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I was blind. But now, but now I see.
Some years ago I was climbing the Fourteeners in Colorado.
I am sure you have heard me tell
the stories about the Fourteeners,
14,000 foot high mountains in Colorado,
and how we try to climb them in a single day hike.
To do that, you have to get up and over the peak before noon,
because lightning strikes at around 1:00 P.M.
We do not want to be on the top of the mountain at 1:00 P.M.
So we start generally around 4 or 5am at the latest
being at the trailhead in complete darkness.
This one particular mountain,
my brother usually comes with me,
but this particular day he had already done this hill.
He said, “I am not doing that again.”
That was not a good sign!
But he says, “It is a nice climb, it is just hard.
But you need to get up there at 4:00 A.M.
And now look, when you go up this road, just be careful.
Go past the first gate, after you go past the second gate,
and stop, turn around.
There is a place there you can turn around,
turn the car down, facing downhill.
So when you come back, you can come straight down.”
Now, normally when you go to these trailheads,
the roads are really rough, as in you need a four wheel drive!
So when he was saying,
you do not go past the first to second gate,
obviously expecting really bad roads,
but when I got there,
it was a beautiful straight road, and flat.
It was steep, but flat and straight.
And I was surprised.
We are just going up, going straight up past the first gate,
past the second gate, and I see the turnaround
and I am hesitating but I decide to to take his advice.
I turned around and then walked up this third gate and the fourth gate.
And it was a perfectly smooth and straight road.
The hike went and I thought no more about it until we returned.
We did the hike.
It was a safe hike.
When we came back down I realized in the light of day
why he told us what he had.
There was a thousand foot cliff on this side
and a thousand foot cliff on the other side!
The road was a ledge.
Sometimes you are better off not knowing!
When we had the lights of the car going up,
all we saw was the beautiful road in front of us.
We never saw the cliff edge here or the cliff edge there.
On the way down, it took me forever to drive down
because I was terrified of driving over the edge.
I mean, you are looking at a a thousand feet.
There are no negotiations here.
There are no guardrails, and it was not like it was a wide road.
There was no room to have a second car.
So if we met another car,
somebody had to back up one direction or the other.
I know that I am not driving back up that hill in reverse gear.
It was terrifying.
So why do I bring that up?
The light of our truck was shining
only on the road right in front of us.
Everything else was shrouded in darkness.
I did not see it.
So I did not know there was any danger.
Why do I say this?
The darkness was my friend
because what we do not see, we are not afraid of.
What we do not see can not hurt us, right?
So I had the light of my car
and it was just enough to see the road in front of me driving.
That is what we did on the way up!
Sometimes the darkness in our lives can be in fact our friend,
because it allows us to focus only on what we need to focus on.
Today we have this reading,
this classic reading of the man born blind in his blindness.
Here is the irony.
This is John's gospel, classic John's gospel,
double meaning and irony.
Here is a man who is born blind,
who cannot see, and yet he sees Jesus for who he really is
and calls him the son of God.
The Pharisees and the scribes can see,
but they do not see Jesus for who he really is.
In their sight, they were blinded in the darkness.
Sometimes in our lives, like this man born blind,
his attention was clearly focused on
who God really was in his life
because he had so much darkness
that it was only focused on just this one, one part of his life.
Applying that to our own lives,
sometimes we think that when bad things happen to us
that it is all going to be negative.
And I get that, that is a real temptation.
When suffering comes our way, it does not feel good,
but it certainly focuses our attention.
If you play it just on a physical level,
like when I hurt my knee two years ago.
I focussed all my attention on getting well
because I had to lose weight.
I had to learn how to walk again with a different gait.
It took me eight and a half months
to learn to walk a new walk to correct my knee.
I was focused completely on that.
Because of that, I lost 25 pounds and
I had to do all this sort of work.
So all of a sudden, this thing that was a burden for me
became a benefit to me because of the darkness.
Now that requires us to believe,
it requires us to have faith in Jesus
that there is going to be something
through this darkness with from which I will benefit.
It is not that I want the bad, the suffering, or I want the pain.
None of us do.
But we have to believe that when it comes our way,
there will be something transformative
that will come to our life.
That is what the gospel is trying to tell us.
That is what Jesus assures us of.
That is what the whole cross,
the whole message of the cross is all about.
That is why we sing this opening song about the cross
because it is the cross that focuses our attention
and keeps us recognizing
that whatever pain or suffering is in our life,
and if we allow it, God will produce some beauty.
The light will shine in the darkness,
but we have to allow it to happen.
That becomes our journey of Lent:
to cooperate in some way with
those struggles in our lives that come our way
and to allow them to transform us into somebody deeper,
somebody kinder, or gentler,
somebody who is less judgmental.
If we can allow the suffering in our life to transform us, it will.
But we have to do it with God's grace.
It just does not just happen.
We have to allow God's grace to work in our own life.
Today we are gonna have the second of the scrutinies.
The word scrutiny is the same word as scavenger.
What it means is we are going diving,
the word we might use is a dumpster dive.
We are going to dive deeper into the darkness of our lives.
And so while we do this scrutiny
with those who are coming in to the fullness of our faith,
each one of us are doing it again for ourselves to
focus our attention on what we need to focus.
Think of it as the light that
shines in that darkness of the early morning hike,
that only the road I see ahead of me is all I need.
I do not need anything else.
The darkness allows me to focus on that.
So today, as we hear these scrutinies,
let us apply them also to ourselves and
to allow to Lord to work in our own lives,
to gently transform us into that better version of ourselves.
So we can become not just believers in Jesus Christ,
but followers of Christ in the path of the light of Christ.
Today we come and we say that I was born blind but now I see.
That is the same prayer for all of us.
I was blind. But now, but now I see.
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