The Person We All want to Meet

Guest Speaker
Jerry Zumwalt

Today we are celebrating the Ministry of the Laity in the United Methodist Church.  It is recognition that every Christian is a minister of the gospel.  That is what the laity means; all of us who are not ordained but who believe.  The Latin and Greek roots of the word laity mean “of the people.”  It was the early Methodist tradition to send lay preachers to ride circuits here in Texas and elsewhere to meet with people on the frontier and eventually form churches.  Denton County where we live was named after John B. Denton who was a Methodist lay preacher, lawyer and soldier here in the early 1800’s. 

The theme set out by the Texas Methodist Annual Conference for today’s laity Sunday is: One in Spirit, All in Ministry; in the Spirit of Fellowship. We practice fellowship in our church.  We will eat together after service today, and we remember, as our mission statement for the day says: “If we want true fellowship with God and neighbor or fellow believers, we cannot walk in darkness. To remain in the light, we must be intentional about spending time with God in prayer and in searching the Scriptures and by practicing the other means of grace, such as worship, Holy Communion, fasting, works of mercy, and holy or Christian conferencing.”  I am Jerry Zumwalt, your lay preacher for today.

When Theresa and I moved to Texas from Oklahoma in 1984 Sunday shopping was governed by what was commonly referred to as ‘blue laws.’  Back in 1961 the legislature passed a law requiring everyone driving in a car to wear a seatbelt and another law prohibiting the sale of 42 various products on Saturday and Sundays.  The effect was that businesses selling appliances, cars and furniture had to be closed one day or the other, but stores selling groceries could be open seven days a week.  It meant that malls were not open but grocery stores were open although some products like beer and wine were not sold.  It was intended to recognize the Sabbath and allow employees to have a day off for rest and worship.  Some companies, like Chik filet are still closed on Sundays for that reason.  Of course if you were in the grocery store business you had to work.  Some people wanted to shop on Sundays; companies didn’t like to have half their store dark where they kept items they couldn’t sell on Sunday.  They objected to the ‘blue laws’ and in 1985 those laws were repealed. If you weren’t alive then or didn’t live in Texas during those years you might never know about the ‘blue laws’ they had here and in a few other states. 

I imagine this was the situation in Israel the day Jesus and his disciples were walking down the road in Jerusalem.  Strict Orthodox Jews today observe the Sabbath with many specific restrictions.  They can do no work, they must rest, they don’t read, they count their steps during the day from sundown Friday until the three evening stars appear in the sky on Saturday night.  They can only walk so many paces and that must include the steps to synagogue and back home.  If you drive in the Hillcrest Road area of north Dallas today on a Friday night you will see Orthodox Jews dressed up and walking to synagogue—which is close to their house.  But most people are not this religious today nor so observant of the Sabbath, neither were they were they in Jesus time.  Sure Exodus 31:15 calls for the penalty of death for anyone who does work on the Sabbath, but just like the ‘blue laws’ the Sabbath laws could be used by the civil authorities in Israel, who were also the religious authorities, to allow some work and prohibit others from working.  Our religious leaders always work on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.  Work in Jesus time went on during the Sabbath in the streets, on the farm, in the temple, the things that had to be done, unless the priests objected, if they had a problem with someone and then they could call down the law of God on a man.  Jesus objected to this kind of hypocrisy. 
And so as John describes in his gospel at the end of chapter 8 Jesus had just spent the day teaching at the temple and arguing with the Pharisees to the point that they picked up stones to kill him and he hid himself and slipped away from the temple grounds.  Remember there are no chapter breaks or verse marking in the original texts, and as Jesus went along he sees a man blind from birth. 
It’s late on a Friday afternoon; the sun is just going down.  Jesus has been philosophical all day and his disciples ask a classic question in keeping with the common belief of the day that a curse like blindness must be caused by someone’s sin.  It’s a question we still ask, and there are people who are blind because of their own wrecklessness  or that of their parents.  Like the kid who stared into the sun during an eclipse when he was warned not to or a child born blind because of an STD contracted by their mother.
But I must ask the question, “How did the disciples know he was born blind?”  They are not far from the temple so they might have passed by this place many times before.  The rest of the story shows they do not know each other.  Perhaps he had a sign that said he was born blind or perhaps he sat in front of the shop his parents ran and anyone could see that his father and mother were still very much a part of his life even though he was a grown man.

