Seeing is believing; believing is seeing
The Rev. Sara Fischer
I came into this world … that those who do not see may see….
Look around. Whom or what do you see that you haven’t seen before? What do you notice? Seriously—look around, whether this is your first time here or your tenth or your 2000th time—look around and see something new.
This morning is all about seeing. God opens Samuel’s eyes to see something in David that David’s family didn’t see. The psalm is about seeing God’s shepherd-love in every aspect of our day-to-day lives. The author of the Letter to the Ephesians invites us to see by the light of Christ. As happens during most of our Sundays in Lent, each of these readings set us up for this morning’s gospel.
This morning’s gospel is actually one long sermon illustration of the theology present throughout the Gospel of John, that simply believing in God’s presence in Jesus is the basis for salvation; that is, healing, wholeness, and life lived to the fullest. When the man who receives his sight says “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing,” we might hear an echo of Nicodemus who, two weeks ago, said to Jesus: “No one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Because of what he has seen, Nicodemus believes. Because he can see, the man formerly blind believes.
The man born blind believes, and so he sees. Seeing reflects a relational God, rather than a transactional God. The blind man sees, and therefore he recognizes Jesus as Messiah and bows down to worship him as we do, Sunday after Sunday. The process of seeing and believing in this Gospel, and perhaps in all of life, is a circular one. We believe, and therefore we are able to see what we might not otherwise. We see, and so we believe.
Most of you are familiar with Rahab’s Sisters, a street outreach to women and women-identifying people that operated out of Saints Peter & Paul for twenty years.
When Rahab’s Sisters first opened its doors in 2003 and we used to walk up and down 82nd Avenue two by two, we would pray before we went out that God would open our eyes to see the women who needed to be seen by us. When we did, we saw women we hadn’t ever noticed before and wouldn’t otherwise have seen, women getting in and out of cars, women turning down dark side streets, women darting quickly in and out of phone booths, women eyeing us from just inside a convenience store.
Praying that prayer every Friday night before we went out into the street was a grace that allowed us to move into our ministry with clarity and without fear, and to experience, ourselves, that same healing and wholeness, that same light in the darkness, which we sought to offer the women we served. When the women did come inside, we, like Samuel in this morning’s reading, saw something in them that they did not see in themselves. This seeing was where transformation happened. Before we truly saw them, we thought we knew who they were and what they needed. Only when we saw them, in the biblical sense, were we transformed. And, to some degree we may never know, they were transformed by being seen, just as the man born blind is transformed by being seen.
Someone said—and I have heard this attributed to Mother Teresa, Fr. Greg Boyle, and many others—that we do not go to the margins to help the poor, but so that we might be transformed.” This is true not just for those of us who are inexplicably drawn to people whom no one else wants around. For all of us, there is an edge to our own comfort zone where we find Jesus by seeing differently.
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We read this story of the man who receives his sight, this one-act drama in seven scenes, during Lent because it is part of the Lenten journey to baptism and renewal. In the early church the story was understood without question to be a teaching about baptism. Christian baptism has been from its earliest practice a movement from darkness to light, from spiritual blindness to new sight. Jesus sends the blind man to wash in a pool called Siloam, meaning Sent. The water that opens his eyes, the water of new sight, is water infused with the having-been-sent nature of Jesus and all the apostles who follow him.
The baptismal promises that form the core of how we live out our faith, are infused with the language of seeing and believing: We need to see evil in order to persevere in resistance. We need to believe Good News to proclaim it in our daily lives. We need to see Christ in all persons in order to serve Christ. Respect comes from the Latin phrase to look at, to regard. It is a seeing word; we see the dignity of every human being as Jesus saw the dignity of a sightless beggar whom others ignored or condemned.
When we see all whom we encounter as whole people, as people deserving of welcome and grace and fullness of life, our own faith is strengthened. What is going to save this broken world is not rescuing—from some precious distance—souls gone wrong, it is seeing and being seen by others. What is going to save this broken world is being together in this complicated and messy corner of the planet so that together we can be sent into the world God loves, as God’s beloved people to God’s beloved people, that all might be seen and see. May it ever be so.
