Seeing With Different Eyes

A Sermon for IV Lent                                                            All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC March 30, 1014                                                                     Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

1 Samuel 16:1-13              Ephesians 5:8-14              John 9:1-41         Psalm 23 

Seeing With Different Eyes

The lessons for today have as their theme the tension between seeing as God sees versus seeing with human vision alone. We have the story of Samuel, who had guessed wrong about choosing Saul as King of Israel because Samuel had looked only at the outside of Saul and had missed the vision of the troubled man whose insecurity would prove disastrous. In this story, God sends him to Bethlehem to look over the sons of Jesse as suitable successors to Saul. Samuel still wants to look only at outside appearances, but God guides him to look deeper and choose David.  

The Psalmist will later have a song attributed to David, the 23^rd Psalm, which reflects a person who is surrounded by his enemies but knows that he sees through God’s eyes what cannot be seen with the eyes of humans - that the Lord is his shepherd and sets a table before him in the presence of his enemies.

This theme of the tension between God’s vision and human blindness will continue through all the Bible. For instance, it is the center of the message of the seers - the people who see - the prophets, such as the prophet Jeremiah who sees with God’s eyes and declares, “Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.” 

Jesus lives his ministry as one who is a prophet, who sees with God’s vision, but also one who brings God’s vision to life and lives it in everyday life. The Evangelist John recounted the story of Jesus and the man born blind as a motif of the tension between human blindness and divine vision, and his focus is to let each of those of us who follow Jesus to continue to intervene and resolve this tension. The ministry of Jesus brings the man born blind a new vision, but the ones who see with only human eyes continue to live in a deep spiritual blindness. John will call that kind of blindness “sin”. We have a mistaken tendency to be literal and see “sin” as things we do that are bad in and of themselves and “sinners” as bad people. However, the Biblical definition of “sin” is about missing the point of life.  And you and I are sinners when we miss the point. We are, at times, incredibly blind to the reality of God’s presence in the space within and between us, and Lent is the time when we focus on our tendency to rely on human vision alone and thereby enter into the darkness of divine blindness.

The 17^th Century Poet John Milton went completely blind when he was in middle age, and he wondered of what further use he was. He had been very successful in Puritan political circles and in writing, but when he went blind, he feared it would end his ability to write. This was long before he was to write his greatest poetry, such as Paradise Lost, and, as part of his prayers, he wrote a sonnet about his discussion with God about the blindness.

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

The blindness becomes his opportunity to see with God’s vision, and he enters into the ancient myths and sees the dreams of God with his poetry. Four years after his human blindness begins, he is even able to have a second marriage in which he never sees his wife with his human eyes, but he sees her with the divine vision of love. She will die in childbirth, and when she dies, he writes another sonnet as his prayer of dealing with the pain of his loss and with the hope that, in the life to come, he will see her fully as he sees her now in his dreams.

 METHOUGHT I saw my late espoused Saint
   Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
   Whom Joves great Son to her glad Husband gave,
   Rescu'd from death by force though pale and faint.
Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint,
   Purification in the old Law did save,
   And such, as yet once more I trust to have
   Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
   Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight,
   Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
   But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
   I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

One of the reasons that I have spent so much energy on dreams is because I think that, as we busily go around in this life, we have selective human blindness to our world, our very selves, our neighbors, and our God. In the eight hours when we no longer are using our eyes because they are shut, we are visited with hints of God’s vision in our dreams. Our ego, our human thinking, wants to have nothing to do with these distractions because they get in the way of our struggle to consume more stuff and have more experiences, to live with more but to skate blindly over the surface. Our task is to bring the unconscious to consciousness and to see what God might be showing us so that we might live fully in this life – and so that we might also see the life that is still to come. 

 I know I have hit you with two poems already, but I am going to go for a “three-peat” with another poem about seeing, this one by Mary Oliver, When Death Comes:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.