Homily for 25 May 2014: 6th Sunday of Pascha (the Man Born
Blind)
(Acts 16:16-34)
(John 9:1-38)
Today’s reading from the Gospel according
to St John gives us the chance to consider how God works in ways that are hard
for us to understand. In fact, in order
to begin to understand how God works, we have to put aside and get beyond a lot
of ideas that we think are just plain facts, just normal situations, just
natural conclusions.
This is what happens to the disciples
when they ask Jesus about the man born blind.
To them, it’s just obvious and natural to believe that he is blind
because either he or his parents sinned.
But Jesus overturns their conclusions when He says, “Neither this man
nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed
in him.” He goes on to teach the lesson
that we must “do the works” of God while we have the time, while it is still
daylight.
The fact is, no one is perfect. In a way, all of us are born blind. We are all born with some imperfection,
because all of us, since the first sin of Adam and Eve, the original sin, have
fallen away from the perfection God originally intended for the human
race. So doing the works of God, and
having them revealed in us, consists of trying to live in a way that eventually
will restore—or allow God to restore—that original perfection in us.
Our Byzantine Christian Tradition calls
this “theosis”—becoming like God or returning to God. It’s part of the process of salvation. All of us are born the way we are so that the
works of God can be revealed in us.
Our challenge—our call from God—is to be
who God made us, no matter how other people may judge us to be sinful or
defective or abnormal or unnatural or any of those other nasty labels, and to
live in a way that shows the glory of God to other people. We have to remember—about other people and
about ourselves—that God doesn’t make junk (as Bishop John Elya so often said);
God makes us in God’s own image and likeness.
So anything that is natural or born in us is given by God—from hair
color or eye color or skin color to being left-handed or right-handed, or male
or female, or musical or athletic or mentally gifted. What we have to do is discover, with God’s
help, how to live with what God has given us so that the works of God are
revealed in us.
Our church community is the place where
we can make this discovery and share the revelation of God’s works in each
other. This is because the church is a
special place where God calls God’s people together. It’s not a business. It’s not a social club. It’s not an obligation. It’s not about numbers. It’s not about money. Church is a mysterious, wonderful, beautiful,
mutual revelation of God at work, accomplishing God’s will, through the people
He loves—in all our sinfulness, all our blindness, all our imperfection, all
our diversity.
Through faith and love, through prayer
and fasting and works of charity, the church is the place where we recognize
the face of Jesus Christ in our own faces and in the faces of all the people
around us. Although we are born
imperfect, we are born again through water and the Spirit in Baptism, and we
set out on our life-journey to reveal God at work in us and in the world, and
at the end of that journey we are made perfect in the eyes of God.
So we don’t complain about, or curse, our
blindness and our other imperfections.
We thank God for the chance to show forth God’s love and mercy and
justice and righteousness, and we give thanks and praise and glory to the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of
ages. Amen.
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