Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 6, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all understand fear of the dark. I expect we've all experienced it, maybe not as adults, although even for us adults the dark can be a pretty scary place. Certainly we all felt it as children. We're all a bit anxious, I suspect, about "things that go bump in the night." The problem with the dark is that you can't see in it. You can't tell who or what is there. You can't make out what that thing is that just went bump. Maybe it's something completely harmless, but maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a prowler, or the bogeyman coming to get you! The imagination can run wild in the dark. Yes, we all understand fear of the dark.

This morning, however, I want to talk not about fear of the dark but about fear of the light. You see, I think we're all afraid of the light too, afraid of the light of Christ in which we claim to live. John's story about Jesus and the man blind from birth that we just heard is first of all a story about light. The important thing about the story isn't whether this miracle ever really happened but what the story is telling us about Jesus and about how those around him reacted to him, that is, how people like us reacted to him.

The most famous line from this story is also the line that tells us what the story is about. In the story John has Jesus say: "I am the light of the world." That's mostly what John wants us to get out of the story. Jesus is the light of the world. John makes the point by having Jesus say it, but he also makes the point by putting the line in a story about Jesus healing blindness. Blindness here is a metaphor for being in the dark. To be blind is to be in darkness. In this story, however, the man who was blind from birth gains his sight for the first time in his life when he encounters Jesus. Jesus bringing physical light into this man's world for the first time is a metaphor for the way Jesus brings light to all who encounter him and accept his message of God's love and compassion for all people.

And the Pharisees can't deal with it. Most of John's story is about how the Pharisees can't deal with it. They can't deal with the fact that Jesus has given the men blind from birth his sight. They grab onto everything they can think of to avoid believing what Jesus has done. Jesus can't have given the man his sight because Jesus is a sinner, some of them said. That position, of course, traps them in some hopelessly circular logic. Jesus cured on the Sabbath which makes him a sinner so he can't have cured. Never mind. These guys were desperate.

Some saw the problem with that logic, so they refused to believe that the man they saw with his sight was indeed the same man whom they had known before as blind. He sure looked like that blind beggar, but they refused to believe their eyes because they couldn't accept what Jesus healing the beggar would mean for them and their world. They gave this one up only when the man's parents confirmed that he was indeed their son who had been blind from birth. So they attacked the man himself. They couldn't defeat his reasoning about Jesus, so they simply "drove him out." If you can't beat 'em, shut 'em up! This is ever the logic of power. The point of all this, I think, is that the people of Jesus world, especially the religious people of his world, simply could not accept the fact that his homeless, itinerant preacher from the backwater town of Nazareth was indeed the light of the world.

What does this story mean for us and our world? To get at the answer to that question, we need to ask the question that I've asked of Bible stories here so often before: Who are we in the story? And remember, in Bible stories we are never Jesus. That leaves only two possibilities. Either we are the man who had been blind but who gained his sight when he encountered Jesus, or we are the people who can't deal with the fact that Jesus brings light and sight to people like us.

Maybe some of you are like the one who gained his sight in his encounter with Jesus, but I know that I am a lot more like the people who were so afraid of the light Jesus brings. I think that most people in our society today are much like those people in the story who ran away so fast from the light that Jesus is. We are afraid of the light. We show our fear of the light in the way none of us truly lives the way Jesus calls us to live. We just don't have it in us to do it. I know I sure don't.

What are we so afraid of? Why do we try so hard to avoid the light of Jesus, to refuse to see what his truth lights up? The answer, I think is this: If you think the dark is scary, it's nothing compared to living in the light of Jesus. Yes, living in Jesus can bring us peace; but, at least at an unconscious level, we also know that living in Jesus makes demands on us. As the old hymn says: "Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all."

And we'd rather not see that demand. Seeing that demand on our lives in the light of Jesus drives us out of our comfort zone. It makes us take risks. It makes us vulnerable, exposing us to pain, suffering, and even death for the world that God so loved that God gave God's only begotten Son, as John also says. We are afraid of the light, afraid of the light of Jesus. Let's get over it. We don't have to be so afraid of the light. Jesus, after all, has promised to be with us every step as we walk in his light. With that promise we can have the courage to step out of our darkness. The author of Ephesians says that we are light. Maybe we can't go that far, but we can at least try, as the author of Ephesians also says, to live as children of the light. As children of the light of Christ, with the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, maybe we can at last stop being quite so afraid of the