The Blind Man, Jesus, and Hugh Hollowell: Seeing the World With New Eyes

Scripture Text: John 9: 1-41

This is the third week we have heard gospel lessons from the gospel according to John, each one addressing a conversation between Jesus and a person he has encountered. And here again, as in the past two weeks, we have a case of double entendre; of Jesus emphasizing a new meaning for a part of life we typically take for granted.

Jesus talked to Nicodemus about being born from above - something more than, other than, typical human birth.  Nicodemus came and went in the dark, and there was no indication that his eyes were opened about Jesus, at least during that conversation.

When Jesus engaged with the woman at the well, their conversation about water and thirst quickly turned toward the reality of the living water that only he could offer.

And because Jesus saw her with eyes of love, her eyes were also opened, and she recognized him, and she saw herself in a new way, as a vessel of living water, and she was able to witness to others about what she had now seen for herself.

And here we have a story about blindness and seeing, where the act of seeing quickly moves beyond the topic of physical sight. Christ sees that the man is blind, and acts to open his eyes, saying to the disciples, “we must work the works of God while it is day, while the light is still here…. I am the light.” And now this man, once blind, can see… and what he can see goes beyond plain sight to an awareness and understanding of who Christ is. He sees, but with new eyes.

Christ’s eyes see the world differently; and we see the world differently when we see through the eyes of Christ, the eyes of love.

It is Jesus who starts the interaction with the man on the side of the road. The man makes no request of Jesus. Like the woman at the well, it appears the man had no idea who Jesus was. Jesus is walking by, he speaks to his companions, then spits on the ground, works the mixture of water and earth into muddy clay, places it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go wash in the waters of a place whose name means “sent”. And suddenly, for the first time in his life, the man can see what he never could see before.

The next part of the passage describes the investigation by the Pharisees of what happened; in fact, Jesus completely fades from the story for this entire section. The Pharisees’ focus is on revealing the man’s sin and Jesus’ sin.

And as the man tries to reply to the questions about how and why he can now see, he shows that what he is really beginning to see and understand is who Christ is, and that Christ has changed his life. The man starts out saying, “my life has been changed, and I have no idea how it happened” and ends up saying “he [Jesus] must be of God, for how else is this possible?”

So when Jesus comes looking for him, having learned that the man had been thrown out of the synagogue by the Pharisees, and Jesus tells him that the one standing before him is, in truth, the Son of Man, this man is fully ready to say, “I believe”, and to worship him. And he’s ready because of what Jesus has already done in his life; because of how Jesus has changed him. 

Isn’t this how it often happens to us, how we begin to truly believe? We may have been raised in the church, we may know Jesus as part of our upbringing, or maybe not; but doesn’t it often take something life changing for us to begin to understand what Jesus has really done for us, and who Jesus really is, and what living our lives as disciples of Jesus really means?

Don’t we need new eyes to really see Jesus?

When Jesus takes hold of our life, or when we let Jesus in, we begin to see not only Jesus, but the world and the people in it with new eyes – eyes of love – eyes of Christ.

I have a friend named Hugh Hollowell. He is the founder and director of Love Wins Ministries in Raleigh, NC, where he pastors a congregation made up mostly of people who are experiencing chronic homelessness. He is an ordained minister in the Mennonite Church USA.

Here is how he describes Love Wins Ministries:

“We feed people…

But we are not a feeding ministry.

Sometimes, we help people get jobs…

But we are not a job training program.

Maybe 10-12 times a year, someone leaves homelessness with our help…

But we are not a housing ministry.

Yet, at any given moment, we may be doing any of those things.

But what we really are is a ministry of presence and pastoral care for the homeless and at-risk population of Raleigh, NC.”

http://www.lovewinsministries.org/

Hugh began this ministry after spending more than ten years climbing the ladder of business success, only to find himself reasonably well off, sick from the stress, and terribly unhappy with his life. So he quit everything that was part of that life, and he eventually moved from Memphis to Raleigh, traveling by bus, with his last $800 in his pocket, to change his life. It was time, as he said, to be born again. Where he had realized that he had become a user of people, in his words, in order to get what he wanted, his eyes were opened to see the world in a new way.

And so he started a ministry based entirely on relationships. As he describes it, “relationships with people who often cannot return the favor, and who can’t advance my career or puff my ego.”  He started it by selling hot dogs from a stand to raise money to begin this ministry, and now they still rely entirely on donations and proceeds from his occasional speaking engagements, but Love Wins now has several people working there, all of them fundraising whatever they need to live on, and they have a house where people can come and be loved, where people are seen and known by name and worried about when it’s cold and they are sleeping outside. They are seen with eyes of love.

I’m telling you about Hugh, because Hugh doesn’t see people who are poor or living on the streets or fighting addictions or just hard to get along with in the same way you and I probably do. Hugh sees them as people needing friends, needing relationship, as the first step to changing their lives. And so Love Wins is about relationships, about helping with that first step. They can do that because they see people and situations through new eyes, with eyes of love, with Christ’s eyes.

