The Blind Leading the Blind

4^th Sunday of Lent

Cycle A 

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind but now I see

We all know the story of John Newton, the composer of Amazing Grace. How he was the captain of a British slave ship in the 18h century who had a conversion experience that led him to become an Anglican priest and abolitionist. He had only been living according to the beliefs of his day, and for years saw nothing wrong with treating slaves the way he did. Because they were not like him. Something in their makeup made them inferior, and therefore, subhuman.  Much like the Pharisees saw people who had been born blind. John Newton came to see his former life of sinfulness as blindness. And as one blind he was lost, in the darkness. Through God’s grace he was given his sight again. He was able to change his life and be saved.

We equate darkness with evil. We call Satan the Prince of Darkness, and we fear the dark. Because we can see we feel uncomfortable in the dark. We fear the unknown, we fear what we cannot control. We’re afraid we’ll stumble and fall in the dark. Darkness is frightening for us only because we know the difference between light and darkness. If we were born blind we would never have experienced light, so darkness would hold no fear for us. For one born blind, who has never experienced the light, stumbling and falling is a natural thing. Relying on the help of others is a requirement for survival.

This gospel begins with Jesus’ own disciples asking a question based upon a belief all Jews had at the time – that physical weakness and disease meant you or your family were steeped in sin. If you were a sinner God punished you with infirmity. If you were righteous you were healthy, wealthy and wise. Everybody believed this: the Pharisees did, the disciples did, and the blind man himself did.

The blind man could not enter the temple. Everybody said he shouldn’t be there, and he himself thought he shouldn’t be there. He also thought he was unworthy to be in the presence of God, just because he was blind. He was reduced to begging at the door. The people who passed him every day saw him as unworthy, beneath them, worthless to God and man. And so he saw himself as unworthy and worthless. How could he ever become worthy? How could he ever come in out of the darkness and be included among the seeing?

The saddest thing about the blind man is that he bought into his culture’s prejudices and allowed them to make him feel less about himself, to alienate himself from God and his community. Even today, we can allow outside influences to keep us from God. We can beat ourselves up so much that we actually stay away from God. How wretched you must feel to keep yourself from God. Have you ever not come to Mass because you felt unworthy? Or stayed away because you were not in the “right frame of mind” to receive the Eucharist; that you just didn’t think you could come to Mass with all those people there and try to pretend that everything was ok? Why just go through the motions?

Do you think that you shouldn’t come to Mass if you haven’t exactly been living a perfect Christian life lately? I mean, why add one more hypocrite to the mix? Do you think that you have to have it all together in order to worship the Lord? I’m not perfect, so I’ll stay away. Does Jesus really only call the righteous? If that were the case there’d be no one here. It’s sort of like saying that I’m starving, so I really shouldn’t come to the banquet. The very thing you think you should avoid is the thing you really need. Sometimes we blind ourselves to what we’re really doing here.

It’s ironic that the best way to become worthy of the Eucharist is to experience the Eucharist. None of us can ever make ourselves worthy of being here. If blindness is equated with sinfulness, then we’re all born blind, aren’t we? As John Newton said, it is through God’s grace that we can see again. Only God can make us worthy, just by willing it so. So we have a choice, to beat ourselves up for not being worthy or to accept the grace of God that allows us to see. To exclude ourselves from the banquet or to humbly accept the invitation.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that the ones who thought they were worthy – the Pharisees – were the ones that Jesus said were blind. Their sin was their prejudice against people like the blind man, people they thought were sinners. They could not see their own shortcomings, and that we’re all blind in one way or another. The story ends for us just as it did for them. Many times we’re the Pharisees; we’re the good church going folks who think we have all the answers. We’re the John Newtons of the world, who go along with the conventional wisdom of our day, blinded to how we are actually making things worse in our ignorance.

But we don’t have to persist in our blindness, do we. Like the blind man, we’re sometimes on the outside looking in. Not really sure what we’re seeing, Jesus calls us forth. He makes us uncomfortable at times and calls us to the waters. We do not know the way, so others need to help us get there .When our eyes are opened, we still are not sure exactly who Jesus is, even when he is right in front of us. We come up against opposition. The entrenched prejudices of others try to derail our journey. Sometimes we are thrown out. Sometimes others try to keep us in our places. Finally, Jesus comes to us in the light and we recognize him for who he is. We have become his disciples.

In many ways we’re all blind and the ignorant together. Someone once described Christianity as one beggar helping another beggar to find bread. The blind leading the blind. We have all needed help to see from time to time, and we have all helped others to see the light, too. And we all stumble together towards our Lord.

