Eyes Wide Shut

Many years ago, I read about a man named Pierre-Paul Thomas. His incredible story comes back to me every time I hear our gospel for this morning. Maybe that comes from my having only one good eye. More likely, it is a reminder to be honest with myself about all the times that I don’t see the world, and my place in it, with clarity. All the times I fail to see where God is leading me.

Pierre-Paul Thomas was born blind – indeed he was a lot like the blind man in our gospel story this morning.

He grew up in a family of nine brothers and sisters in a small town about 100 kilometres north of Montreal, in the 1940s. Mr. Thomas learned to see with his fingers. He repaired bikes, and worked in a bakery, kneading dough. But he lived in a grey world of shadows, walking with a white cane.

And then, a miracle. Though at first it didn’t seem that way. In 2011, when he was 66, Mr. Thomas fell down a flight of stairs, and fractured the bones of his face, including those around his eye sockets. In emergency. the doctors mended him as best they could. But a month later, he was in the office of Lucie Lessard, a well-respected plastic surgeon, who performed the next surgery. He still recalls her nonchalant question: “While we’re at it, do you want me to fix your eyes, too?”

It seems that all these years Mr. Thomas had suffered from a blindness that could have been fixed with an operation, but he had grown up before public health care, another side note to this tale. Dr. Lessard did her work – just as Jesus in the gospel did his - and Mr. Thomas emerged into a world he had never before experienced. His eyesight would never be perfect, but he could see so much more. Colours and clear shapes. The faces of his family.

One thing he noticed so clearly: nobody had ever described to him the little green buds that grow on the trees in the spring.

Can we even imagine that? Having been blind all our life and then suddenly being able to see? How must it have been for that man in the gospel, who so faithfully followed the directions of Jesus, who covered the man’s eye with mud mixed with saliva and then told him to wash in a pool of water. Still the man listened, whether it was because he believed or because he would have tried anything if it meant he might see. We do know, from our text, that he refused to be swayed from telling the truth of what had happened. Though berated by the Pharisees, he refused to be cowed into giving up the truth. For that, for seeing with his own eyes, he was driven out of the temple, a terrible punishment in that day. It was not as if you could wander down the street to another temple.

When Jesus says, “I have come to make the blind see and those who see blind,” the Pharisees believe in him enough to be worried. “Surely, you’re not saying we are blind?” And Jesus chastises them: for their failing is thinking that they see clearly, and not realizing that they are blind.

For how often do we hear this phrase: ‘Open your eyes!’? We use it to describe a naive person who is being taken in by someone else, or to expose the way we might see another person being manipulated, or when a lie is being too easily believed. But how often do we say it to ourselves? How often do we go to God and ask him, “Open my eyes, so that I may see clearly”? We may not, because we might be worried about what seeing too clearly inside ourselves will reveal – we prefer blindness to what is experienced by others.

But here is the thing about Mr. Thomas: he was extremely grateful for his gift of sight and the world he was now a part of. But even two years later, he was having a hard time shaking old habits, still feeling along the wall when he walked. It was hard to change, even when he could see clearly.

And that’s also a metaphor for us. In our blinded state, we fall into habits, we slip into old ways of being. We use certain fixed words to describe ourselves, and ones that pin down others as well. Words like selfish, critical, dishonest. We assume that how we see the world is the way it is, and the way it will be, or the way it has to be.

But Jesus calls us to open our eyes and look deeply at our lives. To see clearly how we are in relationship with others. See the places where we have made a colourful life grey, or allowed shadows where they don’t need to be. It begins with a simple request: God, help me see clearly. With God, we may open our eyes and see ourselves clearly: where a failure to forgive is twisting our insides, where anger is really jealousy, where judgment is really self-criticism. In those moments of eye-openness, when we are honest with ourselves first, we come to see more clearly the way that God intends us to see.

We cannot see the little green buds on the trees – the new beginning of each day, and each relationship – if our eyes remain closed. Amen.

Stereotypes: Toss them Down the Well!

March 12, 2023—John 4:5-42

A few years ago, two employees named Nicole Hallberg and Martin Schneider worked at a company that fixes up resumes . Nicole and Martin decided to conduct an experiment. On their emails to clients, they would switch names. Nicole would become Martin and Martin, Nicole.

The real Martin soon found himself having email conversations that he found curious. They were unexpectedly snippy in their tone. Or over-explained simple issues. Occasionally, someone called him “hon.” Finally, to test what was happening, Martin pretended he was handing things back to “Martin,” and – as you probably guessed, the tone became immediately friendly.