Here is a story from Love Wins from just last week. Please listen for how seeing with new eyes made a difference in this story, told in Hugh’s words…

http://www.lovewinsministries.org/2014/03/love-means-shoe-shopping/

“Her name is Mickey, and she found me on Tuesday of this week, timid and uncertain. If you look up the definition of “mousy” in the dictionary, the entry should have her picture next to it. She is petite and naive-looking, actually 26 but looking all of 18 or 19. But spend some time talking to her, and you learn of her two kids being raised by family, a history of drug use, and a cross-country crime spree that involved hot checks and a stolen car. All of that will clue you in that she is not as naive as she appears.

But you also get the feeling she wishes she could be.

Like I said, she looks naive, but she has spent the last eight years having to be tough. But tough led her to drugs, the wrong guy(s), and a stretch in prison. She knows how to be tough – but tough has never worked out for her – at least in the long term.

Which is why she was uncertain on Tuesday. Because she is now on probation, and staying at the rescue mission. And she really, really needs a job, or else she loses her spot at the mission, and she is pretty sure that a safe bed to sleep in every night is what is keeping her sober and giving her the freedom to make good choices. In other words, to her, getting a job is a matter of life and death.

So, Monday, she was overjoyed when she heard she had a job doing construction clean-up, and it starts in a week. And then crestfallen when she learned she needed a new pair of steel-toed shoes before she could start. Forty dollars was between her and a job that literally is life-saving.

Tough Mickey would know how to solve this problem – but that wasn’t who she was anymore – or at least, who she didn’t want to be. Instead, she went to the mission, to the clothing closets, and called everyone in the phone book and cried and pleaded and no one had any shoes. And neither did they seem to care that she had no shoes.

When she was in prison, she had heard about Love Wins. The other inmates had told her it was a place that you would be accepted. That was safe. Where you could just… be. Which is why she was there this Tuesday, begging me to buy her a pair of shoes. And why she cried when I told her that of course we could. And why she was ecstatic when Joel took her to Walmart yesterday to try on shoes and pick the pair she wanted.

Now, you can argue that wasn’t necessary – that we could have just handed her a Walmart gift card and sent her on her way. That it wasn’t the best use of time for a volunteer to take her to the store, and that she would have been fine with a used pair someone had donated.

But any of those arguments would be missing the point. Because the point is not to get her back to work, but to figure out how to be in relationship with her. And if I am the one who decides what her shoes look like, where she gets them, or that she gets the cheapest pair, that is a lot more efficient – heck, it is a lot of things, but it isn’t relationship.

What it mostly is, is power.

We decided a long time ago that we can love people, or we can have power over people. But to date, we haven’t figured out how to do both. So, we choose love. And sometimes, love looks like shopping for shoes.”

Sometimes, love looks like shopping for shoes.

Sometimes it looks like offering water.

Sometimes it looks like sitting with someone in the dark when their lights have been turned off.

Sometimes it looks like stopping to give a hand to a friend by the side of the road who is unable to see Jesus for themselves.

Sometimes it is being a friend to someone who we really don’t like much at all.

Love sees with the eyes of Christ.

Christ sees us with the eyes of love, and sets us free from our spiritual blindness, from our sin.

Christ sees the whole world with eyes of love, and because of that he died for us, to save all of us from all our sin and brokenness and blindness.

And Christ calls us to open the eyes of our heart, and to see one another with the same eyes, the same mind, the same heart as Christ.

We must begin by loving one another right here, in this congregation, setting aside our differences and our hurt, and loving those who are still feeling hurt or wronged.

And only then are we ready to take that love out into the community, together, as the body of Christ and share it.

Because God sees us all with eyes of love, and because of that love, offers us freedom to see one another in the same way.

And that is very good news.

        

The Samaritan Woman, Jesus, John Calvin, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Living Water

John 4: 5-42

So he [Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

The woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" Jesus said to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life."

The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back."The woman answered him, "I have no husband."  Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!"

The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet.

Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth."

The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you."

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?"

Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" They left the city and were on their way to him.

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no one has brought him something to eat?" Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, 'Four months more, then comes the harvest'? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, 'One sows and another reaps.' I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor."

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I have ever done." So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world."

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Water is essential to life.

Water is easy to take for granted.

Every day the woman went to the well, for daily water for herself and her family. Just like most every woman during that time. It seems so hard to imagine having to do such a thing, in the time and place in which we now live. However, this is still the daily requirement for more people around the world than we can probably even comprehend.

According to the website water.org, every day women spend a total of 200 million hours collecting water for their families.

Every day.

That is the amount of time it would take to build 28 Empire State Buildings.

Every day.

It’s greater than the combined number of hours worked in a week by employees at Wal*Mart, United Parcel Service, McDonald's,IBM, Target, and Kroger.

Every day.

The water they collect comes from distant, often polluted sources, which they then carry back in 40 pound cans on their back.

Every day.

There are 780 million people in the world who lack access to clean water. That’s more than 2.5 times the number of people living in the United States. It’s almost one out of every eight people in the world.

All this is to say that the scene we heard in the gospel today is not far from current reality for many, many people.

Water is essential for life. And water is not easily accessible for many people on this planet.

