And Now I See
MaryAnn McKibben Dana
June 21, 2009
John 9
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If you could ask God any question, what would it be?
Of all the mysteries in all the world, what would you bring to God to be opened up and explained?
My guess is that a fair number of you would ask some question about how a loving and just God can allow the profound suffering in our world. The proverbial “why bad things happen to good people” question. It is the sticking point, the stumbling block, the point past which the skeptical cannot go… even for those of us in the church it remains a profound mystery.
I think the question I would ask is kind of an offshoot to this question of bad things happening to good people. Now I understand that there is sorrow and pain in the world. And I can get my head around the idea that we live in an imperfect creation, a fallen creation, a world of cancer cells and aging bodies… and we live in a world of imperfect people, people who hurt one another and themselves, who cause one another all manner of suffering… I get all that. What I don’t get is why certain people seem to have more than their share of hardship. I can accept that there is sorrow in the world, I just don’t understand why it is not more evenly distributed!
That’s what I’d love to hear explained. That seems like a fair question. It seems reasonable, that if nothing else, a just and loving God could spread out the joy and the sorrow nice and even. Instead what we have are some people, who may experience some tough stuff but are basically untroubled, and others who just can’t seem to catch a break.
Do you know people like this? Maybe it’s not just a person, but a whole family system. While we feel the pain of that, it’s human nature to want to explain it, which means we can find ourselves looking for some cause. I have a friend who’s really bad about this! She’s a very caring person, but when she’s told that someone has died, she will cluck and sigh with sincere sympathy… and then the questions start. Well, did she smoke? What was his diet like? Did she have her seat belt on? … This is human nature, isn’t it? If we can make it the person’s fault, then that makes their hardship a little less scary for us. It’s sad, but at least there’s an explanation. We can be immune from it—Well, I don’t smoke. I take care of myself. I buckle up. I’ll be OK.
In the gospel of John, Jesus and his friends come across a man who has been blind since birth. And they, too, want to figure out the cause: Who sinned, that this man has been punished with blindness? Was it his parents? Was it himself? Why did this happen? Tell us. Underneath the question is an assumption that there’s actually a spiritual cause for his blindness, that the man was destined to suffer this fate, either through his own bad choices or the misfortune of being born to sinful parents. Even after he is cured of his blindness, people still don’t want to believe it’s him: This isn’t the man we used to see begging! this is some other man! the blind man was born in sin. He’s blind. Period. The world we glimpse in John’s gospel is one in which one’s destiny seems sealed, the die is cast, end of story.
Do we believe this? Is this the way the world works?
For those of us who have spent our lives in the church, it’s easy for some of us to dismiss ideas of luck and fate. Luck, destiny, fate—those aren’t really faith words. And yet we often use God language in much the same way. If a person walked away from a car accident unscathed, we rejoice that God delivered him… so was it God’s will that the other person didn’t make it out? If our family prospers financially, we proclaim God’s providence… but what about the people who are living paycheck to paycheck and are on the verge of losing their home? If after years of trying to have a baby, we are finally successful, we say that God has blessed us. What does that sound like to a couple that is despairing after years of infertility?
Too often we in the church have leaned on faith language that is simplistic… on words that may be a comfort to ourselves but are heartbreaking to others. I don’t think we mean any harm; in fact I know we don’t… but sometimes we can make God out to be the cosmic tooth fairy. I know I have been guilty of this as well. We hear Jesus in this story, saying, “This man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” and we think OK, I guess that’s the way God operates. But it just doesn’t sound like a loving God. As a hospital chaplain years ago, I met a man who had struggled with terrible chronic pain for thirty years. After spending the morning with him I walked back into the pastoral care office and shared my experience with a colleague, lamenting the decades of pain he has endured. My colleague listened soberly and responded, “Maybe he is here to teach you something.”
Maybe.
But boy, that’s a hefty price to pay for my personal edification.
I have a pastor friend who says that whenever she writes a sermon about God’s providence and healing, she imagines that she is preaching it to a sanctuary full of people who are struggling with a terminal illness. If her words still have integrity in front of that audience, then she can go ahead and preach them on a Sunday morning. …It’s not a bad trick, really, since last I checked, none of us are getting out of this thing alive!
So here we are in the midst of this story of Jesus’ healing, confronted with the question of how we understand and talk about God’s healing. How do we understand God’s will? We believe that God provides—so what does that mean for those who seem not to have been provided for? We believe God cares about us, but does God not also care for those who wait for years and years for healing to come, crying out How long, O Lord?
Perhaps a starting point is to stand in our own experience, say what we have seen, and leave it at that. We get in trouble when we try to speak for God, when we try to be definitive: Yes, this must have been God’s will, or No, this was not God’s will.
A friend of mine, a pastor in Baltimore, had a woman visit his church about a year ago. K had grown up with atheist parents—very decent people, ethical and loving, but non-believers. Despite this secular background, she always felt something was missing. K found her way to my friend Andrew’s church. She felt like she had come home.
