Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 18, 2010

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.

It’s a familiar story to many of us. Saul, later known as Paul, is persecuting the early followers of Jesus in Jerusalem in the name of Jewish orthodoxy. Then he gets authority from the chief priests to go to Damascus and do the same thing there. That’s when it happens. He sees a bright light, is knocked off his feet, struck blind, hears the voice of Jesus, and is converted to faith in Jesus Christ. Thereafter he becomes the Apostle to the gentiles, and the rest is history.

Luke’s story—Acts is actually volume two of the Gospel of Luke—of Saul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus is full of powerful and intriguing images—theophanies of light and voice, blindness, conversion. One of those images in particular caught my imagination this past week as I studied the story anew. It is the part of the story having to do with blindness, with Saul’s eyes and with his vision. The story says that Saul sees a light, hears a heavenly voice and falls to the ground. Then it says that “though his eyes were open, he could see nothing.” Saul has been struck blind as part of his road to Damascus experience, or maybe as a result of it. The story says that he remained blind for three days. Then the disciple Ananias comes to him, lays hands on him, and calls him brother. Whereupon, Luke says, “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.”

Now maybe something like this happened with Saul as a factual, historical matter, and maybe it didn’t. I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t care. What’s a lot more important here is the metaphorical meaning of Saul’s blindness and his regaining his sight. The New Testament is full of stories of people being blind and then gaining, or regaining, their sight. Several of Jesus’ healing miracles involve curing blindness, and the metaphorical meaning of these stories is, I think, fairly obvious. In the world of the New Testament, and in our world, blindness is a metaphor for unknowing, for a lack of comprehension. When someone explains something to us and we get it we say: I see! When we’re frustrated with someone who isn’t understanding we say Don’t you see? Just as people in the ancient world did, we equate seeing with understanding and blindness with not understanding.

Luke is using that metaphor here to make a point. Saul thought he could see. He thought he could understand. When he realizes that he hadn’t understood the truth about Jesus he becomes blind. His blindness is a metaphor for the spiritual darkness in which he lived when he was persecuting the followers of Jesus. When he accepted by the Christian community in Damascus, represented here by the disciple Ananias, he can see. What he can see is that Jesus is the Son of God, which he immediately begins to proclaim.

In talking about Saul’s regaining his sight, Luke uses a powerful metaphor. He says: “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” Whenever I hear that line I am reminded of something I heard Joseph Campbell say in his TV interviews with Bill Moyers. He said that the reality of the spiritual dimension of life is obvious to most people except to us modern westerners. We don’t see it, and many of us deny its reality. Campbell said that we have scales over our eyes and that if we can just remove the scales from our eyes we too will be able to see the reality of the spiritual. Clearly Campbell is using “scales” as a metaphor. I understand him to have meant that our western rationalism and philosophical materialism, our heritage from the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, keep us from seeing everything that really is there, in particular, the spiritual dimension of life. Remove those scales from before our eyes and we will see.

The scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see. And like every great Bible story, this one invites us into it to see what it has to say to us. Like every great Bible story it invites us to ask questions of ourselves. The questions to us that I hear in this story are: What scales do we have over our eyes, and what are they keeping us from seeing? Like Saul when he was struck blind, our eyes are open in a sense. We aren’t obviously vision impaired, most of us anyway. Yet I am convinced that there are truths that we do not see. And I am convinced that we have scales over our eyes that are keeping us from seeing them. To explore that contention let’s start with some things that, on one level, we know are truths but that we don’t fully and clearly see.

We confess our faith in God, but do we really see what that means? Is God really real to us? Is God more real for us than anything else in our lives? Much of the time I can’t answer those questions yes for myself, and I suspect that many of you can’t either. Do we really, fully, clearly see God as our ultimate reality and our ultimate concern, that to which we will subordinate everything else in our lives? If I’m honest I have to admit that I don’t really do that, and I suspect that many of you don’t either. Do we really, fully, clearly see the truth of the way of Jesus? On one level we know that that way is the way self-emptying, of nonviolence, of justice, of radical inclusivity, and of compassion and care for all people and for all of creation. But do we really, fully, clearly see that way not only as the truth but as the way that we must follow? I suspect that many of us don’t. Not fully. Not completely. We may pay lip service to these truths, but if we’re honest I think we have to admit that we are blind to them, or at least that we are visually impaired when it comes to them.

Why are we so blind to these truths? In the terms of our sight and scales metaphor we ask: What are the scales that are over our eyes that are keeping us from seeing the truths of these things really, fully, clearly? I think there are many of them, and perhaps you can think of others. Here are some of mine. To begin with, we all grew up in and live in a culture that doesn’t truly believe in the reality of God, the reality of the spiritual. We are products of a rationalistic, materially oriented culture. That makes it hard for us clearly and fully to embrace the reality of the spiritual dimension of life, which isn’t material and which isn’t particularly rational. That’s one set of scales, the one I think Joseph Campbell was talking about. Another set of scales is our comfortable way of life. Most of us are pretty satisfied with how our lives are, and we don’t see the need for a lot of change. We don’t see the need for transformation. So we go along as we are—comfortable, and not letting any inconvenient truths upset us and our comfortable lives. That’s another set of scales that we need to lose. Another, I think, is simply fear. We don’t fully and clearly embrace the truths of our faith because we are afraid of what people will think of us. We fear rejection. And we fear the uncertainty that comes with any process of transformation. We know what we have to deal with in our lives. We don’t know what we might have to deal with in a life transformed by a clearer vision of God’s truths.

So we cling to our scales. We like the way the world looks through them. That world fits our cultural notions of how things are. It works for us, more or less; but here’s the problem: We say we are Christians; and Jesus came to us to teach us what the world looks like when we lose the scales, when the scales fall from our eyes. God wants us to see the world clearly, not as it is distorted by the scales of rationalism, comfort, fear, or any other set of scales. God called Saul, and the scales fell from his eyes. God calls us too. Are we ready to lose our scales? Or are we going to stand pat and say Scales? What scales? Amen.