But most curious to me is the reason this miracle happens.  Jesus heals many beggars during his ministry; he heals the blind, the deaf, the insane, even the dead.  Nearly every miracle Jesus performs and every healing comes because someone; a parent, a friend, a servant, or the person themselves asks or approaches Jesus for healing.  In Luke 18 the blind man Bartimaeus was begging at the side of the road and he called out to Jesus, “have mercy on me.”  In Matthew 20 the two blind beggars call out the same cry.  I imagine that phrase was their stock in trade.  “Who’s coming,” they might ask people in the crowd.  “Joel, the rug merchant,” and they’d call out, “Joel, Joel, have mercy on me.”  Or it might be Avram the money lender, “Avram, have mercy on me.”  And someone might say, it’s King Herod and the blind man would call out, “King Herod, have mercy on me, great King!” and the crowd would laugh because it was a slave boy riding a donkey.  People can be cruel.

Now sitting by the roadside is this blind man whose name we do not know.  He says nothing.  He asks for nothing; even though he is a beggar.  He hears these people approach and they are talking about him.  He hears a man spit and he lets this man rub mud into his eyes.  His useless eyes.  This is the only miracle during which Jesus uses this process.  Almost every other miracle is accomplished with orders or spoken commands.  It is a curious choice.  I like to remember that the scriptures have a much broader audience than just me.  I heard a missionary tell the story one time of working with native peoples in the Amazon jungle, translating the scriptures from Spanish which everyone knew into their native language.  The missionary had asked the village elders to sit with him and review the passages he worked on and they would judge the clarity and accuracy of his accounts.  For the most part they took little interest in the content of the scripture but enjoyed quibbling over words.  Of course the missionary had hoped to reach them with the message, but they remained uninterested until they got the ninth chapter of John and he read them this passage.  Jesus spat on the ground and made mud.  “Read that again,” they asked, suddenly interested in the content.  “Read that part about spitting.”  The missionary was surprised.  “You never told us Jesus was a spitter.  This is how we heal people.  We spit on the ground, too.  We want to hear more about this Jesus and how he works.”  So he told them.  It’s hard to imagine what the bible can mean to someone else.
Jesus tells the man born blind to go wash in a pool nearby and he goes. He wanders like a blind man down the street; following smells and sounds, maybe counting his steps.  He wonders, perhaps, if he is being played for a fool.  When he finds the pool: He washes.  And he surprisingly, he sees. 

