The Complacency of Hope

Readings:
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41

Audio sermon link:
http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/BFF89116-D8DD-4C4F-C43B-D7DA7B3DCE39.mp3

Everyone’s confused. What’s up??

God looks beyond outward appearances to read what is in your heart. He looks beyond the anonymity of David as the 8th child and sees in his heart that he lives th 23rd Psalm. He was the King no one thought would be King.

Oddly enough, there is a level of comfort in being well-enough off and helping a blind beggar. But we don’t want the donkey cart turned around. It’s not always a welcome thought that it is in times of illness, crisis … it is hard to believe that it’s in times like these that God is really at work. In the sinfulness, in the blindness, in the shadows, God works His ways through us and through our blindness.

Why, Pastor Johnson asks us, do you think mud is wiped in the blind man’s face and washed away before he sees??

To remind us … mud comes from dirt and dust, that of which we are made. It takes water to wash our nature away and cleanse us, the clear the way through the dirt enough for us to really see. Our Baptism (the waters) is what allows us to walk out of the darkness and walk with Jesus. Just as David is not the likely choice to be King, so the blind man is not the likely choice. It’s all supposed to look more official than this!

But Pastor Johnson reminds us it takes a certain humility to accept that it is our Baptism that enables us to see, that it’s our Baptism that takes us from mud to the light of walking with Jesus.

We take our sight for granted.

“Only once you appreciate and accept your ‘mudness’, are you able to open your eyes and see.”

Not too long ago, I and my family walked away from what, on any other day, any other time, would have been a fatal car crash. My children in my arms, alive and OK, I slept very differently that night of the accident. I awoke very early the next morning – in fact, I arose very early for weeks afterward … very much more aware that this day before me was a gift, a gift I did not deserve. A gift from my Baptism. The mud had been washed away from my eyes. I went to school to see people arguing over what that day seemed like petty annoyances, but about which I might have been just blind enough to have argued just days before. A good friend shared with me that I'd be seeing the world through new glasses ... for awhile. They were right.

Before we are shown the light, had the mud cleared from our eyes, it is too easy to be complacent in our mirage of self-control. It is too easy to dismiss hope in favor of cynicism masked as realism. Many’s the time a messenger of hope arose that he was greeted with the proverbial “We’ll decide when we need to hope, thank you very much.”

Every green light on our way comes from above.

Even ones we may never see ourselves to the other side of. We cannot see Him until we humble ourselves. We can’t see Him through eyes that are cynical, focused on laws and rules, through day planners filled with “the daily routine”. There’s a lack of humility in our thinking we know where we’re going.

Pastor Johnson shared a story that repeats a theme he’s spoken on before – the possibility for change, to “make a new thing”. Pastor’s Uncle Sonny was a happy drunk, one of those characters that told great stories, did voices and impersonations, told the best jokes, did card tricks. One day, he stopped drinking and got sober. And funny thing was he was still funny, still told great jokes, still lit up a room. God broke through his barriers and “made a new thing”. But the reaction to that breaking of barriers was not unlike in so many other families. Nobody really wanted to believe Sonny’d gotten sober. Not yet, they thought. He’s only this far away from his next drink. There was a weird air of cynicism, almost disappointment. Disappointment in a a weird way like when someone we thought of as “behind us in line”, fatter, slower, somehow takes themselves up by the boot straps and passes us up in line, loses weight, takes the lead. We view the world through the microcosm of ourselves at the center.

There is disappointment because it shed light on the rest of the family’s drinkers … those still choosing to hide behind their own ‘mudness’. “Uncle Sonny, hemade us look good … or at least OK”. His was the distraction you looked at ‘over there’ that prevented you from seeing the ‘mudness … over here’. Without that, people just might look for the next best thing. Maybe us?

We’re still not humble enough to see our own mudness, choosing rather to hide behind the façade of another’s, we’re still unable to see. We’re still complacent and not realizing we’re in need of a better brand of hope.

Lent is a time for us to turn some of our focus inward enough to see the mud. Inward enough to look at what’s really there, inward enough to allow the sight there to humble us, humble us enough to a point where we can ask for the waters of Baptism to once again flow over us on Easter and make us see.