Ruth Wilkinson - Sam and the Darkness (March 19 23)

In this passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus encounters a man who was blind from birth. His disciples ask if the man's blindness was a result of his or his parents' sin, but Jesus explains that it happened so that the works of God could be displayed in him. Jesus then spits on the ground, makes mud with his saliva, and puts it on the man's eyes. He instructs the man to wash in the pool of Siloam, and when the man does, he is able to see. The man's neighbors and others are amazed and question if he is really the same person who was blind. The man insists that he is and tells them how Jesus healed him. The religious leaders interrogate the man and accuse Jesus of being a sinner, but the man defends Jesus, saying that if he were not from God, he wouldn't have been able to heal him. The leaders become angry and throw the man out. Jesus later finds the man and asks if Good morning. Reading this morning in the Gospel of John, chapter 9, starting at verse 1. As Jesus 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? Neither this man nor his parents sinned, said Jesus. But this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 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. After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva and put it on the man's eyes. Go, he told him, wash in the pool of Siloam. This word means sent. So the man went and washed and came home seeing. His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg? Some claimed that he was. Others said, No, he only looks like him. But he himself insisted, I am the man. How then were your eyes opened? They asked. He replied, The man they called Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go down to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed and then I could see. Where is this man? They asked him. I don't know, he said. To verse 24. A second time, they summoned the man who had been blind. Give glory to God by telling the truth, they said. We know this man is a sinner. He replied, Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind, but now I see. Then they asked him, What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered, I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too? Then they hurled insults at him and said, You are this man's disciple. We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses. But as for this fellow, we don't even know where he came from. The man answered, Now that is remarkable. You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. To this, they replied, You were steeped in sin at birth. How dare you lecture us? And they threw him out. Jesus heard that they had thrown him out. And when he found him, he said, Do you believe in the Son of Man? Who is he, sir? The man asked. Tell me so that I may believe in him. Jesus said, You have now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking to you. The gospel of Christ. Thank you, Ken. That is the word of the Lord. A number of years ago, back when our kids were still actually kids, my family went on a vacation to Kentucky. The state of Kentucky has an amazing set of parks. State parks. You should check them out. And one of the best features that these parks have is a system of caves. These amazing underground caves. And I love exploring caves. It's like they're all different and they're all amazing. And I just love doing that. And there are sort of two kinds of caves. The first kind of caves is what they call improved caves. An improved cave is one that has been completely mapped. And it has been made safe for tourists, like moi and my family, by the addition of things like electric lights. And sometimes there are stairs. Sometimes there are even elevators. There are paths marked through. There are handrails. And there are guided tours. And my absolute favorite part of the guided tours in these caves is when you get to a space that's big enough for everybody to stand in and the tour guide gets everybody to stand still and they tell you, okay, find a handrail or hold on to the person standing next to you as a point of reference. And then they say, three, two, one. And they turn out the light. And I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but being in the dark underground is not the same as closing your eyes. It is not the same as being in your room with the windows, with the curtains drawn. Being underground and in the dark, it is complete. It is thick. It is heavy. It is a darkness that you can feel. It's a darkness that is a complete absence of information coming into your brain so that not long after the lights go out you start to lose your sense of balance and you can even, Ken is nodding, and you can even lose your sense of up and down. And we stand in the darkness listening to the guide telling us a story of long ago when people first came to Matthew's cave and they got a little bit turned around and they couldn't find their way back out before their oil ran out. And then they were utterly lost. And then the guide turns the lights back on and everybody goes, oh wow. And we can breathe again. So after a few guided tours, my family sort of felt like we were ready to try an unimproved cave. We figured we were ready. We were prepared. So we looked at the map and we chose one on the map that looked like a good fit for us and we followed all the rules and we checked in at the park office, told them where we were going, when we were going to be there, how many people were going into the cave. We showed them our