Mud Baths

Lent 4a

March 30, 2014

John 9:1-41

Around the year 1772, though the date is not certain, John Newton penned one of the most iconic hymns in church history.  Newton, a priest in the Church of England, wrote Amazing Grace as an expression of the faith of a man who was once a wretch in every sense of the word, but found salvation.  In his younger years, Newton made his living in the slave trade, first as a slave buyer then working his way up to captain slave ships.  He had deserted the Royal Navy when he was a teenager and spent a good amount of his early years an arrogant, foul mouthed, insubordinate individual.  Even after he became a Christian, he neglected to cease his shenanigans until he left the slave trade 6 years after his conversion.  After he was ordained, however, he became very active in speaking out against slavery and worked with other prominent abolitionists in England to seek an end to slavery. 

He once was lost, but then was found…was blind, but then he saw.

A blind man sat outside one day begging for alms.  It was his only way of bringing in any income.  To the people around him he was just the blind guy.  To this day we still don’t know his name.  Today he will be known as Matthias.  Matthias didn’t know when he began begging on that Sabbath day that his world was about to be changed.  Matthias had been born blind.  He had never seen anything in the world around him.  The people around him probably barely noticed him either.  He would have been illiterate, considered unfit to work because he could not see what he was doing.  He may have been homeless, but that is uncertain because of the presence of his parents in the story.  He was pretty much a no body. 

Until that day. 

Matthias was sitting in his normal spot when he heard footsteps coming his way…thirteen people…men, given by the heft of their footsteps.  He heard one of the men ask another, who was a Rabbi, whose fault it was that Matthias was born blind, his or his parents. 

Here we go again, Matthias thought.  But the Rabbi’s response caught him off guard.

Neither this man nor his parents sinned.  But let us look for where God is at work in him. 

Matthias heard the man get closer to him, spit in the sand, and put mud on his eyes.  He didn’t know what to think.  Why was this man touching him?  Why was he rubbing mud into his eyes?  How was he going to get this stuff off? 

‘Go and wash in the pool at siloam’ the man said.  Matthias made his way to the pool, washed off the mud…and something happened.  There was light, there were colors, there were people and buildings.  Matthias could see.  And not only could he see, he wanted to tell everyone what had happened to him, even at the cost of being kicked out of the temple and being excommunicated.  For surely a God fearing man didn’t heal on the Sabbath.  There were rules about work on the Sabbath.  Work on the Sabbath is forbidden.  Healing is considered work.  Therefore, healing on the Sabbath is forbidden.  And anyone who disobeys the rules and heals on the Sabbath is a sinner and cannot be from God.  But if it had been any other day, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.  They may not have even known that Matthias had been given sight.

Matthias had mud placed upon his eyes by Jesus, an ancient medicinal practice, and Matthias saw and he believed in the one who made him able to see.

The Pharisees saw a man who had his sight given to him and who testified about the one who gave him sight, but because Matthias was given his sight on the Sabbath, it didn’t mean the same thing.  Perhaps it wasn’t Matthias who needed mud on his eyes as much as the Pharisees needed some mud on their hearts.    

You probably heard in the news this week that World Vision changed its hiring policy to allow individuals living in same sex relationships to be considered for employment at World Vision, an international organization founded upon Christian principles with the purpose of finding places where children and their families are hungry and not only securing sponsors to feed them, but also working for the injustices that put that family or community into poverty in the first place.

Immediately, a large backlash ensued from Christian groups who did not agree with World Vision’s decision.  There were lots of denunciations and threats of pulling support from World Vision and their mission.  In the face of the backlash, World Vision made the decision to go back to the old hiring policy within 48 hours of announcing the new policy.

Regardless of whether your support the gay and lesbian community or whether you believe homosexuality to be a sin, as Christians, we cannot be Pharisaic when it comes to feeding hungry children and looking for ways to fight the sources and causes of poverty and hunger.  We cannot stand by and say “hey world vision, great job taking care of children and feeding them…oh wait, the person feeding them is gay? Never mind, you need to stop feeding that child right now,” the same way that we can stop supporting a fast food chain or a retail store because we do not like how they do business because if we do that children who were sponsored will go back to being hungry, communities that were seeing improvement will no longer have the support they need.  We cannot be blind to the greater need because we have decided that for righteousness sake, the provider of that need has to fit into a certain mold…and once we ensure that, we can sit back with a clean conscience enjoying our shrimp cocktails knowing that we did the right thing. 

And however you feel about World Vision’s decisions this week, I think it’s safe to say that those who bullied World Vision using children living in poverty as the pawns need a little mud on their hearts.

Too often legalism can cause us to become implicated in the sin of absolute certainty.  We think that in order for a mission to be worth doing it has to follow a long list of rules and guidelines to the letter.  We are more willing to cast Matthias out of the temple for challenging us than we are willing to stop and question what we think we know.  And we miss messiah sightings because it wasn’t on the right day or at the right time or embodied by the right person.  And when we think we know exactly what God is up to and how and when God works, we have created a god in our own image.

That is what the Pharisees did…and it’s something we do now and again.   

Thankfully, God is not created in our image…we were created in God’s image.  The image of a God who heals on the Sabbath, the image of a God who takes slave traders and turns them into abolitionists, the image of a God who works miracles in bread and wine, water, and sometimes a little mud.

Could you use a mud bath? I sure could