He can speak for himself. This healing has caused a whole lot of trouble, and the man is given the third degree. He’s had enough. “One thing I do know,” he says. “Though I was blind, now I see.” And so they throw him out. On one of the videos I saw online, Patrick Henry is playing ‘Claire de Lune’ by Debussy. The title means the light of the moon, light Patrick will never see, but that he knows. He tells Ty Pennington that he doesn’t consider his blindness to be a disability at all, but rather an extraordinary ability. People who see, see the outside of other people, he says, and because he can’t see that, he has an extraordinary ability to see what is inside, what really matters. In the final scene in today’s gospel story, the formerly blind man is with Jesus, and Jesus confronts him with the ultimate implications of his healing. The man has been cast out of the company of the squabblers, the doubters, the nay-sayers, the critics and he finds himself in the company of the living Christ. The sight he has been healed with is not just the ability to see people’s faces or the rocks on the ground that might trip him up. It is the ability to see the light of the world. It is to find himself in the presence of all that is holy. That holiness is revealed in him. Vision, then, may have more to do with the heart than with the eyes. And I’m afraid that it might be true that most of us have our blind spots, handicaps of one sort or another that keep us more wound up in the concerns of the Pharisees than willing to place ourselves with abandon in the presence of the one who has the power to heal, because to go there means we must give up so much control, or rather give up the illusion of control. I’m sure Patrick Henry Hughes would still have been a nifty kid if he had been born the way his parents expected him to be, but I wonder if he would have been blessed with the profound wisdom with which he blesses the world, the grace with which he reveals God’s works. No one would wish these handicaps on him or on anyone. As Richard Lischer quotes one person saying: “One thing I know is that when I was going through my divorce I hurt so much I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I was so filled with hate I couldn’t think, but somehow I got through it, and I’ve come to recognize that the somehow was Jesus.” That is the story of the gospel, that into the brokenness of this world, into the misguided, misshapen, distortions of our lives God has sent Jesus who is in flesh and blood the somehow who not only gets us through the tough times, who not only heals our disabilities, but who transforms us in the process, who gives us vision we didn’t even ask for, the ability to see and to know with our hearts. Patrick Henry’s heart vision is 20/20. It is with this new vision, the vision that is born out of our very fragility, our recognition that Jesus is the somehow who is the source of all our healing and our wholeness so that God’s works might be revealed in each and every one of us. Amen.
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters