“The Glory of God”
St. John 9:1-41
4th Sunday in Lent – March 2, 2008
Pastor Chip Winter

            Grace to you and Peace, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon is from the Gospel appointed for this date.
            My dear family in Christ, one can't help but wonder how this man and his parents felt about being the object of a theological dispute. Here is a man who has been blind from birth. And what was the response of Jesus' disciples? They launch into a theoretical discussion with Jesus: "Who sinned first this man or his parents that he was born blind?"
            Put yourself in the place of this man.  Imagine that the other day you awoke with a wretched sore throat. At a meeting that morning you said to some of the gathered participants, "I've got a horribly sore throat; I can hardly talk. I don't know how much I'll be able to contribute to this meeting."
            With that the two people to whom you said this launched into an energetic conversation on the origins of sore throats: "I heard that if you don't intake enough vitamin C you are a candidate for lots of sore throats." The other replies, "People just don't take good care of themselves anymore. At this time of year people ought to know that with the constant changes of weather a sore throat is always a possibility – they don’t dress warmly enough."
            On and on they went – and you were tempted to turn away in disgust. What you wanted was a modicum of sympathy, not a debate on how you had failed to take good care of yourself.  For all that was said it sounded like you had no one to blame but yourself for you sore throat!
            If you and I could feel this way about a theoretical debate over a sore throat, think how this poor man born blind felt about the disciples' theological discussion! You're blind? Well now, let's get out our Bibles and see if we can find good material on the issue of the moral origins of blindness.
            I thought of this poor man and the response of the disciples a few years ago when that terrible Tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas. In just a few horrible moments whole villages were engulfed by killer waves, swept out to sea in deaths unimaginable.
            In the days that followed some pastors with whom I am in contact received telephone calls from their local reporters. These calls often sounded something like this: "I'm doing a story on the Tsunami and its aftermath. How do you, as a person of faith, explain this event?"
            At first a pastor might be tempted to reply, "How do I explain it? Well, I'm not an oceanographer myself but I think that the earth's crust cools, the plates shift, an earthquake happens, and then the tremors set off huge waves out at sea. At least that's what I picked up on the Weather and Discovery Channels."
            But that’s not what the reporter is looking for. He asks a pastor, a person like me, this question specifically because I am "a person of faith." What do people of faith say in the face of a terrible Tsunami? What is really meant is, "You say you believe in a good God. Well, how could a good God, a powerful good God, allow something like this to happen?"
            It's an old question that is usually listed under the theological heading of "theodicy" - justifying the ways of God to humanity. If God is all powerful and good, how could this all powerful God allow bad things to happen to good people? That's theodicy. Either God must not be all powerful or God must not be all good, if there are terribly unjust events that happen to people in this world.
            Now a person is really rather fortunate when such a call as, "How do people of faith explain this Tsunami?" comes after they have just visited a woman who is dying of cancer.  It puts the question into perspective, into context. And context is terribly important.
            One of the first things to note is that such a question assumes that huge human suffering is big news. And it is big news, but it’s suffering of a specific sort that’s the biggest.  Such a question is not very frequently asked when we hear that every 83 seconds, on average, we experience the death of a person who doesn’t know Jesus – less than every minute and a half.  For that person’s eternal well-being, we do no hold out much hope.  Jesus is the way, the truth and the life – no one comes to the Father but by Him. 
            Nor is a question like that posited on the statistic that last night something like ten thousand children died of hunger and malnutrition around the world. I got no phone call asking, "Now how can a good God allow something like that to happen?"
            Allow to happen? That’s the second thing to note – how it’s phrased.  God "allows" little children to starve? Is that God's responsibility or ours? In this life there is a huge amount of unrelated, unrelieved, and unrelievable suffering and that's life. That this comes as a huge faith crisis to someone suggests to me that such a person has been neglecting his responsibilities to care for his neighbor, or that this person is an incredibly insensitive, out-of-touch person.
            And finally, there is a great deal of suffering in the world that comes from simply being a human and living in this world and not some other world. Suffering doesn't come as news to the church. We are up to our elbows in suffering just about every day of the week. Life is suffering and part of the good news is that Christ has made that suffering the week-in week-out business of the church.
