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Lent and Healing from Blindness

St. Philip’s Cathedral
Atlanta, Georgia
March 2, 2008, Lent 4
The Very Rev. Harry H. Pritchett, Jr.

I heard a report on NPR not long ago that a flock of vultures—those black, predator birds—flew into Disney World in Florida, and began take up residence along the immaculate sidewalks of Main Street U.S.A. They were roosting over the verdant landscapes of the Magic Kingdom where new flowers are constantly replaced and never allowed to wilt and die. Evidently these vultures had migrated toward Orlando because of the destruction of their part of the Okefenokee Swamp for new development. Quite naturally, the advent of these harbingers of death upset the managers of this clean and perfect city so they sent their custodians on a mission of ridding the sunny land of these reminders of fragility and darkness – perched like grave diggers, watching and waiting for the gradual deterioration of the Technicolor dream world. But there they were – these dark scavengers of decay and degeneration lazily but relentlessly staring down on an otherwise flawless – antiseptic – squeaky-clean universe which is Disney World.

Well the picture of vultures in Disney World is sort of like the themes of Lent in our otherwise controlled and orderly middle class world where sometimes pain and degradation are only whispered realities of other people. Yet Lent is the season in the church’s life where all the faithful are invited, if not forced, to allow our blinders of denial and arrogance to be removed by the new light of Christ and to see again or for the every first time the fundamental human issues of sin and death, corruption and suffering, limitation and isolation—the truth about us human, creatures—dust to dust to dust. That invitation begins the season for experiencing and enduring the dust we are when our foreheads are signed with dust on Ash Wednesday. “Dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Is it any wonder that for all too many of us denial is always our trump card? Otherwise we fear that seeing reality will lead us to despair which is swooping around with curved beak and wide wings, ready to pounce down and eat us alive. We have the unconscious fear we might just give up or be apathetic. And so we lock ourselves up and hold on to ourselves under the grand illusion that we are in control, that we can figure everything out, that we can know everything in some sort of imagined , cause and effect universe.

Now if all this sounds like every character in the Gospel story for today except the blind man and Jesus, then I am making my point. The neighbors, the Pharisees, and even his parents respond in a kind of denying blindness to the truth of the blind man’s healing. The neighbors try to claim he’s not the same man. The Pharisees get into an academic theological argument that sounds more to me like a sophomore late night seminary conversation. Even his parents deny in a rather indirect referral. And nobody… not any of them, rejoices in the new truth of the gift of sight. My hunch is that underneath, they all feared the truth. They were afraid of their own human dustiness as well as the new healing way of seeing.

How interesting that Jesus rubs the blind man’s face with Jesus’ own spit and dust and then, and only then, the man blind from birth gets his sight. There is a great mystery here. Perhaps, it means that on facing the truth of our own limitations, our blindness as human creatures—our own dust—we can not only see who we are, but get a glimpse of the graceful healing in the Heart of God.

Yet to face ourselves by ourselves and not go forward beyond the dust is pretty grim stuff indeed. But when we were dusted to begin this Lenten Season on Ash Wednesday, we were dusted with another symbol, and that was the sign of the cross. And that symbol declares our faith that our dust somehow mysteriously has been redeemed. The sign of the cross on our foreheads tells us that in taking flesh, God’s own self has become dust. It affirms that in a surprising reversal, the dust of Jesus was short-lived and is ultimately as fleeting as ours. For a few brief years, Jesus’ feet scuffed at the dust of Palestine—his sweat bloodied the dust of Gethsemane—and his last loud cry on the cross joins ours in the dust of death.

But here is the deep mystery, seen and perceived only through the open eyes of faith.  Because here joy transmutes sorrow and ecstasy marries pain. I do not mean that we cease to be human. We will always be men and women of flesh and blood. We can expect to experience in every fiber of our being the anguish, the tears, the daily dying, and the sense of nothingness that fragile dust can never quite escape. But the new thing, the redeeming wonder is that the God of all that is, experienced every bit of that as well.  

And therefore you and I are now charged with the grandeur of God. We are brothers and sisters of God in the dust. Our dust is literally electric with God’s own life. Our nothingness is filled with God’s eternity.

And so for now, with the crosses of our baptism on our foreheads, the dust ought no longer terrify us or drive us blindly into denial. Of course, we are corrupt and of course, we shall die. But the sign of the cross cries to us that death is not the end of our dust… that we do not have to pretend we live in a Disneyland World—that the vultures are simply a part of our divine humanness—and that in some peculiar way, they can fly and swoop and glide and soar because we are all creatures of a loving God who has redeemed our dust.

On those occasions when I really deep down believe this to be so, then I am no longer afraid of true sight. I am, like the man in today’s gospel, healed from my blindness, and the flapping of vulture wings can sound, for the life of me, like those of the angels.

Amen

Comments? Contact Dean Pritchett at: hpritchett@stphilipscathedral.org

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