"into the unknnnoooooooooowwwwwwwnnnn!"

Read this first: John 9:1-41

Jesus is breaking all the rules in our reading today. As usual. Of course he is. He’s healing on the Sabbath. He’s interacting with outcasts. He’s upending the Jewish moral code. He’s making a mess. He’s healing on the Sabbath. He’s wreaking havoc on all the purity and moral codes of his time.

Not only all that, though. He’s breaking all of our rules, too. He’s surrounded by crowds. He’s not practicing proper social distancing. He heals with his spit and mud. And he doesn’t just touch his own face, rather, he touches someone else’s face. 

Jesus is not only breaking all the rules for his time, but he’s breaking our rules too. What do we do with that? I mean, I’m used to Jesus breaking everybody else’s rules. What do I do when he’s breaking mine?  

Jesus breaks all of the Covid-19 rules we’ve so diligently and so recently set up for ourselves. He breaks all the rules we’ve been trying to get each other to follow. As we try to keep our parents in the house and our nieces and nephews from going on spring break, Jesus is out there mingling and sharing and getting much closer than the requisite six feet coughing distance. I guess what I mostly want to say about this passage is, “don’t try this at home, kids.” 

This is such a challenge for me because under “normal” circumstances, I’d be preaching on this passage and encouraging us all to lean in, get dirty, become embodied, get closer. I’d want us to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who goes out, who goes to, who enters in. Go. Feed the people. Visit to the homeless camps. Find community. Seek out the other. This is my theology. This is my faith. This is precisely what our God did and still does. God leans in, God gets dirty. God is embodied. God gets closer. But how do we live in to this in an era of social distancing? How do we incarnate the love of God to and for each other during this time of Facebook Live, Zoom conferencing, elbow bumping, and long distance telephone calls? 

Honestly? I don’t know how to be a Christian during Covid-19. Too much is changing, too fast. I don't know how to keep up, and I don’t know how to adapt. Some pastors are doing brilliantly, video-recording their sermons, mastering YouTube, updating their websites and doing daily Facebook devotionals. Me? I’ve hunkered down, I’ve read a few books, I’ve fretted and prayed. My whole theology, one that I thought was pretty solid, one based upon incarnation and embodiment and dirtiness and vulnerability, has become upended, tossed around, and I’m forced into a new paradigm, one where my passions for feeding, telling stories, and connecting and touching, need to be replaced or adapted or at least put on pause. 

I thought I was done with this deconstructing business, I thought I’d already deconstructed my faith, asked the hard questions, struggled with my doubts and come out the other side. But like a tilt-o-whirl, just when I think the ride is over, I'm whipped back in, back into the questions and the struggle and the doubts all over again. What is my faith if I can’t touch? If I can’t connect? If I can’t feed and hold and sit with those who need to be fed and held and connected with?

I’m suddenly feeling very sorry for the Pharisees in our reading today. And that feels weird. 

This passage is about an entire paradigm shift for the Jews. Much like a virus, Jesus is rocking the boat, rocking their faith, and messing up the status quo. And much like a virus, some things aren’t going to survive this shift. Some ideas and ideals, assumptions and theologies and structures and systems might not make it through the dramatic changes that Jesus brings about.  But unlike Covid-19, Jesus has come to wake us up, to refocus our faith, to pare it down to what really matters, and offer us new life on the other side. Unlike Covid-19, Jesus comes to heal and transform and resurrect.

Let’s watch and see how he does it.

See the disciples think they’re asking a pretty progressive question at the beginning of our drama today. Who sinned? The parents? The blind man? Where did this “disability” come from? They’re asking a question of theodicy. Why is there evil in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people? What’s this Corona Virus and why is it affecting the most vulnerable of us out there? Who sinned? Mom and dad? Or the kid? Someone has to be blamed for this, right? And Jesus answers them, “neither.” Neither mom and dad, nor the child.  And there it is, step one in the paradigm shift. 

Of course his answer is equally problematic. He says that this man was born blind so that God’s words might be revealed through him. As if it’s God’s will that he’s blind just so that God can fix him and make a lesson out of him. And that just makes him sound like a pawn. That just makes him sound like his sole function of being is to be God’s puppet to show how very good God is. It makes it sound like it’s God’s fault.

But maybe Jesus isn’t saying that at all. Maybe there is an alternative interpretation. Maybe Jesus is saying that if you have to blame someone, blame God. If it has to be somebody’s fault, it’s God’s fault. God can handle the blame. God can take the fault. God can even make something good out of it. Another shift in the paradigm.

But because Jesus sees this man as a man, first, because Jesus sees beyond this man’s blindness to the person he is, whole and complete and unique and special just as he is, he heals him. He uses spit and mud and touch to cross all kinds of barriers and quarantines between this man and himself, between his disability and the societal rules set up to keep his sin from “infecting” every body else. Jesus builds a bridge. Jesus breaks the rules. Jesus shifts the paradigm. And then he sneaks off the stage. This formerly blind guy’s world is changed. Upended with a little spit and some dirt. A paradigm shift.

And this throws everyone else into an uproar. 

First they don’t even believe this is the same guy.

Then they want to hear how this all happened.

Then they want to know who to blame. 