            I'm glad that many run of the mill Americans responded generously to the Tsunami relief efforts. But even if none of them had, the church would have responded. What was for many Americans a one-time act of generosity was a rather typical Sunday at the church. You won't get out of here today without having the opportunity to give money which will, in part, help with the suffering of people that you don't even know and might not feel any responsibility for, except that Jesus has made their suffering your suffering.
            Another annoying thing about such questions is that, in my experience, the question, "How could a good God allow something like this to happen" is often rooted in a kind of modern moral arrogance. Behind the question is, "Now how could an allegedly good God allow something like this to happen when, if I were God, I would certainly run the world differently. God means the power to do anything you want to do and, if I were all powerful like God, I would always do good with my power." Translated: "I am better and more morally sensitive than God."
            Jesus reminds us that being God does not mean that one simply has complete power to do anything. There are different kinds of power and sometimes the things that God in Christ wants to do are accomplished through love or persuasion or patience and not the exercise of raw power.
            Also, how do we really know what "good" would look like as far as the whole cosmos is concerned? For instance, I assume that it's a good thing that we have gravity. It admirably holds things down on this earth. However, when its force on a set of silo jacks causes one of the dog-eared crank shafts to fly off the jack with the force of the weight of the silo and to swing around and narrowly misses my right eye, slicing through my eyebrow, as happened to me one summer in college, that's a bad thing, so far as I am concerned at that moment. But I don't think that means that I live in a bad, evil universe simply because in this instance gravity caused me pain.
            So how are you and I to respond to questions like this? For to leave it unanswered is not acceptable.  We could say, as I have listened to the responses of other fellow "people of faith," many of them more clever than I: 1. God is in complete control at the wheel. God has got a plan for the world, and it's good, we limited human beings just can't figure out the plan right now. Maybe those people who died were sinful, who knows? God's judgments are always just. While this answer has the advantage of truth, it doesn’t comfort and it doesn’t deal with the fact that you and I are also sinful and we are deserving of the same fate.  2. Or, we could say…nothing. We don't have any answers about such mysterious suffering, nobody does. God is large and indescribable.
            Frankly, neither response satisfies. To claim to know some reason, some rationale for the tragedy makes God look arbitrarily mean. To refuse to say anything makes God look detached and aloof, an abstraction that doesn't really mean anything.
            Thus I go back to today's scripture. When questioned about this man's pain and suffering by his disciples, Jesus doesn't really answer their question as it’s posed, but He isn't silent either. He responds that this is a good opportunity, not for theological debate or theodicy, but rather, "So that God's works might be revealed in him." And with that, he spits on the ground, makes a paste of the dust and saliva, and heals the man.
            Jesus does not engage in theological speculation. He is there with the man, He touches the man, He heals the man and thus reveals the peculiar glory of God.
            When did that Tsunami hit? The day after Christmas, the very first day after the church's Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate that our God did not remain aloof from us, indescribable and utterly incomprehensible. Our God became flesh and came among us.  This God came to suffer, die and rise from the dead for us.  This God came to forgive our sins and give us everlasting life as God’s children.
             The story of this healed blind man comes in the same Gospel that begins, "In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh and moved in with us . . . and we beheld his glory." The great, grand glory of this God become flesh with us is not that He has an explanation for absolutely everything but rather that He is with us.
            Furthermore, God doesn't just say, "I'm all powerful and all in control, just accept your lot." God reaches out to us and touches us. Our God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all those other attributes that theologians attribute to God. But more than that, our God is, says the Incarnation, omnipresent - "with us, all the time, everywhere." In just a few weeks, as we observe Good Friday, we will see the lengths that this God is willing to go to be with us.
            God goes to the end. God reaches the goal. To be sure, this end is exactly the opposite of what we fix as our goal. We wish to climb up to heaven; God, however, descends - down to where? To death on the cross. This is why Jesus had to experience hell. He had to go the way to its very end. Our rightful end is hell, that is, banishment from God - God forsakenness. Only there has God completely come to us, there where he has taken upon himself everything, even the cursed end of our way.
            Our God enters the cosmos not so much to explain or to disclose but to make war on evil, to show forth the great glory of God in our salvation. Salvation, to be forgiven, to belong to God, is better even than a theologically satisfying explanation.  This is what we take home today, to share with others in their suffering, to share in their questions.  Amen.