My very favorite version of Psalm 23 by Bobby McFerrin.
I probably posted this before. Well, here it is again!
John 9:1-41; Psalm 23
Life is difficult. And sometimes it’s even worse than that. Sometimes life is broken.
At this very moment, in this very place, a significant number in our congregation are grieving. If you have lost a loved one in the past two years, it would be totally normal for you to be still grieving pretty intensely, to have some tender places and some sad moments. If you are not one of those, you could reach out from where you are sitting right now and touch someone who is broken from the loss of a loved one.
If not that kind of broken, sitting among us today are other kinds of broken: Health is broken; finances are broken; relationships are broken;
I’m not speaking generally about what could happen among us. This is what is happening right now among us, to you and to me, to us.
One day, as Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. Broken eyes. Broken life. Never had seen the color of his mother’s eyes. Never had seen a sunset or a lightning storm. He couldn’t even see who was walking by him. Really broken man with blindness.
What do you see when you see broken? The disciples looked at the blind man and saw someone to talk about, someone to solve. They saw broken and wanted to find out who was to blame.
"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
In their question “Who sinned to make this happen?” is the unspoken put-down: “This blind man must’ve done something awful to have deserved this. Or was it his parents? Poor thing, bless his heart.”
They call them disciples because they have a lot to learn from Jesus. Don’t we all?
We see broken and we sometimes try to figure it out -- who is at fault -- who sinned -- who made this happen?
Or, we see broken and try to solve for the unknown, like broken life is an algebra equation.
Or, we see broken and secretly -- or not so secretly -- thank God that, even though I am broken in some way, even though we are broken in many ways -- there is always someone worse off, poor things.
When Jesus sees broken,
Jesus doesn’t assess the situation for fault or solutions;
Jesus is not the one who makes this situation into a Sunday School lesson or a sermon;
Jesus doesn’t look down on the person.
What Jesus did was to actually touch the man who was blind. Jesus used his very own warm spit, got his hands really dirty with actual dirt, and made mud to put on the man’s eyes.
Jesus wants the blind to see, whether it’s a man who was blind from birth -- or disciples who now are able to see that, in God’s eyes, broken is another word for someone who can be touched with good news.
