Year A
 1 Samuel 16:1-13
 Psalm 23
 Ephesians 5:8-14
 John 9:1-41

May the words of my mouth…  O God…  speak your truth…

The human eye is a marvelous thing…  according to the Southwestern Eye Center…  our eyes blink an average of 4,200,000 times a year…  and so if you were paid a nickel every time you blinked…  you would earn about $210,000 each year…  also…  your eye is the fastest muscle in your body…  hence the phrase…  In the blink of an eye… ]  eyes are made up of over 2 million working parts…  and each individual eye contains 107 million cells…  and all of them are light sensitive…  the human eye can distinguish about ten million different colors…  our eyes are about 1″ across and weigh only about a quarter of an ounce…  and they remain the same size throughout our entire lives…  while our nose and ears never stop growing…  the world’s most common eye color is brown…  and my favorite…  is that pirates wore earrings…  because they believed it improved their eyesight…

Now seeing can be strictly an optical function…  with the eye as camera…  light enters the eye and the brain processes what it sees… . without any special effects from image-editing software like PhotoShop… but what we see…  can elicit strong emotion…  think about the images of widespread destruction in Ukraine…  or that resulted from the earthquake in Turkey…  think about how you felt when you saw your parents or children after more than a year of forced separation from COVID…  and remember…  that what we see can also be layered with value judgement…  in our reading from 1Samuel…  the narrator tells us that David was ruddy…  had beautiful eyes…  and was handsome…  but handsome compared to who…  and so I’m reminded of the expression…  beauty is in the eye of the beholder…

But our reading from 1Samuel…  also tells us that God doesn’t see the way we see…  God doesn’t have eyes…  God’s vision transcends the world of optics…  because God looks on the heart… it’s just like in the Collect for Purity when we acknowledge that to God…  all hearts are open…  all desires known…  and from God…  no secrets are hid…  so what God knows and understands are our deepest desires…  and our deepest fears…  and our potential…  like how a shepherd could become a king… 

In today’s Gospel…  Jesus sees the essential human condition he has been sent to alleviate…  being cast out…  and needing to belong…  and the blind man represents the spiritual need we all have to move from darkness to light…  and this man’s cure will be a sign of this…  and even more so…  that the Light of the World illumines those who are open…  but is opaque to those who claim…  from powerful positions…  to see…  and some scholars maintain that this chapter of John’s Gospel was addressed to Jewish believers who had been banished from the synagogue…  as the blind man’s parents were afraid that they might be… 

So of course…  when we say…  I see…  we may also mean that we understand…  in her book Learning to Walk in the Dark…  Barbara Brown Taylor writes…  normal sight prefers outer appearances… it attends to the surface of things… which makes it essentially a superficial sense… but there is a kind of light that transcends both wave and particle… it is the light that becomes apparent to those who have learned to rely on senses other than sight… it is the light by which the mystics see… when they meditate in the night hours…  picking up their pens in the morning to write down their revelations…

When I was growing up…  there was what might have amounted to an urban legend…  I’m sure at least some of you have…  Joel had not…  that if you got a cut…  you ought to let a dog lick it…  and according to an article on the American Kennel Club’s website from just a few years ago…  as unlikely as it sounds…  scientific evidence suggests that dog saliva…  has some antibacterial and antimicrobial properties…  that dog saliva is even slightly bactericidal against E. coli…  and against a certain kind of Strep which can be passed from companion animals to humans…  and microbiologists have even turned their attention to the saliva we generate…  and they have found histatins in our spit…  histatins are a group of histamine producing proteins…  which are anti-bacterial and anti-fungal and are found only in humans and primates…  and these microbiologists also found an abundance of white blood cells which protect our body against infectious diseases and foreign invaders…  and laminins…  a component of connective tissue membranes that holds cells together…

And if we spit…  it’s almost always on the ground…  but spitting on another person…  especially in someone’s face…  is a global sign of contempt…  disdain… or hatred…  and so it may seem off-putting to most of us…  that Jesus made mud with his saliva and rubbed it into this man’s eyes…  maybe Jesus knew something about the healing power of saliva…  and the curability of this man’s blindness that we don’t…  because according to the National Institutes of Health…  blindness in infants can sometimes be caused by a variety of maternal health issues during delivery itself…  and which can be cured…

So do we recognize those who have been healed…  does their appearance change…  the townspeople doubted that the man who could now see…  was the same man who had been blind…  maybe they didn’t think he was capable of that kind of transformation…  maybe they didn’t think that Jesus was…  ]  when I was growing up…  a friend’s family had a summer home up in Maine… and when his mom came back from being away for about ten weeks…  right away… I noticed… I perceived something different about her… a quiet centeredness… a peace… ]  like in the Gospel… I wondered…  could this be Pat… and I asked her… what happened…  what did you do…  she said she’d learned to meditate…  and similarly…  my extended family wondered about my conversion… wait… you were Jewish… then something happened and you’re not…  what happened…  who did this to you…  or how did you come to do this to yourself… I’m the same as I was before…  and yet I’m different… but to some of my cousins…  I’m a different person…  I wonder how I looked to them…  I wonder how deeply they could see into me…

The blind man didn’t see Jesus after his sight was restored…  because when he went and washed in the pool of Siloam…  and by the time his sight was restored…  Jesus wasn’t there…  that’s why…  when Jesus heard that the townspeople had driven him out…  Jesus sought him out…  and asked…  Do you believe in the Son of Man…  he answered…  And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him…  the blind man didn’t recognize him because he didn’t see him in the first place…

And so I wonder…  what keeps us from seeing Jesus…  not only with our eyes… but with our hearts…  what keeps us from seeing the transformations in those we know…  who may look the same on the outside…  but are changed somehow…  and which contribute towards our rejection of them…  even though they may radiate more light on the inside… what keeps us from seeing the transformations in ourselves…  what keeps us from being transformed…  and perhaps more importantly…  since Jesus welcomed everyone so that everyone belongs…  what prevents us from welcoming others…  and from what blindnesses do we suffer which keep us from being able to accept the fullness of God’s welcome of us…