SPEAKER_00: Well, our scripture today comes from the ninth chapter of John's Gospel.
SPEAKER_00: It says 41 verses, but some of you are wondering how I'm going to stand for that long.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm just reading the first 12.
SPEAKER_00: So don't worry.
SPEAKER_00: But if you need the whole of the story, you can look to all 41 verses, and we'll talk about that this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you stand as you're able for the reading of the Gospel?
SPEAKER_00: As Jesus walked along, he saw a man who was blind from birth.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus' disciples asked, Rabbi, who sinned?
SPEAKER_00: So that he was born blind?
SPEAKER_00: This man or his parents?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus answered, Neither he nor his parents.
SPEAKER_00: This happened so that God's mighty works might be displayed in him.
SPEAKER_00: Well it's daytime, we must do the works of him who sent me.
SPEAKER_00: Night is coming when no one can work.
SPEAKER_00: While I'm in the world, I am the light of the world.
SPEAKER_00: After he said this, he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and smeared the mud on the man's eyes.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said to him, Go wash in the pool of Silo.
SPEAKER_00: This word means scent.
SPEAKER_00: So the man went away and washed.
SPEAKER_00: When he returned, he could see.
SPEAKER_00: The man's neighbors and those who used to see him when he was a beggar said, Isn't this the man who used to sit and beg?
SPEAKER_00: Some said it is.
SPEAKER_00: And others said, No, it's someone who looks like him.
SPEAKER_00: But the man said, Yes, it's me.
SPEAKER_00: So they asked him, How are you now able to see?
SPEAKER_00: He answered, The man they called Jesus made mud, smeared it on my eyes, and said, Go to the pool of Siloam and wash.
SPEAKER_00: So I went and washed, and then I could see.
SPEAKER_00: They asked, Where is this man?
SPEAKER_00: He replied, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: That is the word of God for us, the people of God.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_00: O Lord, let the words of my mouth and the thoughts and meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight.
SPEAKER_00: For you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: You may be seated.
SPEAKER_00: Who sinned?
SPEAKER_00: The disciples wondered, who sinned?
SPEAKER_00: This man or his parents?
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the blame game.
SPEAKER_00: When a bad thing happens and we try to figure out whose fault is it?
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host today, Rev Kev.
SPEAKER_00: Good to have you.
SPEAKER_00: Whenever something bad happens, we often think, well, God must be somehow punishing me.
SPEAKER_00: Or if something devastating happens to an entire nation, God must be punishing them.
SPEAKER_00: The word for this in the theological realm is called theodicy.
SPEAKER_00: How do we reconcile belief in a loving and just God with the suffering of our world?
SPEAKER_00: Pat Robertson claimed that the Haiti earthquake on the Haitian was the Haiti earthquake, he blamed it on the Haitians in the 18th century who he claimed made a pact with the devil to be freed from French colonization.
SPEAKER_00: Who's to blame the victims, Robertson said.
SPEAKER_00: Over and over throughout his sensationalist news program, Robertson has made a living on placing the blame on victims.
SPEAKER_00: There's a common Jewish reflection on suffering, that the parents' sins are visited on their children, on their children's children.
SPEAKER_00: We've read that before in the Psalms or in Proverbs.
SPEAKER_00: We have an entire book in our Bible about suffering like this, right?
SPEAKER_00: The book of Job.
SPEAKER_00: Everything in Job's life gets taken from him in the first three chapters.
SPEAKER_00: And he still won't curse God.
SPEAKER_00: And then the next 30 some odd chapters are spent with all of his friends coming to visit him and basically trying to figure out when did you sin and mess up?
SPEAKER_00: What is it?
SPEAKER_00: What where did you go wrong to cause this, Job?
SPEAKER_00: Who can we blame?
SPEAKER_00: Laura and I had the privilege of having uh Kate Bowler for a teacher while we were at Duke Divinity School.
SPEAKER_00: And before she was the best-selling author of this book and others, this is everything happens for a reason and other lies I've loved, uh, she began as uh, she was my TA actually before she was even a full professor at Duke.
