Black Light Jesus
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In two sermons right after Christmas break I did a couple of out-of-the ordinary things-you'll certainly remember that there was that stab at singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and you may also remember my telling you the story of buying the broken monorail toy. Well, today, I want to go back again to the late sixties, and put those two things-music and shopping-together by telling you about the first piece of rock music I ever bought. In fact, thanks to the CD player we have attached to the Chapel sound system, I don't have to tell you about it, I can let you hear a little bit of it. To get the full effect, though, you have to picture a bunch us sitting around in our blue and grey uniforms, listening to this music, in a barracks room, perhaps with a daring non-regulation "black light" ultraviolet bulb in one of our lamps, to bring out the hidden phosphorescent images in the two posters per person that the Cadet Regulation Book allows. Since it's my barracks room, and since I was nauseatingly pious, you could even picture the black light poster that one of my friends made for me, that showed Jesus on the cross under ordinary light, but a background of flames under the ultraviolet. Heaven only knows what it meant, but it was neat. Anyway: here's a little bit of the music. ["Overture" from Tommy.]
So, yes, there it is, despite my later loyalty to The Doors, I have to admit that my first album was Tommy, by the Who, that rock-opera story of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who finally breaks free from his psychological prison. It's not much of an opera, really, not even much of a musical, though what we just heard came from the Broadway version. But it is an example of one of the oldest ironic themes in our culture, the ironic connection of physical blindness and mental insight. And that same ironic theme runs through today's gospel lesson, this story of a man born blind.
At the beginning of the gospel of John, which also we heard back at Christmas time, the author talks about Jesus in terms of life and light. He says,
4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…
9 The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.
11He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.
12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God;
13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
Today's lesson from the ninth chapter of the gospel puts that idea from chapter one into story form-we see Jesus as the light which enlightens everyone, coming to his own people and not being received, but giving the power to become a child of God to the one who does receive him.
Now of course what makes the story striking is the fact that the person who gets it, the person who sees who Jesus really is and receives him, is the person who starts off the story being blind. The person who receives the savior is the person everyone else thinks is a sinner. That's the Tommy kind of irony, the idea that the only person who really sees what is going on is the person who is blind. And the point of the irony in our story is that if Jesus can enlighten a blind man, he should be able to enlighten anyone.
"Enlightenment," of course, literally means "shedding light on something," but we always use it to mean mental, intellectual light: To be enlightened is to understand something that we didn't understand before. So in our story for today, first the blind man physically gets his sight back-he's enlightened in the literal sense of the word. And then in addition to that, he gets a new understanding: he understands that Jesus is God incarnate, and he worships him. Healing blindness was one of the great traditional signs of the coming of God's kingly reign, along with making the lame walk, making the deaf hear and (as in the story of Lazarus) raising the dead to life. So this story picks up that idea of the miraculous sign of the kingdom, and then goes beyond it. The author says to us, "Oh, sure, Jesus healed the blind-but the real sign of the kingdom of God was that he could make you see that the kingdom was already here."
And that, I think, is where we Christians today are supposed to come into this story. We are supposed to connect with that blind man who was enlightened. John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote "Amazing Grace," made that connection when he wrote, "I once was lost, but now am found; / Was blind, but now I see." And in fact most early Christians would have made that connection, because they ordinarily called "baptism," "photismos," which is the Greek word that means "enlightenment." So if we have been baptised, if we have been washed the way Jesus sent the blind man in the story to wash, then we have also, like the blind man, been enlightened. We have a new way of seeing the world, beginning with the new understanding that Jesus is the sign-or, rather, that Jesus is the reality--of God's kingship already at work in the world.
What is it that Christians are supposed to see with this new vision? Let me give you an extended metaphor-and this will bring us back to the world of black light. I suppose you can still buy black-light posters, but ultraviolet has been showing up a lot in another context lately. I don't know how many of you watch the various detective shows on TV right now that focus on forensic science, but I imagine almost everyone has seen at one point or another the dramatic moment where the investigator sprays some chemical around the murder scene, then turns on an ultraviolet light, and suddenly you can see an eerie blue glow wherever the least drop of blood was spattered. The idea of this passage is like that, with Jesus as the black light-having been baptised, having been enlightened, people who have been made children of God see the whole old crime scene of the world in a new way. We still see all the evidence of crime, all the symptoms of sin, that we ever saw; we see at the very center of everything the worst of all crimes, the ultimate judicial murder. But in the weird ultra-violet light of this illumination, we see, too, that electric blue glow, that tell-tale phosphorescence, which shows that everything in this ancient crime scene, every last surface of the fallen creation, every thing and person that annoys us, every hidden nook and inaccessible cranny of our own souls, has been, not merely splattered, but soaked, with innocent blood-every bit of the broken universe has been drenched in the blood of Jesus Christ the primal victim and, thereby, redeemed, taken up into that victim's victory over sin and over death itself. To him be glory, both now and forever. Amen.