flashlights. We showed them that our flashlights worked. We told them that we would check in with them when we finished our tour so that they would know not to come looking for us when the sun went down. And off we went. Now the cave that we chose, and this is actually a picture I found online. It's kind of nondescript. But the cave that we chose was actually open at both ends. So it was a tunnel. It was a winding tunnel through this just mountain of bedrock, this living rock. But it had been carved by water over time. So we thought this would be a cool one to explore. So we went on in with our flashlights. Now the cave is about a kilometer and a half long. It's not really super long. And it was really cool. It was really interesting. And we're having fun, and we're having our adventure here. But after a while, the novelty started to wear off. And there's nothing to look at. There weren't even bats or anything like that. It was bats for a kilometer and a half in our little pocket of flashlight light. So after a while, we started thinking, okay, well, this has been fun, but maybe enough is enough. So we weren't sure how far we'd gone. We didn't know how long we'd been because none of us was wearing a watch. So we had this great idea, and we stood still, and we found something that we could touch as a point of balance. And we turned off our flashlights, and we stood there in that dark, just four heartbeats, surrounded by this bedrock. And it didn't take long for our eyes to start to adjust just a little bit. And we could see that in one direction, it was that heavy, thick black. And when we looked in the other direction, we could see just a hint of gray, just the hintest hint. Is that a word, hintest? The slightest hint of gray. And we knew that we were closer to our destination than we were from our starting point. So we turned on our flashlights, and off we went, and we finished our trek through this tunnel, and we came out into the green living light of the Kentucky forest. Jesus, when Ken read this story for us this morning, the story that is happening in Jesus' life right then, Jesus is closer to his destination than he is from his starting point. He knows what's behind him. He knows what's ahead of him. And he started warning his apostles. He started warning his disciples of what is going to happen, even though they don't get it, and promising them that it's going to be okay, but we have to go through this experience. I am going to be killed. The Gospel of John is kind of unique. It has a number of stories in it that aren't found in the other Gospels. John was just writing from his heart, writing from his own memories, and this is one of the stories that isn't found in any of the other Gospels. John has a particular focus in his writing. He is focusing on the fact that Jesus is Messiah, that he is there in the Jewish nation to fulfill a promise given to the world through the Jewish nation. And John, he's very skillful. He's very, very intentional about the pacing of the story that he's telling. And it's kind of interesting when you look at it. There are 21 chapters in the Book of John. I'm getting into numbers. I don't usually do math, but this is kind of interesting. There's 21 chapters in the Book of John. The first eight chapters are fairly action-packed. They focus on what John calls sign miracles, and they're called sign miracles because they tell us something. They have information in them that points us towards Jesus being the Messiah. So that's John's main focus. The first five of seven sign miracles happen in that first chunk of eight chapters. In those eight chapters, Jesus changes water into wine, he heals a child, he heals a man, he feeds 5,000 people with scraps of bread, and he walks on the water. And in between doing all that stuff, he has that amazing conversation with Nicodemus about why he has come to the world. He has that amazing conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well about who he was and how he cared for people. Jesus, in those chapters, has the showdown in the temple with the Pharisees where he saves the life of the woman caught in adultery and gives her a new opportunity to begin again. And he irritates the religious leaders to the point where they are ready to kill him. And in between all that, Jesus is teaching and teaching and teaching and teaching his apostles and preparing them and warning them that he will be killed and he will no longer be with them. That first eight chapters covers three years of Jesus' ministry. The last ten chapters of John covers about two or three weeks. In my Bible, the first eight chapters, the first three years of Jesus' life are 15 pages of print. The final two or three weeks of Jesus' life are 15 pages of print. John has brought us to the point, this pivoting point of this story, which is where things really start to turn. And then he goes into slowing the story down and telling those final, final weeks of Jesus' life. Now, my temptation, as a bit of a Bible geek, is to really dig into this story because there's so much going on here. There are so many hints and subtexts, things that Jesus did and the way he did them and the things that people said and the things that people didn't say and just the whole thing of how this was, again, pointing towards the fact that Jesus was the Messiah. I love just to get into that. You know, I could get into that and we would be here for hours and you would all be Googling Uber Eats Northumberland and possibly chewing your own legs off to escape. I don't know. But what