Sermons

Healing Is Only Halfway There

Holy Spirit, be in our midst. Fill our hearts. Open our eyes. Amen.

This week I saw my first roommate in DC for the first time in six years. In the years since we’ve lived together, she’s become a devout Catholic, raising her family in the faith in which she was raised. She gave me a piece of advice: What she really likes in a sermon is when the preacher gives a short summary of their sermon that she can take with her and remember throughout the week. So in service to my old friend, the take away from my sermon today is this: Healing is only halfway there.

Today we hear the story of Jesus healing the man born blind. Outside of the Passion narratives, today’s gospel is the longest reading in the lectionary! It reads almost like a play, you can imagine the different characters coming onto stage to play their parts: the man, his parents, Jesus, the disciples, the Pharisees. There is so much going on in this story that is striking. It could fill ten sermons (and probably as many sermon seminars).

But what drew my attention today, is that in the 41 verses, the healing of the man actually takes place in verses 6 and 7. Then there are 34 more verses! We call this the story of Jesus healing the man born blind, but it might be better to call it the story of People Fighting over Jesus Healing the Man Born Blind. Or how about The Lost Disciples Still Don’t Get It? Or, Jesus Healed This Man. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next. The healing of the man is the catalyst for a conversation among the Jewish authorities about what this rabbi Jesus is doing. He is disrupting the order of things. Healing is only halfway there.

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The disciples see the man in this story and try to make an object lesson of him. “Who sinned, was it this man or his parents?” That way of thinking may seem out of date, but I assure you that it is still very alive in our culture, which is still quick to judge parents and especially mothers, for any apparent difference with their child. Jesus rejects that way of thinking and instead says that “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” I would argue that the man does not need to be sighted for God’s works to be revealed in him. The man is already made in the image of God. We learn that he has parents and relationships with many people in this community. He is already revealing the works of the Lord.

But once again, healing is only halfway there. Because the people, instead of recognizing the incredible work that has been done right in front of them, would rather act like they’ve never met this man in their life! He must be a dupe. The people claim not to know the man and get his parents to come testify that he is who he says he is!

(Side note: This reminds me when people claim that protesters at events like No Kings are all paid actors. Because it’s easier to believe something that farfetched than to see the amazing thing that is actually taking place in front of your eyes!)

Now the play is really underway and they bring the man to the Pharisees. I have to give kudos here to the lectionary for choosing this reading for Lent 4 because we are getting so close in our liturgical year to Holy Week. The scene that plays out here foreshadows another interrogation coming in just a couple weeks, when Jesus is asked “Are you the king of the Jews?”

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But back to the man. After his parents attest to his being who he says he is, the crowd still will not accept him. And they go back to their old way of thinking. Toward the end of the reading, they say to him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” Even though Jesus has just said that neither this man, nor his parents, sinned in his birth, there is this willful disregard for what Jesus is trying to teach. The text really does an incredible, if rather unsubtle, job of showing that it is actually the Pharisees who are unable to see.

And so what does that mean for us here today? I, and I am guessing many if not all of you, desperately want God’s healing. I pray for brokenness to be made whole, for tikkun olam, to borrow a phrase from Judaism, to heal a fractured world. And I know that I have experienced the healing of Christ in my life. But I think what this story teaches us is that when that healing comes, we still have to use it. We still have to put it into practice. And when we do, we can expect that the world will push back on us, that those who are committed to the broken structures of our world will do everything in their power to ignore, and obfuscate, and willfully put their heads in the sand. Healing is only halfway there.

Yesterday I had the privilege of celebrating two of my clergy colleagues with an ordination in the morning and an installation in the afternoon. The ordination was for my friend Noni from the Anglican Church of Southern Africa and it took place down at Virginia Theological Seminary. Because of a quirk of the processional lines, I ended up in the very first row for the ordination, extremely close to Noni and the bishop of Eswatini as we prayed. If you’ve never been to an ordination, first please go, because I think they are amazing (perhaps I am biased). But if you’ve never been, what happens in the moment of ordination is that the people gathered sing for the Holy Spirit to come and make the person into a deacon or priest. And then there’s a few moments of silence before the bishop speaks. And yesterday the air was just electric. You could feel the presence of God. And I was so close that I couldn’t even bring myself to look at my friend, because I wanted that moment to be for her. I may have been afraid like that moment from Raiders of the Lost Ark where I didn’t know what would happen to me if I looked directly at the holiest thing.

Because I know what that moment felt like for me and it felt like healing. It felt like God recognizing that despite everything I had been through and all the journey still ahead, that I was enough to carry this duty forward. The bishop who was there yesterday, Rt. Rev. Dr. Dalcy Dlamini, is one of only a handful of women ordained to be bishops in the Anglican provinces in Africa. And in her sermon she told Noni that ministry would be hard, but it would be harder for her because of the color of her skin and because she is a woman.

We can change and grow and be healed. But it doesn’t mean that the world will, unless we make it. The healing we experience is only halfway there.

In preparation for this sermon, I listened to a lecture from my preaching professor, Dr. Dominique Robinson. And she said something that resonated with me. She said that

“Lent has a way of slowing us down long enough to remember how tired we are.” That has felt especially true this year as the war with Iran has coincided with our season of Lent and the Muslim month of Ramadan. In this weariness, we need healing more than ever.

My prayer for us today is that we accept the healing that God is offering and that we use it to rebuild our fractured world.