March 2, 2008

Take Off the Blinders and See

by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson

John 9: 1-17

Opening Illustration: (Slide) “After doctors in Ireland said there was nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in England.

The technique, pioneered in Italy in the 1960s, involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from the patient's own tooth and the surrounding bone.

The procedure used on McNichol involved his son Robert, 23, donating a tooth, its root and part of the jaw.

McNichol's right eye socket was rebuilt, part of the tooth inserted and a lens inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

The first operation lasted ten hours and the second five hours.

"It is pretty heavy going," McNichol said. "There was a 65 percent chance of me getting any sight.

"Now I have enough sight for me to get around and I can watch television. I have come out from complete darkness to be able to do simple things," McNichol said.


Blindness vs. Seeing in John

Community experienced: loss of congregation, expulsion from the synagogue, disbelief.

Way to deal with being isolated – write stories about Jesus.

Tell the story

Story tells us something about the way you and I perceive God.

Relationship with God predicated on obeying a set of rules. God as Father – rules our own parents set down for us.

Our fixation on details can cause us to discount the religious experience of others. Sometimes we react in a parental manner.

Sometimes the religious experience of others is really a new work of God in the world.

Jesus was a replacement for the law – everything to do with God went through Jesus.

I wonder if we get so caught up in the details of what we think being a Christian is that we miss the bigger picture, which is Jesus himself.

Final Illustration: Nelle Morton – Executive Secretary of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. Postwar North Carolina.

Nelle worked with group to build a Credit Union to assist people who were losing homes and business to loan sharks.

Just before the project was completed, members from a similar group they had set up from Virginia, black and white, came to celebrate with them.

Word went through town. Town reacted by assembling 400 people to harass them. Including police and sheriff.

Whole group got word they were coming and spent the night hidden in the tall grass near the camp.

This community would have identified itself as strict, devout Christians. But they were unable to see that God was doing something new in their community.

Their fixation with assigning white people and black people to a particular place in society and enforcing those roles blinded them from seeing the divine work of justice taking place.

You and I are challenged every day by blinders which keep us from seeing the range of possibilities God has opened to us.

This passage challenges us to take another look at our own lives, at our own religious experience, and say, “What am I missing?”

As we think about ourselves, our religious experience, our interaction with our children, as we reflect on the news, as we think about what’s happening at our place of employment, we should not be asking ourselves, “How can I fit this into what I already know about God?”

We should be saying to ourselves, “Is God doing something new here? How can I get out of the way so that it can happen? How can I help bring it along? How can I share the good news with other people?”

I’m going to ask the organist to come forward and play the final hymn, “Open my Eyes”. As we sing this, I want you to ask God to open your eyes to something in your life that you haven’t been seeing clearly.