Our youth are donating one third of the Souper Bowl of Caring proceeds from this congregation to the ongoing well project in Thika, Kenya, that has been a focus of the Presbytery of Detroit since the 1990s. Our Presbytery dedicated a well in 2004, and another one just this year. These are deep water wells which cost around $40,000 each, having to drill through bedrock to reach the water. These wells are being powered using solar energy, and they provide water to surrounding communities. But still the women must come from miles around, to collect clean water from the wells and to carry it back to their communities, day after day.

The Samaritan woman came to the well in the heat of the day. This is a contrast from the time of day we heard that Nicodemus met up with Jesus, in our story from last week.

Nicodemus came in the dark of night. The woman is at the well at high noon, when the heat is greatest.

Both of them, however, intentionally arrive at the scene of these stories at a time when nobody else was likely to be around. Nicodemus came at night so others would not know he was seeking Jesus. The woman came during the day because, as a Samaritan, she was not welcomed when the other women would come, usually in the cool of the morning, since she was not a Jew and was not welcome around other Jews.

Unlike Nicodemus, she did not expect to encounter Jesus there, or anyone else, for that matter. Unlike Nicodemus, she knew nothing about Jesus until she found him there, until he spoke to her, until he began a conversation about getting a drink of water, and moved from there into words that, like with Nicodemus, were beyond common sense and logic.

But where Nicodemus could not accept Jesus’ explanation of being born from above, the Samaritan woman seems to accept Jesus’ offer of living water, at face value. “Sir, give me some of this water, so I will not be thirsty anymore.”

She is ready for her life to be transformed from the daily drudgery of gathering water in her jug, only to empty it out for others and do it again the next day.

Her sense that Jesus is offering something more is increased as he shows how he knows everything about her.  Her trust of Jesus grows as she realizes that he does not judge or condemn her for what he knows about her life. And she begins to gain an understanding of the life transforming, life giving water he offers, as she mentions the Messiah, and he says, I am He.

And as she runs back to her village, leaving behind her jug intended for daily water, saying to the villagers, “come and see”, her eyes begin to open, and she begins to recognize him as the Messiah.

And so do the other Samaritans as they follow her to Jesus, and encourage Jesus to stay, and bear witness that Jesus is, indeed, the Anointed One, the Savior who is to come.

Living water.

We all need our daily water to survive. What is living water, and how can it be even more important to our lives than our daily water? What thirst does it quench? How is it eternal?

The theologian John Calvin, whose writings during the Reformation became the basis of our Presbyterian doctrine, provides a beautiful description of the Holy Trinity, the Triune God, that helps to explain what living water means to us, why it is foundational to our lives.

Many people have tried to explain the Holy Trinity, God in Three Persons, but words and comparisons and characteristics all seem inadequate. We speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, knowing even as we say those words, that they only partially describe the unity of God in three persons. It has its limitations, as does every attempt to describe God.

God is beyond description and comprehension.

Some people use Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer to describe the Triune God. But this implies that God has three unique and individual functions.

And that, too, is limiting.

John Calvin uses water to describe the living God, the Holy Trinity. He also freely admits that this description is limiting, that God is beyond comprehension. But then he lays out this beautiful explanation of living water.

He describes God as the wellspring, the fountain, the source. He describes Jesus as the river, the path, the way. And he describes the Holy Spirit as the current, the flow.

Thinking of the God as water, as living water, ever flowing from God the source, through Christ the river, by the ever-changing power of the Holy Spirit as current and flow, can help us to perceive the eternal presence of God, the continual relationship between God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and the way in which they are all the same, all living water, sustaining our lives for all eternity.

We sang this morning, Come thou fount of every blessing. God the source of all our blessings. God the wellspring of living water. In a few minutes we will sing I’ve Got Peace Like a River. Jesus the river that guides our path through life. The river that’s filled with living water. And in our closing hymn, the Holy Spirit, restless spirit, moving over the living water, creating its current, the flow, moving around and through and in us, calming us, exciting us, inspiring us, and bringing us strength and peace.

The living water of the one God, the salvation of the triune God, quenching our thirst for the life that truly is life. This is what Jesus offered the woman that day.

I heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu being interviewed on a radio show as I drove in this morning.

He told of a time during apartheid in South Africa when black women were all called Annie, and black men were all called boy by white South Africans. Their real names were ignored.

From the pulpit he would tell his black congregation, “when they ask your name, tell them your name is ‘God Bearer’ – because you all carry God within you. You are a vessel, filled with the living God. And, he said, those elderly women left the church standing a little bit taller, their backs straighter, seeing themselves as God Bearers.

We are all God bearers. We are vessels, carrying living water within us.

The Samaritan woman left her jug and ran back to the village – she had realized she was a vessel of living water. Hearing Jesus’ words, recognizing him as the Messiah – she realized that she was a jug of living water herself.

The apostle Paul tells us that we hold this treasure in clay jars. We are ordinary vessels, each and every one of us, all filled to overflowing with an abundance of living water.

Just as the Samaritan woman went to the village, overflowing with the wonder that she shared with everyone there – so too are we called and filled and equipped to carry this living water out into the world with joy, and to share it with everyone who is thirsty.