Vintage

Series: Follow Me into the Light

John 9:1-5

You notice that no candles are lit this morning, which is a little bit different for HarborPointe. Because I want to highlight one candle. I want this candle to represent my candle and your candle… the light that you and I have been given while we are here on this earth. I realize that most of your candles are bigger than mine. Your wick is a little bit longer than mine. You have a bit more wax… but the truth of the matter is that relatively speaking none of us have all that much time here on this earth… and someday in the not too distant future, it will be extinguished.

Now, the question that I would like to raise this morning is this: What are you going to do with your candle? What are you going to do with the light of life that burns within you? What are you going to do to make your light count?

In Jesus’ day, like ours, certain people were viewed as discards. You know what a discard is don’t you? In certain card games you get the opportunity to throw some cards away. You discard the ones you don’t particularly like. You get rid of the cards that don’t seem to fit your hand.

Unfortunately, in the game of life, certain people have become discards as well. They don’t look right, act right, talk right… so we end up discarding them. We keep the ones that we think will make our hand the hand that is a really good one. What happens to the discards? Well, they just have to make it on their own.

How many of you at one time or another have been a discard in someone else’s hand?

In Jesus’ day, there were a whole pile of discards. Some of these discards were couldn’t walk. They were called lame. Even today we talk about lame jokes… they can’t carry themselves… they aren’t well support. Lame were discards

Then there were the lepers. You know they were discards. Looked awful. Smelled putrid. And above all, were contagious to be around. You made those people shout “Unclean! Unclean!”

The list went on of discards.

And to add insult to injury, the religious people of Jesus’ day were saying: “You know what, the reason these discards have become discards is because God is judging them. Either they have sinned or their parents have sinned.” So these people went around believing that not only were they discarded by everyone around them, but that they were discarded by God himself.

Some of us have been in that same position. We believe we have been discarded by others and by God.

Among the group of discards were the blind people. That is the context for our story in John 9.

Blind from Birth

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

John 9:1-2 (NIV)

You would have hoped that this question would have come from the Pharisees… or some group of people that just didn’t get what Jesus’ ministry was all about. But the question came from Jesus’ own disciples…the people who had heard Jesus preach and teach… the people who had seen Jesus minister and reach out.

At the very beginning of his public ministry, Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth and entered the synagogue in which he grew up from childhood and opened up the scroll of Isaiah the prophet and began to read:

Recovery of Sight

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke 4:18-19 (NIV)

When John the Baptist was imprisoned, he began to question lots of things, including whether or not Jesus was truly the Messiah after all. Jesus told John’s disciples to go back to John and give him this report:

Blind Receive Sight

The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.

Matthew 11:5 (NIV)

Discards of all kinds are finding help and hope. And at the very forefront, the blind are receiving sight.

But having heard Jesus teaching and preaching and having seen Jesus’ ministry of healing, Jesus’ closet disciples just didn’t get it. So they blurt out what comes into their head. What sin caused this guy to be blind? They could have added: “Isn’t it good that we haven’t sinned like this guy or we might be blind as well.”

And given how obtuse the disciples could be at times, I wonder if what they were saying wasn’t overheard by the blind man himself. “If God had already cursed them, what more could they do to make thing worse?” After all, you are not dealing with a regular person… you are dealing with a discard.

Let me ask you a question: Who have you discarded? Is it someone whose lifestyle you don’t approve? Someone who looks different, acts different, dresses different, talks different? I think all of us have some discards in our life… all of us except Jesus. Robert Coles, a Harvard Psychiatrist who wrote several books about child development including The Spiritual Life of Children writes:

Dorothy Day

… I think back to my days of working in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker soup kitchen. One afternoon, after several of us had struggled with a “wino,” a “Bowery bum,” an angry, cursing, truculent man of fifty or so, with long gray hair, a full, scraggly beard, a huge scar on his right cheek, a mouth with virtually no teeth, and bloodshot eyes, one of which had a terrible tic, she told us, “For all we know he might be God Himself come here to test us, so let us treat him as an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful one we can imagine.” At the time I had a great deal of trouble seeing God in that face… “and yet,” as Dorothy Day would sometimes say, never finishing her sentence, thereby leaving open any number of possibilities.

