Can you see?

 

The service begins about 7 minutes into the recording.

The Mothering Sunday talk is recorded directly below the recording of the main sermon

This is a very splendid story in John's Gospel, although it's rather long, which is why I divided the reading into two bits.
It's not just about a healing, it's about what happened afterwards.

We start with the man born blind,
and first of all the disciples want to know why this had happened.
We all want to know why, don't we,
when dreadful things happen.
Why was this child born disabled?
Why have so many people died in avalanches this year?
Why are there such widespread floods across Europe?
Why did so and so get cancer?
Why did so and so get cancer and then get better,
when someone else couldn't get better, and died?
And so on and so forth.
It's human nature.
Even though we sometimes know the answers, or at least part of them –
the avalanches and floods are caused by exceptionally heavy rain and snow, arguably caused by global warming;
that person shortened their lifespan by smoking.
And so on.
But other times there seems to be no reason for it.

And so the disciples ask Jesus whether the man's blindness was some kind of punishment for him, or for his parents.
I wonder if the parents were asking, too:
“Why us?
What did we do wrong?”

But Jesus said no, it wasn't anything like that, but to show how he, Jesus, is the Light of the World.
And he proceeds to heal the man.

Now, all the Gospels tell of Jesus healing a blind man, sometimes called Bartimaeus, but this is the only one that takes it further, and looks at the consequences.
You see, after all, if your life is touched by Christ there are, or should be, consequences.
If nothing changes, was it a real touch?

For the blind man –
and let's call him Bartimaeus for now,
as it makes life easier with pronouns and such –
life changed immediately.
My sister-in-law, who is blind,
says that not only would he have been given his sight,
but he would have been given the gift of being able to see,
otherwise how would he have known what he was looking at?
He wouldn't have known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a tree, would he?
But he was given that gift, as well.

And he could stop begging for his living, he realised,
and he went and did whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was.
And, of course there were lots of mutterings and whisperings –
Is it him?
Can't be!
Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!

“Yes, it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story.
“Yes, I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”

“So what happened?” asks the neighbours.

“Well, this bloke put some mud on my eyes and told me to go and wash,
and when I did, then I could see.
No, I don't know where he is –
I never saw him;
Yeah, I'd probably know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”

And the neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day.
And they don't believe him.
Not possible.
Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen.
And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath.
Not unless the person who did it was a sinner,
because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath –
it's work, isn't it?
And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!

They got themselves in a right old muddle.
Now we, of course, know what Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were –
he is on record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed donkey,
or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink,
whatever day of the week it was,
so surely healing a human being was a right and proper activity for the Sabbath.
But the Pharisees didn't believe this.
They thought healing was work,
and thus not a proper activity for the Sabbath at all.

So they decided it couldn't possibly have happened,
and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to say
“Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he?
What has happened?”
And his parents, equally bewildered, say
“Well yes, he is our son;
yes, he was born blind;
yes, it does appear that he can now see;
no, we don't know what happened;
why don't you ask him?”
And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.

Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions, don't you think –
thrilled that their son could suddenly see,
scared of the authorities,
wondering what exactly Jesus had done,
and was it something they could have done themselves, and so on.
And, of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on.
Very soon now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more;
now he was like other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry and have a family.

So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus, and he says,
“Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is a sinner or not?
All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!”
And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen,
and he gets fed up with them going on and says
“But I told you!
Didn't you listen?
Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?”
which was, of course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it,
but then again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed.
And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be,
and they get even more fed up with him, and sling him out.

And then Jesus meets him again –
of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before,
doesn't actually recognise him –
and reveals himself to him.
And Bartimaeus worships him.

Then Jesus, the Light of the World,
says that he has come so that the blind may see,
and those who see will become blind –
looking hard at the Pharisees as he said it.
The Pharisees are horrified:
“What, are we blind, then?”

And Jesus says, “If you acknowledged that you were blind, you, too, could be healed.
But but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains!”

