John 9:1-17 – Jesus heals a man blind from birth and then teaches about God’s love.
It’s as old as Adam and Eve: “The woman you gave me, Lord – she made me eat the fruit!” Sound familiar? The blame game is wired into our DNA: who’s at fault? whom can you go after; who’ll pay? It’s everywhere.
Right now, our elected representatives in the US Congress are caught in an angry stalemate that’s doing nothing to complete a federal budget. The current stop-gap measure expires this Friday and observers say Republican and Democratic lawmakers are barely willing to talk to each other. They seem to do little but blame those across the aisle. I thought we elected them to fix the problems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/us/politics/26fiscal.html
In Japan, as we watch the tragedy play out, whom do we blame: God for a flawed creation, nuclear engineers who underestimated the potential for disaster, or the Tokyo Power Company that has made a huge profit over the years?
In Wisconsin, who’s wearing the white and black hats as a judge postpones the new governor’s executive order to ban collective bargaining and unions for public employees, saying it will help balance the budget?
In Augusta, are labor unions an enemy or an ally in our financial struggles? Are businesses the powerful or the powerless? Is health care a privilege or a right? Are legal immigrants protected by our laws and our moral principles or not? And where, oh where, will the infamous mural end up?
The blame game: lawyers reap huge profits from suing anyone and everyone who coulda/ shoulda predicted the future or done things differently. (Think “Joe Bornstein.”) And so often the guilty act like victims and the victims are left holding bag. I read that several years ago a San Francisco taxi driver chased a mugger with his cab, eventually pinning the mugger against a wall with his car bumper. The mugger’s leg was fractured as a consequence and he successfully sued the cabdriver, then was awarded $24,595. A higher court eventually overturned the award but the cab company spent $68,000 defending their case.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv17n3/reg17n3-hayward.html
Who’s to blame? Who’s at fault? Where can we point the accusing finger? It’s a question as old as humankind. So it was in the Gospel of John as we just read from chapter 9: Jesus encountered a man blind from birth and his disciples asked “Rabbi, who sinned; this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
They were expressing the common belief that all suffering is a direct result of sin – the fact that the man was blind proved that someone had sinned. It was now only a matter of assigning the blame. Some people will blame the victim no matter the situation.
Jesus answered, “it was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be revealed in him. We must work the works of the one who sent me while it is day; night comes, when no one can work.”
That answer shocked the disciples. Jesus was saying: stop the blame game and recognize this as an opportunity for God’s healing power to be made known. Jesus suggested the disciples and we must place the focus in the right place – not on whom to blame, but on what to do now… how to move forward in faith.
Knowing that life has earthquakes and rainbows, tsunamis and symphony, laughter and love, sorrow and sickness and dying and so much more, how do we choose to live in the face of it all?
As the poet Mary Oliver says in the final stanza of her poem “Summer Day”:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
We live in counterpoint – and we’re at our best when we recognize good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and dark. Yes, some people do evil things with reckless disregard; and sometimes kind, good-hearted people make terrible mistakes. Yes, sometimes we must sort out who’s to blame and who will pay the cost.
Certainly there are situations that demand we assign blame and seek justice, but more likely we lock ourselves into misery by holding on to our need to find others guilty. And so, we often forsake our chance for joy and contentment.
Ultimately, whatever fleeting satisfaction we may find in the blame game, we have to decide whether to move on. Much more, I hope we can be formulating our answer to the poet’s question: “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
This life is a breathtaking gift. It’s finite – it will end. It’s fragile – it can end in an instant. And it’s precious –precisely because it’s finite and fragile.
That’s why Jesus redirected the debate about the blame game. “That’s the wrong question,” he said. “The right question is what God can do.” Jesus healed the man’s vision and in the same act restored the vision of the disciples who weren’t able to see or understand what Jesus was really about.
What do you believe? Is your life determined by ancestry, by the sins or blessings of your parents? Many feel they’re locked into life and there’s no hope for change. We’re a product of our environment, programmed by our genes, condemned by old sins and errors. It often seems our freedom has been over-ruled by much larger forces that we can’t control.
But Jesus was emphatic: we can change because faith gives us freedom. Right here, right now, this very minute, we can break loose and start fresh. God’s grace creates miracles every day. No matter what’s happening in our lives a new chapter starts when we admit that we’re hungry, thirsty, lonely, or afraid. Then we can open our hearts and hear the call to new life.
That truth was captured in the National Public Radio segment called “Story Corps,” a series of real life stories recorded all over the country. I’m recalling the story of George Hill, a Marine Corps veteran who became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and found himself on the streets of Los Angeles, homeless for a dozen years. He said he would watch people get on buses and think, “Those are normal people.”
One day he was sitting on the plastic bag in which he carried all his possessions and along came another homeless man who had rags tied on his feet. And his hair was matted in two big, nasty dreadlocks. Then, Hill said: “Out of all the people on skid row, he looked down at me and reached in his pocket and pulled out a dollar in change. It’s all he had and he gave it to me and said, ‘Here, man. I feel sorry for you.’ And he shuffled away.” Something about that moment changed everything for Hill, he says.
“I just said, ‘Oh, no, no. I’m going to get some help.’” With the money the man gave him, Hill says he took a bus to a hospital psych unit. And his life was transformed – saved, really. Hill has now been off the streets for 10 years. He has a job with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and is pursuing a degree in computer information systems at Cal State University.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19252578
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Point the finger and assign the blame? Or strive for common ground, and listen to people who see the world differently, and seek the best for all, and find joy? Whatever you plan to do, don’t forget to live your one wild and precious life!