SPEAKER_00: And soon after she was in that position with me, she gained tenure track as a professor of American Christianity at Duke Divinity School.
SPEAKER_00: Uh she finally was able to have her first child after years of infertility, and it seemed like life was set for her until she came down with stage four colon cancer.
SPEAKER_00: She wrote an article about that in the New York Times in 2016 that really kind of propelled her as she was going through the treatment.
SPEAKER_00: And her memoir is a reflection upon what that meant in her life.
SPEAKER_00: She wrote in Everything Happens for a Reason about her journey in the beginning of this book.
SPEAKER_00: She says, I wish this were a different kind of story.
SPEAKER_00: But this is a book about the before and afters and how people in the midst of pain make up their minds about the eternal questions.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Why is this happening to me?
SPEAKER_00: What could I have done differently?
SPEAKER_00: Does everything actually happen for a reason?
SPEAKER_00: At the root of this question is this one.
SPEAKER_00: Does God cause everything in the world to happen?
SPEAKER_00: Is everything that we do just predetermined for us?
SPEAKER_00: If so, then we start to move down the line of questioning about faith and about prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Why do my prayers matter if it's all predetermined?
SPEAKER_00: What's the point of faith if everything is just all set up?
SPEAKER_00: And if God causes it all, is God just doling out cancer diagnoses and miscarriages and paralysis?
SPEAKER_00: This is obviously problematic.
SPEAKER_00: Because what's at stake with these questions is our entire belief about who God is and how God operates.
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you have prayed and asked God to take something away that you would have said that God brought upon you.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you have a friend who stopped believing in God altogether because of these questions.
SPEAKER_00: That's what is at stake when we ask the question that the disciples do about the blind man.
SPEAKER_00: Who sinned?
SPEAKER_00: Who's to blame?
SPEAKER_00: The story continues with an encounter between the Pharisees and the formerly blind man.
SPEAKER_00: They want to get their story, their ammunition against Jesus from the source.
SPEAKER_00: You see, the Pharisees are obsessed with blame here.
SPEAKER_00: So obsessed that they missed the literal miracle right in front of their faces.
SPEAKER_00: And at issue is this Jesus healed this man on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: You weren't allowed to even knead on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That was what they were accusing Jesus of.
SPEAKER_00: They had 39 different ways that you weren't supposed to work on the Sabbath, and one of those was kneading, like kneading bread.
SPEAKER_00: And they claim that that's what Jesus did to the dirt when he poured the spit into it, but similar to someone else who before made a human out of dirt, so Jesus goes to work in the dirt that day.
SPEAKER_00: Prosperity theology is a particular theological teaching, famous for its televangelists, right?
SPEAKER_00: Those that say God blesses you with earthly health and wealth if only the believer believes enough.
SPEAKER_00: Do you hear the sound of blame implicit within?
SPEAKER_00: Kate Bowler's area of expertise in American Christianity is the history of prosperity theology.
SPEAKER_00: In this belief system, there are spiritual laws about everything.
SPEAKER_00: And the blame is always upon the suffering person for not having enough faith.
SPEAKER_00: Bowler writes, Spiritual laws offer an elegant solution to the problem of unfairness.
SPEAKER_00: They create a Newtonian universe in which the chaos of the world seems reducible to simple cause and effect.
SPEAKER_00: The stories of people's lives can be plotted by whether or not they follow the rules.
SPEAKER_00: In this world, there is no such thing as undeserved pain.
SPEAKER_00: There is no word for tragedy.
SPEAKER_00: And friends, it isn't just prosperity preachers who believe this or peddle it.
SPEAKER_00: A lot of us have this conception of God that isn't based on the Bible or on Christian teaching.
SPEAKER_00: It's really a belief in karma.
SPEAKER_00: What goes around comes around.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Adam Hamilton wrestles with this in his book Why, Making Sense of God's Will, another book that I would highly commend to you.