That's the thing, isn't it –
the Pharisees wouldn't admit they needed Jesus.
They wouldn't admit there was anything wrong.
Jesus has picked up on this before –
you remember the story he told about the Pharisee and the tax-collector,
and the Pharisee was too pleased with himself to be able to receive God's grace.
The tax-collector knew he was a rat-bag, and thus God could do something.

We know that bit.
We know that we need to acknowledge our need of God before God can act –
we must make room for God in our lives.
But when we have done that,
and God has touched us, in whatever way,
things change.
For Bartimaeus, it was about learning to live with his sight,
and about dealing with the issues that it raised.

I wonder what it is for us.
For make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes –
perhaps we used to get drunk,
but now we find ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses.
Perhaps we used to gamble,
but suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a bookie, and those apps on our phone remain unopened!
Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer,
but now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope or to log on to the Wi-fi.

Very often these sorts of changes happen without our even noticing them.
Others take more struggle –
sometimes it is many years before we can finally let go of an addiction, or a bad habit.
But as I've said before, the more open we are to God,
the more we can allow God to change us.
Sometimes, of course, we cling on to the familiar bad habits,
as we don't know how to replace them with healthier ways of acting and thinking, and find it too scary to trust God to show us the way.

But perhaps it isn’t just our personal behaviour that changes.
Maybe we find ourselves getting involved in our community in a way we hadn’t been before.
It will be different for all of us, but we will probably find ourselves, in some way, walking alongside the poor and marginalised in our society.

The point is, when God touches our lives, things change.
They changed for Bartimaeus, I know they changed for me,
and they will have changed for many of you, if not all of you, too.

But it's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you.
I know I have, many times.
The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back.
We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves –
we would always fail if we were.
We just need to acknowledge to ourselves –
and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway –
that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course –
there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off.
But I'm not going into that one right now;
nobody really knows why that happens, except God!
But for most of us, most of the time,
if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us,
we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened,
and we are back with him again.

It can be scary.
Bartimaeus was scared, and with some reason
as his healing ended up with his being chucked out of the synagogue.
That was relatively mild compared with what has happened to some of Jesus' followers down the years, though.
But then, we always seem to be given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes.
It’s not necessarily true that God never gives us more than we can handle, but what is true is that we don't have to cope alone.
God is there, not only changing us,
but enabling us to cope with that change.

And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory!
Because it's not just about what happens to us –
although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most.
It's also about showing God's glory to the world,
showing people that Jesus is the Light of the World.
As happened when Bartimaeus was healed;
as may well happen if and when God touches our lives.
Amen.

---oo0oo---

What day is it today?

Mothers’ Day –

is the wrong answer!
At least, it might be Mothers’ Day out in the world,
but here in Church it’s Mothering Sunday,
and that, in fact, is only tangentially about human mothers!

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday –
it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now,
it was a day when you could relax the rules a little.
And the tradition grew up that on that day,
you went to the mother church in your area –
often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area.
Or sometimes, it might have been the church where you were nurtured and taught as a child, before you left home.
I have had the honour and privilege of preaching at my own “mother church” in a Sussex village, and I love to visit there when I can.

Families went together to the local cathedral, if they lived near enough;
sometimes even whole congregations went together,
and it became traditional for servants to have time off to go home and see their families on that day and go to church with them,
if they lived near enough.
In the Middle Ages, servants may only have got one day off a year,
and it was, traditionally, the 4^th Sunday in Lent.
Many servants had to leave home when they were very young –
only about 11 or 12 –
because their parents simply couldn't afford to feed them any longer.
And, indeed, many of these children hadn't known what a full tummy felt like until they started work.
But even so, they must have missed their families,
and been glad to see them every year.

And today is also a day for remembering God’s love for us.
We’re having the readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent today,
but if we’d had the traditional Mothering Sunday readings,
we would have heard Jesus weeping over Jerusalem:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you.
I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
But you wouldn't let me.”