Robert Coles (The Spiritual Life of Children) pp 67-68

Or as Mother Teresa used to say:

Jesus in Disguise

Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

Mother Teresa

Most of us are way too quick to discard people. How many of you are grateful that Jesus doesn’t discard very quickly? When Jesus saw the blind man in question he said:

Works of God

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

John 9:3 (NIV)

Quite frankly, I believe this is one of the most comforting and encouraging passages in all the Bible. I have often asked myself, “Why didn’t this or that work out in my life?” The answer is neither… it is so the works of God might be revealed

If everything works out magically well, we have no need for the works of God.

I want to point out something. I used to believe that the works of God could only be displayed by healing the blind man. But could it be that in some sense the blind man was further down the path toward wholeness than the disciples who thought they had things all together?

Could it be that the blind man had a harder time seeing discards than people who had their sight intact. The blind man isn’t prejudiced against those people who didn’t look right. In this way the works of God were displayed in him.

And then, the works of God were displayed in him by his courage to face an adversity day by day since the day he was born. Certainly courage is a display of the works of God.

But maybe most of all, the blind man displays the works of God by allowing Jesus to enter his life. That never happens unless we conclude we have a need… we are blind. Each of us needs to be able to say that I am blind before we can see.

Jesus later said to the Pharisees:

Your Guilt Remains

Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”

John 9:41 (NIV)

Then Jesus makes another remarkable assertion. Your need is my opportunity to do the work of God. Your need is my opportunity to shine Jesus’ light. Where can the light shine the brightest? Where it is most dark. And where is it darkest? Among the discards…

Night is Coming

“As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

John 9:4-5 (NIV)

Some of us are a bit neurotic here at HarborPointe. We look at a passage like this and we think we are supposed to be working all the time… non stop… pedal to the medal… There are all kinds of people in need floating around all over the place.

On Christmas Even someone came up to Ann and asked her for some money. And Ann usually doesn’t just give money away, but she told me that for some reason she felt led to do so. And she did.

Wouldn’t you know, that 2 weeks later someone came up to me and asked for 75 cents… eventually I gave him a card and invited him to come to HarborPointe…and then he said: “I already have this card. Your wife gave it to me on Christmas eve…

Then I said, well you are into my wife and me for some money… now you have to come to church.

People are out there, in need. And you can always be doing the work…

But what, fundamentally, is the work of God? What fundamentally can you and I do to shine the light until the nighttime comes… until the day of the Lord comes?

I think it has something to do with understanding that Jesus is the light of the world and the closer we get to that light, the more effective our work becomes… and the more we drift into the darkness the less effective our work becomes. It is not a matter of going and doing… it is a matter of drawing close to the light.

I think the Apostle Paul wrestled with that question when he was writing to the church at Thesalonika. Here is a church that Paul founded, but it was being torn apart by a variety of theological perspectives. There was a strong belief in the imminent return of Jesus… so strong in fact that some people were quitting their jobs in order to prepare themselves.

I think others were saying: If the world is coming to an end, might as well eat, drink and make merry…

This is what Jesus says:

Children of Light

You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.

1 Thessalonians 5:5-8 (NIV)

What does a breastplate do? It protects the heart. A lot of us want to protect our heart by not getting too close to anyone else. A lot of us want to protect our heart by becoming cold and distant. A lot of us want to protect our heart by pretending we don’t care. A lot of us protect our heart by getting angry and lashing out.

But Paul says you are a child of the light. You protect your heart with faith and love. Some dogs protect themselves by bearing their teeth and growling. Out dog Missy protects herself by being cute.

How do you protect your mind? Some people feel they will protect their mind by thinking negative thoughts. They will protect themselves… nothing worse can happen than what I am already prepared for.

But Jesus invites us to protect our minds with the hope of salvation. God has something really good in store for us. The next chapter is the very best chapter of all.

Some of the concluding words in the Pauls letter to the Thessalonians is this:

Work of God

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (NIV)

Are you doing your work? In the darkness you are sleeping or you are drunk. But in the daylight, in the light of the world you are rejoicing, praying, giving thanks… that is the work you are doing.

Guess what? Discards can rejoice and pray an give thanks. You don’t have to have a whole lot going for you to rejoice that you have air to breathe… you don’t have to have a whole lot to pray… you don’t have to have a whole lot to do God’s will…

Conclusion: Wouldn’t it be great that at the end of your life you could hear Jesus say: “Do you know what, you have joined me in becoming the light of the world. I would like you to light a candle. Please find a candle and light it. And then move over by the cross. Once you have lit a candle, please move to the cross.

The night is coming… and all the lights go out. The night is coming when no one can work. The night is coming when the only light that shines will be Jesus’. The light you have been given is to give glory to God.