Scrutinize This

3^rd Sunday of Lent

Scrutiny (A)

Many of us have been forced to scrutinize our lives the past few years. We are being forced by job cuts and dwindling resources to take stock in our lives, perhaps reevaluating what we want to do with our lives. I met a man last week who had just been laid off from a high paying sales job. Instead of trying to find another job like the one he had just left he has decided to go back to school to become a nurse practitioner. He wants to help people and feels that’s the best way for him to do it. It’s not that he hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile up until now; he just wants to take his life in a different direction, one that he feels he is being called to pursue.

How many of you have, shall we say, “embellished” your resume’ to get a job? I figure I’ve bluffed my way into practically every job I’ve ever had. Those few press releases I wrote freelance made me a “public relations specialist”. That one article I wrote for a trade magazine as a college intern proved that I was a “published writer”.  I have a “working knowledge of Japanese” because I can competently order in a Tokyo sushi bar and then ask where the bathroom is.

Lies? Not really. Stretching… Maybe. When we write our resumes, we scrutinize every job we’ve ever had. We go over past job descriptions and list all the things we have done and accomplished. We do a bit of soul searching to determine exactly what it was we did accomplish. Some things we leave in, some things we take out. Every time we switch jobs it seems we have to take inventory of our past lives. We are forced to judge ourselves by what we see as our successes and our failures. Maybe that’s why we fudge a bit. Maybe we see the failures too glaringly.

We don’t outright lie on our resumes, we just highlight our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, so we can get our foot in the door. In the end, whatever our resumes say, we still have to perform at our jobs or we get fired.

I think we do the opposite when we scrutinize our moral lives. Whereas when we put together our professional resumes we tend to exaggerate the positives, our moral resumes may tend to emphasize our failures. All too often when we take stock in how well we’ve actually been living our lives, we come up short. All we see is the negative.

Each year we are given the opportunity to take some time to reflect on our lives, to pray about it and make corrections. Lent is the time when we update our moral resumes.

Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.

But Jesus actually hadn’t told the Samaritan woman everything she had ever done.  He only told her one thing about her life; that she had problems with her relationships with men. He didn’t run down a long laundry list of sins, and he didn’t judge her life choices. He simply stated the fact, and then praised her for her honesty, even though she hadn’t told him the whole truth. She had fudged her resume’ yet Jesus saw the positive in it.

Why did she make the leap from that one fact to “he told me everything I ever did”? Seems a bit drastic. Who scrutinized whom? It wasn’t Jesus. But something about him caused the woman at the well to take an inventory of her life, and it came up short. No amount of fudging could make it look good. He didn’t tell her everything she ever did. She told herself.

Jesus did not come to judge. But when we come face to face with our perfect God, we can’t hide.  When we encounter Jesus our lives are laid bare before us, and he forces us to scrutinize ourselves.  Jesus doesn’t throw our shortcomings in our faces. He just allows us to see ourselves for who we really are, and then steps back to see what we’ll do next. The woman at the well took one simple piece of information and used it to make a complete turnaround in her life. She knew everything she had ever done wrong; she just needed a gentle push to get back on track.

The woman at the well begins with a surface level observation, taking Jesus literally at his word that he has physical water to drink that will never dry up. A pretty neat trick, if he can do it. I think we also sometimes come here to see if Jesus is really all he’s cracked up to be. We have also been called to the well, and some of us saw immediately how deep it was and others were a bit more skeptical.

As the woman was forced to confront her own weaknesses and sinfulness, she recognized Jesus as someone special, not just another nice guy, but a prophet. A prophet speaks truth to power, and speaks truth to each of us. He tells her the truth of her life without judging her for it. We have also found out that the more we learn about Jesus Christ the more we learn about ourselves. We become aware of the positives and negatives of our lives more acutely, and we have become better for it.

Finally, when the woman focused on the person of Jesus, she came to recognize him for who he really was. She began to understand who God really is and how we are in relationship with God; that we must worship him just the way he is, in spirit and in truth, that we actually have to mimic God’s identity. Much like Mary Magdalene in the garden on Easter morning, she came to recognize Jesus as God only when she could strip away all the preconceived notions she had of who was before her. She had to see the spirit and accept the truth. Only then could she accept what he offered her. Only then could she truly worship him.