The image of Jesus as a mother hen!
What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers,
although that, too,
but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother.

Tempted and Fallen

 

Children's talk:

Today is the first Sunday in Lent.
Lent is the time when we prepare for Easter.
But Easter is still a very long way away,
it isn't happening until April.
We get just over six weeks to prepare, which is quite a long time, really.
At Christmas, we only get four weeks,
can you remember what that time is called?

The thing about Lent is that it's traditionally been a time of fasting.
This means some kind of physical deprivation,
to help you with your spiritual preparation.
Some people find that not eating sweets, or meat, or fizzy pop –
booze if you're grown up –
or something like that helps them to be more spiritually aware,
and more ready to think about Jesus at Easter.

In many churches they don't have flowers in Lent,
to remind us that this is a special time.
And then we appreciate the Easter flowers all the more.
And in churches where they have different colours on the communion table or the minister's robes at different times of year,
during Lent and Advent it's purple.

This can be a good discipline, but of course it can just be done for the sake of doing it!
I don't know if any of you know the children's author, Noel Streatfield?
She wrote a lot of books for children,
the most famous of which is called Ballet Shoes, and is still a very good read, even though it was written a long time ago.
Well, Noel and her sisters grew up about many years ago;

their father was a vicar,
and in their family, as in many others,
it was assumed that nobody would want to eat sweets or cake or jam during Lent, so they were never served!
So even if you had wanted to eat them, you couldn't have done so.
And I don't really see what good that did, as it wasn't a voluntary thing,
and just made the children dread Lent each year.

My mother used to say that if you give up something for Lent,
you ought to put the money you save aside,
and give it to Children in Need or a similar charity,
so that you aren't just doing it for yourself.
She has a point!

Some people take on something extra during Lent.
Perhaps they go to a study group, or read a bit of the Bible every day,
or spend time visiting someone who isn't well, or something.
Or maybe you could do something like remembering to say "Thank you" to God for something every day.

I try to do that on social media every year, but it is surprisingly difficult to do, too, to find something different to say “Thank you” to God about every day.

The thing is, it doesn't really matter what Lenten discipline you choose, as long as it's something that helps you come nearer to Jesus.
If it doesn't, don't do it!

Main Sermon:  

The first reading today was about a man, and a woman and God.
The man and the woman don't have names –
later on, they are called Adam and Eve,
but at this stage they don't need names.
They are just Man and Woman.
They are the only Man and Woman that exist –
God hasn't made any more, yet –
so they don't need names.
Man can just go, “Ummmm”
and Woman will know he's talking to her.

God has made the Man and the Woman, and put them in a garden,
where there is plenty of food to eat for the picking of it.
It's lovely and warm, so they don't need clothes,
and in fact they are so comfortable with themselves and with God that they don't want clothes.
There are animals to be cared for, and crops to be tended,
but the work is easy and pleasurable.
And all the fruit in the garden is theirs, except for one tree,
which God has told them is poisonous.
If they eat the fruit of this tree, God said, they'll die.

Well, so far, so good.
But at this point, enter another player.
The serpent.
Now, the Serpent is God's enemy,
but the Man and the Woman don't know that.
They think the Serpent is just another animal.
Now Serpent comes and chats to Woman.

“Nice pomegranate you've got there!”

“Mmm, yes,” says Woman.

“Look at that fruit on that tree over there, though,” says Serpent.
“That looks well tasty!”

“Yes, but it's poisonous!” explains Woman.
“God said that if we ate it, we'd die, so we're keeping well clear of it!”

“Oh rubbish!” says Serpent.
“God's stringing you a line!
It's not poisonous at all.
Thing is, if you eat it, you'll be just like God,
and know good and evil.
God doesn't want you to eat it,
because God doesn't want any rivals!
Go on, have a bite!
You won't regret it!”

