The Reverend Charleston David Wilson
In the Name of the Living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The National Federation for the Blind estimates that 285 million people worldwide are blind. Christina Hartmann is a young American woman counted among that number. She trained as a lawyer, but she went blind due to a rare eye infection just as she began to practice. On her blog, she writes:
The most destructive part of losing one’s sight is the feeling of incompetence. As someone who’s naturally organized and orderly, the new way of interacting with the world can get rough. I’ve broken or cracked more than half of my set of drinking glasses by dropping or knocking them over. I vacuum up electrical cords because I forgot to check for stray cords. I’ve walked into people by accident. I’ve stepped on my cats too many times to mention, and I’m afraid that one of them even holds a grudge.
Just as there are many people around the world that are physically blind, there are millions of people who are spiritually blind – blind to who Jesus is. And this, I would like to suggest to you, is the primary takeaway from the forty-two verses we just heard proclaimed today from the 9th chapter of the gospel according to St. John.
So, let me ask you a hard-hitting, Lenten, preacher’s sort of question?
Are you blind to who Jesus is? Don’t answer that yet.
Let me tell you a true story about an English boy named John. John’s loving and Christian mother died when he was seven. His dad was an alcoholic sailor, so John was most often left to his own devices. Trust me, it is never good to be left to one’s own devices; I am perfectly wretched when left to my own devices!
John was a complete misfit, so he lost his first job, because of “unsettled behavior and impatience of restraint.” Perhaps you can identify. So he decided the Royal Navy was a good place to be; in 1744 he went out to sea on the HMS Harwich. Naval discipline didn’t suit him well (surprise, right?), so he deserted. The only job John could secure after being labeled a deserter was as a deckhand on a run-down slave ship.
John was such a wreck that he even lost the lowest job on the slave ship and was booted off and stuck in Africa for a time, where his clothes eventually rotted and fell off, and he had to beg for food.
In 1747 John managed to con the owner of a slave ship registered in Liverpool to make him the captain on a passage to England. On the way to England, it turns out he wasn’t a good navigator or captain at all: they sailed directly into what we would call a hurricane.
During the height of the storm, John suddenly felt called to find a bible to read. Of course, that’s how it always works, isn’t it? As the old war saying goes, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”
So, John suddenly plundered through some books that had been tossed out on the floor in the captain’s cabin, but he didn’t see a bible. So he picked up the only book he could grasp, which happened to be St. Thomas a Kempis’s great work, The Imitation of Christ.
Just before he thought all hope was lost and the ship was about to capsize, John’s finger fell on a line that described the “uncertain continuance of life.”
At that very moment, John changed forever; the waves suddenly stopped and he sensed for the first time both his own mortality as well as God’s grace, love and mercy.
He experienced a powerful conversion of heart. A few years later he became an Anglican priest, and after reading one day the very same gospel passage we heard minutes ago, and seeing himself as the blind man in the story, he famously penned the following famous words:
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch; like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see!
Of course, I’ve been speaking about Blessed John Newton, who once was spiritually blind, but was given sight to see who Jesus is!
Oh, by the way, let me say briefly who Jesus isn’t, because I can see from your faces that the storm story may have sort of scared and confused you!
Please don’t think that Jesus is some scary mean monster who wants to condemn and criticize us and send us into a hurricane! We sing “Amazing grace,” not “amazing condemnation!” It is grace (not judgement) that renews our spiritual vision.
Blessed John Newton experienced amazing grace! The blind man in our gospel today experienced amazing grace!
And amazing grace is a special kind of grace.
We tend most often to think of grace in a limited, transactional way. We ask God for it – say, for example, in prayer – and we receive it. End of story. And that’s a powerful kind of grace indeed. And thanks be to God for it; I certainly don’t want to diminish it.
But “amazing grace” is different. It’s the kind of grace we did not ask for or expect to receive, because we weren’t looking for it in the first place!
The most important little detail in the gospel appointed for today and in the story of John Newton’s conversion is that neither of those guys was especially searching for Jesus.
It turns out, as grace would have it, that Jesus was searching for them!
He walked over – unsolicited, mind you – to the blind man and healed him. Amazing grace! And, in Newton’s case, he caused that book to flop open where it did, and then he calmed the waves of his heart. Amazing grace! No matter our pasts, He comes to each of us today – sneaking in – to set us free all so He can manifest the Father’s love. Amazing Grace!
On this Fourth Sunday in Lent, which the English Church rightly calls “Refreshment Sunday,” my prayer for you (and for me) is that we might truly be refreshed by amazing grace – the kind that seeks us out and blesses us unexpectedly, as we continue our Lenten journeys – so that when we reach the empty tomb of Easter together our joy may be utterly and totally complete.
Because…because:
“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we first begun”
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
4th Sunday of Lent
26 March 2017