SPEAKER_00: He writes early in that book: Among the assumptions I once held was that the Bible teaches that if I believe in God and try to be a good person, God will take care of me and bless me, and nothing bad will happen to me.
SPEAKER_00: Because this is what I thought the Bible taught.
SPEAKER_00: Every time something bad happened in my life, my parents divorced, our house burned down, two of my best friends were killed in an accident.
SPEAKER_00: I was left wondering if I was being punished by God because I had been bad, or if I simply did not have enough faith in God, or if perhaps there was really no God after all.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, the belief that good things happen to those who are good and bad things come around to those who are bad has this name, karma.
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps this is how some of us think about God deep in our hearts when we're honest.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's sometimes your compulsion for showing up at church.
SPEAKER_00: If I just come enough times, then the cosmic scales kind of balance in my favor with the man upstairs.
SPEAKER_00: But friends, grace and karma don't mix.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is all about undeserved love and favor from God.
SPEAKER_00: Grace is the foundation of who we are as United Methodist Christians.
SPEAKER_00: And karma is all about how good things come for deserving people.
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe in grace or karma?
SPEAKER_00: Do God's blessings and curses come to your life because you deserve them?
SPEAKER_00: Or is God the God of grace who is always working for good in the world, even when we don't understand what God is up to?
SPEAKER_00: Even when we are like the man born blind, hoping and praying for a different reality.
SPEAKER_00: As the story of the formerly blind man continues, the Pharisees desperately want to pin him down.
SPEAKER_00: So they begin a conversation with him and say, Give glory to God.
SPEAKER_00: We know that this man, Jesus, is a sinner.
SPEAKER_00: And what they're asking the blind man to do is swear on the Holy Bible and say, Do you promise to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
SPEAKER_00: So help you, God, but he will not be intimidated by them.
SPEAKER_00: The formerly blind man responds in a way that is one of the most familiar verses to us in all of Scripture, even if we didn't know where it was from.
SPEAKER_00: He says, Here's what I do know.
SPEAKER_00: I once was blind, but now I see.
SPEAKER_00: What the man says is literal, and at the same time it resonates deep in our faith core as we think about that first verse of Amazing Grace.
SPEAKER_00: I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see.
SPEAKER_00: But the Pharisees refuse to see.
SPEAKER_00: They refuse to get out of their preconceived notions and be surprised in any way by God.
SPEAKER_00: That happens to us.
SPEAKER_00: We want to have all of the things figured out about God, all of the ways pinned down of how God is supposed to work.
SPEAKER_00: So the man who is born blind is left completely baffled and incredulously.
SPEAKER_00: He says to the Pharisees, How do you not see this?
SPEAKER_00: He says, This is incredible.
SPEAKER_00: You don't know where he is from.
SPEAKER_00: Yet he healed my eyes.
SPEAKER_00: We know that God doesn't listen to sinners.
SPEAKER_00: God listens to anyone who is devout and does God's will.
SPEAKER_00: No one has ever heard of the healing of anyone's eyes born blind.
SPEAKER_00: If this man wasn't from God, he couldn't do this.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees cannot handle the truth.
SPEAKER_00: In their blindness, they kick the example of God's healing grace right on out of the synagogue.
SPEAKER_00: Their conception of religion, their demand for blame could not handle this undeserved healing of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So the Pharisees are the one who Jesus calls blind.
SPEAKER_00: They are in the dark, unable to see Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: You see, in John's gospel, sin is not a specific action that is done.
SPEAKER_00: Rather, John frames sin as resisting Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It is denying what God is doing in Jesus, and that is the Pharisee's problem.
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the blind man progresses in his faith throughout the story.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus first is the man who healed him, then he is a prophet, then a miracle worker from God, and finally the Lord, who the blind man bows down and worships.
SPEAKER_00: This man has 2020 vision by the end.
SPEAKER_00: He was utterly blind, and now he sees all by the grace of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I would like to suggest that how we answer these difficult human questions about faith can boil down to how we understand one verse of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Our questions about who sinned and why is this happening to me?
