March 2, 2008 - Lent 4A

The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 2, 2008

1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14
Psalm 23

From the Gospel for today: (John 9:1-41)

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

In Jewish thought of the time, illness and deformity could come from sin. The disciples' question just assumes that suffering is caused by sin. It could be the parents' sin. Exodus 20:5 says, "I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me" –– a thought that is repeated in Exodus 34:7; Numbers 14:18; and Deuteronomy 5:9. Or it might be the blind man's sin. If so, his sin had to take place in the womb, because he was blind from birth. In the Jewish thought of the day, that was a possibility, in part because of reflections on the struggle of Jacob and Esau in the womb. *

The Pharisees, in particular, thought that not keeping the letter of the Jewish law could result in illness, deformity, and poverty, so they tended to despise those who were deformed, ill, or poor. (If such a catastrophe happened to a Pharisee, of course it came from some other source.)

Today, we know that we have to be careful about what we ascribe to sin, because sin and suffering are not always related, and yet sometimes they are. In the most obvious case, if a pregnant woman smokes crack, her baby is going to suffer. And yet many babies are born with problems whose mothers refused to even take an aspirin or antihistamine during pregnancy.

But more to the point, our job is not to point out sin like the disciples in the reading for today. Since Christ came and died for our sins and the sins of others, our job is to help those who suffer just like Christ helped the man born blind, much to the amazement of the disciples and the rage of the Pharisees.

I don’t know your family history, but my ancestors – and thanks to hard work I didn’t do I have a fairly complete record of them – worked hard for the Social Gospel. For one homey example, the Victorian ladies in my family not only spent one full day a week cooking and mending clothing at the church and taking hot meals and clothes to the poor and visiting the sick, they also marched for the vote for women, defying society and convention and sometimes family to do so. They felt that men and women were created equal, and they put on crinoline skirts and hats with feathers and carried signs that said “Give the Vote to Women,” and we are all indebted to them and millions like them and richer for their dedication.

In the late nineteenth century one of my ancestors must have been pretty intimidating. He rode up to a lynching with a shotgun across his lap, took the black man that was about to be lynched with him, and rode away to safety through the center of town, daring anyone to stop him and the man he had rescued. Perhaps he helped make up for some of my slave-owning ancestors.

My ancestors, and yours, worked to end sweat shops, to establish eight-hour work days, to establish unions, and to secure voting rights for all Americans. And they did this primarily because of the strong Social Gospel teachings of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Perhaps here I should pause and give you a definition of the Social Gospel. I don’t think I can do better than a definition offered by the Presbyterian Church around the turn of the twentieth century: "The great ends of the Church are the proclamation of the Gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world." It may be a little dated in language for 2008, but it says it all. It is an attempt to spell out the work that Christ left for his Church to do. (For another definition see Matthew 23.)

One would assume that is the mission of all Christians today is to help all those who are in need and who suffer, no? Actually, no! Look at the prosperity churches. They say that God wants everyone to be rich. And those who aren’t rich? Well obviously, they have not heard the Good news, are sunk deep in sin, and thereby deserve their poverty.

Fortunately, the prosperity churches are relatively few in number and exist mainly on television. Unfortunately, a far more serious threat exists in our country today. That threat comes from Christians who, in spite of Christ’s message, in spite of stories like the one last week of the woman at the well, in spite of the story today of the man born blind, understand Christianity in an Old-Testament way and miss his message of salvation through grace alone and his command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and help those who suffer. This might only be sad, except that these Old-Testament Christians have become an organized force in our society seeking to undermine the work that generations of Christians – Lutherans and Episcopalians and other historic and traditional churches – have done trying to fulfill Christ’s command to help those in need. They want to undo the work of the Social Gospel, to undo what our ancestors in the faith worked so hard for, to undo what we as Christians today should be trying to do.

These Old-Testament Christians not some easily-identifiable cult. Rather they look just like you and me. But they say and do strange things. They take Christ message about sin and turn it 180 degrees. They have the attitude of the Pharisees toward the blind man. They say they say that drug abuse is not only a sin, but also that people who take drugs are sinners by nature and moral failures in our society, and that is why they take drugs. Note that carefully. They are born inferior and that is why they take drugs. And that is also why they live in neighborhoods where drugs are sold, and send their kids to schools where there are drug dealers, and are lazy, and don’t get better jobs so they can move out to the suburbs where there is no drug abuse. (Pharisees always tend to be a little out of touch.) Therefore, these people with drug and drug-related problem are born in sin don’t deserve help, or compassion, or assistance – only punishment. After all, they are obviously damned anyway, or they wouldn’t be living like that. (Now if the family of these Old-Testament Christians is touched by alcohol or dug abuse, then obviously it is a disease, and not a sin or a moral failure. I hope you understand that.)

