Fairhaven Sermon 3-15-2026

I'm in the middle of a pretty bad allergy day, so if I sneeze in the middle, I apologize. I feel it coming. I was in seventh grade or so when after a lifetime of easily passing my annual school vision test, an optometrist finally pointed out that my sight was not perfect and was in fact far from perfect. And that was a surprise.

I had no idea that I was seeing the world as anything but exactly what it was. So a few weeks later, I returned to the office, in Walmart, of course, to pick up my new glasses. And this whole new world emerged before my eyes. I could see the aisles over the hallways from halfway across the store.

The signs. My view of the ceiling sharpened. I could see the details of the rafters. I could see all the little bolts up in the ceiling.

And when I got to school the next day, I could recognize my friends' faces from all the way across the gym, which I didn't realize was a problem previously. But what still sticks out to me, what I remember most clearly, is how trees changed. I'd never realized what I wasn't seeing. Treetops, as it turns out, had been fading into this fuzzy blur for who knows how long, this kind of muddled together green and brown that would just kind of shake around in the wind.

And now I can see every single individual twig. I could see them moving in the breeze. I could see the birds as birds and not just brown dots up there. And it was such an amazing difference that I remember taking my glasses off and putting them back on again to watch that all come back and forth into view.

And I was stunned that I had been missing this for who knows how long. And my focus was finally corrected, something I didn't even know that I needed. You know, my visual impairment had not been crippling. You know, I heard friends say that they couldn't read the blackboard without glasses, that it had really been affecting how they were doing in school until they got it fixed.

I didn't have that problem. I thought I was fine. I got by. And yet having it fixed was amazing because I had just been missing so much that having it back really improved how much I could enjoy my life.

And so, despite never having been blind, I can speak personally to how much sight matters, the deep value that it has for you. And I cannot imagine the experience of someone who's never been able to see at all, let alone the maybe even more traumatic experience of someone who's lost their vision over the course of their life, this is the kind of disability that to those of us who can see is really hard to fathom. It's very scary. So we're conditioned as we enter this morning's reading from the Gospel of John to think that the man born blind that we read about is sort of the object of the narrative here.

That is, that the purpose of this story is to talk about how Jesus saved this poor man from a lifetime of misery, of suffering, and made him normal for the first time in his existence. We might even think, as we read this, that this man's entire role in the story is to be this passive recipient of a miracle. He's an object of pity. And that is not the case.

That is not the way John tells this story. This man is not some helpless soul. He would sit and beg, as the townspeople say about him, but that's not intended to have a shameful connotation. Not for him.

Why would it? He's a blind guy in an economy where the only option pretty much was farming. So what's he supposed to do? It's not like he can drive a team of oxen and a plow. And so it's the community's job in this society to take care of him because he can't. He fundamentally cannot take care of himself.

And in fact, beyond that, there is this strong implication in this story that he has been deeply mistreated. This is easy to miss here. we find out midway through the chapter that his parents are alive and well. And in this case, it would be their job to take care of him.

And if he's sitting and begging in order to make a living, in order to feed himself, we can infer that they have abandoned their fundamental responsibility now. to take care of their disabled son. His parents are there, but they've left him to fend for himself. And listen here to the ease with which they continue to cast him aside whenever they're questioned about him.

Whenever he's healed, the Jewish leaders ask the man's parents about him, and they reply, We know he's our son. We know he was born blind, but we don't know how he now sees. We don't know who healed his eyes. Ask him.

He's old enough to speak for himself. They want to keep their distance. They do not want to be involved with him. And yet this man, whom we might think is the most pitiable character, turns out to be a force to be reckoned with on his own.

As the chapter progresses, as we get further along, his spiritual sight sharpens every time he speaks, while all the religious insiders, the people who should know better, just stumble around in the dark. They're not figuring any of this out. Everyone in this narrative, everyone in this story, except the man who is literally blind, is fundamentally unable to see what is right in front of them. Look at the disciples here, for example, who open the story.

Their focus is completely warped. Rather than seeing this man as a suffering neighbor in need of their care, they see him as this theological puzzle to be debated. And it's coming from within their cultural context. You know, this is in Scripture that sin can be passed down because of what the parents did.

But listen to how dehumanizing their question to Jesus is when they see this guy. Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind? Was it this man or was it his parents? There is this deep need on their part to figure out why this guy deserves it. Rabbi. What did he do to make this bad thing happen to him? How did he get himself into this position in life? And if that sounds silly, oh, we don't believe that people are disabled because of their parents' choices— Think about how this still plays out in our world.

Whenever you see a homeless person on the street corner, isn't that same question in the back of your head? What did they do? How'd they get there? Or if you think about the two million people that are in prison in this country, And surely they did something over the course of their life that landed them in this position. Maybe. Maybe not. And Jesus' answer shocks them by saying there's not a lot of justice to it.

Jesus says that neither he nor his parents sinned at all. The way that people's fates shake out in life, Jesus tells them, is not quite so tidy as, Well, bad things happen to bad people. It'd be comforting if that was the case, but that's not the case. And the Pharisees the same way have a spiritual astigmatism here, but a different kind.

And their misplaced focus is not on theology like the disciples. But on the law of God, they're less concerned about the consequences of sin in the man's life and instead are focused on the law of God's requirements to the point that their focus on God's law makes them miss God's action. They are less interested in this miracle that is going to change this man's life forever than the fact that it happened on the wrong day of the week. And these Pharisees are bending over backwards to refuse to acknowledge that Jesus has done something truly miraculous, truly holy, and they have to reject the evidence of their own eyes to do that.