And the guy born blind? He calmly tells them what he knows. “The man called Jesus made some mud, put it on my eyes, then told me to go clean up, and I did, and now I can see.”

But his explanation doesn’t make sense. This rocks their worldview. This shakes their foundations. People aren’t just healed of their sins. People born blind aren’t simply made to see again. Mud and saliva aren’t found at the apothecary. God doesn’t honor work on the Sabbath. This goes against the careful constructs they’ve set up for themselves.

So they take him to the Pharisees. The guys in charge. The ones who are supposed to have all the answers. The ones who’ve wrestled with the questions and figured it all out. 

They want to hear the story again. So the guy tells it again. “He put mud on my eyes, I washed, and now I see,” he says. For the formerly blind man, whose world has been changed right before his eyes, he adapts well. He tells the story. He accepts it. He keeps it simple. He can see now. Before he couldn’t. Life is never going to be the same for him again, but how he got there is simple. Mud, Spit, Wash, See.

But the Pharisees are having trouble adapting to this news. They don’t know what to make of it. They can’t fit it into their worldview. On the one hand, this Jesus guy must be a sinner because he didn’t observe the Sabbath in the way that we understand it. But on the other hand, how could he have performed these signs if he is such a sinner? They’re trying to force Jesus into their paradigm, and it’s just not working. Every time they get one part of him to fit, the rest slips out the other side. 

But the man born blind? He adapts. He adjusts. He calls Jesus a prophet. And when he is told that Jesus is the Son of Man, by Jesus himself, no less, he adapts to that too. He accepts. He believes and he worships. Like the layers of an onion, more and more of his blindness is stripped away, and he sees even more clearly with each shift in the paradigm, with each adaptation he has to make to his worldview.

But that doesn’t fit. That doesn’t work for the Pharisees. So they call his parents. They ask them to figure this out. They ask them what’s true. And they can’t fit it into anything they know either, they can’t explain this, so they say, “I don’t know,” and they throw it back on their son. 

So the Pharisees bring him back in and tell him to get this situation to fit in with what they know. “Give glory to God,” they say. “Tell us that Jesus is a sinner.” 

And the man born blind doesn’t do it. He doesn’t force Jesus into their paradigm. He doesn’t explain this miracle away. He simply tells the story again, again and again, hoping that somehow, the truth will clarify things. But the truth doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit in to the world the Pharisees have made for themselves, and they can’t adapt. They can’t see. They revile him. His story doesn’t fit in with theirs. They want to know where this Jesus guy comes from and how he fits. 

And the man born blind tries to explain it to them, tries to adjust their paradigm. “Here is an astonishing thing!” he says, surprised, but still willing to go with this crazy change. “You do not know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” The man is trying to speak the language of the Pharisees, to get them to understand, but they can’t. They won’t.

They still can’t see it. They drive him out. They reject his story. They can’t make it fit.

Isn’t that what we do when we can’t make things fit? We throw them out. We drive them out of our heads. We reject the stories that don’t fit into the constructs we’ve so carefully built for ourselves. 

But when Jesus hears that they’ve thrown him out, he goes out to find him. Jesus goes out to those of us who don’t fit. Jesus finds us. Jesus shifts our paradigm, changes our world, and changes us. 

The Pharisees are having a hard time coping with this changing world. It’s a changing paradigm that Jesus brings into being. The whole system of sin and knowledge and church and faith is being turned upside down. 

And that’s where we are today. Church isn’t what it used to be. Community looks different. Sundays aren’t what they used to be. Even before this whole virus business, the Church was in a state of drastic change. 

It’s been said that every 500 years Christianity has a big rummage sale, where it gets rid of all its old stuff to make room for the new. Phylis Tickle writes, “about every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace, or hard shell, that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.”

It’s been about five hundred years since the Protestant Reformation, and we’re due for a rummage sale. 

That is, Christianity is changing. Christians are changing. We are living in a Post-Christendom world. Lots of people simply don’t go to church anymore. Many people don’t define themselves as religious anymore. Values have shifted. Attitudes have changed. The paradigm has been altered. Tod Bolsinger equates our experience to that of Lewis and Clark’s, who explored the land west of the Mississippi river in search of an easy water-route to the Pacific ocean. They brought with them the things they thought they needed, namely, canoes, only to discover that there was no direct water route to the Pacific, only wilderness, mountains, and uncertainty. 

The question is, how are we, as Christians, going to respond to these changes? Will we dig our heels in and insist that things stay the way they’ve always been? Will we be like the townspeople and the Pharisees, disbelieving in the work that Jesus is doing in our midst just because it doesn’t fit with our preferred paradigms? Or will we adapt? Will we see things anew? Will we open our eyes to the work that Jesus is doing all around us, even though it’s different in form, or function, or language, or expression from anything we’ve ever experienced before? Will we insist on dragging our canoes through the mountains, or will we adjust, gather up some different supplies, and take a step into the unknown? 

I don’t know what is in our future. I just know that Christ is there. Because that’s what Christ does. Christ follows us, finds us, changes us, renews us, transforms us. Christ even does this when we’re binge watching Netflix in our pajamas for the third day in a row. Let’s adjust. Let’s adapt. Let’s see what healing is in store for us.

Thanks be to God.