I call these Old-Testament Christians who mouth the words of Christ but ultimately reject them the New Pharisees, because just like the Old Pharisees, they feel that because of their innate moral superiority they have rights that other people do not have. Obviously, they are going to reject the Social Gospel. Instead, Christianity becomes just about keeping certain selected rules and regulations, pointing out sins in others, and punishing sins that they find offensive – almost always involving morals, not greed or consumption or pride.

Not surprisingly, having rejected the Social Gospel, they want to get rid of rights that do not benefit them. Many of the Old Pharisees were wealthy and were part of the ruling class. That is true of the New Pharisees. And Like the Old Pharisees, they have banded together to make laws to benefit themselves. For example, they have made great strides in getting rid of taxes in the upper tax brackets, removing taxes on luxury goods, and making sure that they never pay taxes on their estates, no matter how fabulous, that they pass along to their descendants. But their greatest triumph has been teaching wannabe New Pharisees to live poor and vote rich. They frequently cite Scripture, and protecting the sanctity of the family, and, need I say, patriotism, to achieve this end. Consequently they have a huge supporting block of wannabees. It is a variation on the old pyramid scheme.

This has allowed them to set their sites on new targets, that is, things that the New Pharisees don’t like or need or that don’t enrich them. They generally call these things entitlements. For example, they often want to get rid of Social Security. No one is entitled to assistance in old age. They should have worked harder and saved more money so they didn’t need entitlements. They are opposed to medical insurance for poor children. Poor children are not entitled to anything. Let their parents, or parent, or grandmother, get a job, or another job, or three jobs, and pay for their medical care. Obviously these children, or their parents, or someone, are sinners, or they would already have insurance. And, of course, we don’t have to even mention universal health care, because no one is entitled to health care. Which is easy for people who can afford it to say.

Is this the Social Gospel? No. Absolutely not. Is this even Christianity? It doesn’t look like it to me. Christ taught us to help others, not to take away from those who have little so we may much may have even more.

Some people think the greatest crisis facing the Church in this country is falling attendance at Sunday worship. I think the greatest crisis is the New Pharisees. Everywhere I go I see more and more churches that accept only those who are deemed “good enough” to be New Pharisees. Do you believe like we do? Do you vote the right way? Will you be told what to do? Will you accept our interpretation of the Bible, no matter how flawed? Will you forgo thinking for yourself. Then welcome! You can be a New Pharisee! No wonder attendance is down. Who would not be turned off by such an attitude? If you have to pass the New Pharisees’ scrutiny even to be a member of the church, why would you bother, unless you were one of those people taught to live poor and vote rich, then you might join in hopes of being a “Real Pharisee” some day, rich and entitled and eventually sitting at God’s right hand for keeping all the rules, and you would be allowed to join as a sort of “second class Christian” to embellish the Pharisees’ work and image.

Well, let’s talk about us for a minute. This church advertises on the college radio station. We like those folks and support them, and, of course, it is the only place we can afford to advertise. Our ad clearly states that we are “accepting” and “inclusive.” In other words, everybody is welcomed, and people don’t have to pass any kind of “Pharisee test” to be allowed to worship here. We can’t put mud on peoples’ eyes and make them see – Oh that we could! – but we can offer them a worshiping family who won’t tell them that they were born sinners and have no hope but rather that they have forgiveness of sins through grace alone and are entitled to the love and care that Christ commanded of his Church. Small and poor as we are, we can live the Social Gospel. We can be anti-Pharisee.

I think we all need to be on Pharisee Watch. They are in churches, they are on television, they are in government, and perhaps most alarmingly and dangerous of all, there is a Hidden Pharisee, a mole, that tends to lurk deep down inside each of us and blinds us to the truth. Blindness is a terrible thing.
“They don’t even speak English.”
“Mark my words, she’ll turn out just like her mother.”
“Anybody who gets AIDS deserves it.”
“Since global warming is a myth I can use all the resources I want to.”
“People are poor because they are lazy.”
“The solution is to build more prisons.”
and my favorite
“Cal ought to stick to preaching and stop meddling!”

That Hidden Pharisee inside each of us is the most dangerous of all. He, or she, is the one we really have to be on guard against. The Hidden Pharisee is the one who blinds us to the message of Christ, to the needs of others, and to our own ability to be Christ’s hands and feet in a broken and hurting world. The Hidden Pharisee blinds us to the Social Gospel. Perhaps we should pause and read and reread the words of the most enlightened Pharisees from todays Gospel who witnessed the helaing of the blind man and heard Jesus, "Surely we are not blind, are we?"


* Exegesis by Richard Niell Donovan at sermonwriter.com