Pastor Christa von Zychlin

Our Savior’s Ev. Lutheran Church

Hartland, WI  53029

Lent 4

March 6, 2005

MUDDY EYES

One of my favorite cartoons has a little old man sitting in a chair at the eye doctors, holding his glasses in one hand and squinting intently at the far wall where an eye chart is posted with only a Huge letter E on it.  The caption underneath the cartoon has the guy saying “F”.

I can relate to that cartoon because I see very poorly with my own eyes, without my glasses or contacts.  The Gospel reading for this 4^th Sunday of Lent reminds us that there is something much greater than physical healing, and physical sight, and that is spiritual healing, and spiritual sight.

Do you see clearly?  Or do you in fact have muddy eyes?

Wayne, my ever long suffering husband, talks about those times when he dares not talk to me too much.  “OOOh you’ve got muddy eyes” he says, and he claims they get yellow streaks in them too.   And the look tells him – if he’s being the least bit perceptive – which unfortunately for him isn’t always the case ---  that his Christa wants no new information, wants no new jobs to do.  Wants no extra noise in the house.  No,  I just want to be left alone in my glowering gloom.

Those sort of days don’t occur all that often, but when they do it’s like all of life is covered with sludge.  It may be as simple as the early-March blahs, when spring has not yet sprung.  My friends in Illinois and Ohio have tulip & daffodil shoots coming up, but in my garden I look and I just see thick snow and dirty leaves.  My sister has crocuses blooming on the south side of her house but chez moi… nothing.

I also call these my “turtle in the middle of the Merit Parkway eyes” which simply means that one day Wayne and I were driving down the Merit Parkway in Connecticut, a scenic but treacherous route with New York City commuters anxious to get t their weekend homes whizzing down the highway, and there I saw, alas, a turtle lumbering from one side of the highway to the other.  And I suddenly felt the whole hopelessness of the universe… quite the opposite of rose colored glasses, it’s like I put on glasses smeared thick with mud  -- all of life, I decided, is like a turtle trying to cross the Merritt Parkway.

The characters of today’s Gospel drama have muddy eyes.  Did you notice?

The disciples, first on the scene, show muddy eyes when they ask Jesus, “So who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?”  The disciples see the whole universe as a place where God is going to get you in the end, and pay you back 2 or 3 times for every bad thing you’ve ever done.  And so when they see this blind man on the side of the road, they wonder, lovelessly, abstractly, they wonder, (much as you and I might idly wonder about those 1000 homeless people on the streets of Milwaukee):  “Gee, how did they get to be that way?  A bad family environment or just bad choices they made? 

And Jesus says, why do you ask?  Do you think this man is an abstraction to God?   Theoretical analysis is not really your business right now, disciples, but it IS your business to know that here you have in front of you people with the capacity to shine with God’s power & love.

That’s not the way this world sees things.  Not then, not now.  The extremely popular motivational & self improvement guru Stephen Covey writes these words which I found on a desk calendar:  “The law of the harvest governs:  we will always reap what we sow—no more, no less.  The law of justice is immutable.”  Whew.  Maybe those words sounded good to him when he wrote them, but did he really think about them?  And does he really believe them?  Because if that is true, if we always reap what we sow no more, no less, than all of us are in deepest mud & sinking fast.

But thankfully, those words are not Jesus’ words.  When the disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents…” Jesus answers:  Neither, but watch -- here is a man who is not an abstraction to God, but one about to shine with God’s power & love.”  And then Jesus does an odd-ball thing, he spits on the ground, scoops up the mud ball, tells the man to go & wash off, and give glory to God – the blind mans sees!!!

The next set of characters to reveal their muddy eyes are the batch of neighbors which of course includes some of those very earnest but troublesome folks called the Pharisees.

The Pharisees, were actually good people, very religious, good family values type people.

But they had mud on their eyes because when this great wonder occurred, when a man who had been blind since birth got to see again, the Pharisees came out to investigate.  And investigate they did, until they completely lost sight of the joy of it all because of the one little detail they thought that Jesus had overlooked:  he had dared to heal the blind man on the Sabbath, when everybody in Palestine knows you weren’t supposed to be doing any work on the Sabbath.  Them’s the rules.

It reminds of the time when Rhonda Jones got baptized at Hillside Memorial Lutheran Church in Ohio.  She came from a home where they had never gone to church, but she was getting married to Jim Olsen who was a deacon and whose mother was the organist so Rhonda needed that baptism in a big way.  The great thing is that she had really enjoyed the new members class and had asked some of the best questions the preacher had ever heard and was more excited about becoming a Christian than some Hillside Memorial Church people thought was proper.

And the day of the baptism came and the little church was full and the babies were baptized and then it was Rhonda’s turn.  And the preacher had tears in her eyes and Rhonda had a huge smile on her face and the whole congregations laughed for the joy of it… except for her fiancé, the good deacon Jim Olsen.  He was furious, and why?   Because the preacher had used too much water and Rhonda’s hair & part of her new dress had actually gotten wet, and that had never been done before at a baptism at Hillside Memorial Lutheran.  We almost lost Jim over that baptism, because THAT day he had mud in his eyes.

Muddy eyed disciples, muddy eyed Pharisees… Finally there’s one more character in the Bible story today who had mud in his eyes, and that one is, once again, the man born blind.   WAIT you may say, didn’t he go &  wash in the pool of Siloam & came back & the he could see?

Yes, he could see physically, but it took another step for the blind man to see spiritually.  It took another step & that step was that he needed a personal confrontation with Jesus of Nazareth.

Do you believe in the Son of Man?  Asks Jesus.

And the man born blind peers straight at the huge E on the wall and he says in effect “F”

Doesn’t even GET IT who the guy is standing in front of him, so he asks “Where is this son of Man so that I can believe in him?”

And then & there Jesus grants the man… not according to the immutable law of justice’ not something that the man had somehow already sown and was now reaping

But in utter grace, Jesus grants the blind man the gift of sight.

Spiritual sight to accompany his physical sight.  Both of them a gift from God

And the man says, “Lord I believe,” and worships the Son of Man who stands before him.’ Muddy eyes no more.

And you, do you see today at worship the one who would be Lord of your life?  Do you see the one who cares about the blind man, who cares about the Merritt Parkway turtles, who cares about each and every one of the 1,000 homeless men, women and children on the streets of Milwaukee, and yes, who cares about you?

He is standing before you in/ with and under the words of the Holy Scriptures, in/with and under the wine & the bread of the Holy Sacrament.  Are your eyes muddy or are they clear today?  This day,  you have come to the right place & time, & Person to be healed of your blindness.

O Lord Jesus Christ

Muddy our eyes that we might be healed.

AMEN.

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