Well, I read a fascinating story this week in USA Today sports, maybe you heard or read the storyA hole-in-one is rare on the golf course, but what are the odds of a blind golfer sinking one? Leo Fiyalko couldn’t see it, but his golf buddies did — a hole-in-one on the fifth hole at the Cove Cay Country Club. Fiyalko is 92 and has macular degeneration. He’s been golfing for 60 years, but his 110-yard shot with a five iron on Jan. 10 was his first hole-in-one. “I was just trying to put the ball on the green,” Fiyalko said. Fiyalko tees off every Thursday with a group of golfers ranging in age from 70 to 90-plus. He used to have a seven handicap, but now he needs help lining up his shots and finding his golf balls because he only has peripheral vision in his right eye. “Can you imagine? I mean this guy is blind and he hits a hole-in-one. Now I am not a golfer, because every time I play that windmill blade keeps getting in the way of my putt, but I have to think that is the most amazing thing I ever heard of. But then again, any time anyone makes a hole-in-one it is probably more luck than not, so hey, why not a blind guy? But to add insult to injury to lousy golfers everywhere, Leo is also 92 years old.  Holy cow. Leo is surely a testimony of what you can do if you try, and he unquestionably redefines what it means to be handicapped (pardon the golf pun).
“I know that some blind people are truly remarkable; I had such a friend in college. And he was a good friend.  He was born blind, and is the only blind person I have really ever known well, and he taught me a lot.  He was an amazing person, his name was Jim Dawkins, and for some reason I don’t know or don’t remember, we all called him Disco.  Disco Dawkins. Now that may sound odd to you, but when I was in college in the early to mid 70’s Disco was the thing. I was thinking of buying a white suit, but I was a lousy dancer as I was destined to be a Baptist preacher. Maybe he was called Disco because he did have the biggest stereo that I have ever seen before or since – when I asked why such a big stereo, he said, “I’m blind, not deaf, and I like good music.” He also had a really nice car. I know, a blind guy with a car, but it makes sense, when he asked someone to drive him somewhere he didn’t have to bum off their car or gas, he offered his own. He also had cool stuff, like a laser cane, a thing-a-ma-jiggy that allowed him to read ordinary books that were not in Braille, and a pair of glasses that warned him of impending danger, such as low-lying tree limbs over the sidewalk. And speaking of that, when he went somewhere with me, he left his cane in the dorm because he knew I would watch out for him as we walked.  He trusted me and he simply held my elbow. He said that he knew that I would look out for him and that my eyes were his eyes right as I was running him into a low lying tree limb. I apologized profusely and he replied, “That’s OK, I didn’t see it coming.” But what was truly astonishing about Jim was of course how sharp his other senses were. He knew it was me just from the sound of my stride and step, he knew whether or not his light was on by the temperature of his room, he could catch a ball more times than not by listening to the sound of it.  We went swimming one night and he proudly produced a penny he found on the bottom of our school’s Olympic-size pool.  He found someone’s lost credit card in the Student Center, after probably a 1000 people with sight had stepped on it that day. He was always finding stuff, to the wonderment of us all.  We all questioned as to whether or not he was really blind.  He truly saw in ways that others did not. I would ask him when we were alone what it was like to be blind. And he really couldn’t tell me. He couldn’t tell me because he had never seen, so he could not imagine sight anymore than I could imagine life as a blind man. I could not make him understand the concept of light, which he understood as heat. I remember having an hour long conversation on the subject that he was most curious about–the concept of color. Try explaining that one. But explaining the simple difference in light and dark was challenge enough and I never could make him understand. I so wanted him to see. But in the end, he married and has a successful career in Dallas. And as the metaphor goes, he was not the blind one, we were. He loved, he laughed, and he really lived, far better than most sighted persons. And so I have a real life lesson on the man born blind in John chapter 9, our lectionary gospel text today.  And of course, the metaphor is obvious, the spiritual lesson is easy to see, again, pardon the pun.  Here is a man born blind, and Jesus gives him sight.  Can you imagine? To see light, to see color, to see human faces– Unbelievable! Reminds me of a radio talk show I once heard with the news story about a miraculous new surgery that would give sight to many who have never seen before. The story said that musician Stevie Wonder was a candidate and was contemplating the surgery. The radio announcers began dialogue and took calls to answer the question, what should he look at first? Some said the snow capped Rocky Mountains; others the Pacific Ocean at Carmel-by-the-Sea. Still others suggested a smile, or a big city, or chocolate cake and even one suggested Brittney Spears. One caller said at all cost, he should avoid looking at Michael Jackson, however. I suspect that even the simple clutter of a messy garage would be an amazing thing to see if you were born blind.Our story today is about a man who all his life had a disability. Everyone around knew him, and knew about his problems.  