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"I Saw the Light"
The Rev. Dr. D. Scott Stoner
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Please be seated. I am going to do what I did last week given that the Gospel is very long and very small print, I am going to simply tell you the story and you have to trust me that I’m not making this up. I am going to tell you the story of the Gospel at the same time that I preach about it.
In this story what happens is that Jesus and his disciples come into a village and they come upon a blind man who has been blind since birth and he is begging by the side of the road (the only way he can support himself) and the disciples with Jesus ask him a question. That was a question that got to the heart of what a lot of people believed at the time. They said to Jesus or asked him, “This man who has been born blind, is he blind because of his parent’s sin or is he blind because of his own sin?” Those in their mind were the only to choices because you see back then people believed that physical infirmities like that were caused by sin. Either a person’s sin, and they actually believed in that time that there was such a thing as prenatal sin, that a baby could sin while it was still in the womb, or was it was the parent’s sin? Because there is a passage in one of the Old Testament books that says the sins of the parents will be visited upon their children and their grandchildren. And so that was the only question, who’s sin caused this man to be blind? And Jesus says (I want to get his words exactly right), “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” So Jesus as he often did, he broke open the traditional teachings how people understood things and he said this man is not blind because of anyone’s sin. That was a pretty radical idea right there and if he would have just stopped right there that would have been interesting enough. But, he goes on to heal this man of blindness and he does it in a pretty unique way. Jesus spits into the ground and he leans down and he takes this spit (I couldn’t make this up) and he leans down and he makes it into mud and he takes it and he puts it on the man’s eyes. Covers his eyes with mud and tells him to walk to the pool of Salome, wash the mud off his eyes and you will be able to see. And so this man walks however far it was to the pool of Salome, washes the mud off of his eyes and for the first time in his life this blind man can now see.
Then the story goes on back and forth because the Pharisees, who are the religious rule keepers of the day, are watching all this and they are not pleased with all of this because you see they suffer from a different kind of blindness. A spiritual and emotional blindness. As they say there is none so blind as he or she who will not see. They are threatened by Jesus, he is getting quite a following and their power is lessening. But they also get Jesus on a technicality in this story, they find out that he did this healing on the Sabbath and the act of making mud out of your saliva and putting it on someone’s eyes and healing them would have been constituted as work under the narrow interpretation of the Jewish law at that time and so the Pharisees said this man cannot be of God because he is breaking the rules. You can just see them getting more and more constricted. You can see their blindness overtaking them. And it goes back and forth, they bring the blind man in front of the phariseea council and say, “Did this man really heal you?” They bring his parents in to validate the miracle and that’s how the story goes back and forth.
And so the lessons today are all about this image of darkness and light, blindness and sight. And we just sang that song, I want to walk as a child of the light. It is one of my favorite hymns and it is Jan’s all-time favorite hymn sang at her ordination. I remember that. About walking in the light. There is another singer who wrote a great song about being blind, not in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense, and coming to see the light. That person is Hank Williams. For some reason there are no Hank Williams songs in our Hymnal. I’m not sure why, but hopefully there will be soon. But I’ve always wanted to sing a Hank Williams song in church as your rector and I only have a few months left so I’m going to do that. I’ve got my guitar up here and I’m going to sing it this morning, in a second but I’m going to tell you why. Hank Williams, not to be confused with Bocephus, who is Hank Williams Jr., of Monday Night Football and all that stuff. I don’t know anything about him really. But Hank Williams Sr. was the real thing; he was the father of country music really. He was born in 1923, in rural Alabama; he died at the age of 29 a young man. He was born with a mild case of Spina Bifida, he had a crooked spine and lived with incredible pain everyday of his life and probably and partially in response to that he developed an addiction to morphine at a young age and alcohol at a young age and he went back and forth between the struggle with is addictions and he would become clean from them. He would see the light. He wrote some of the rowdiest songs about honkytonkin’ but then he wrote some of the most spiritual songs, one of which I’m going to sing in just a second. And he is an incredible song writer, he wrote, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Hey Good Looking, What ‘Cha Got Cookin,” See? I don’t know why these aren’t in the Hymnal but they aren’t for some reason. But this next one could be, I’m going to sing it for you. It’s called “I Saw the Light,” and I’ll just sing a bit of it because it is based on the story of the blind man who comes to have sight again and it is a first person account of his own conversion experience that happened to him over and over again in his tragically short life. The chorus is real easy and if you’ve heard it before you are welcome to sing along.
I saw the light I saw the light
no more darkness no more night
Now I’m so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light.
Just like a blind man I wandered along
Worries and fears I kept for my own
Then like the blind man that God gave back his sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light.
I saw the light I saw the light
no more darkness no more night
Now I’m so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light.
