Lord Let Me See Again

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

The restoration of sight is one of the great recurring themes of the Gospel. In Luke we get Jesus at the start of his earthly ministry standing in the synagogue, unrolling the scroll, and reading from the prophet Isaiah–“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release of the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” A little later, we have that transformative encounter with the blind man at the roadside calling out for Jesus–”Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”--despite being shushed by the disciples. Jesus stands stock-still, and when the man comes near him, pops the question–“What do you want me to do for you?” And the man replies, “Lord, let me see again.” “Receive your sight,” Jesus replies, “your faith has saved you.”

Whether our eyesight is 20/20 or getting worse every darn day and the outside world looks like “trees walking” at times, seeing clearly, seeing with the eye of the heart, seeing with the eye of Jesus’ love wide open is the work, by grace, we are given to do in this life. The Rich Man in our parable you’ll no doubt notice isn’t nasty or abusive to poor Lazarus at the gate (that would almost be better!); he simply doesn’t see him. The Rich Man is so consumed with what he’s consuming, so stuffed-full of his self-sufficiency, that he can’t see anything other than that which satiates his own immediate needs and desires. The Rich Man’s answer to Jesus’ question, “What do you want me to do for you?” might be–“It’s all good. I got this.” He thinks he sees clearly, but he doesn’t. While he feasts sumptuously in his purple robes, Lazarus right outside the gate is being feasted upon–he is food for the stray mutts who sniff and lick at his open sores day and night.

Knowing that we don’t see clearly, that the eye of heart needs, by grace, to be illumined and clarified so that we can see as Jesus sees, is the very first thing. Without that we haven’t even begun the spiritual journey: “Lord, let me see again!” Without the humbling acknowledgement of our inability to see, we’re stuck in a hell of our own self-sufficiency–a purple fine linen well-provisioned hell, but a hell nonetheless. Simone Weil, writing to a correspondent to whom she had sent an essay, says this, 

I was very moved to see that you had paid real attention to some pages I had shown you…. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist…. The people who have any hope of salvation are those who occasionally stop and look for a time, instead of eating.

Simple seeing, open, non-acquisitive attention that contents itself with letting the other be other in their otherness without immediately reducing them to what we need from them, or how we can consume them to satisfy our desires–is the “substance of prayer” and the beginning of love. We can’t love what we don’t see, and knowing that we don’t see far beyond our own table is the beginning of being gifted Jesus’ eye of love that his life, his love might live in and through us.

The truth is, unillumined by grace, we don’t see very well at all. We’re blind. Curled in ourselves in the contracted world of the self-centered ego and its unexamined needs, others, in a very real sense, don't really exist. Easy example. Say, I think my worth as a human being comes not from the indissoluable bond of love established by God in baptism, but from people thinking well of me. Everything hinges on being liked, of looking good in the eyes of other people. If that’s the case, then every interaction has that hidden program for happiness running in the background (to use a computer analogy). Every encounter, every person I meet is filtered through the predetermining algorithm of, “How can I get this person to like me, praise me, or at least not dislike me?” We use the other to fill a need that only God’s unconditional love can fill. The actual person in their unrepeatable uniqueness created in the image and likeness of God, is passed over, missed, used, eaten up, sumptuously consumed for the gratification they can provide to the fragile ego-self that only knows itself apart from God. The Rich Man, writes Ruth Burrows failed not because he was rich, “but because he closed himself to God before him in the other person…. The other person didn’t matter to him; he didn’t beat him or drive him off. He just ignored him because he was wrapped up in himself. Our Lazarus,” she continues, “need not be a pauper. Lazarus is merely the person who is not myself–the other–with her individuality and her own outlook and needs.”

In a sense, then, the Christian journey, conversion of life, begins with the recognition that we don’t see. It’s an acknowledgement of our essential poverty—“for we brought nothing into the world… [and] can take nothing out of it.” And from that poverty, we cry out, “Lord, let me see again!” Lord, let me see your hand at work in the world around me. Lord, let me see you in my neighbor, your handiwork in the splendors of creation. Let me see myself, the other, your world as you see it and act as your hands and feet in the world. 

We move from the self-satified sumptuousness of the Blind Rich Man who thinks he sees clearly towards something more open, receptive, yielding, and curious. We move from the hell of self-reliant enclosure, to a posture and disposition more like the little children to whom Jesus promises the Kingdom of Heaven. With Jesus we discover our salvation not in spite of the other, but in the other, the other who saves us from ourselves, who opens our eyes, who raises our vision and enlarges our circle of concern from the cramped confines of our crumby (pun intended) feasting table.

Simone Weil has a rather infamous and slightly terrifying prayer that goes by the moniker of the “paralytic prayer,” which ends with the phrase, “And let me be a paralytic–blind, deaf, witless and utterly decrepit.” What in the world is this? Who would pray such a prayer? And why would they pray it? Because the simple acknowledgement of our need for God, our powerlessness, our inability to control the world, the simple declaration of our littleness, our poverty, blindness, is the very channel through which God’s healing grace flows. “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Lk. 5: 31-32). Lord, let me see again! 

Coupled with this littleness and need–another word for humility–comes a kind of Holy Curiosity, that by faith knows Christ is playing in ten thousand places and faces, that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. Where the Rich Man has it all sewn up tight, the world by its tail, and an answer for everything, we in our littleness ask the question of everyone and everything– “Has God passed by you? Show me what he is like! Tell me of him.” Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening we pray confident that God is speaking to us in the irreducibly mysterious face of the other in each and every encounter no matter how darkly veiled to our human senses.

Today, we are installing the Reverend Deacon Elizabeth (Libby) Hunter as Canon for Community Engagement of the Cathedral Church of St. Mark. And I can’t think of a better scripture for the occasion. In her life and ministry as a vocational deacon, Libby has and continues to embody the basic disposition of Christian life–an acknowledgement of our need for God, Holy Curiosity intent on discerning God’s presence and action in the world, and prayerful reflection upon how best we might co-operate with that grace for the building up of the Kingdom. If the Rich Man is blind to Lazarus, Jesus is the one who sees, who takes the side of the poor. And growing ever closer to Jesus–from acquaintanceship to friendliness, to friendship, to intimacy, to union and communion with him–is what it means to come to see. Only by him and with him and in him do we really see.  And in ordained ministry, it is the deacon who best exemplifies this graced sight, this graced hearing of the cries of a broken and hurting world still groaning in its labor pains. It is the deacon who–modeling their life on the servant ministry of Christ who took on himself the form of a servant, and humbled himself, becoming obedient even to death on the cross–shows us that whoever would be great must be servant of all, an open space to receive God coming to us in the revelation of the other.

Deacon Libby’s whole ministry has been dedicated to patiently undergoing this clarifying of vision, and as Canon for Community Engagement she will continue to call the Cathedral and the broader church away from sumptuousness and into service, reminding us of our need for God, and calling us to make a little space in our lives for God to get at us and show us who or what we’ve been blind to, deaf to. And then she’ll continue to prod us to meet them in their need as the hands and feet and voice of Jesus. It’s an incredibly high calling, and I can’t think of a person better gifted by God to model for us how to, “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8).

And just like the blind man at the side of the road calling out to Jesus it all starts with recognition that left to our own devices, without God's grace, we still don’t see. But the good news is that paralyzed, blind, deaf, witless and utterly decrepit is just how God wants us that we might be raised by a power, a sight, a hearing, a wisdom and strength not of our own, but of God’s. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. Lord, let your church see again using Libby’s eyes and grant us both the courage to follow where you are leading and the grace to accomplish the work you would have us do to the glory of your name. Amen.