Roger Ray, pastor
Lent 4a March 30, 2014
John 9:1-9
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' 3Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. 4Wemust work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' 6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes,7saying to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam' (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, 'Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?' 9Some were saying, 'It is he.' Others were saying, 'No, but it is someone like him.' He kept saying, 'I am the man.'
I've been a fan of Jon Stewart's fake news show, The Daily Show, for more than 15 years. His irreverent and incisive interviews have often made him a more reliable news source than most of the professional journalists on TV. He has interviewed presidents, authors, heads of state, movie stars, religious leaders and corporate giants but I have only seen him awe-struck once and that was when he interviewed a 15 year old girl. And there are none of his famous guests whom I would love to have a chance to personally meet more than that little Pakistani survivor of a Taliban assassination attempt, Malala Yousuf.
She was only 11 years old when she began writing a blog for the BBC about her life under the rule of the Taliban and her urgent desire for girls in her country to have access to education. When she was 15, an assassin boarded her school bus and fired three shots right at her head. One bullet ran along the side of her head and entered her shoulder. Malala has undergone a number of surgeries and was hospitalized for more than four months. The shooting has left her disfigured and she has suffered hearing loss as well as some speech problems but in little more than a year after she was shot, she was sitting in the Oval office of the White House trying to educate President Obama about terrorism.
Though a faithful Muslim herself, Malala has been a victim of Islamic extremism in a way that few human beings alive today can fully understand. If anyone has reason to want to see an aggressive prosecution of the war on terrorism, surely it would be Malala Yousuf.
After the meeting, she told reporters, "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism," she explained to our president, "Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."
Malala says that she would like to one day be the Prime Minister of Pakistan, which, I suppose, is a worthy goal since our constitution would not allow her to be elected to be the President of the United States. But I wish.....
In the Bible, blindness is used metaphorically to represent those who can see but who refuse to see. Modern readers can be ridiculously fact-literal about biblical stories and by reading them that way, become blind to the point themselves. John takes a lot of precious ink and paper to recount a narrative that was too long for us to read in church today though I suspect that most of you know the story pretty well.
If John were just trying to list miracles to get readers to believe that Jesus had magical powers, he would just say, "30 years ago, Jesus cured a blind man named John Smith who lived on Main St. in Jerusalem."
John is not trying to prove that Jesus was magical, he is telling you a story about blindness.
The early part of John's gospel is full of brilliantly written metaphorical narratives starting with Jesus' conversations with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well but this one, this story in John 9, is deeply ironic because in a story crowded with bumbling disciples, gossiping neighbors, judgmental religious leaders and back stabbing family members it almost seems like the blind man in the story is the only person in Jerusalem who can see and everyone else is blind to reality.
I am convinced that what John wanted to tell us about Jesus is that Jesus was able to see this blind man as a human being in need of real help when everyone else around him saw him as an opportunity for pity, gossip, religious debate, or as a family burden or a neighborhood problem. And folks, if we are in any way followers of Jesus, we want to be able to see in this way too....because we live in a blind culture too.
Sean sometimes sings a song for us from the 1940's Broadway musical, South Pacific, called, "You Have to be Carefully Taught."
You've got to be taught To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught From year to year,
It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!
Certainly Malala's parents deserve no small amount of credit for helping their daughter to see the absurdity of the prejudice against females in conservative Islam...or, more accurately, the version of Islam practiced by misogynists.... I believe that Islam is more inherently egalitarian in matters of gender than either Judaism or Christianity but there is a very backwards, fearful and prejudiced expression of conservative Islam that Muhammad would have rejected more than 500 years ago. After all, in his house, he was the one who was illiterate and his wife was the one who had an education. If not for her, there wouldn't be a Quran!
But like the song says, prejudices have to be taught very early to make them stick. By the time they are teenagers, most girls in the Middle East have accepted a secondary role in society. Just as most of us here who grew up in the segregated school system of the United States, learned to accept that the races somehow were supposed to be kept apart.
There is no logical reason why any of us who are straight ever wasted a single second of our lives, an ounce of our energy worrying about what gay people do. Yes, we can all have an innately negative reaction to the unfamiliar and the different but by and large all prejudices are taught, carefully, and through constant repetition until we are so blind that we can no longer remember how to see.
I lift up Malala because she, at the age of 16, still struggling to recover from having been shot in the face by a crazy fanatic, sits down in the Oval Office with the first black President of the United States, a man who has lived abroad, a man who grew up without a father, a man who has suffered as the victim of racial prejudice,
....but a man who still seems to believe that sending his flying assassin robots into foreign nations and killing innocent civilians in the process of killing suspected terrorists will help to stop terrorism.
I understand that there are dangerous people in the world and that the use of drones has all kinds of advantages over launching most other more conventional forms of military attack. But once we became capable of what seems to move away from what would be considered warfare towards what has to be seen as political assassination, then it became too easy to do without risk to American lives. And then, when used so often and without any way of isolating a suspected terrorist from the children who are playing in the streets, the mothers who are hanging out the laundry and the men who are gathered around a pot of coffee in conversation, then blowing up a house to kill one terrorist but accepting the deaths of a dozen innocent people as being merely collateral, then guarantees that the survivors on that block have just become ready to be recruited as terrorist.
What Malala said to President Obama was what President Obama should already know, what he would already be able to see if he had not simply refused to see it before.... Killing innocent people doesn't end terrorism, it causes terrorism. And she even offered him a workable alternative..... focus on education because education actually does deter terrorism.
She lives there, she knows. The Taliban has no greater deterrent than the voice of this 16 year old, future Prime Minister. Realistically, the Taliban's best recruiter is President Obama but the person who has done the most to turn Pakistani citizens against the Taliban is Malala.
I think that being a disciple of Jesus is a matter of learning how to see again.... It is about fighting the blindness of prejudice, ignorance, racism, sexism and classism. Believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, died a substitutionary death to save our souls, that he was divine, walked on water or made blind men see is not what being a Christian is all about.... Forgive me for saying it quite so bluntly, but that stuff has to do with being rather gullible and maybe even being a tad bit slow..... but being able to see through the prejudice we have been taught.... Being able to see the oppression of the poor and the abuses of corporations that we have been taught to bow down to in the name of patriotism, democracy, freedom and the American way..... that's what it means to be a person after the heart of Jesus.
So, you want to learn how to be a better Christian? Pay attention to this little Muslim girl.... I think she can see better than we can.
