March 6, 2005

Fourth Sunday of Lent

John 9:1-17

“Here’s Spit in Yer Eye!”

     Ever hear of a “powwow doctor”?  I used to serve a church in Pennsylvania in a little village called New Chester – St. John’s United Church of Christ of New Chester.  A lot of the people living there were of German decent and there were still some old German traditions around…like believing in powwow doctors. 

     I don’t know where the idea of Powwow Doctors came from, but they were people who acted as physicians in rural communities in the old days when there weren’t many medical doctors to go around.  They applied a homegrown brand of medicine using potions made of materials at hand and methods that had been passed down for generations.  The cure for warts, for instance, was typical powwow medicine – on a night with a full moon, the patient was to cut up a potato and bury it outside a shed where rain drips off the roof and hits the ground.  In the morning, their warts would be gone!  I also know a lady who was so skinny as a child that her mother took her to a powwow doctor to be healed.  She said it worked great except that later in life she wished she could turn the spell around!

     Mixing spit and dirt and smearing it on a man’s eyes might seem to us a rather strange way to treat blindness, but 2,000 years ago it might have been some powwow doctor’s standard treatment.  As the Son of God, there’s a pretty good chance Jesus didn’t need to make mud pies to heal a person’s blindness,  so why did he do this?  Perhaps, as was typical of Jesus’ approach to things, he wanted people to know he would meet where they were, in terms they understood.  He would meet them in the ordinary with the power of God.

     Every day we are inundated with images that seek to convince us we need to conform to someone else’s standards to be acceptable.  Countless billions are spent on trying to get the right look.  Christ’s Holy Spirit, however, comes to where we are today, as we are.  Jesus meets us on our terms, in real terms of spit and mud pies and blindness.  Jesus meets us in baptism and Holy Communion, in water, bread and juice, the ordinary everyday stuff of life.

     Perhaps our blindness is that we think we should look for him somewhere else, in the clouds maybe or in the proper level of meditation or in the perfect prayer.  Perhaps true vision is seeing him in spit and dirt, in the ordinary.  Perhaps healing is seeing that God’s presence and power in Christ’s Holy Spirit is everywhere and in every common thing, in every breeze, every bird, every breath, every beat of the heart, every person, in you, in me.

     As close as the spit in our mouths and the dirt under our feet, the Savior is with us now, within us, working in and through us.  Every little thing in the universe is connected and related and reveals God’s loving creativity.  We are surrounded, embraced and filled with the Holy Spirit.  The miracle is seeing.