I have to come back to in this, you know, I mean, I've got like 20 minutes, 25 minutes. So what I come back to this again and again and again is what is Jesus doing and where is God in this story? I heard a really cool quote recently. Somebody said, the text of the Bible does not just want to say something. The text of the Bible wants to do something. These words aren't on the page just for information. The words on these pages are a power for transformation and for change in our lives. The text doesn't just want to speak. The text wants to do something. So when I look at this story, the story that is sandwiched in between the first three years of Jesus' ministry and the final three weeks of Jesus' earthly life, I look at this story and I ask myself, what is this story inviting us to do? What is this story demanding of us? What is this story offering us as an opportunity? Sam and the religious leaders had seen the same miracle. They were sharing the same experience. They heard the same testimony. They were starting in the same place. But if you look at those words on those pages, you can see how Sam and the religious leaders, although they start in the same place, they go in opposite directions. Let me tell you what I mean. So Sam has just got his sight back. He was born blind. He's never seen anything ever in his life and he gets his sight back. The first thing he does is go home. He goes back to his parents' house and I always kind of think this is sort of an interesting thing to think about. This is a man who was born blind. He's gotten to know the city that he lives in without sight. He finds his way around by counting steps, by listening for audio cues, by feeling for obstacles with his stick. And then suddenly he's got his sight and I sort of wonder if he might have on his way back home every now and then had to close his eyes to get his bearings and figure out where he was. But he finds his way home and he finds his way suddenly in an argument. He's in a debate. People are upset at what has happened to him. So many of the first faces that Sam saw in his life were angry or doubting or afraid. So Sam is beginning in the dark. And Sam's first response to Jesus is I don't know. I have no idea. I don't know who he is. I know his name is Jesus. I know what he has done for me. I can't even tell you what he looks like. So Sam starts in the dark knowing that he does not know. So then he goes to the next step and he says okay, well what do I know? I know that he performed a miracle. I know that Moses and Elijah and Elisha performed miracles and they were prophets. So maybe Jesus is a prophet. So Sam's next step is that Jesus is a good man. He goes from I don't know to Jesus is a good man. And his next step, and you can sort of see that he's influenced by his culture in this. This is a culture where Sam grew up being told and you can see this at the beginning of the story and at the end of the story that the reason he was blind was because either he sinned in the womb and yeah, that's a thing or my parents sinned. I'm blind because it's somebody's fault and it's probably my own fault in some way. So this is the culture he grew up in. If there's something wrong with you it's because you did something wrong. So Sam's next step in understanding who Jesus is is to say well if God did what Jesus asked Jesus must be good. And his logic isn't perfect there but he arrives at the right conclusion. He comes to the point where he understands that Jesus is from God. So we've gone from I don't know to he's a good man to he's from God and then finally at the end of the story when Sam has been completely I'm just calling him Sam because Sam's a good name. In case you were wondering where that came from it's not in there. When Sam has been let down by his family he has been let down by the religious leaders in his community. He's been let down by his neighbors. He's actually been kicked out of the synagogue which was a practice that you can find traced back into the Old Testament law. He has been kicked out and Jesus comes to look for him. And when Jesus comes to look for him and he finally meets Jesus face to face and maybe this is the first friendly face he has actually seen. Sam realizes okay if it's not you Jesus then it's nobody. And he says those amazing words Lord I believe. Maybe he didn't know exactly what it was that he believed but he believed in Jesus. And that was an important huge step. Now the religious leaders they start in the same place as Sam with a bit of an advantage because they've had the opportunity to study they've had the opportunity to learn about what they were expecting the Messiah to be it was part of their job to actually look for the Messiah and to recognize him when he came. And I give them credit they start by asking questions. They're starting in the dark and like Sam they know they don't know everything but they're willing to ask questions. Their next step is that they want to do the right thing. They want to get this right because the Messiah that's a big deal. They don't want to miss him when he comes they don't want to misidentify someone and then find out they were wrong. But they run up against the fact that Jesus broke a law. They can't get past the fact that he broke a law. He broke the Sabbath law by healing on the Sabbath. And yeah, sure they would admit that the prophets, Elijah and Elisha and Moses were not perfect either. They were all sinners in one way or another. But Jesus, this is different because he is repeatedly and unrepentantly breaking the Sabbath