Seeing, Observing, Beholding
Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 2, 2008
1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41
O God, you have given us eyes not only to see, but to observe, to perceive and ponder, to behold the world, ourselves and others in the light of your glory and your eternity, help us again and again to "see as you see" the spark of your spirit becoming visible and dwelling in the heart of all things. Amen.
Dear friends, if there is one unified theme in today's readings it is the interplay of sight and light, blindness and vision. The marvelous story of the anointing of David by the prophet Samuel has the memorable words: "mortals look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." On the other hand the author feels compelled to pay some attention to David's "outer appearance," by referring to the fact that "he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome." The mystic author of Ephesians ponders how everything that becomes visible is light and thus that author inadvertently stumbles upon a quite modern scientific thought, namely that all of the created matter of the universe is in a sense frozen light, light incarnate. How could that author have known that we human beings and everything else for that matter are made of stardust, light transformed? And finally, we have the wonderful Gospel story today of the young man born blind, whose sight is restored, in whom God's glory becomes visible and the magnificent word of the glorified Lord Jesus Christ: I am the light of the world. Today's Gospel is perhaps the longest Gospel reading in the whole lectionary. To shorten it would be to do it damage. Its every detail invites us to ponder, sometimes with a smile and perhaps sometimes with a furrowed brow of wonderment. Did you feel the humorous irony in the blind man's question to the Pharisees, "Do you also want to become his disciples?" Or the parents' word: "Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself." Did you feel it in the Pharisees questions at the end, "Surely, we are not blind, are we?" Indeed: sight and light, blindness and vision are the themes, the gold threads running through all of the readings this morning.
Remember the old adage, we can't see the forest for the trees? The truth of that pithy proverb has actually been proven by psychological research. Perhaps you've heard of the experiment involving a basketball game and someone in a gorilla suit. The researchers asked themselves this question: How much, if anything, of our visual world do we perceive when we are not attending to it? This is what they did. They asked people to pay attention to the ball while watching a basketball game, focus on where the ball is at any given moment. At some point in the game a person wearing a gorilla suit walks across the basketball court, several times. No one notices this extraordinary thing. They're all paying attention to the ball and don't see the gorilla. In the field of psychology this discovery was given the fancy name, inattentional blindness. It simply designates the fact of how little we actually see when we are not paying attention or when our attention is focused elsewhere. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I've seen recently: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." I wonder: how much of current events do we miss because we're paying attention to the trials and tribulations of Britney Spears?
Dear friends, the Good News of the Gospel today is this: we were blind, but now we see. The Good News of the Gospel is that Jesus has refocused our attention on God and God's love. The Good News is that Jesus has overcome our inattentional blindness and opened the world of divine grace and forgiveness, divine truth and beauty.
Remember high school grammar and the grammatical rules about positive, comparative and superlative adjectives? You know: good, better, best, lovely, lovelier, loveliest? Let us imagine that the verbs for our senses also have such intensifiers. How about this: see, observe, behold. Or this: hear, listen, hearken. How true that we so frequently see but do not observe, that we hear but do not listen! How seldom do we ever truly behold something or truly hearken to something. We are usually too busy, too distracted, too pre-occupied. Every year, dear friends, Lent is an intentional call to observe and to listen, to behold and to hearken. Lent calls us to a more intense living and an intentional perceiving of ourselves, our neighbors, our world and, not least of all, God.
Dear friends, this coming week we would do well to ask ourselves from time to time the question: What gorilla is walking across the basketball court of our lives which we have not seen? But also this question: What evidence of God's glory and grace is present in our lives, which we have not seen? When we ask such questions we are, in the words of the poet, W.H. Auden, truly praying. This is what he said about prayer: "To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself." May we do so. Amen.
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