So Woman has another look at the tree,
and sees that the fruit is red and ripe and smells tempting,
so she cautiously stretches out her hand and grabs the fruit,
and, ever so tentatively, takes a tiny bite.
Mmm, it is good!

So she calls to Man, “Ummm, hello?”

“Mm-hmmm,” calls Man, looking up from the game he was playing with his dogs.
“What is it?”

“Come and try this fruit,” says Woman,
and explains how the Serpent had said that God had been stringing them a line,
and how good the fruit tasted.
So Man decides to have a piece himself.

But it's coming on to evening,
and at evening, God usually comes and walks in the garden,
and Man and Woman usually come and share their day.
But tonight, somehow, they don't feel like chatting to God.
And those bodies, the bodies they'd enjoyed so much,
suddenly feel like they want to be kept private.
They look at one another, and both retreat, silently, into the far depths of the garden, grabbing some fig leaves to make coverings for themselves.

Presently, God comes looking for them.
“What's up?
Why are you hiding?”

“Well,” goes Man, “I didn't want to face you, 'cos I was naked.”

“Naked?” says God.
“Naked?
Who told you you were naked?
You've been eating that fruit I told you was poisonous, haven't you?”

“Well, er, um.”
Man wriggles.
“It wasn't my fault.
That one, the Woman you gave me.
She said to eat it, so I did.
Wasn't my fault at all.
You can't blame me!”

So God looks at Woman, and says, “Is this true?
Did you give him the fruit?”

Woman goes scarlet.
“Well, it was Serpent.
He said you, well, that the fruit wasn't poisonous.”

But, of course, the fruit had been poisonous
It wasn't that it gave Man and Woman a tummyache or the runs;
worse than that, it poisoned their whole relationship with God.
They couldn't stay in God's garden any more.
Serpent was going to have to crawl on his belly from now on,
and everyone, almost, would be afraid of him.
Woman was going to have awful trouble having babies,
and Man was going to find making a living difficult.

But God did show them how to make warm clothes for themselves,
and didn't abandon them forever,
even though, from that time forth, they weren't really comfortable with God.
Well, that's the story, then, that the Israelites used to explain why human beings find it so very difficult to be God's people and to do God's will.
And it shows how first the Woman and then the Man were tempted, and fell.
They had tried, although they didn’t know it, to settle for something less than God, for human knowledge and ambition.
They thought they knew better than God.
At least, though, they didn’t think that they didn’t need God, as all too many people do today!
The man and the woman fell.
But Jesus resisted temptation.
You may remember that he was baptised,
and there was the voice from heaven that said
“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
And then Jesus went off into the desert for six weeks or so,
to come to terms with exactly Who he was,
and to discover the exact nature of his divine powers.

It must have been so insidious, mustn't it?
"Are you really the Son of God?
Why don't you prove it by making these stones bread?
You're very hungry, aren't you?
If you're the Son of God, you can do anything you like, can't you?
Surely you can make these stones into bread?
But perhaps you aren't the Son of God, after all...."
And so it would have gone on and on and on.

But Jesus resisted.
The way the gospel-writers tell it,
you would think he just waved his hand and shook his head and said,
“No, man shall not live by bread alone!”
But that wouldn't have been temptation.
You know what it's like
when you're tempted to do something you ought not –
the longing can become more and more intense.
There are times when you think,
Hmm, that'd be nice, but then you think,
naaa, not right, and put it behind you;
but other times when you have to really, really struggle to put it behind you.
“If you are the Son of God....”

The view from the pinnacle of the Temple.
So high up.... by their standards,
like the top of the Shard would be to us.
"Go on then –
you're the Son of God, aren't you?
Throw yourself down –
your God will protect you!"
The temptation is to show off, to use his powers like magic.
Yes, God would have rescued him, but:
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
That's not what it's about.
That would have been showing off.
That would have been misusing his divine powers for something rather spectacular.
It would have been settling for something less than the best God had for him.

