Text: John 9

"Give Me Something Real"

I’ve been listening to a song this week called, “Give me something real.” The singer has been burned by superficial relationships, and he’s sick of it. All he wants is for the person to whom he is singing to be authentic with him. His refrain is: “Show me what you’ve got, and give me something real.” I have listened to this song over and over because it reminds me of you. This past week a group of us went to meet our new bishop. We talked with him about finding ways to lift up your voices, to help the rest of the church hear and understand the truthfulness, the authenticity, that you demand of your spiritual experience. I listen to this song and I hear you singing, to folks my age and older who hold the reins of religious authority, “Show us what you’ve got, and give us something real.”

Our gospel reading tonight is a sustained meditation on what it means to enter authentically into the sacred. Jesus happens upon a man who has been blind since birth. Jesus sees him, and there must be something intent in the way Jesus takes this man in, because the disciples start asking questions about him. They want to know why he is blind, whose sin has resulted in his disability. Jesus denies the premise of the question. “It was nobody’s sin,” he says. “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” In other words, what Jesus is looking at so intently is not this man’s incapacity, but his capacity. Jesus has just entered into a long and complex encounter with this man. By the time it is over, the man will have gained not just physical sight, but also spiritual vision.

Well those words sound a bit lofty, don’t they? “Spiritual vision” conjures for me an image of some ethereal reality, something radically divorced from the messiness of our daily lives. Well, Jesus will have none of that. As he goes to work, he gets down and dirty, literally. He spits on the ground, makes a little patch of mud, and smears it on the man’s eyes. The word translated “smeared” is often translated, “to anoint.” It is a word chock full of religious significance, but here it refers to mud and spit. Divine spit, but spit nonetheless.

Can you picture Jesus kneeling on the ground, spitting and stirring to create his muddy balm? Surely God looked a bit like this as she brooded over the chaos of her brand new creation. I imagine the angels watching God mold this world, these fleshy bodies. Like the disciples watching Jesus, the angels reactions probably swung wildly – one minute, “Yuck!”, and the next minute, “Coooool.” And make no mistake, what Jesus is doing for this man has everything to do with what God intended in creating us. It is significant that Jesus smears this mud on the guy, then tells him to go wash it off himself. Jesus is imparting to this man not just sight, but agency. While he is still blind, the man needs to claim his own healing, his own power. That means he has to get all the way to this pool, wherever it is, with his face covered with mud and spit, which has been placed there by someone he has never met before. He looks like a fool. He has no idea where this story is going to take him. But to find healing, he has to enter into that chaotic, intimidating wilderness of unknowing. Which is to say, he has to enter the sacred.

Lucy Tatman is a theologian who suggests that the sacred stands in tension with religion. By that she means that the sacred is the wild and untamable realm of God, which religion is always tempted to think it can tame. Here is her attempt to name the sacred without domesticating it:

The sacred, the holy. The mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the numinous. Unknown untouched pure wholly other terrifying awful overwhelming presence most alluring of physical attractions – power inescapable all-encompassing dark bloody heat touch burning light source life madness danger terror death touch trembling longing burning pleasure presence knowledge gone. Present yet absent. Known and unknown. Lived, felt, feared, celebrated, yet curiously unthinkable. All but inexpressible. Unpardonably unreasonable. Almost almost almost irrational. But not quite. There seems to be a logic to the sacred, a deep, dark, enfolding, slippery logic. A fleshy, chaotic logic. Contained, yet always bursting forth, erupting, demanding, desirable, dark, terrible…A bloody logic, a threshold logic. The logic of the womb, perhaps. Simultaneously blessed and accursed. And yes it is a gendered logic, a racialized logic, a sensual sexual logic, all together all at once. The sacred, the holy, the numinous. The signifiers multiply, gather and disperse: their single commonality, a resistance to control.

At Jesus’invitation, the blind man hurls himself fully, entirely, into the chaotic, untamable sacred. He has no idea what he is doing, and yet he knows exactly what he is doing. John tells us that three times this man is asked, “What happened? What did that man Jesus do to you?” And three times he responds, “I don’t know. He smeared my eyes with mud and spit. I was blind, and now I can see.” Two of these times, the man is responding to questions from the Pharisees, the religious authority of his day. What are they after? Tatman suggests that religion is pulled in two directions as it encounters the sacred. She writes,

At its best, I think Religion tries to make meaningful, to make somewhat orderly the chaotic confusions of life and death as these confusions course through our different bodies. At its worst I think Religion rules everything out. That it denies chaos, denies confusion, denies death, denies entirely the pulsing, raucous profusion of pleasures, pains, multiplicities and differences that constitute shared, entangled life.

You and I could talk at length about the ways that religion, that the institutional church, stumbles over itself into this place Tatman describes of trying to control and thus deny the sacred. And so I want for a moment to focus on that rare moment when the church actually gets it right. Because sometimes, as a global community, we do get it right; and we need to understand how and why we get it right if we hope to keep doing more of that. I am thinking right now of the ancient tradition we enter on Ash Wednesday.

On Ash Wednesday, we bless a small patch of mud, made from ashes and olive oil. A priest smears that mud on a part of your body that knows that it is to be kissed and slapped, tickled and tormented. On that day, we make visible our woundedness, which is our capacity to know God. “Remember,” we say to each other. “This is what you are. Mud and a little divine spit. Face it. Deal with it. And with that truth in view, enter the sacred.” Ash Wednesday is in some ways shocking, but it is profoundly real. It is no surprise to me how many of you showed up to get those ashes, to be confronted by this moment of naked spiritual truth. You, whose rallying cry to God, to the church, could be, “Show me what you’ve got, and give me something real.”

Let’s not kid ourselves. The path into the sacred is neither easy nor comforting. The man in this story gets his sight and his agency; but when he tries to get real with the Pharisees, they throw him out. His authentic, life-changing experience doesn’t move those with religious authority.

But it does move Jesus. John tells us: “When Jesus heard about his expulsion, he found him.” This is my favorite moment in the story. Jesus goes to find him. This man has willingly entered the unknowable chaos of the sacred, and God rushes to be there with him. In that place, the man finally has answers to some of his questions. Gently, lovingly, Jesus asks, “What has happened to you? What do you know?” And the man says, “I know you. I see you.” In acknowledging that the man has got it right, Jesus him into the picture. “You have seen [the Son of Man], for it is he who is speaking with you.” Jesus names himself, the divine, not as something apart from the man, but as something that exists in relation to this man. It matters to Jesus that this man sees him. This man’s experience – his agency, his courage, his authenticity – affects how Jesus names himself, how Jesus reveals himself.

You and I are just so much mud and divine spit, but our desire to be real affects God. Your hunger for spiritual authenticity is a gift that you bring to each other, to me, to the church, and yes, to God. Keep going. Show us what you’ve got. Give us something real.

Amen.