Blinded by the Dark

2 Corinthians 4:3-6 [NRSV]
And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake. For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Back in the town across the bay where I grew up, in a little place called Orange, we had a movie theater. Orange doesn’t have a movie theater anymore, but in the 1920s they built this grand opera house that had become a place to show movies by the time I came along. And it was a pretty decrepit place when I went there. It had uneven rows of seats so that in some places there would two rows right close together and in other places it looked like a row was missing so that there was a huge gap.

One time I went to the movies with my mom and we got to the theater late. The movie had actually started before we got there so we were trying to find our way in with only the light from the screen to guide the way. You know what that experience is like. You go from the brightly-lit lobby into a darkened theater and you feel like you’re blind.

Mom was leading the way and she took us to a row where some people were already sitting down. We started in and we were not having a good time of it. We were stepping on people’s toes and at one point Mom even sat down on somebody’s lap. It was all very embarrassing, but it got worse. When we finally got to our seats and our eyes adjusted to the light we realized that we were in one of the wide rows and we had had about four feet of space to walk in. I can only imagine what those poor people we had stepped on on the way over must have thought. But what I learned was this - there are times when we have the capacity to see where we are going but we are blinded by the dark.

There’s a spiritual truth in this. As you no doubt know, it is possible and perhaps even typical for us to go on with our lives blinded to God’s presence and calling. We have the capacity to be united with God. In fact, that is our normal state. We were created to be related to God and to one another. But sin gets in the way. The gods of this world, as Paul calls them, distract us from the light of Christ and we end up giving them our allegiance, our money, our trust, and ultimately our lives. We have a hard time seeing Jesus and recognizing him for who he is.

Which makes us qualified to be disciples, I suppose. Peter, James and John had the same problem. They were called away from their lives as fishermen to become followers of Jesus and at times they didn’t seem to get what Jesus was up to or who Jesus was either. Peter, you remember, was the first to confess that Jesus was the Messiah, the Savior all Israel had been waiting for. But he was also the first to rebuke Jesus when Jesus told them that he would have to suffer and die. James and John left their nets pretty easily but they also asked to be at Jesus’ side in glory, not understanding what that meant. In other words, these three who appear in our gospel lesson this morning, and whom we assume were better able to get what Jesus was up to because they were there with him, had a hard time getting it.

But there was that moment when it was unmistakable. Jesus took these three and went to the top of a mountain and he was transfigured. His clothes became dazzling white. Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the Old Testament law and the prophets, appeared next to him as if to say, “This one, this Jesus, is the fulfillment of God’s promise that we proclaimed.” A cloud overshadows them and a voice from heaven, God’s voice, comes and says, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!” What more do you need? If they were looking for a sign to tell them who Jesus was, this was surely it. It must have been clear from that point on.

But you know, and I know, that the story didn’t end there on the Mount of Transfiguration. The disciples would go back down the mountain and they would still have trouble understanding. They would still make mistakes and argue among themselves and protest when Jesus talked about suffering and death and fall asleep in the garden when they were supposed to be keeping watch and abandon him at his death and disbelieve his resurrection. There was a lot more to their story, just as there was a lot more to Jesus’ story.

It was these same disciples, though, who took the word to a hurting world. They were the ones who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and began to preach about the Jesus they had known as Jesus, the Son of God. They had a message to share and did they share it! Within a generation all of the known world was dealing with a proliferation of new Christians who had their lives turned completely around. In the Greek city of Thessalonica, the people of the town dragged the Christians into the street and said, “Look, these people who are turning the world upside down have come here, too!” [Acts 17:6].

What happened was that a people who had been blinded before suddenly were able to see. The metaphor is all there in the story of Paul. Previously he was Saul, a bitter opponent and persecutor of the Christians. But on a trip to Damascus he was knocked to ground by a blinding light and the voice of Jesus. It was literally blinding. Saul could not see until he was taken to the home of a Christian named Ananias who touched him and scales from his eyes and he could see again. He went on to a new life and a new mission as the great missionary Paul. You can just hear the hymn, can’t you? “I once was lost but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.”

But Paul realized that keeping your eyes open is not as easy as it might seem. As he traveled the region and began new fellowships of Christians there was excitement and energy. But there was also confusion and conflict. Paul kept writing back to these new churches and advising them through the midst of deep hurts and wounds. Sometimes false prophets and preachers appeared with conflicting messages. Sometimes leaders would fail or members would be engaged in immoral relationships. There were arguments over food and worship and spiritual gifts. There were theological divides. There were competing religions and the temptations of the world. There were so many things that blinded the new Christians to who Jesus was. They had the capacity to see, but they were blinded by the darkness of the world.

In the passage from 2nd Corinthians that we read today, Paul is writing to a church that was beginning to question the things Paul had been teaching them. It was a hard message for them. They began to accuse Paul of offering an obscure message that didn’t seem as attractive as those being peddled by other preachers who were coming through town. Paul talked about a Jesus who was fully human but also the image of God. Paul talked about a suffering savior who saved us so that we could be servants. That didn’t sound as great as the story being told by some others who emphasized the freedom Christ brings and lived as if they had no responsibilities toward anyone. Paul warned of those who preached a gospel that seemed to point to themselves because it would end up obscuring the one thing that mattered - the preaching of Jesus as Savior.

