March 2, 2008
The Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year A)
(Children’s Sermon)
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
In the time of Jesus people believed that if someone was sick or had bad luck it was because God was punishing them – the same way you are sent to your room or lose privileges when you do something wrong.
In the story from the gospel that we hear this morning, Jesus is trying to tell the people they have it all wrong. Bad things do not happen to us. God does not even send bad things our way to punish us. Indeed, God doesn’t send bad things at all; we mange to find them all by ourselves.
In this story Jesus is saying that God is with us in the bad times of our lives and will help us “see” the way out.
The other thing Jesus is trying to tell people is that HE is the truth, and that those who see him for who he is will know God as they never have before. They will know God, and they will know truth. Have you ever heard the song “Amazing Grace?” It is one of my favorites, and mostly because it has one line in it that I think says the truth of this whole long gospel in just a few words. That line is, “I was blind but now I see.”
In this passage Jesus is trying to get everyone to see: first, to realize that sin and seeing have nothing to do with each other, and then that seeing is when you look at the world knowing God loves you and is there for you – even when you do make mistakes and are paying the price for those mistakes.
I need a volunteer to help me illustrate this.
(Put blindfold on a volunteer child. "Can you see?")
Hand an object to another child and ask him/her to describe it to the now “blind person” without saying what it is. Ask the “blind person” if he/she knows what the object is . . . then take off the blindfold and let the child see it.
There are many times in our lives when we can’t see, not because we have a blindfold on, but because we are blinded by our own thoughts or ideas or just because we simply don’t know any better . . . yet!!! And then something wonderful will happen, and we will see the whole world differently from how we have before.
When I was little, I lived in a town called Fresno in California. And the road signs kept pointing to the road to “Yose-mite.” I also heard people speak often of Yosemite; but for several years I thought that “Yose-mite” and Yosemite were two different places. Then one day I took that road which the signs said to take, knowing I wanted to go to Yosemite, and I found “Yose-mite” pronounced correctly was really Yosemite! Well, here in Boston we can do that all the time. We know Worcester and Woburn aren’t spelled like they are said. We even know that Rte. 95 is really Rte. 128!
I can remember when I was learning to read and when the letters actually began to make sense to me as words. I felt as though I had been blind but all of a sudden I could see. Then I could see words I recognized in whole pages of words. The same was true when I was learning Spanish. I would hear or see words that made everything fall into place.
What Jesus wanted the people to know that morning was that spiritual blindness, or social blindness, can be healed if we listen to God. If we follow the instructions of Jesus, we will see the world the way God sees it and it will be like having the blindfold taken off.
The way we keep from getting the blindfold on ourselves is to listen to God when we pray and also to listen to God’s people, our friends here and our families and all the people that we love. For God will speak truth through others, especially when we don’t want to hear it. And sometimes hearing that truth will be like seeing for the very first time.
May all our blindfolds become bandanas so that we may see the world and each other as God does.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd