Good morning.  Thank you for your gracious welcome this morning.  I am thrilled to be here with you as your priest.  I was expecting you and am delighted to see you.  And I’m looking forward to getting to know you.  One way that I’d like to do that is to visit with you – as soon as possible – one to one and in small groups – whether you’ve been a part of Emmanuel Church for more than 40 years or you’ve just walked in the door for the first time, or something in between.  Please come to coffee hour after the service where you’ll see that I’ve put two clipboards in the parish hall with a few dozen possible visiting times over the next few weeks.  I’m very flexible about being able to travel to meet you wherever you are – whatever is most convenient for you.  Feel free to call or e-mail during the week to find a time if you can’t schedule something today. 
       Now some of you who were reading along in the bulletin will have noticed that I did some editing of the text as I read the Gospel lesson for this morning.  The way that the story has been handed down to us has at least two rather large stumbling blocks in it (1).  One stumbling block was created by community strife in the sixty or so years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospel of John and it got recorded anachronistically in the text.  The other stumbling block was created with the invention of punctuation in terms of sentence structure in the 15th and 16th centuries.  You know our oldest copies of our scripture lack spaces between words, lower case letters, and sentence structure.  Most of the time, the place where one word ends and another begins, or where one sentence ends and another begins, is not a matter for debate.  Other times, the placement of a comma or a period can change the entire theological meaning of a passage of scripture.  And we have one such example before us today.
So this is the moment when you will need your red pencil.  Turn in your bulletins to today’s Gospel reading.  Put a period after “he was born blind.”  Capitalize the S in so; put a comma after “revealed in him” and make the w in we lower case.  Then put a period in the next line after day, and capitalize n in night (2).   Everyone with me?  I’ll read it one more time. 
       “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.  His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’  Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind.  (period)  So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.   Night is coming when no one can work.  As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’”
       In other words, Jesus was not saying that people must suffer so that God’s works might be revealed.  The revelation of God’s marvelous-ness does not require some people to suffer enormously.  Rather, what Jesus is saying is this: “stop worrying and arguing about who sinned.”  We have work to do so that God’s work  -- that is, God’s compassion and God’s healing grace – can be revealed in this person who has been suffering.
       This sounds more like the Jesus I know, who is always over-turning the tables.  Sadly, the Church is often trying to put the tables back the way they were.  Jesus saw a man blind from birth.  We understand from a few verses later in this passage that this was the man who used to sit and beg.  The disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  I wonder if you hear the disciples’ question as I do – as painfully naïve – knowing with my post-enlightenment era mind that blindness from birth is not divine judgment.  But my smugness is fleeting, because I know that we ask the question “who sinned, this person or his parents?” all the time with regard to other conditions that cause people to sit and beg – illnesses like alcohol and drug addiction, severe depression, schizophrenia, stress-related illness, AIDS, liver disease, lung and heart disease.  Who sinned?  Who is to blame here?  It’s one way we decide who is worth helping – who is worthy of help – whether we are walking through the city or we are evaluating assistance programs.  
       Jesus’ response to his disciples’ question about who sinned indicates to me that he thought the disciples are asking the wrong question (as his disciples often did).  What I hear Jesus saying is, “it’s not about sin.  And you are wasting the precious time that God has given you asking questions like that.”
       Jesus said, “So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of the one who sent me.”   So what does that mean?   What are God’s works that we must work?  Well, Love…Mercy…Compassion…Justice.  So that love, mercy, compassion, justice, can become visible, we must work them.  That is, we must engage them.  God’s work is ours to do, Jesus is saying.   Jesus is demanding a lot more of us than mere mental gymnastics of figuring out who sinned and the potential ramifications of that sin. We have real work to do and it’s urgent.
Think about a person who is sitting and begging as you are passing by.  Picture that person in your mind.  If you haven’t passed someone who is begging lately, meet me in the Boston Common sometime soon and we’ll take a walk.  Jesus is saying that making God’s work visible requires that we encounter every person, including and maybe especially people who are begging, from a perspective of love and mercy, compassion and justice.  As far as I can tell, the only way we’re going to see those qualities in others is to be present in that way ourselves.  And Jesus is also saying (through his actions) that our own healing is inextricably bound together with the healing of the beggar.  It’s in the relationship that gets formed that God's work is revealed.   In fact, we acknowledge the beggar in ourselves whenever we indicate that we would like to receive bread at God’s table – we extend our hands.  In doing God’s work we are both givers and beggars.  That’s one of the ways God’s work works. 
       The other big stumbling block in this Gospel lesson today that I mentioned earlier is the part about fear and division and rivalry in the community that gets blamed on “the Jews.”  In our Christian tradition, the codification of that contention between the Jesus followers and those who did not follow Jesus has polluted Christian people and done immeasurable harm to Jewish people.  We dishonor Jesus – we dishonor God -- when we proclaim a gospel that teaches fear or contempt for Judaism, whether explicitly or implicitly.  As a Church, we must not passively receive and repeat language that dishonors God no matter how widely agreed upon it is.  And we must not drift away and let dishonorable language be someone else’s last word (3).
So when I read this portion of the Gospel today, I made some adjustments – adding the word “some” and omitting the term “the Jews.”  It’s not a perfect solution, but it is my faithful contribution to a complex challenge.
The Good News is that Jesus has shown us that God’s glory is indeed revealed in the healing of the most marginalized parts of our society, in healing of the most marginalized parts of our Church, and in healing of the most marginalized parts of ourselves.  The work that Jesus is calling us to do – the work of love, mercy, compassion, justice -- is demanding and exhausting and completely exhilarating.  And it will change us and it will change our communities.  It already is!