Usually in the gospels, people come to believe in Jesus because of the miracles he performs. But there is no miracle here. No water turned into wine, no blind person seeing again, no cripple walking, no one being raised from the dead. Or is there? Water is not turned into wine; it is transformed into everlasting life. The woman does not regain physical sight; she sees who she really is. Her legs are not strengthened; she is healed from the paralysis of fear and doubt that has kept her away from her neighbors. She is not raised from earthly death; she dies to her sins and rises to a new life as Jesus’ disciple.

Like the woman at the well, we also have met Jesus in unexpected places. While going about our everyday lives, Jesus has come to us and spoken to us, even when we’ve felt we didn’t deserve it.

Have we ever put as much effort into scrutinizing our moral lives as we have putting together our resumes? Do we understand that we too are called to constant conversion, or are we like the apostles in today’s gospel who can’t see beyond our own prejudices to see people as God sees them? Do we get so hung up on our own daily concerns that we don’t recognize the God who’s in our midst? Have we totally missed the point?

Come and meet someone who told me everything I ever did. Could we stand up to such scrutiny? 

Why Are You a Deacon?

3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2

Cycle A

Ten years ago last Friday I was ordained a Roman Catholic deacon. And ten years ago today I served my first Mass and preached my first homily here, at this church, from this ambo. Like many of you, I often take the opportunity at anniversaries to do a little reflection and introspection on my life and how I got to where I am today.

And so I think it’s perfect that today’s gospel reading is about the calling of the first apostles, Peter, Andrew, James and John. And it’s also wonderful that yesterday we celebrated the feast of the conversion of St. Paul. Today is a great time to talk about vocations.

It seems that whenever I meet someone new at some function or other and they learn that I’m a deacon, the first thing they want to know is: what is a deacon and what does he do? This is especially puzzling for my Mormon friends, because LDS deacons are about eight years old. Then, invariably they ask me what made me want to become a deacon. And you, know, that’s not an easy question to answer. That’s the core question for anyone discerning a vocation.

For some people it’s something they’ve known they’ve wanted to do for a long time. Fr. Bob says he’d known he was called to be a priest since he was four years old. Others have no idea they are being called until someone points it out to him. Deacon Bob says that he didn’t seriously consider his vocation to be a deacon until Fr. Bob suggested he pursue it. Another trend in the church today is second career or late in life vocations. Fathers Rick Sherman, Pat Elliott and J.J. Schwall in this diocese were all ordained in their fifties or sixties.

I thought I wanted to be a deacon and I actively petitioned the bishop to be allowed into the program. I guess it had always been in the back of my mind. My father was very religious and I was influenced by that growing up. I briefly thought about being a priest when I was ten or eleven, but then set it aside when I discovered girls. It was only after my kids were older and I began to learn more about the permanent diaconate that I thought it was something I was being called to. My call was a nagging feeling in the back of my heart that would pop up from time to time. Nothing dramatic or obvious. No visions of angels or heavenly hosts.

A priest is always a priest and when he wakes up in the morning he knows what he is to do that day and what role he is to play. But for a deacon it’s a bit more complicated. I often joke that there are two main differences between priests and deacons. First, deacons can be married and second, a deacon can say no. But it’s both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, folks don’t usually call the deacon at two in the morning to rush over to the hospital to give last rights. On the flip side, a deacon is often torn. A deacon’s first priorities are his family and his job. A priest is a priest and can be totally dedicated to his people in a way a deacon cannot be.

I often say that a deacon is not what I do, it is who I am, but in reality it doesn’t often work out that way. When I wake up in the morning, I know I’m a deacon but that’s not what I usually think about first thing. I worry about my business and my house and my wife and my children and all the things most of us worry about.

I am constantly shifting roles. And it is easy to forget my vocation to serve others. It’s easy to forget that I’m ordained and that that role comes with certain expectations and responsibilities. It’s easy to be a hypocrite when you are expected to live a certain way. You all see a certain side of me; my family knows me differently. I often tell Nancy that if she thinks I’m bad now, just think how bad I’d be if I wasn’t struggling to live as a deacon.

I am telling you all this not to toot my own horn but because you’re just like me. Some folks are called to dedicate their entire lives to God as priests and religious; most of us aren’t. You also are called to a vocation, whether it be as married or single, parent or child. You are still called to the same service and holiness as your priests, deacons, and religious brothers and sisters. You also have to wear a lot of hats. You are a husband or wife, a business person, a friend, a son or daughter, father or mother, and you are constantly having to balance all of them. The one thing that ties them all together is your faith, the love of God in your life that is calling you to serve one another. And it is a constant struggle.