On Nicole’s side, posing as Martin, she was having a great time. Her questions were all being answered. She wasn’t being second-guessed. Nobody was calling her sweetie.

This past week, as we celebrated International Women’s Day, that little experiment came back to me. It’s an example of how a name can change people’s perceptions. And how stereotypes and assumptions change not only the value we give people, as well as the learned wisdom we attribute to them, but even the subtle ways we talk to them. And so we have to ponder what has changed – and what hasn’t– when we consider our gospel story today.

Jesus meets a Samaritan woman coming to collect water at the town well. Let’s consider this woman for a moment: based on her exchange with Jesus, scholars have traditionally described this woman as a prostitute, pointing to Jesus’s shocking revelation that she was living with a man who was not even her husband! And here she was getting her water at noon, when everyone knew that “proper women” had already fetched their water in the morning and were partly done with their washing by then. So here she is – a lazy Samaritan woman with too many husbands, and of questionable morals. The narrative was right there in front of Jesus. The judgement is ready to fall.

So what does Jesus do? It is remarkable, really. He asks her for a drink, which is a big deal, as we know from her reaction: “Why would you, a Jew, ask to share a drink from a Samaritan like me?” The theological exchange that follows is one of the longest in the gospel. I guess John was either so shocked by the event that he had to get it all down, or perhaps he felt it might serve the followers of Jesus later. What Jesus basically says to the woman is: What’s a cup of water, when I have so much more to offer? You should be asking me for a drink from the living water of God. Now think on this: if it was shocking for Jesus to ask for a drink from this woman, how much more shocking must it have been for him to be offering her a drink back? And yet he does, and she accepts it.

They next have an interesting exchange about her marital history, as if Jesus is testing her. When asked to fetch the man in question, she admits that she has no husband, and Jesus confirms her history. But where is the judgement in his tone? Let’s set aside the fact that a growing number of scholars are questioning our interpretation of this woman’s past – she may have been divorced, she may have been widowed multiple times; we don’t know. The reality is: Jesus doesn’t care. The very way he raises it and then moves on to a welcoming discussion about grace and faith suggests he was actually clarifying to the woman how much he didn’t care about the stories being told, or the past that was nipping at her heels, or the stereotypes people were so keen to attach to her. He was saying: I knowwho you are. None of that matters. Because you matter.

It is really an extraordinary exchange in the Bible. Because what we have is Jesus breaking the rules of society without a thought, having an in-depthconversation with someone who would have been seen as outside the circle. And then, this Samaritan woman doesn’t just drift from the picture – she becomes someone who spreads the gospel to others. Jesus includes her, honours her, and empowers her. He crumbles up the stereotype in front of everyone watching and tosses it down the well.

What’s truly remarkable is how much this story challenges the biases that lead to discrimination and intolerance today. We often keep these biases quiet, or maybe they slip in unconsciously. We assume that poor people are lazy, or perhaps didn’t work hard enough. We assume that people who aren’t white must be from “somewhere else,” or don’t speak English well. We assume that old people are slow and young people are selfish. An outspoken woman is bossy; a kind man is weak. Even when we say we don’t think that way, these biases often shape the way we see people, how we speak to them, what we assume they need, or are capable of. And yet again and again, the gospel challenges the idea that people can ever be reduced to stereotypes. How many examples do we need to hear ofthe welcoming back of the prodigal son, Jesus urging aid for the GoodSamaritan, and, even this morning, conversing freely and with respect to the woman at well? Jesus sets repeated examples of throwing out stereotypes, of rejecting narratives that stomped people down, and casting wide the door to those who would be invited inside. If we must be careful about how false narratives slip into our own thinking, let us also be mindful when false narratives of our faith are just allowed to drift out there, to be picked up and used to wrongful ends.

This morning’s gospel is a feminist gospel. Jesus and the woman have adiscussion much the same as he would with the disciples. He refuses to accept – or even consider – the sexist gossip that the villagers are spreading. It is not whatmatters to Jesus; what counts for Jesus is our coming together in relationship, one of mutual respect and kindness.

It is such an easy trap for us humans to follow the stories that our experience, our prejudices, and our culture want to say to people that we don’t know. What results are sexism and homophobia, racism and Islamophobia. And each time we miss an opportunity, we miss the potential of a larger community, we miss a life-changing moment at the well of the living water. We miss a chance ourselves to experience more from the people around us.

Don’t fall into this trap. Remember this story in the gospel. And yes, indeed, ask yourself, each and every day: What would Jesus say? What would Jesus do? We know the answer. Amen.