They go back and forth as to how they're going to make that leap here. And at first, they just insist that no miracle could have happened. Couldn't have happened at all. Sinners can't do God's work.

That's just the guy that looks like the beggar. Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath. Well, that can't be. And they keep waffling on their explanation, and they next lean into the belief that it's a hoax, maybe.

They ask the man's parents, he was born blind? And of course, they find out that he was. And after that, they try once more. They move on to questioning how it happened. And they ask the man who was once blind, what did Jesus do to you? How did he do to you? did he heal your eyes? Which, of course, the man doesn't know.

Just that it happened. And finally, when none of those things solve the problem for them, keep their way of thinking about things working, they retreat back into this sense of superiority. And they say to the blind man, You are his disciple, but we are Moses' disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses, but we don't know where this man is from.

And when the man fires back, he dares to point out that God answers the prayers of righteous people. They fall back onto that very same conclusion that Jesus' disciples made at the beginning. You were born completely in sin. How is it that you dare to teach us? They can't understand because they don't want to understand.

And so they attribute what is unquestionably a good thing to a sinner. A sinner has healed another sinner? Can't be. Impossible. The Pharisees are convinced that this is just an open and shut case.

Jesus has broken the law. And in their eyes, he hasn't just broken social norms. He hasn't broken the law of the land. He's violated God's own law given to them through Moses.

Moses. But Jesus is doing something more expansive than their interpretation of the law allows. Again, wouldn't it just be easier if we could decide who's good and who's bad based on whether they obey the law and the norms we have in our society? But Jesus doesn't operate that way. He doesn't give us that cut and dry, in, out, yes, no, good, bad.

He here is the one who appears to be breaking the law, and we know that he's God himself, so he's actually fulfilling the spirit of the law. So the Pharisees' interpretation of the law is being violated, not the law. And it's interesting, I think, that in telling us this story, John tells us about the violation of the Sabbath almost as an afterthought. You probably didn't notice this the first time through.

But John doesn't mention that this was on the Sabbath until the 13th verse. The entire healing process has already occurred. The mud on the man's eyes, his washing, his neighbors questioning him about it. All of that has already happened before John remembers to tell us, oh, by the way, this happened on the Sabbath day.

But this is the single highest priority for the Pharisees. They demand this clear rubric of right and wrong in order to maintain their understanding of how God works. The law that they receive that they're trying to interpret from Moses isn't wrong, but Jesus Right. rejects that way of understanding it, that it's quite so simple as they think it is.

Jesus has made this incredibly poetic move here in choosing to heal this man specifically because we find out over the course of this story that the only one who can actually see is the blind man. It's that old proverb, there's none so blind as those who will not see. No amount of evidence, no amount of reasoning will convince people who want to believe they're right, even if God himself is telling them they're not. This healed man is filled with such a powerful, righteous anger about all of this, too.

Now, the dialogue in this story is incredible. Does any of this matter compared to the only important piece, that there's a man who was blind and now he's not blind anymore? Who cares about how it fits with our theology, with our understanding of the law? Who cares whose fault it is that he couldn't see to begin with? There is so much emotional weight here to what the man says to the Pharisees. I don't know whether he was a sinner. Here's what I do know.

I was blind, and now I see. And he has this sharp sarcasm about it all as he keeps getting dragged in front of people to be questioned about it. He's asked by the Pharisees to repeat his story again and again, and finally he shoots back, Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to be his disciples too? And you can feel this fiery frustration in him that something good has happened, that God has transformed his life, that he's included for the first time ever. He's lifted up while his family and his community have abandoned him for decades.

And all of this is being treated as a matter of debate. Is this good or not? He knows. And we see in Jesus here a God who refuses to be bound by the limits humans put on God. He knows.

The Pharisees and the disciples, for that matter, can easily point chapter and verse in Scripture explaining why this couldn't happen. They could point to why Jesus isn't allowed to heal a man on the Sabbath. They can point to another verse that would explain that this man must have been born in sin to be in this condition anyway. They can find ample evidence that this is not allowed and that it's impossible.

And yet Jesus does it. And in addition, he tells the Pharisees point blank, Physical disability, social stigma, poverty, those things are not a result of sin, Jesus tells them. But their refusal, anyone's stubborn refusal to participate in the healing, the reconciling, liberating work of God, that is the result of sin. That is the cause of sin.

The man born blind is brought to true belief in God, not because of anything the Pharisees who are teachers of Israel do. He's included once more in the community, not because his neighbors are generous, not because his parents take care of him like they're supposed to. Do. That still doesn't happen.

None of them have helped him in his blindness over all this time. And they are fundamentally unable to see much worse than he is. But Jesus has come to flip things upside down and says, I have come into the world to exercise judgment so that those who don't see can see, and those who see will become blind. And it turns out that's already how it was anyway.

And the healed man says to Jesus, I want to believe. And this is exactly what Jesus is waiting to hear from you and from me. He doesn't need to know what you know. I want to believe.

He doesn't need to know just how devout you are. He's not concerned with your qualifications, and He doesn't first weigh whether you've been on your best behavior in following the law of God and the state of Pennsylvania. What Jesus is looking for, what we see by the end of this story, is people who are willing to admit their vision is imperfect. Healing and salvation are here for those who are finally ready to stop pretending their sight is perfect.

who are ready to put on lenses, to see like Jesus does, to look at the top of trees and realize they didn't even know they were missing something. And then we will see the Son of God standing right in front of us. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.