The vocations of marriage and ordained service are actually very much alike. You who are married could not dream of life without your spouse, hopefully. You feel drawn to your partner in a way that could not be denied if you were to be happy. You choose to make your relationship holy through the sacrament of holy matrimony. And every day you strive to live your marriages as examples of God’s love to the world by serving one another and the community.

You are not the same people you were on your wedding day, are you? Marriage has changed you, hopefully for the better. You were bride and groom on your wedding day, now you are a married couple, truly one. You have learned that by trying to fill the needs of the other you are living as God intended you to, and it has become easier and easier for you to reach out to others in need also.

And those of you called to a vocation of single life, whether it is by choice or temporary, can also live the life of a disciple through your example of service to others. You are called to be an example of holiness and constancy to young people and other singles your age.

And like a deacon, you move in and out of your holiness. We go in and out of our commitment to our vocations. It’s always there in the background, the glue that holds things together, but you forget about it sometimes, don’t you. You don’t always live up to the ideal, and that’s ok. Some people call it hypocrisy, I call it the reality of life.

Peter, Andrew, James and John were the same way, as were all the apostles. We heard today that they left their nets and followed Jesus that day, and we often don’t think of what happened next. Jesus lived near them in Capernaum, so it makes sense that the apostles at first hung out with Jesus some times and other times they had to attend to their responsibilities. Like other men of their day, they were probably married. What, you think that Jesus only called single men? There weren’t a lot of them around Judea. We know that Peter was married, why not the others? And you think their wives just let them quit their jobs to hang out with some itinerant preacher?

So, I imagine that sometimes they accompanied Jesus on his journeys, and other times they stayed at home and went about their business. They were husbands and fathers and sons and businessmen. They also had to balance all the areas of their lives, just like we do. Jesus seems to weave in and out of our priorities throughout our lives, and that’s natural. And the beauty of it all is that it is in the ordinariness of our everyday lives that we find Jesus and best give witness of him to others.

The apostles were simple men, hard working men, family men. And their call by Jesus changed them and I believe it changed their families, too. It was sometimes painful. The apostles grew into their vocations. They screwed up a lot and got it wrong. Sometimes their motivations weren’t the purest; sometimes they were in it for themselves. But one thing you will discover as you discern your own vocations is that you are called where you are for who you are. God is not looking to call only perfect disciples. If he were we’d all be doomed.

One big problem I had during my formation was that I had an unrealistic, idealized idea of what a deacon should be. I saw other deacons out there and tried to become like them, but I never could. I actually wanted to quit six months from ordination because I didn’t think I was worthy to be a deacon, at least the type of person I thought a deacon should be.

But then a wise priest told me that the church ordained him a priest but the people made him a pastor. He told me that living your vocation actually prepares you for it. He told me that God has called me as I am and the church has ordained me as I am. I don’t have to become some stylized idea of what I think a deacon should be. And I have found that to be true over the past ten years. My vocation as deacon has been helping me to truly become a deacon. But it will be a lifelong struggle.

Just as all life experiences change and form you, your vocation to God subtly changes you over time. Your spouse married you for who you are. Are you worthy of your spouse? How has your marriage changed you? You have changed me by allowing me to become part of your lives in very intimate ways; in your living and your dying, in your love for one another and in your children.

Discerning a vocation is not easy or quick. Just like there is no love at first sight, it is rare to find a vocation at first sight. Sometimes you fight it tooth and nail, but if you don’t find your place you won’t truly be happy. Sometimes you will feel that you are unworthy and unprepared. How do you think Peter, Andrew, James and John felt that day?

We have to expand our idea of vocation beyond simply the ordained. We need to continue to pray for and encourage vocations to the priesthood in our young men, in your sons. Most importantly, we must not discourage any potential calls to vocation. I know a woman who, when I mentioned to her that her son might be being called to the priesthood exclaimed, “Over my dead body!” Her son grew up, fell in love with and married a good Mormon girl, converted, and ironically now has the priesthood!

We have to all find our own way, the way to God that we are all called to as individuals, and I think the one thing that ties those ways together is the idea of service. The Greek word for service is diaconia. We are all called to be deacons to the world and we are truly happiest when we serve others.

The greatest deacon in all of history was Jesus Christ. Like Jesus, we are all called to be deacons, and we all share in the priesthood of Christ. You were called through your baptism and are made worthy through your baptism. It will be a struggle, but persevere. As St. Peter said, “Therefore, brothers, be all the more eager to make you call and election firm, for, in doing so you will never stumble.”

Hopefully, someday you can answer the question, "Why am I a deacon?"