Lent 4A, March 26, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our vision, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Nine years ago, on the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare Sunday, aka Mothering Sunday), I began my service to Emmanuel Church as your priest with these readings from the lectionary. I brought a basket of red pencils with me that first morning for Steve Babcock, our trusty head usher, to hand out with the bulletins. His eyebrows went up just a little bit when I handed him the basket, but he was a great sport about the odd request. (It was the first of many.) I had collected the red pencils from art supplies from my prison ministry program, raided my kids’ colored pencil sets, and I probably bought two boxes or so. I’m so happy to report that nine years later, that I would need more than twice the number of pencils that we used in 2008 and I did not have the time on my hands to collect the additional pencils needed this week!

For those of you who were not here on March 2, 2008, the reason for the red pencils was to correct what I believe is a terrible punctuation error in the Gospel reading for today. There are other terrible errors in the Gospel reading as well. They keep us from being able to laugh at the rather slapstick comedy being presented in this story. The way that the story has been handed down to us has several rather large stumbling blocks or scandals in it. One stumbling block or scandal 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 or scandal was created with the invention of punctuation in terms of sentence structure in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Many of you know our oldest copies of our scripture lack spaces between words or sentences; there are no lowercase letters. I brought copies of two of the oldest known fragments from the Gospel of John to go with today’s bulletin so you can be reminded or see for the first time what the writing looks like. (One is from the 18^th chapter of John and the other is from the 7^th chapter – I don’t have a copy of this 9^th chapter in the ancient script.) As you can see, reading them is a little like reading a “word find” puzzle. Many times, the place where one word ends and another begins, or where one sentence ends and another begins, although obscure, is not debated. Other times, the placement of a comma or a period can change the entire theological meaning of a passage of scripture. We have one such example before us today.

In your bulletin, the places where I’ve made edits are in bold or in brackets. The punctuation change is suggested by Biblical scholar, John Poirier in an article entitled, “Day and Night,” published in 1996, my first year in seminary. [1] My classmate Christine Carr led me to it, and it rocked my world. It had never occurred to me to question punctuation, good English literature major that I was. Re-punctuated, this story goes from being about a God who needs certain people to suffer in order to reveal God’s glory (in other words, suffering being God’s will), to being about God’s glory being able to be revealed in every human being no matter what the differences in our various abilities (in other words, God’s glory being revealed in the alleviation of suffering).

I do not think Jesus was saying that people must suffer so that God’s works might be revealed. The revelation of God’s marvelous-ness does not somehow need or 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 glory, God’s goodness, God’s compassion and God’s grace already present – can be seen even more clearly 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 so often trying to put the tables back the way they were.

Jesus saw a man blind from birth. We understand from this story that this was a 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 addiction, severe depression, schizophrenia, stress-related illness, STDS, liver disease, lung and heart disease. Who sinned? Who is to blame here, the one who is begging? His or her parents? 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.

In two different Bible studies of our Gospel this past week, the first thing someone said when I asked, “what do you notice?” was “that’s a lot of talk about sin!” It’s true, so I want to remind you of what I said last week about the Biblical definition of sin: it is separation from Love. Sin is what we do or fail to do that keeps us apart from giving and receiving Love. The answer to the question of who has sinned is, anyone who is capable of making choices that separate themselves or others from Love. It’s a particular problem that humans have. Individuals do it, communities do it, cultures do it, nations do it. Our word division comes from the Greek word schism; our stumbling block comes from the Greek word for scandal. They are both the causes and the consequences of a separation from Love. I also want to remind you about the Biblical meaning of believing, as in believing in God or Love or Jesus or Moses: it’s being loyal to, putting one’s trust in. It’s not an academic or intellectual exercise.

Jesus’ response to his disciples’ question about who sinned indicates to me that he thought the disciples are asking the wrong question (as disciples often do). What I hear Jesus saying is, “it’s not about finding fault. And you are wasting the precious time that God has given you asking questions like that.” Jesus answered, “So that God’s works might be revealed in this man who is begging, 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, dignity, mercy, compassion, distributive and restorative justice. God’s works are the works of right-relationship, and 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 do not have the luxury of sitting in either judgment or in despair. We have real work to do and it’s urgent.

Jesus is saying that making God’s work visible requires that we encounter every person, including and especially people who are begging, from a perspective of dignity, mercy, compassion, distributive and restorative justice (even when, especially when these qualities are not apparent in them). Think about a person who is begging as you are passing by. Picture that person in your mind. 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 demonstrating 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 dignity of 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. If you don’t normally receive communion with your hands outstretched, or if you normally don’t receive communion at all, I encourage you to try it today.

The other big stumbling block or scandal in this Gospel lesson today that I mentioned earlier is the part about fear and division and rivalry in the first (through twenty-first) century Christian community that gets blamed on “the Jews” and on “the Pharisees.” The caricature of Pharisees in the Gospel of John is historically irresponsible and it is unjust. 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 repeatedly teaches fear or contempt for Judaism, whether ancient or contemporary, 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. [2] The libel of the Church has caused Pharisee to be a bad word – but Pharisees were people like us, and Jesus was probably a Pharisee as well. So when I read this portion of the Gospel today, I made some adjustments from Pharisees to people like Episcopalians, from Jews to Judeans (those people in and around Jerusalem where this story takes place). It’s not a perfect solution, but it is my faithful contribution to a complex ongoing 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 Good News of Jesus Christ was that no one is excluded from the Love of God – no matter what the divisions, the scandals, the conflict; no matter what we have done or failed to do; no matter where we have gone or failed to go; no matter who we are or have failed to be. And the Good News is that the work that Jesus is calling us to do – the work of dignity, mercy, compassion, distributive and restorative justice — is demanding and completely exhilarating. And it will change us and it will change our communities. It already is!

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