One week later—she found herself in a doctor’s office. Perhaps we can picture her there, sitting on a squeaky leather couch, maybe staring disbelieving at the framed degrees on the wall as the doctor gave her the almost unbearable news… Brain cancer.
Well, the community has walked with K over the past incredible year. Even when she was not able to attend worship, she would download the sermons and listen to them, propped up in her hospital bed. My friend Andrew learned that K had grown to love the hymn “There is a Balm in Gilead,” and one week, when the congregation was scheduled to sing the hymn, he arranged for the sermon download to include the singing of the song. K called him, her voice choked with emotion, thanking him for that simple gift.
And a few weeks ago, my friend Andrew gathered with K’s friends and family, celebrating her life and witnessing to the resurrection. Her brother said before the service, “I bet this is the hardest thing you do.” And Andrew said, “No, this is one of the most meaningful things I am privileged to do - to give thanks for a life well lived and the love that never ends.”
Now… where is the healing in that? Where do you see God’s hand in that?
This story resonates on a lot of levels. But not in the same way for everyone. For some it seems a comfort to think of K finding her way into the arms of Christian community at such a critical time in her life. To others, who think of a life cut short, it just seems like a cruel joke of timing—that just when she would find a community of faith, a place where some piece of her clicked into place, that she would be taken away from them. To some it seems as random as God arranging for a man to be blind for years, decades maybe, just so Jesus could come along at the right time and use him as a demonstration of God’s great power. Where was God’s power when this person’s eyes were being formed in the womb?
No, we must be careful when scribbling God’s name in permanent marker over any of the events of the stories of our lives.
Barbara Brown Taylor, writing about answered prayer, said this recently:
“What sounds like an answer to one person sounds like silence to another. What seems like a providentially big fish to someone registers as blind luck with some one else. The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom. Only you can say whether God answered you. If you have any sense, you will ask someone with more experience than you to help you decide what the answer means, but even then the choice is yours.” (from An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith)
I’m guessing there are many of you who have experienced God’s healing and grace in profound ways. And it may have happened despite all the odds, despite people in similar circumstances whose stories did not end as fortunately as yours did.
And it’s hard to know what to do with that.
And I’m guessing there are some of you who are still waiting for healing, who didn’t get the storybook ending, who are still wrestling with God even though others are saying things like, “Aren’t you over that yet?” And yours is a valid story too. Both are worth telling.
This is what the man cured of his blindness does too. Everyone around him is trying to sweep him up into their own theological arguments. Who restored your eyesight? Is he a sinner? Does he follow Moses? Did he do this on the Sabbath? Who is the man? And again and again, he refuses to participate in their theologizing. The man says, “All I can tell you is that I once was blind but now I see.”
I think many of us are reluctant to speak about our faith and how we see God working in our lives because we think we have to figure it all out. The good news is, we don’t have to. The blind man offers a testimony: Here is what happened to me. I’m not going to try to explain it, I’m not going to draw any conclusions once and for all from it—I’m just going to tell you about this amazing thing that happened to me. And notice that the only one—the only one—who gets to say what God is up to in this story is Jesus, right at the beginning when Jesus says, God’s works will be revealed. Now, watch what I’m going to do.
In our journey toward healing and wholeness, let us not try to defend God. Let us simply share our stories. The stories themselves are healing. And the telling of our stories is healing! And I think it’s so powerful, and has such integrity, to let the stories speak for themselves, rather than marking up the story with lines and arrows pointing to God: God did this… God intended that… Here’s what God’s up to. Only God gets to know that.
Flannery O’Connor writes, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”
Here’s a story… it’s from Shane Claiborne (from the radio program Speaking of Faith) about a married couple he knew [this is a quote from Shane; the story was paraphrased in the sermon]:
And they said, you know, ‘We were unable to have children as a married couple.’ And they were about 50 years old. And they said, ‘But then we were walking through our neighborhood and we met this woman who had found herself homeless and she was six months pregnant. And so we said, “My gosh, you know, you got, you can’t be on the streets.”‘ So they brought her back to their house and said, ‘You know, we’ll figure this out as we go.’ And they said, ‘If you want to have your child while you’re living here with us, we would love to be a part of that process because we’ve always wanted to have a kid,’ you know. And so, she did. She had her kid there, living in their home.
And it was so amazing that they continued to live together and raise the child. And then, they said to this mother, they said, ‘Well, what are your dreams, you know? We’re getting to live out one of ours.’ And she said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to nursing school.’ So they said, ‘Well, we will take care of your kid and help you financially if you want to go to nursing school,’ and so she did.
And I just went back to visit them and they’ve lived together for over 10 years. The woman who’s formerly homeless is a nurse. That little girl that she had is almost a teenager now. And the amazing thing is that the woman of that married couple now has multiple sclerosis and she’s dying, but she’s got a nurse living in her home with her, taking care of her when she dies.
…“All I can tell you is that I once was blind and now I see.”
It is testimony enough.
Thanks be to God.