We live in an age when the dangers Paul talked about are just as real and present as they always have been. It is hard to keep our eyes on Jesus when we are eye-deep in the darkness of the world. We have so many distractions from the gospel we can’t even begin to name them. Financial worries, relationship troubles, addictions, .mp3s, television, computers, worries, anxieties, illness, fear, greed, consumerism, gossip - these are all things that can channel our inherent desire for God in other directions. We can be blinded by the darkness in the world.
But there is also darkness in the church. I don’t know if you have noticed this but this church is made up of human beings. And not only that - this church is made up of sinners. We pray that we are sinners being healed by the grace of God, but we are only on the way to perfection. We have not arrived.

What this means is that we can sometimes be blinded by the darkness in here as well. We can lose sight of Jesus. Instead of conforming to the image of Christ, who is the image of God, we can conform Jesus into our image. The church is always prone to the danger of bad theology and the result is a great woundedness within the church as well from people who have sought refuge here, who have sought healing here.

How do we see bad theology at play? When we make Jesus out to be an overbearing parent for whom our best is never good enough…when we emphasize judgment without grace…when we deny the capacity built into us from before our birth to cooperate with what God is doing in the world…when we have a Jesus who is more interested in pointing out sinfulness than leading us to salvation from sin…that’s bad theology.

On the other hand when we make Jesus the model of acceptance and tolerance without remembering the way he challenged people to change…when we talk about his willingness to eat with sinners without talking about his willingness to overturn tables in the Temple…when we hear him say “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone” but fail to hear “Go and sin no more”…that’s bad theology.

When we make Jesus out to be unconcerned with the world…when we make his salvation only a matter between me and God - “Me and Jesus we got our own thing going”…when we believe that the gospel has nothing to say to the powers and principalities that rule in our day…when we see our government out of control and unresponsive to the people, as it is….when we see wars and rumors of war…when we see poverty in our community and divisions in our schools…when we see these things and do not speak because we feel that the Jesus we have remade has nothing to say to the world…that’s bad theology.

When we imagine an Armageddon Jesus who is unconcerned with the here and now because the end of the story is only about destruction and death…when we are overly fascinated with the end of the world because we believe the only thing that matters is the coming of the next…when that God is rending and not reconciling all things to God’s own self in Jesus Christ…when we neglect our lives and our bodies and our relationships in this age because we are convinced they have no ultimate meaning…when we believe in life after death but not life before death…that’s bad theology.

You see where I’m going? Are you going with me? Jesus is always more and other than what we can say about him. He’s always coming to transform our expectations of who he is and never to accept our prescriptions for how he ought to act, because our ideas about making the world new are always going to be tainted by sin. Our will always gets in the way. So how do we discover who Jesus is? How do we escape the dangers of being blinded by the dark? By telling the story. By going back to the story week after week and reading things that just don’t make sense with the way things are. When we read the Sermon on the Mount we can’t help but be confronted by things that make no sense with how things work in the world as we know it. Love your enemy? Blessed are the meek? Don’t store up treasures for yourself on earth? Don’t worry about tomorrow? Who of us can read those words without it catching us up short? How can we read these things and not reflect on how we are living our lives? They are always going to be hard sayings.

That’s as it should be. The Jesus who meets us on the Mount of Transfiguration and on the fishing boat and at the table with sinners and welcoming little children and hanging from the cross and vacating a tomb is always going to be a Jesus who is difficult for us to hold on to. But when we put on Christ…when we keep searching and listening for Jesus…when we decide to follow Jesus instead of him following us…then we will find that the light changes…we can see capacities and abilities we never knew we had…we can see the possibility of transformation and can know that it is not just meant for others but it is meant for us.

The story is often told of sculptors who are asked, “How in the world did you create such a magnificent work of art out of that block of marble?” And the sculptor will often say, “I did not create it. I only revealed what was there in the rock all along.” Somehow they have eyes to see and skill to uncover something in a block of stone which no one else can see. But when they follow that vision to completion we proclaim them creative geniuses.

The world is not unfamiliar with the image of Jesus. His image has been carried around the world by soldiers, missionaries and television broadcasts. Wars are fought in his name, but people find hope and healing in Jesus as well. In one way or another many people have had an encounter with the image of Jesus.

But how many have seen in that image what those disciples saw - a Jesus who cannot be co-opted by human agendas. A Jesus who denies the gods of this world as unworthy of worship and incapable of saving grace. A Jesus who is not content to leave us as we are but who continually draws us into the will of God. This is the Jesus hidden by the image of Jesus.

But those who have ears to hear and eyes to see know that our blindness can be overcome - not by paying attention to the darkness, but by looking for the light. Thanks be to God.