Sermon: What does it mean when we say, "We made a mistake. It was a mistake"?
Text: John 9:1-41
Have you ever put the first button in the wrong buttonhole?
It’s usually not too bad, because by the time you are buttoning the last buttons on your shirt, you realize you have made a mistake – you see yourself in the mirror, or you see that your hem is crooked – even before leaving your bedroom. No one has seen it. No embarrassment. Fine. You just need to button yourself up again.
But how about in your real life, or in your job, when you realize, ‘Oh, what have I done? I made a mistake!’ What is the first action or step you take to fix the situation? How do you try to right the situation? How are you buttoning it up again?
How about when you’re part of a community, and you realize, “Oh. It’s terrible. What have we done? We’ve made a mistake!”? How do you fix what’s gone wrong when there’s more than one pair of hands involved?
Let’s go a bit deeper. As a faith community, we put our wisdom together, we engage with each task from our best judgement in a real, tangible way (with the financial statements in hand). We put our faith in God into each process. We do our jobs with great care, because we do really care about our beloved community. However, it is also true that challenges still emerge, unwelcome surprises may overwhelm us, disappointments and worries can swamp us. In recent weeks, I pondered upon a question: as a faith community that puts our whole faith into each process with which we engage, “what does it really mean when we say, ‘We made a mistake. It was a mistake”?
Our Gospel story begins with a dialogue whose context is not the same to this question, yet we can relate. In the story, when Jesus walks along, he sees a man blind from birth. His disciples ask him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Even though the context may be different, I would like to highlight the perspective Jesus’ answer can give us. Jesus answered, “Neither this man or his parents sinned:” The man was born blind “that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”
… Hmm. But what does Jesus’ answer mean - “The man was born blind that God’s works might be revealed in him.”?
It was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud paste, spread the mud on the man’s eyes, and opened them. Sabbath means God’s rest. The Sabbath day, in the religion at the time, called for no one to work, in emulation of the story that God rested after the 6 days of creation.
When Jesus says, “It is not that he or his parents sinned.” he means that neither the man born blind or the parents who gave birth to him were the cause of his blindness. They were not the first wrong buttons. It does not mean that there is an earlier, real, ‘first wrong button’ that preceded the parents, either. It also does not mean that God is the first wrong button as God intended his blindness from his birth.
What Jesus really means may be there’s no such thing as ‘the first wrong button.’ It’s not Adam. It’s not Eve. It’s not even the ‘original sin.’ BECAUSE ‘God is working still and I, Jesus, am working.’ God’s work is in the present progressive form. God was, God has been, God is, and God will be… very intently, creatively, immeasurably, unimaginably working in every single moment of the history of time. Can we say that the moment when the man in the story was born with blindness lacks God in any depth or fullness? God encompasses all time. God is the divine element in the process which has, and still is consecrating our life, our being, our community. God is sacramental. We may be frightened about the uncertainties of the future. From our experiences, we all know how the unwelcome surprises of life can suddenly greet us like a monster with two horns, out of nowhere. We may be frightened because what happens in the world and what happens in our lives may have led us to no longer believe in a benevolent universe. We don’t always get the best roll of the dice – we may even feel like the dice are loaded against us.
However, I invite you to ask what can be your antidote to fear. For me it is learning and ‘couraging’, to trust in the process our life is deeply invested in, BECAUSE we can. Jesus calls us to See (in verse 5): “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” It is not just that ‘on the other side is light.’ but Jesus is encouraging us to see the light in this side of where we are now.
But how?
I find the answer in TRUSTING. It’s not just an attitude like optimism. It is not the same to just manage our life to keep afloat. Trusting is more like diving in. Trusting means that we carefully discern what our gifts and strengths are, and investing them in the process of new creation. THEN, (the next part is more important) we must know that we will not fail. That means we trust! Jesus makes a strong statement: when it is daylight, (Jesus is the light of the world), YOU will not stumble. Trusting is courage and nurturing the inner power for us to see the light in this creative process. It requires a leap of faith that God’s essence, power, and nature works innately to bless us.
From a faith perspective, there’s no wrong hole for the first button. Faith calls us to develop a different way of Seeing and understanding how things work - how things change and how things evolve - and find a different way to make judgements. When we say, “We made a mistake. It was a mistake,” that is a very valuable work of evaluating the history of how the community has been working together; at the same time we are more encouraged to affirm God in the process who is the Light: resilient, creative, life-giving and blessing.
I used to be the kind of thinker who viewed things in a cause and effect relation. If a bad thing happened, I understood it should be the consequence of a bad decision or a choice made previously. There must be the first button wrongly placed - somewhere! The weakness of this cause and effect approach is when a bad event happened, our first reaction we take is to trace down the history of the situation only to look for what was the first wrong button. We might miss the relation of the causes which are much deeper than they seem. And this approach lacks another important thing: how we spiritually understand ourselves and the situation; how the works of God have been and are being manifest in us throughout time – even in the event and action of the ‘wrong first button.’
As we engage with spiritual evaluation, our Sabbath position – comfort – is challenged to open to God’s creative interruptions.
I learned: a simple analysis of cause and effect does not produce any spiritual growth in us. We just gain an analysis! Even if we may not point a finger of blame, it might also lead the community to a place of making judgments and blaming others.There’s a proverb, “A stitch in time saves nine.” However, the first wrong stitch and the first wrong button do not have the power to tell us how the Glory of God is made manifest and is revealed in the nine stitches and the other buttons. The community is not a stitch or a button. The community and who we are still evolve even after a mistake or a mess.
We are in the Lenten journey. Look up to the cross. The cross is never a mistake. Jesus died on the cross, but Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem was not a mistake. The disciples were worried and predicted that Jesus would be stoned, killed or taken to court, yet decided to be obedient - and their decision was not a mistake. Could Jesus’ humble birth be a mistake by God? Why not in a royal palace? (If Jesus had been born in a royal palace his royal status might have saved him from the start.) But we know that being born in a peasant family was not the cause of the cross. The Roman Empire’s oppression was not the cause of the cross. The Jews who accused Jesus of blasphemy and insisted upon his death were not the cause of the cross. Why are they not the cause of the cross? If we say that they are, we would be limiting and reducing and nullifying God’s redemptive plan for the whole of humanity through God’s glory WHICH IS THE CROSS! (God’s glory is not just in the resurrection, but already the cross IS God’s glory, upheld.) We all have to see how God works in all events in our life, even in the sacredness and terribleness of the death of our own. God continues to bring us healing, wholeness, and redemption: God saves us from our own plans.
Last Sunday, during the theme conversation, some of you may remember the story I shared with our children: “The Universe in a Tea Cup.”
In the story, the teacher affirmed that looking deeply, we can see the interwoven elements that have given rise to the cup. The potter, her clay, the water to mix the clay, the elements of fire and air, (because the fire needs air to burn and all human beings breathe in the air), the wood in the kiln, the forest the wood came from. Then the teacher asked, “Ananda, if you took away heat and returned it to the Sun, if you returned the clay to the earth, and the water to the river, if you returned the potter to her parents and the wood to the forest trees, could the cup still exist?”
You have not made a mistake. You have not failed. Our journey has never been a mistake and is not and will not be a mistake. Because we are here today as who we are now, and if we overturned(returned) our past decisions, actions, joys, challenges, growth together, we do not exist. We just can’t make who we are now without these chains of blessings and growth. No one person, one group, one community, one past action, one past motion is the wrong first button. From the very first, the Christian community have been gathered again and rebuilt in the Holy Spirit, just as we are, as God perfects the imperfect.
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