SPEAKER_00: And does God cause everything in the world to happen are rooted in how we interpret Romans 8.28.
SPEAKER_00: It's a verse that you might not know that you know.
SPEAKER_00: But how we think about that verse truly forms how we think about how God works.
SPEAKER_00: Paul writes in that verse, we know that God works all things together for good.
SPEAKER_00: For the ones who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
SPEAKER_00: We commonly read this to be about how God causes every good blessing.
SPEAKER_00: Your kid getting into college, the nice house we bought before the market skyrocket around us.
SPEAKER_00: The inference is this God makes good things happen for you if you are faithful.
SPEAKER_00: But what do we do about the times when it's not?
SPEAKER_00: About the people who don't have material blessings?
SPEAKER_00: And how do we account for the times that are so very difficult?
SPEAKER_00: The times of grief over a child dying, the pain over another job lost.
SPEAKER_00: The reason why Kate wrote this book, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved, is because people came to her and said really dumb things.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them rooted in that Romans 8 verse.
SPEAKER_00: And said, God just needed an angel in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Well, God doesn't turn us into angels, first of all.
SPEAKER_00: So but that's what she's addressing here.
SPEAKER_00: So, friends, how can we hope then when we know that life is going to hand out its fair share of lemons?
SPEAKER_00: I had a pastor who I worked for once, and one of the wisest things he said was, here's what I know.
SPEAKER_00: You're either going through something, you've been through something, you're about to go through something.
SPEAKER_00: That's some truth.
SPEAKER_00: Two verses before, Romans 8.28.
SPEAKER_00: It's Romans 8.26.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul writes this in the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know what we should pray, but the Spirit itself pleads our case with unexpressed groans.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, hope is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, groaning our prayers with us with sighs too deep for words.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, if you had been in it before, like in it, really in it, then you know the groans.
SPEAKER_00: You know the groans of the presence of the Holy Spirit when you couldn't say a darn thing, and you were convinced that there was no way out, and it seemed like there was no hope whatsoever around you.
SPEAKER_00: If you have been there, then you know the groans.
SPEAKER_00: And that is the promise, my friends.
SPEAKER_00: Is that God is with us, with us in the Holy Spirit in the midst of the groan.
SPEAKER_00: What if instead of God causing every single thing to happen, it's that God somehow works all things in your life ultimately out for your good.
SPEAKER_00: So that when you look back on the whole of your life, maybe at the very end, maybe even after you've gone unto glory, we can see how God used even the worst things to draw you into trusting relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that God caused those things.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, Romans 8.28 doesn't say, for God caused all the things.
SPEAKER_00: He says, for God works all the things together for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean that God caused all of the things.
SPEAKER_00: There doesn't have to be a silver lining in every little thing.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, what is hope?
SPEAKER_00: Hope is that God is with us in the pain.
SPEAKER_00: What is hope?
SPEAKER_00: Hope is the incarnation that God comes to be with us, to dwell with us.
SPEAKER_00: Hope is that God's will is always, always for human flourishing and for wholeness.
SPEAKER_00: Friends, we don't have to blame anyone.
SPEAKER_00: The math equation of life does not have to work out perfectly.
SPEAKER_00: In the center of her memoir, Kate Bowler pens these powerful words.
SPEAKER_00: I can't reconcile the way that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible.
SPEAKER_00: The gorgeous and the tragic.
SPEAKER_00: Except I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out.
SPEAKER_00: I see a middle-aged woman in the waiting room of the cancer clinic, her arms wrapped around the frail frame of her son.
SPEAKER_00: She squeezes him tightly, oblivious to the way he looks down at her sheepishly.
SPEAKER_00: He laughs after a minute, a hostage to her impervious love.
SPEAKER_00: Joy persists somehow, and I soak it in.
SPEAKER_00: The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colors.
SPEAKER_00: I think the same thoughts again and again.
SPEAKER_00: Life is so beautiful.
SPEAKER_00: Life is so hard.