Ground Rush

Parachutists have a phrase they call “ground rush.” Now I have never jumped out of a plane, so I can’t vouch for this personally, but apparently, when you first make the jump and you are falling through the sky, but have yet to open up your parachute, you have this feeling as if you are falling - dropping towards the ground at a completely reasonable speed. You have time to take in the scenery, and while it’s exhilarating, your sense of time slows down completely - the ground, after all, seems very far away. But once you fall a certain distance, your perception shifts - and it’s not the falling that you’re aware of - it is instead the ground rushing quickly towards you. In that instant, one might imagine that Time speeds up rather quickly. And you are probably awfully keen to pull your parachute cord. It has been suggested that this might make a good analogy for the way we experience life - the first half of which we might spend enjoying the feeling of time travelling slowly, and the second half, suddenly realizing that time is ticking down. Of course, time is always ticking down. It is only our perception that changes.

Lent, of course, is meant to be one of those perception-changing seasons of the church. Forty days to contemplate the passage of time, both to slow it down, like the parachutist first emerging from the plane, but with a sense of its passing quickly, like the second half of the descent. These are the two postures of Lent: slowing things down, then speeding up, or focusing on what is important. It is a difficult one for us to master, since we most naturally fall into the opposite pattern: that is, speeding up, or focusing on, all the things that are the least important. Much is of this is a matter of perception: from what angle do we see the world? Where is the countdown clock in our lives? Do we lament our lack of time with our kids, only to spend precious moments with them on our iPhones? Do we wish for a better marriage while devoting the best of ourselves to work? Do we write an ending for our lives without seeing the journey we have to take?

This morning’s gospel features a wordy debate between a Pharisee and Jesus. The Pharisee - Nicodemus - is trying to pin Jesus down, to get some specifics on heaven and the spirit. But Jesus dodges the questions: he leaves his answers open-ended. Clearly, this frustrates poor Nicodemus, who wants it clearly mapped out. To use our parachutist analogy, he wanted to know that when he jumps out of a plane, he will fall for exactly so many seconds, pull his chute at this time directly, and land in this place precisely. But Jesus denies him this kind of answer. “The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

Jesus speaks of us in two parts - flesh and spirit. The first, we understand better: it is the most animal part of it - hunger, thirst - even those baser human emotions such as anger. Love for our families and spouses we might add to the flesh side of our lives since they come naturally. But the spirit, as Jesus would say, works more mysteriously - it is that human quality that is harder to understand, the one that makes less sense in a Darwinian world, the acts of charity and kindness toward strangers, sacrifices we make not for ourselves, but for others. It is the feeling of euphoria when time does not seem to matter, when the wind is blowing us, but we don’t know where and are prepared to be led by it. Part of Jesus’s frustration with the law-oriented society into which he was born was just that: so focused on rules, they were not prepared to be led the way the wind blew them. They wanted to know the destination before they took the next step.

That’s hardly how life works, in any event, so it’s an attitude that holds us back from the real decisions we must make.

Certainly, this week, witnessing the horror of the migrant tragedy off Italy’s southern coast, we have seen people moved by the spirit. I think of the rescue crews who worked tirelessly trying to find survivors. Expressions of grief from around the world. And the demands for action that were split between the imperative of humanitarian treatment and a crackdown on traffickers. Sometimes it takes a tragic story to move our spirit. That is the unquantifiable element of humanity - the part that brings us closer to God - the part we cannot explain. It is not complicated to understand our definition of heroes and martyrs - they are the people that choose the spirit over flesh. They are the people that choose faith over law.

Let us return to that airplane, with us about to leap out of it. An analogy for life, but also for every day. And certainly, one that works for Lent. What Jesus wants for us is to experience, every chance we can, these two seeming contradictions of life - the ability to see the big picture, and the capability to respond in small and significant ways to improve that picture. Jesus wants to us feel both time moving slowly, and time passing by. This is also the discipline of Lent - both contemplation and action, which in partnership require an awareness of life at its largest, and an ability to distill it down to specifics. If we stay too long in the first, we forget to pull our parachute cord.

And I like the parachute analogy for one other important reason: who is our parachute, after all? Our gospel gives us this answer: For God so loved the world that God gave Jesus so that everyone who believes may not perish but may have eternal life. And just in case we didn’t get it the first time, we have this clarification: Jesus didn’t come to judge us or condemn us. Jesus came to save us - that is, to guide and comfort us. That is the parachute that helps us see life large, and act upon it. It is the spirit that moves our flesh into faith, that carries us forward to sacrifice for others, that inspires heroes. Don’t be like Nicodemus arguing semantics with Jesus. Listen for the wind, savour the view, and pull your parachute cord.Amen