Most people probably simply felt sorry for him. This man really couldn’t work, his disability left him to beg for a living.  But a funny thing happened to our man. He was healed by a stranger of his blindness that he had from birth.  The story we find in John Chapter 9 is really remarkable when you stop to think about it.  The cure of the man takes exactly 2 verses, and the resulting religious controversy takes 39 verses.  And that about says it all about religion. And the contrasting, obvious, spiritual blindness of the Pharisees is the point. So end of story. But I want to back up a moment because something really bothers me in the text, or at least the way most interpret the text: And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.” I often struggled with the unfairness of why my friend was born blind.  Evidently it was a topic of discussion this day as well. Jesus seems to say basically that it was not because of the man’s sin or his parent’s sin– so far, so good. But he then said it was so the works of God might be revealed in him. Or as we sometimes say, and as it says in other translations, “for the Glory of God.” For me, that thought strictly speaking from a human perspective is problematic. For the Glory of God? What kind of reason is that?  I mean think about this here. What kind of deity do we have who make examples out of real people and their suffering, whose own ego needs stroking sometimes at the high cost of human suffering?Come on now, all to the glory of God? So does it follow that we somehow glorify the Almighty by things such as cancer, heart disease, AIDS, and the like, and even worse suffer these things for that very reason? Are we allowed to have accidents, hardships and griefs to display the works of God so that He will receive glory? How twisted does that seem? Can you imagine trying to comfort one with incredible grief by saying it was for the Glory of God? Strangely enough, I hear such explanations all the time.  I will never forget a couple of years ago speaking to people who were witnesses to a terrible tragedy.  Several people were killed when their emergency vehicle was struck by a train.  I heard the usual, “it should have been me” and the typical “it just doesn’t seem real.”  But I also heard some people talking about it later who declared that God had to have a purpose in it, and that is why it happened.  It was God’s time to take them, and that God would get the glory from it.  I sat there and my indignation grew.  What kind of God gets glory by killing off three young people whose only sin was trying to help someone else in distress?  What did God have to do with anything this senseless and tragic?  To say that God had a purpose or that God gets glory out of this kind of thing paints a very small image of one called Almighty God.So I ask you, do we really believe that human life is that insignificant?  More importantly, do we really believe that God’s ego is that big?  Do we honestly think that we are pawns in the game of life, played out on a board where the chess master must win even at the expense of the players?  Do we really think that God gets glory and praise because he can snuff our lives out in a tragic instance as a lesson to the others who refuse to pay homage? Do we really believe that one who is love is that much of an egomaniac? Stop and think about it, think about what we are really saying here. The truth is, so many people live in fear of a God who can smite them at any moment as we are at the mercy of his whims.  We are reduced to nothing more than entertainment, or perhaps an object lesson for the persistent sinner who needs to watch out.  And you had better properly stroke his ego, because it requires glory and praise or else.  Do we ever stop to think about this image of God that we have ingrained in our psyche? We really see him sometimes as the spoiled child who demands attention, or the harsh dictator who demands our allegiance.  And the smaller we can make ourselves in his presence the more attention our god requires and receives. He gets glory, but only at our expense in most of our models.  Or in this case in our text today, he gets glory by the miracle that gives this poor suffering soul his sight. That in effect is saying that this man was created to be an object lesson, and endured much hardship and begging in life for this one moment in time when he could unleash the glory of God upon a people who didn’t really appreciate it anyway.  After all, despite this object lesson about God par excellence, the Pharisees were still metaphorically blind.  So what a waste this man’s misery had been.You may believe that this view of God offends our modern sensibilities.  But come on now, don’t you really think on some level that God is behind our most difficult tragedies?Hasn’t what I said so far riled you up a bit?  Isn’t there that voice down deep that is saying that this life is nothing more than an illusion meant to teach us spiritual lessons about God?  Wasn’t Nietchze right when he said that “we could endure any how if we had a why?”  And for us that why always includes reasons we don’t understand, and so become reasons that are by default initiated by God.  Isn’t it true that the randomness and ambiguity of life is so hard for us to accept that any reason that is above and beyond us gives us comfort?  We can accept the fact that God wants glory and wants to get our attention much easier than we can accept the fact that the man driving that ambulance made a terrible and senseless mistake and three wonderful and well-loved people in the community were killed because of it.  