--John Wm. Houghton
+ In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In two sermons right after Christmas break I did a couple of out-of-the ordinary things-you'll certainly remember that there was that stab at singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and you may also remember my telling you the story of buying the broken monorail toy. Well, today, I want to go back again to the late sixties, and put those two things-music and shopping-together by telling you about the first piece of rock music I ever bought. In fact, thanks to the CD player we have attached to the Chapel sound system, I don't have to tell you about it, I can let you hear a little bit of it. To get the full effect, though, you have to picture a bunch us sitting around in our blue and grey uniforms, listening to this music, in a barracks room, perhaps with a daring non-regulation "black light" ultraviolet bulb in one of our lamps, to bring out the hidden phosphorescent images in the two posters per person that the Cadet Regulation Book allows. Since it's my barracks room, and since I was nauseatingly pious, you could even picture the black light poster that one of my friends made for me, that showed Jesus on the cross under ordinary light, but a background of flames under the ultraviolet. Heaven only knows what it meant, but it was neat. Anyway: here's a little bit of the music. ["Overture" from Tommy.]
So, yes, there it is, despite my later loyalty to The Doors, I have to admit that my first album was Tommy, by the Who, that rock-opera story of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who finally breaks free from his psychological prison. It's not much of an opera, really, not even much of a musical, though what we just heard came from the Broadway version. But it is an example of one of the oldest ironic themes in our culture, the ironic connection of physical blindness and mental insight. And that same ironic theme runs through today's gospel lesson, this story of a man born blind.
At the beginning of the gospel of John, which also we heard back at Christmas time, the author talks about Jesus in terms of life and light. He says,
4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…
9 The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.
11He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.
12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God;
13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
Today's lesson from the ninth chapter of the gospel puts that idea from chapter one into story form-we see Jesus as the light which enlightens everyone, coming to his own people and not being received, but giving the power to become a child of God to the one who does receive him.
Now of course what makes the story striking is the fact that the person who gets it, the person who sees who Jesus really is and receives him, is the person who starts off the story being blind. The person who receives the savior is the person everyone else thinks is a sinner. That's the Tommy kind of irony, the idea that the only person who really sees what is going on is the person who is blind. And the point of the irony in our story is that if Jesus can enlighten a blind man, he should be able to enlighten anyone.
"Enlightenment," of course, literally means "shedding light on something," but we always use it to mean mental, intellectual light: To be enlightened is to understand something that we didn't understand before. So in our story for today, first the blind man physically gets his sight back-he's enlightened in the literal sense of the word. And then in addition to that, he gets a new understanding: he understands that Jesus is God incarnate, and he worships him. Healing blindness was one of the great traditional signs of the coming of God's kingly reign, along with making the lame walk, making the deaf hear and (as in the story of Lazarus) raising the dead to life. So this story picks up that idea of the miraculous sign of the kingdom, and then goes beyond it. The author says to us, "Oh, sure, Jesus healed the blind-but the real sign of the kingdom of God was that he could make you see that the kingdom was already here."
And that, I think, is where we Christians today are supposed to come into this story. We are supposed to connect with that blind man who was enlightened. John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote "Amazing Grace," made that connection when he wrote, "I once was lost, but now am found; / Was blind, but now I see." And in fact most early Christians would have made that connection, because they ordinarily called "baptism," "photismos," which is the Greek word that means "enlightenment." So if we have been baptised, if we have been washed the way Jesus sent the blind man in the story to wash, then we have also, like the blind man, been enlightened. We have a new way of seeing the world, beginning with the new understanding that Jesus is the sign-or, rather, that Jesus is the reality--of God's kingship already at work in the world.
What is it that Christians are supposed to see with this new vision? Let me give you an extended metaphor-and this will bring us back to the world of black light. I suppose you can still buy black-light posters, but ultraviolet has been showing up a lot in another context lately. I don't know how many of you watch the various detective shows on TV right now that focus on forensic science, but I imagine almost everyone has seen at one point or another the dramatic moment where the investigator sprays some chemical around the murder scene, then turns on an ultraviolet light, and suddenly you can see an eerie blue glow wherever the least drop of blood was spattered. The idea of this passage is like that, with Jesus as the black light-having been baptised, having been enlightened, people who have been made children of God see the whole old crime scene of the world in a new way. We still see all the evidence of crime, all the symptoms of sin, that we ever saw; we see at the very center of everything the worst of all crimes, the ultimate judicial murder. But in the weird ultra-violet light of this illumination, we see, too, that electric blue glow, that tell-tale phosphorescence, which shows that everything in this ancient crime scene, every last surface of the fallen creation, every thing and person that annoys us, every hidden nook and inaccessible cranny of our own souls, has been, not merely splattered, but soaked, with innocent blood-every bit of the broken universe has been drenched in the blood of Jesus Christ the primal victim and, thereby, redeemed, taken up into that victim's victory over sin and over death itself. To him be glory, both now and forever. Amen.
--John Wm. Houghton