Jesus was also tempted with riches and power beyond his wildest dreams –
at that, beyond our wildest dreams,
if only he would worship the enemy.
We can sympathise with this particular temptation;
I'm sure we all would love to be rich and powerful!
But for Jesus, it must have been particularly subtle –
it would help him do the work he'd been sent to do!
Could he fulfil his mission without riches and power?
What was being God's beloved son all about, anyway?
Would it be possible to spread the message that he was beginning to realise he had to spread
if he was going to spend his life in an obscure and dusty part of the Roman empire?
And again, after prayer and wrestling with it, he finds the answer:
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
Let the riches and power look after themselves;
they are not God.
The important thing was to serve God.
If that is right, the rest would follow.

You may remember that Jesus was similarly tempted on the Cross, he could have called down the legions from heaven to rescue him.
But he chose not to.
It wasn't about spectacular powers –
often, when Jesus did miracles,
he asked people not to tell anybody.
He didn't want to be spectacular.
He'd learnt that his mission was to the people of Israel,
probably even just the people of Galilee –
and the occasional outsider who needed him, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, or the Roman centurion –
and anything more than that was up to his heavenly Father.

And, obviously, if the "anything more" hadn't happened,
we wouldn't be here today!
But, at the time, that wasn't Jesus' business.
His business, as he told us, was to do the work of his Father in Heaven –
and that work, for now, was to be an itinerant preacher and healer,
but not trying deliberately to call attention to himself.

And a few years later, Jesus was crucified.
It is, I think, far too complicated for us to ever know exactly what happened then,
but it is safe to say that a change took place in the moral nature of the universe.
St Paul expands on this idea in our second reading.

Paul compares and contrasts what happened to the first Man, Adam, with what happened to Jesus,
pointing out that sin came into the world through Adam, which poisoned humanity’s relationship with God,
but through Jesus, we can receive the free gift of eternal life, and thus restore our relationship.

Of course, it’s never as easy as that in practice.
You know that and I know that.
Can we really live in a restored relationship with God?
All the time?
Twenty-four seven?
Well, maybe you can, but I find it very difficult indeed!
We know we’re apt to screw things up in our relationship with God.
Usually because we screw things up in our relationship with other people, but not always.
Sometimes we just screw ourselves up!
We don’t take the exercise we promised ourselves.
We lounge around all day and don’t get on –
so easy to do, I find, when the weather is as awful as it’s been lately, don’t you agree?

But the point is, Paul seems to think that we can live in a restored relationship with God.
And so does John, when he reminds us that
“Those who are children of God do not continue to sin, for God's very nature is in them;
and because God is their Father, they cannot continue to sin.”
He also, of course, reminds us that if and when we do sin, we need to confess our sins and we will be forgiven.
We need to look at ourselves honestly, and admit not only what we did, said or thought,
but that we are the kind of person who can do, say or think such things.
And allow God not only to forgive us, but to help us grow so that we will stop being such people.

John Wesley very much believed Christian perfection was a thing.
He didn’t think he’d attained it, but he reckoned it was possible in this life.
He preached on it and it’s one of the sermons we local preachers are supposed to have read –
you can find it on-line easily enough.
Anyway, what he said about perfection was that it wasn’t about being ignorant, or mistaken, or ill or disabled, or not being tempted –
you could be any or all of those things and still be perfect.
Wesley reckons that the closer we continue with Jesus,
the less likely we are to sin.
I believe he didn’t consider that he’d got there himself, but he did know people who had.
He said even a baby Christian has been cleansed from sin,
and mature Christians who walk with Jesus will be freed from it, both outwardly and inwardly.
I hope he’s right....

But the point is, it’s not something we can do in our own strength;
we have to allow God to do it for us and in us.
The first Man and Woman listened to the serpent, and destroyed their –
and our –
relationship with God.
Jesus was able to restore that relationship through the atonement.
And because that relationship is restored, we can be indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and made whole again.
Let’s not settle for anything less than the best God has for us! Amen.