Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

"Do you believe in the Son of Man?" Some here today might answer, "And who is he? Tell me, so that I may believe in him." (John 9:35-36)

It is our hope and expectation that in every assembly, we can give answer to our visitors, to the inquirer, to the skeptic, yes, and even to ourselves,

"You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he." (John 9:37b)

And a the worshipful response might be, "Lord, I believe." (John 9:38b)

Today we have experienced two marvelous aspects of our baptism into Christ. The first reading brings us through the act of anointing with oil. The psalm also refers to this anointing: “you anoint my head with oil, and my cup is running over.” (Psalm 23:5b) The reading from the gospel brings us through the illumination accomplished through the giving of a burning candle to the newly baptized. We receive the light of the candle, even as in baptism we receive the light of the world, by which we can see things for what they are.

This is what is happening in the story of the man born blind who is healed by Jesus. The physical healing causes him to see things in a totally different way than his neighbors, his parents, and his religious leaders. In this way his enlightenment through the power of Jesus solves one problem but results in a new problem. He is excommunicated from the community and as a seeing man may find life just as difficult as it was when he was a blind man.

Through the illumination which comes through the encounter with Jesus, the man born blind not only receives his physical sight. He receives as a gift the light of the world in the person of Jesus. By this light he is able to see not only the sinfulness of those closed off and blind to the holy presence. He is also able to receive this presence by grace. We cannot come any closer to a depiction of the absolute grace of God than we do in this account of the man born blind and healed by Jesus. The Lord is the light and one has only to discover the amazing grace that enables our relationship with God and receives that relationship back into the divine reality we know as the triune God: the God who creates, redeems and completes us.

The most important element in this depiction of radical grace is the transformation of our understanding of sin. A close reading of the story makes it clear that the disciples and the religious authorities have a different idea of sin than that expressed by Jesus. I would guess that you and I understand things more or less along the lines of the disciples and the leaders. Sin for them and for us are things that we do wrong.

It should not come as a surprise that blindness is associated with early understandings of sin. It should not come as a surprise to us that the disciples ask the question,

"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2)

Jesus rejects both options. And Jesus refuses to see suffering necessarily as a sign of sin. Of course, the opposite might hold true. Sin does sometimes result in suffering, such as is experienced by the victims of crime. Jesus rejects the calculating notion that would allow us to blame someone who suffers. We only compound suffering when we assume that someone’s suffering is evidence of their own wrong-doing. This suffering becomes especially loathsome when we point the finger on ourselves and become our own Satan.

Life among the religious becomes a life of scrupulosity. We spend all our time trying to justify ourselves. Did we do the wrong thing? Are we suffering from the disapproval of our peers, or are we suffering simply from the anxiety that we might be judged by our peers? We become wrapped up in ourselves worrying about propriety. Those who do fairly well by the standards of the Ten Commandments still spend time on the smaller details trying to be good, trying to be right. We become blind to the higher things of faith, hope, love and life.

In the Gospel of John sin is understood radically differently than the traditional moral ways of understanding. Sin in this story is not moral failure. It is rather the failure of faith, the absence of trust, the lack of relationship with the creator. We spend all our energy and effort at trying to be good, boring deeper into ourselves and becoming blind to the presence of God and the relationship with our neighbor.

So it is that in baptism we learn that we are in transition. The illumination that we experience in baptism is the repeatable breaking in of the holy, transcendent presence of God into our lives. Such presence causes us to see that our efforts at self-salvation are laughable and God’s gracious presence is empowering. God’s presence frees us from concern with self and correctness. The presence of Christ gives us the chance to open out spontaneously to the God who compassionately follows us all the days of our lives.

Jesus’s witness to God’s love of the world challenged the cruel assumption that human suffering can be attributed to human sin. The sign provided by Jesus’ healing the blind man brings great threat to the healed man, to his parents, and to Jesus himself. The authorities and the disciples assume that the man born blind was a sinner. The fact that Jesus stoops to heal him on the Sabbath only makes matters more grievous. Jesus is seen as a sinner because he heals a sinner by breaking the law.

Already we see the shadow of the cross forming. Jesus embodies the very word from God provoking only hatred from those who think they are in the right. But we discover in this story that it is Jesus who brings the light into the world by which people may see. The physically blind not only receive their physical sight. They also receive their spiritual sight by which they realize that God the creator is present in the world by the presence of the one whom he sent.

The ones who claim to see well are revealed to be spiritually blind. That is to say that they bring judgment on themselves.

Dear brothers and sisters, when we are assembled we constitute yet another sign of Christ’s presence here on earth. We gather around word and sacrament. We continually grapple with an ugly choice in the church, between proclaiming that we are right or proclaiming that God is present. In these matters let Christ be our example.

We as Lutherans have continued to struggle over moral issues, and we should do so. But “struggling through” is different than “pretending that” we are correct. The church cannot continue in our blindness that the world sees us for whom we are. If we present ourselves as correct, moral and superior, we will ultimately fall under judgment. The glaring examples of this are the claims of certain Evangelical leaders or Roman Catholic leaders who claim that they “see” only for the world to discover them in their blindness to their own sin.

But there is a reverse blindness among those who smugly refuse to stand within society when our understanding of Christ would have us oppose injustice and cruelty. We cannot act as if we do not see, when we see governments act in ways that subject people to hardship.

We hear in the witness of scripture the voice of one who is calling us out of darkness, inviting us to the waters of baptism and to the reception of light. This light continues to shine in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it. As our Lenten journey brings us to the sign of the cross let us not forget the resurrection life that Jesus brings to the world. It is in the cross that we learn that his life conquers death and our fear of death.

Amen.