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Saving Sinners 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23

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Saving Sinners 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23 Saving Sinners 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41 As we journey deep into the season of Lent, have you ever wondered why we crucified a nice person like Jesus? Jesus welcomed little children, loved everybody, considered the lilies. Why will the world (here, in a couple of weeks) respond to his open hand with, “Crucify him!”? Today’s story from John explains why. The people around Jesus – ignorant prescientific people all – weren’t bothered that Jesus miraculously healed people; after all, religion is in the healing business. No, what made them furious was that Jesus miraculously healed the wrong people. Today’s Gospel: A poor man has been liberated from affliction. A miracle! Why would anybody kill Jesus for that? I want you to take your gaze off Jesus and the blind beggar and focus upon the reaction of the good, religious, churchgoing believers-who-would-get-out-of-bed-on-an-March-Sunday-and-come-to the-Church-even-to-hear-a-60-year-old-preacher. People like us. His disciples (us) see the blind man and ask, “Jesus, let’s have a theological colloquy. Whose sin caused this man’s blindness – his or his parents?” Rather than talk theology, Jesus spits in dirt, makes mud, and smears it on the man’s eyes. The man sees. The religious officials – credentialed, theologically informed leaders (like Moderator Gary Paterson and me) – grab the once- blind beggar demanding, “Are you going around preaching that this rabbi healed you of blindness?” And the man responds, “Well, actually, I was blind at the time, so I didn’t exactly see who healed me.” They seize the blind man’s parents, “Before we kick you out, answer us, is this your son who was blind?” The frightened parents respond, “It’s hard to say if that’s our son or not. Who wants to know?” Saving Sinners.ser.wpd 1 The religious officials again interrogate, “Who healed you?” “Jesus did it!” snitched the poor, beleaguered, now seeing, former blind man. And to the Pharisees, that is to us, who are enraged, Jesus says, “I’m the judge who gives sight to the blind and who blinds those who presume to see.” “What? You’re not calling us enlightened seminary graduates ‘blind’ are you, Jesus?” they ask. Then they say in unison, “Let’s kill him.” A seminary professor who teaches a course on Jesus writes: “When we come upon a miracle like this one I ask the college students, “Why do we have so many of these miracles in the Gospels? Miraculous healings are a real turn off for sophisticated, modern intellectuals like us.” And the students respond, “Well, these miracles prove that Jesus really is the Son of God. Miracles make belief in Jesus easier.” Well, if that was John’s point in recording this miracle in today’s reading from the Gospels, it didn’t work, did it? Jesus heals a blind man and the response is not, “He’s the Son of God! Let’s worship him!” but rather, “It’s not right for you uneducated, un-credentialed faith healers to do miraculous stuff like that for losers like him.” If I am honest I have to say, I wouldn’t have preached on this Gospel story to sophisticated, religiously enlightened people – like you – but John insisted. Jesus makes not-very-nice blind people see and sometimes Jesus’ love makes nice-sighted people blind. I don’t know if you have ever heard of a man named Glenn Back but according to Wikipedia Glenn Beck is a politically conservative American television and radio host, political commentator, author, television network producer, media personality, and entrepreneur. He hosts the Glenn Beck Radio Program a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks. He formerly hosted a television program from January 2009 to June 2011 on the Fox News Channel. Beck has authored six New York Times bestselling books. He is the Saving Sinners.ser.wpd 2 founder and CEO of Mercury Radio Arts, a multimedia production company through which he produces content for radio, television, publishing, the stage, and the Internet. It was announced on April 6, 2011, that Beck would "transition off of his daily program" on Fox News later in the year but would team with Fox to "produce a slate of projects for Fox News Channel and Fox News' digital properties". Beck's last daily show on the network was June 30, 2011. In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter named Beck on its Digital Power Fifty list. If he was a part of the Cotton Patch Gospel he would likely be a member of the EEAW (Electronic Evangelists of the Air Waves.) Former Methodist Bishop Will Willimon shared a Rick Mercer style rant about Beck, saying: “I can’t stand Glenn Beck! He calls our President “a racist with a deep-seated hatred of white culture.” He began as a disc jockey and should have stayed one. He’s been fired from a dozen different radio stations with standards higher than Fox News. After divorcing his first wife, Beck became a drug and alcohol addict. He still suffers back pain from an injury incurred when, intoxicated, he tumbled out a second story window, landing on his head. But the most offensive thing about Glenn Beck is that when he remarried in 1999, becoming a Mormon, he started selling a CD, An Unlikely Mormon: The Conversion Story of Glenn Beck, in which Beck has the affront to extol the “healing power of Jesus Christ.” Beck says Jesus saved him from drugs and booze and made him a multimillionaire. He also claims that Jesus made him a much nicer person. (You wouldn’t want to know Beck before he met Jesus!) Beck told Fox’s Chris Wallace, “I’m a Mormon, and most Christians don’t recognize me as a Christian.” A rare moment of insight. Beck’s got a goofy version of American history, a conspiracy theory for everything. He laces his televised boohooing with prayer. He is best described in the title of Alexander Zaitchik’s 2010 book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. Progressive politicians Beck Saving Sinners.ser.wpd 3 calls “Crime Inc,” made up of such notorious communists as Al Gore, Jim Wallis, and George Soros. Sarah Palin praised Beck as “America’s professor of common sense” despite Beck’s calling Jimmy Carter “a waste of skin.” This mishmash of hate and foolishness Beck markets into an annual $23 million dollar empire. When more than 200 advertisers refused his show, it was (appropriately) picked up by diarrhea medication. Then Beck asked everyone to leave the Episcopal church if you heard preaching about social justice – which Beck says you are too blind to see as code for Communism and Nazism. His excuse is that he suffers from ADHD. And yet (back to today’s Gospel) here’s my Lenten point: Jesus Christ loves Glenn Beck to death. I’m fond of Jesus until I think: Maybe Jesus really did heal Glenn Beck in a more gracious and spectacular way than Jesus has ever condescended to heal me. Jesus Christ died for the sins of Glenn, and me, and you. Are you willing to worship a God who loves and dies for sinners? Only sinners. Take my first church. Please. Freshly minted by Yale Divinity School, sent out to the wilds of Georgia, I had never been around such people. Fisticuffs after a church board meeting. Fornication in a Chevrolet after a hymn sing. The racism. The myopic ignorance. Horrendous introduction to Christian ministry. In anguish, I poured out my frustration to a favourite Emory professor. He agreed that it was an outrage – person of my gifts, to be stuck out there with a bunch of fornicating, racist, redneck losers. And then my professor said, “Worst of all, Jesus says that those prostitutes and tax collectors get to go into the kingdom of God before us good people” (Mt 21:31). (Will Willimon) Sight, vision, comes to us through more than just our eyes. Saving Sinners.ser.wpd 4 “In the Episcopal order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord’s Prayer with the words, “Now, as our Saviour Christ has taught us, we are bold to say . .” The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying. “Thy will be done” is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendour the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come . on earth” is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the Hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings would turn out to be phony as three- dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.
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