What would you do after something like that?  The man sets out to retrace his steps.  He follows familiar sounds with new eyes. He returns to the home he has never seen before.  He sees things he has never seen.  Buildings, people, the street, the cooking pots; things he only could imagine he now sees with his eyes.  We once asked a blind friend what she dreamed of.  She had been born blind, and she said that was one of the most common questions she gets.  We who can see always dream of what we see.  In black and white or in color, we dream of sensations certainly; falling, flying; but mostly we dream in images.  As a girl born blind she dreams of textures; scratchiness, smooth feelings and in a nightmare she dreams of the wind.  In the wind she is completely disoriented unable to get her bearings on direction.  Even awake the wind is distracting to her.  And she trusts what she hears much more than a sighted person does.  She is sure of what she hears the way you or I might say we are sure of something because we saw it with our own eyes.  I know what it looks like, we say, I am certain.
The man born blind returned home.  He sees the place where he sat for all these years. He sees his parent’s faces.  He looked them in the eye.  And he has changed.  Changed so much that people who have seen him his whole life don’t recognize him.  He looks like a different man.  He is a different man.  And he knows the man who did this for him was called Jesus.
Now in those days, a person who has been healed is supposed to present himself to the priest at the temple.  The priest is judge of whether a man is healed or not.  And if a man is healed of a communicable disease such as leprosy the priest can allow him back into regular society—if he is healed.  And people are healed and it does happen.  So the neighbors take the man born blind to the Pharisees because he has been healed and because Jesus had made an important pronouncement when he healed the man.  He described what he was doing as work.  “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, said Jesus, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.  As long as it is day we must do the work of him who sent me.”  Work on the Sabbath.  What work did he do?  He mixed mud with his fingers.  Does that seem trivial?  Remember that the stone tablets God gave Moses were written with the finger of God.  Jesus himself defined this act as work.  And the neighbors heard everything.  Let’s pick up the story at verse 15:      15Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. "He put mud on my eyes," the man replied, "and I washed, and now I see."     16Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath." But others asked, "How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?" So they were divided.   Their first thoughts are to the character of Jesus and how he could accomplish such a healing.  When they refer to him as a sinner that means Jesus is a lay person because the priests and teachers of the law are righteous by the sin offerings, by their heritage and therefore by definition.    17Finally they turned again to the blind man, "What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened." The man replied, "He is a prophet."  Prophets were men sent by God with miraculous powers who were not part of the ruling class.  They were outsiders.    18The Jews still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man's parents. 19"Is this your son?" they asked. "Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?"     20"We know he is our son," the parents answered, "and we know he was born blind. 21But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don't know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself." 22His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for already the Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ[a] would be put out of the synagogue. 23That was why his parents said, "He is of age; ask him." At this point things are getting serious.  To be put out of the synagogue means the family would not be able to run their business anymore, no one would trade with them.  They were risking their livelihood opposing the will of these rulers.  But I think this tells us much more for they knew what was at stake with Jesus, they knew there was talk of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel.  Could it be the Pharisees did not know about this talk or does this prove they had heard such talk too?    24A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. "Give glory to God,[b]" they said. "We know this man is a sinner."  25He replied, "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"  26Then they asked him, "What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?"  27He answered, "I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?"  28Then they hurled insults at him and said, "You are this fellow's disciple! We are disciples of Moses! 29We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don't even know where he comes from."     30The man answered, "Now that is remarkable! You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. 31We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. 32Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. 33If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."  34To this they replied, "You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!" And they threw him out.   Whether this means they threw the man out of the synagogue is unclear, but it seems a serious turn of events.  Born blind this man had lived as an outcast in his own society, a living example of sin and rejection by God.  Now he could see, and he didn’t ask for any of it, but he is now rejected for that as well and thrown out by the men whose job it was to redeem him into society by the grace of God. 
But here is the remarkable thing.  Of every disciple and apostle who was now walking with Jesus, the one claim they each would make in testimony to others or when called before the judges and rulers of their age to give an account of their faith, everyone of them will testify that they believed in Jesus because they saw him and saw his work.  The man born blind was one of the first to acknowledge the work of Jesus and he had no idea of who Jesus was.  He had never seen him, never knew of his other work.  He had not asked for his help or healing, but he defended Jesus, risking everything, because he knew what the man called Jesus had done in his own life.  This was a man Jesus wanted to meet.  In his entire ministry Jesus was approached by people day after day with questions, needs and pleadings.  Meeting him, knowing him, even being healed by him, there were many who would still reject Jesus after dealing with him face to face.  Here was a man who truly believed and was tested and proven in his belief.  Jesus definitely had to see this guy again.  It says in verse 35:  35Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?"  36"Who is he, sir?" the man asked. "Tell me so that I may believe in him."  When they met for only the second time the man born blind had no idea who he was looking at.  “Tell me,” he says like a man who trusts what he hears.  But that voice must have sounded somewhat familiar.  37Jesus said, "You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you."  38Then the man said, "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him.   Other translations say that the man knelt before Jesus, that’s what it means when it says he worshiped him.  Scholars point to this man’s immediate acceptance of Jesus as a simple hearted faith.  But I think the man born blind was just the opposite, I think he had a very complex faith.  I think be believed in God and God’s Messiah who would save Israel long before Jesus approached him.  This guy knew what he knew for a fact.  39Jesus said, "For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind."  40Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, "What? Are we blind too?"   41Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
Jesus hung out with the Pharisees a lot.  A lot of his ministry was to these men who were Israel’s leaders.  Chapter 10 which follows is an intense discussion of the responsibility of the shepherd, a term Christians have taken to refer to our ordained pastors, the shepherds of God’s flock.  It ends with a reference to this miracle of giving sight to a blind man. 
No one here has seen Jesus face to face, not yet.  We can only witness, like the man born blind, to God’s work in our lives.  We can also identify with the Pharisee who cannot bring himself to believe we are all blind until we believe.  I think that is why heaven exists.  Because there are always those whose eyes are opened and they are willing to believe and to live what they know is true.  Perhaps you are such a person.  If so, then it is you.  You are a person Jesus wants to meet.