There are several more verses that I won’t go into them right now. That sounds like a vote to put Hank Williams into the Hymnal. I appreciate that. I think we’ve got to do that. As I said, Hank Williams died at the young age of 29. His life full of sorrow and full of darkness and light and his journey back and forth. By best guess he probably died of an overdose of morphine, as I said when he was 29. I’ve been thinking a lot about this song about the struggle between darkness and light between sorry and tragedy and the light and the love that God promises us. I’ve been thinking about it a lot especially this week because as some of you know, we had a very difficult week here at St. Christopher’s. Hank Williams died as I said when he was 29 years old. Last Sunday morning in Chicago, Matthew Manger-Lynch who was married here 4 years ago to Elizabeth Gleeson here at St. Christopher’s was killed on his bicycle in downtown Chicago. He was riding with 40 other riders and this young man whose life was so full of promise and so full of light and so full of energy, his life was cut tragically short. So this week was all about preparing for his service. We had a service for him here on Thursday. We had five hundred people here at St. Christopher’s to celebrate his life, and to hold the families and surround them with God’s love, with the only light that is possible to shine in the midst of some darkness, which is the light of love.
You see so many people; so many of us have been in this place, it is easy for us in this life to get blinded by grief and by loss and by sorrow. And we have two choices in the face of loss. One is to constrict and put up a thicker wall to try to protect ourselves from the sorrows of life. But the problem with that is when we put up those walls we may think we are protecting ourselves from sorrow but what we are really protecting ourselves from is the light and the only thing we can protect ourselves from and that is love. I was so proud of so many people here at St. Christopher’s who came forth to make Thursday possible. The people who didn’t know either one of the families but spent a good part of the day here setting up and serving and cleaning up. The Caring Ministry is such a wonderful ministry here. So many people reached out to made this a place where people could come and grieve together and hold on to one another.
One of the things I was so touched by was the number of people his age, people in their late twenties and early thirties who were here. People who are not used to going to funeral for people their age. There must have been a hundred of them or one hundred and fifty of them here and all holding on to one another. There was one man, I will never forget, Nicholas who was riding with Matt last Sunday morning, and held Matt soon after he was hit waiting for the ambulance to come. Nicholas Thursday morning rode his bike to the accident scene and said a prayer for Matthew and then he got on his bike and he rode to St. Christopher’s for the funeral and he pulled in the parking lot at 4:00 o’clock just as the service was beginning. And he said that he was just holding Matt in his prayers the whole way riding up here the hundred miles. And it was pretty cold day on Thursday if you’ll remember as well.
And I was just so again, touched by this struggle, this struggle that we call life. That to live life fully is a risk. It is a risk that we all can choose to take and be all in life or as I say it is something we can protect ourselves from. And when we come up against something like this we struggle so hard to understand why just as they did in the story today. You know, why do bad things happen to good people? We ultimately don’t know, do we? We just don’t know why certain things happen in life. But we have to be so careful to say the ridiculous clichés people often say. I bet 25 people said to me this week, because of my own bike accident from a year and a half ago. “Wow, Scott there but for the grace of God go you.” And I said, “I know you mean well but please don’t ever say that to me or anybody else in here because what you’re implying is that this person didn’t have the grace of God. And I did. I don’t believe that for a second.” People will say things like, “Well, God will never give you more than you can handle.” Um, I can’t say in church what I would really say to them normally. First of all, God doesn’t give it to you and second of all, I know plenty of people who have gotten more than they can handle. The clichés don’t work. The only thing that I know that works is, “I love you.” And “I’m sorry.” And to hold one another in the midst of our brokenness and one of the things I love about this church is that we do this better than any church I know. We don’t have to hide our brokenness here. And these families have been so open about letting people in to their vulnerability and that is why they will be able to heal from this. And be able to continue to see all the good that there is in life.
The last song that Hank Williams wrote right before his death was titled “I’m not going to leave this world alive.” And I was thinking about that more in an emotional and a spiritual sense. That’s my hope and prayer for each and every one of us is that we do leave this world alive. Matthew Manger-Lynch left this physical world, this temporary earthly world we past through, he left it fully alive, fully invested in life. And we have to make that choice every day to stay fully alive, emotionally and spiritually even when life is harder than we could ever possibly imagine. We can’t do it on our own that’s where we need the light and the love of each other. That’s the only way I have ever known God’s love in my life is when it shined and reflected through other people and I’ve known it for 61/2 years that I have been here with you. And I will close just by saying what I said at the funeral on Thursday life is a risk. Some people have said to me, “I don’t get you cyclists. Why do you ride bikes when you know the danger that is involved in that?” That’s a fair question to ask but Matt wasn’t taking an unnecessary risk, he was riding with a pack, which is usually the safest way to ride. I could ask you why you drive a car. When you know the risk that’s involved in driving a car. We all know people who have been killed in car accidents. In fact, it’s a risk just to walk on your sidewalk this year if you’re in winter in Wisconsin. Why do you leave your house? It’s a risk. You see, that’s the choice we can so try to isolate ourselves from life and think that we are protecting ourselves from risk but that doesn’t work. You see it’s a risk to fall in love, it’s a risk to get married, it’s a risk to have children, it’s a risk to be a part of a community and yet that is how we live in this life fully alive by taking those risks knowing that we are held in love for one another. And we will continue to hold these families as they face the deepest vulnerability that anyone can face we will pray for them and continue to hold them in God’s love and light so they will continue to be alive in this world and not become blinded by loss and grief. And that is really a ministry that all of us share, not just in this place but in all people that we come to know. That is what Jesus can truly heal of from is that blindness that can come from sorrow and grief and that healing can only be found in his love.
Amen.