law. So unlike Sam who comes to the conclusion that Jesus is a good man the Pharisees, the religious leaders come to the conclusion that he is a sinful man. And it's at this point that the religious leaders make their biggest mistake and they stop asking questions. They stop listening to the answers that they receive because Jesus did not meet their test. He did not meet their expectations. He did not look like what they thought he should look like. So rather than as Sam coming to the understanding that Jesus was from God they came to the conclusion that Jesus was a false prophet and therefore a threat. And then they take that final step. And the growing number of them over the next couple of chapters double down on their doubts. They double down on no, this man is not from God. This man is not a prophet. This man is not a Messiah. He is a threat. He is not only corrupt he is corrupting and everybody he comes in contact with is now radioactive and has to be kicked out like they kicked out Sam. Because Sam had been corrupted. They decided that they knew what they knew and they knew enough and they knew what they needed to do. And they started to take steps to shut Jesus down. Those are the two opposite responses that we see. We see Sam moving closer and closer and closer to Jesus and we see the Pharisees and the religious leaders moving further and further and further away. So what is the opportunity that Scripture offers us here? What is our challenge? What is it that the Scripture is calling us to do? Well, we have a choice. How are we going to respond to Jesus? Who is this man? There is a third response that we see in this story and that third response is in Sam's neighbors, in his parents. They figure that if they just sort of ignore the problem it will go away. If they wait long enough the questions will be answered by somebody else and they won't have to think about it. These are our three possible responses to Jesus. Walking away. Walking towards. Or standing in the tunnel with our flashlight looking around and thinking, oh yeah, this is cool. And just staying there until the battery wears out. In every season of our lives not in every day not in every moment but in every season of our lives Jesus is presenting us with a challenge. Who do you say I am? Sometimes it's for those of us who have not yet said yes to that gospel call to surrender our lives, to surrender our hearts, to turn our lives over to his loving care. And sometimes for those of us who are in that place that decision is, am I even just going to take the first step towards Jesus? Am I going to, even though I don't understand absolutely everything yet, I'm going to say yes, Lord. If it's not you, it's nobody. Or are we going to say, no no, it's just too ridiculous. It doesn't sound like what I'm expecting the good news to sound like. It doesn't sound the same as what some things I've heard on the internet. It's not the same as what I've read in some books. So, it doesn't match my expectations. Jesus does not meet my standards. So it's got to be something else. And we walk away. Or is it going to be for those of us sometimes who are in that moment of making a decision to just say, you know what, I have enough light here already. I have my flashlight. I've got myself. I've got my own spirituality. I've got my own thoughts. I've got my own intelligence. I've got my flashlight. And I am just fine where I am. And this is all really cool. And I'm just going to stay here. Well, that's not really an option. Standing still when it comes to Jesus is not an option. Jesus is moving towards you. Jesus is the light. He is coming to find you like light came to find us in the middle of that tunnel. Like Jesus came to find Sam after he had been kicked out. The light is coming to find you. And you have the choice of walking towards it or of walking away. If that's a decision that you have not made, if that is something that you are still wrestling with, talk to me, talk to Jeff. Ask us. What the heck is the hell about that? Because we would love to have that conversation with you. But standing still is not an option. Because Jesus is not standing still. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, You know our hearts. You know our minds. You know how hard we try to get things right. You know how hard we try to find truth. You know how hard it is. You know how sometimes we look in the wrong places. God, we thank you for what you did for Sam that day. We thank you for giving him his physical sight. We thank you for giving him his spiritual sight and a new beginning. And we thank you for the religious leaders who were willing like Nicodemus to ask questions and to listen to the answers and to give you a fair hearing and to be willing to walk towards your light. God, I pray that you will speak to each of us in a way that is powerful, personal, irresistible. Give us the wisdom to know when to start walking towards you to recognize you're not just a good man. You're not just from God. You are the God who comes to look for us. And especially as we walk through the Easter season, help us to understand, even for those of us who've been on this path of faith for a long time, remind us. Don't ever let us forget how much you love us and how much you've done for us and how much you have for us. Give us the wisdom of the blind man. Give us the wisdom of the man who is alone in the world to know that you are the light. And we need to walk towards you, just as you are walking towards us. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.