Sermon Notes 19th March 2023
Desiree Snyman

Wake-up! Grow-up!

A man knocks on his son’s door: “Jaime wake up” he says. 

Jaime answers: “I don’t want to get up!” 

The father answers: “you have to get up and go to school!”

Jaime says: “I don’t want to go to school.”

“Why not?” asks the father.

Jaime says, “I’ll give you 3 reasons why I won’t go to school.

1.    It’s dull. 

2.    The kids tease me. 

3.    The teachers pick on me.”

The father says “Wake-up! Grow-up! I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school.

1.    It’s your duty. 

2.    You are 45 years old. 

3.    You are the headmaster.”

The art of prayer, spirituality and authentic religion is waking up. We are invited to wake up to reality. In Ephesians the writer says, “Sleepers awake!” Some describe the journey of spiritual growth as “waking up!” I see in the text for today a map that landscapes our soul’s journey to spiritual maturity that we may use as a guide to growing-up in God. May it inspire us to dive deeper into God. 

The scriptures says that as Jesus walked along, they came across a man blind from birth. The disciples ask: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents? Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents.” 

This is a religious question and Jesus wants them to wake up from religion!

The disciples are operating according to the equation that if there is suffering there must be sin.

Jesus breaks this equation. 

Jesus breaks that religious belief. 

The equation of suffering = sin only survives if God is the Great and Angry Judge in the Great Somewhere in The Great Out There. Growing up spiritually means learning to see God differently and experience God within. 

One task is to explore different images of God. 

The image of God as almighty father is used only 12 times in Scripture, yet it remains a dominant image in church liturgy. Why? Why is it that people are so offended at other images for God? All it is, is an image. Perhaps we can gently suggest that sometimes we are guilty of the sin of idolatry: that we worship the image of God and not God. The image may point the way to God – we need to look at the way it is pointing and not the image doing the pointing. The journey to spiritual maturity requires using more and more images for God until we use no images – the way of illuminated darkness described by the unknown English mystic in the Cloud of unknowing who says that between me, and God is this cloud of unknowing that only love can pierce.

The Scriptures say that: “When he (Jesus) had said this (broken free from religious equations), he spat on the ground and made mud with saliva and spread the mud over the man’s eyes.” Jesus is redoing Genesis; this is about being recreated. In Genesis 2 we read that God a pottery maker takes some mud and fashions humankind out of the mud. God then breathes into the mud creature, and it begins to live. Mud in the Hebrew language is adamah. And from the mud, the adamah, God creates adams, mud creatures, humans. We are all adams, mud creatures. God then breathes into us God’s breath. We are mud clods, mud creatures, adams. But we have also been breathed into by the God of the Universe. We are thus sacred, we are divine. We are sacred mud clods. We get it so right. We get it so wrong. The getting it right is the divine breath within us breathing out. The getting it wrong is mud clod in us stumbling in darkness.  

The anointing with mud also recalls 1 Samuel 16 where the prophet anoints David King and Psalm 23 (God anoints my head with oil). The man born blind is anointing as a king in the new creation. This is the journey of all of us, when we are Christs, when we are anointed with the mud of the lamb, we are anointed kings and queens of the new creation.”

The Scriptures then say: “Go and wash in the pools of Sent. Then he went and washed and came back and he could see.” What could he see, what could we see? Perhaps he could see his unity with God. Later in John’s Gospel we will hear Jesus explains: “I and the Father are one. I am in God. God is in me. I am in you, and you are in me.”

The boundaries between you and God are an illusion. They do not exist. That is what the blind man sees for the first time: that the divisions between him and God, within himself and between other people are an illusion. And then he says I am (the man). God says “I am” at the burning bush. Jesus also says “I am” at his arrest in John 18. Your I am and the I AM of God and the I am of other people coincide. I AM is a literary feature of John’s Gospel, it implies being. In John 18 when Peter is asked if he is one of Jesus’ followers, he denies Jesus saying, “I am not the man”. In orders Peter’s non-being is contrasted with the being of the man born blind who says “I am the man.” The baptism, being able to see, knowing that your I am coincides with God’s I am: that is ultimate union, or “oneing” to use Julian of Norwich’s term. We are not saying that you are God. It is just that unity with God is so real and so strong that you don’t know where your you begins and where God ends. It is about becoming naked before the naked God, stripped away from our attachment to the ego. Catherine of Genoa, a famous mystic, went through the streets saying: “My deepest me is God!” Paul says it is no longer I that live but Christ who lives in me. It is total and utter unity with God – this is the adventure of spiritual maturity. 

In v21 the parents of the blind man say “he is of age”. This is the coming of age for each of us. Like Jesus, we are so filled with the presence of God that we become a source for that presence for other people. I love that the blind man washed in Sent. That is the message: that having been baptized in unity with God, we are of age, we are Sent as God-soaked men and women to drench the world with God’s healing presence. We no longer say prayers. We have become prayer. We call Christ the anointed one. If we allow the journey from darkness to sight, from immaturity to full maturity to take place, we become little Christs – anointed ones so filled with the presence of God that we become a source of that presence for others.