In other words, Richard Lischer is part of the mainstream religious hierarchy and occupies a position of influence and regard. It would be fair to say he is an academic elder having taught for almost thirty years. If he had lived in first century Jerusalem one might have said, "and, here, is a teacher of Israel." Careful in study, acknowledged in wisdom, clearly religious- Lischer has many traits the Pharisees would have found admirable.

Professor Lischer's article began with this story:

In a church I served, one of the pillars of the congregation stopped by my office just before services to tell me he'd been "born again."

"You've been what?" I asked.

"I visited my brother-in-law's church, the Running River of Life Tabernacle, and I don't know what it was, but something happened and I'm born again."

"You can't be born again," I said, "you're a Lutheran….

You are the chairman of the board of trustees." He was brimming with joy, but I was sulking, Why? Because spiritual renewal is wonderful as long as it occurs within acceptable, usually mainline, channels and does not threaten my understanding of God.

Lischer acknowledges that we all have our notion of what proper religious activity and experience looks like. We're Episcopalians, we understand. We know when to stand and when to kneel, and we'd die before we'd be slain in the spirit in the aisle. So let take one more step, look at the man born blind, and think, for a moment, like a Pharisee. Let's see ourselves as people who know and care about things religious. Years of study, training and practice have prepared us for a life of holiness. 613 laws guide our actions and our thoughts. We are careful, thoughtful and pious. So, what do we do with a charismatic rabbi who- against everything we believe to be holy- works on the Sabbath?

How do we see through this wild story told by a bright-eyed man who claims to have been blind since birth but can clearly see as well as you and me? Not only can he see, he is beaming. It's like light is shooting out of him and when we look in his eyes, energy leaps from his body to ours. This is too weird. Nothing in our understanding or our experience has prepared us for this…this..scandal? Revelation? Miracle? It doesn't make sense. It makes our heads hurt and our blood pressure rise.

This Jesus is so confounding we wish he would just go away. It's hard enough to be good and faithful without trying to come to terms with him, his provocative ideas and the growing crowd of people with impossible stories that mill around him.

They can't all be true…It would be wonderful…But… it's impossible. Somebody is delusional-it's mass hysteria. Can't they see reality?

Ah, reality…a slippery thing. All of John's Gospel is shot through with light and speaks of illumination and enlightenment. Stories are told and signs proclaimed that we might come to believe- to believe in a reality very different than the one that the world puts forward- a reality different even than the image presented by the religious leaders of the day. In the midst of competing shadows, in the very face of darkness, a light for the nations comes into town and says and does the most amazing things. He's the brightest light the world has ever known but only some seem able to see that. Others remain blind to him and the meaning of his works. Still other individuals move from one category to another in the blink of an eye, at the moment they touch him or he touches them.

That's still how it is.

Jesus' earthly ministry is over. But He sent another advocate- the Spirit- who will lead us into all truth- into a greater light. Yes, that Spirit is like the wind- it goes where it will and we can't see it… but we can, actually, if we look. We can see the spirit in the signs of its passage, just as one could see Jesus for who he really was in the signs he performed. But we have to be willing to do more than look. We have to see. When the lame walk, the mute speak, and the blind regain their sight we have to notice it and name it for what it truly is, or we will continue to dwell in a shadowy reality that is far smaller than the realm God is offering to us.

Every thing we do in our worship and in our works is meant to point to the in-breaking of God's kingdom into our present reality. That is what we are praying for when we say the Lord's Prayer- "thy Kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven." We are praying for the reality of which John speaks, the reality Jesus is, to come and dwell among us.

Yet when there is a flash of divine reality, it is like lightening over a landscape. The familiar becomes strange as edges are sharpened and contrasts heightened and that which had been hidden is revealed.

Then we have to choose whether to pretend we did not actually see anything different- and thereby retain our normal and ordinary place in life- or to proclaim what we saw in the light, however momentary, and enter the glorious dislocation that comes to those who follow Christ.

The Pharisees in the ninth chapter of John could not make Jesus fit their preconceptions so they closed their eyes, clung to what they understood, and rejected revelation. The parents of the man born blind did not want to lose their place in the synagogue so they disassociated themselves from an inconvenient miracle - I wonder what this did to their relationship with their son? The neighbors had become so used to things the way there were that some couldn't, or wouldn't, even recognize the formerly blind man. How ironic- he had lived, sightless, in their midst all these years. Now they couldn't see him.

But the man who had been blind saw with greater and greater clarity as he was questioned. His interrogators turned up the heat using the Old Testament formula intended to provoke confession. "Give God the glory," the Pharisees insisted. And the man did, "Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing," he proclaimed.

Before us is the whole story. John has recorded it in such a way that we can look from the perspective of many vantage points. But in the end one has to find a place to stand. We can look, but can we see as well as the man born blind?

Jesus asked the man with the open, light-filled eyes- "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" And he said, "Yes, Lord, I believe." AMEN.