I believe that God cries with them, and gets no glory or satisfaction for such a tragedy that in the end can turn as many away from him as it draws to him.  I believe that we need to heal our image of God; there really are good goats and bad sheep in this world.  But healing our image of God first requires that we heal our images of ourselves.  And if we can do that, we too will really see God for the first time, as our blinders will be lifted.            Sure it was an amazing thing to see this man that you have known all his life, this man who was blind from birth, this poor helpless beggar be given sight.  Sure it was an object lesson extraordinaire, and that people were surely falling to their faces and praising God for something this miraculous.  But I have to think that the glory of God is something more than a reputation built on the backs of his suffering creation.  I have to believe that God’s glory is something more than our human inventions ascribed to the Eternal One.  At least one of the reasons we need to heal our image of God is that we cannot help but reinvent God and describe his character and attributes in terms of our human understandings. We give God mortal characteristics, because that is what we can understand.  We reduce the omnipotent one to a great big perfect human instead of one who is wholly other.  We project our own values and limitations onto his person.  And besides, we are so egocentric everything is about us, and interpreted through our own filters. And I say that because we are the ones who need the praise, I am convinced.  We are the ones who live and die for our 15 minutes of fame.  We are the ones who can’t stand to have our egos assaulted, and our self-esteem is so fragile that we constantly have to have it reinforced and validated.  We, yes we are the one’s who cannot live without the praise of others, for it gives us significance.  And our quest for wealth, fame, and power, are all symptoms of our underlying need for the significance that comes from the praise and admiration of others.  We avoid the shame that devalues us, and we crave the honor that gives us significance. So the question remains, why was this man born blind?  The key is in one three letter Greek word, HINA (OK, it is three letters in the Greek), which is translated “that” in verse 3. “That the words of God might be made manifest.”  And scholars tell us if the word “that” refers to a purpose clause it means one thing, and if it refers to a resultant clause it means another.  I choose to think that in this context vs. 4 and following, it was a resultant clause, meaning that vs. 3 does not teach that God caused this to happen so that Jesus could come along and heal, but that the man’s blindness resulted into an opportunity to do God’s work.             You see Jesus was about the business of redemption. He was in the business making wrongs right, about saving that which was lost. He was about fleshing out the love of God to a sometimes unlovable lot of people. He was about freeing the captives, liberating the oppressed and bringing Good News to people who really haven’t had much good news in life, such as this poor soul born blind in our passage today.  He came here not in some kind of show to let everyone know how great and how big God is, you could see that from creation, but he came to show that God loved the whole world, and would in fact send his only begotten son to die so that we might not suffer but instead might have a full and abundant life. You see, we as parents get glory when our kids do well.  Dianna and I have gotten our share by the prodigious achievements of Eric and Emily.  And we are proud parents, glorious ones.  There accomplishments give us honor and glory, they do us proud.  And God our parent got glory when his son Jesus brought sight to this poor suffering man in John 9.  He did him proud.  But the ironic thing is, the message of Lent is that God got the most glory not from an honorable act meant to make him proud, but from a shameful act.  Not a healing, not the miraculous opening of blind eyes, not the lame walking, or the dead rising, or the infirmed made well. Not even when a legion of demons were defeated and cast into a herd of pigs.  Not when his son walked on water, calmed the storms at sea, or turned a few leftovers into a feast for 5,000. It was not though honor, but through shame.  The shame of the cross. To die along side of hooligans in front of all who had managed to put their meager trust in him.  He died as a common criminal, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. The sky grew dark and the sun refused to shine and God who always gets the glory turned his back on him and Jesus cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Not through honor, but through the shame of the cross.  We never think of giving God the glory through shame, through humility, through service, through sacrifice, but at least on one occasion on a hill far away, it was so.So I ask you today, are the sufferings we endure present so that we might give God the glory, or are the sufferings we endure in place as an opportunity to experience redemption?  You decide. All I know is this.  Because of the cross we too can confess about the man of sorrows, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I once was blind but now I see!”   I see.  I SEE. And for one who has seen light for the very first time, that is all that matters, and it is Good News indeed. Thanks be to God! AMEN.