A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church on Sunday 15 March.  The service will simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.  For the next four weeks, you can catch up here.

The Bible passage was John 9:1-41 and Duncan led and preached. You can read the full text of his sermon as delivered below.

Mother’s Day

Since it was Mothering Sunday (Mothers’ Day)  Duncan read what’s called ‘the Magnificat’ (Luke 1:46-55)  which shows  the vision Mary, Mother of Jesus has of the transformation which God was bringing about.  There’s more to Mary than what we think at Christmas. The  vision in Mary’s song includes these words:

He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.

Duncan spoke about the mothers of Buenos Aires  he saw when in Argentina who protested year after year to have news of their young adult children who had ‘disappeared’ – captured or killed by the ruling junta. They displayed posters with Mary’s words on it throughout the city, and in time the junta was overcome, its leaders imprisoned, and may of the ‘disappeared’ returned alive, having come through much suffering.

Mary Mother of Jesus – a strong, brave woman seen as a symbol of resistance, a prophet of God’s kingdom.

Duncan shares writer Rebecca Lowe’s thoughts:

“We sit at a crucial time in history – a time when the seemingly unstoppable rise of neoliberalist Capitalism sees the gap between rich and poor rising at terrifying rate. Half the world’s wealth is now owned by the top one per cent. In the UK, the use of food banks has increased by 94 per cent in the past five years. Homelessness is up by 27 per cent since last year.

The world feels increasingly polarised, with the rise of far right populist leaders threatening to undermine the very roots of democracy. Meanwhile, across the Middle East, thousands of women flee occupation and persecution, just as Mary fled across the desert with her baby, seeking a place of refuge and safety in an increasingly insecure world.

We need the words of Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, to remind us that another world is possible – a world where the poor are uplifted, the hungry fed and the wealth of the rich redistributed to assist those in need. Is it revolutionary to think these things? Yes. Is it dangerous? It has always been so. But the alternative – blithe acceptance – is far more dangerous. And so, like Mary, we live in hope. Indeed, it is the only way to live.”

The man who gives us sight

Duncan’s sermon on John 9:1-41

I told my walking buddy Robert that I was going to give him a mention in my sermon this morning. On Tuesday, he went to the National Treatment Centre and had cataracts removed from both of his eyes. Within forty-eight hours, his vision had been transformed and he was driving his car again.

It wasn’t a miracle that took place for Robert, but I still find it wonderful and remarkable that we have a health service in the UK which can provide such treatment free at the point of delivery to anyone who needs it.

We are truly blessed in Scotland today to have such a service compared to so many parts of the world where people often end up blind or with very poor sight as a result of very treatable conditions.

So  on a day when we’re looking at a healing miracle of Jesus in our service today,  I just wanted to mention with thanksgiving the NHS. The reality of our Health Service is something not to be taken for granted.

Jesus heals a man blind from birth

Jesus heals a man who was blind from birth. Although one might observe, if you were following that long reading which Andrew read so well, that the actual healing of the man by Jesus seems to be a secondary part of the story. The healing is actually completed in seven verses, and the next thirty-four verses are taken up with a controversy within the Jewish community as to what this healing meant.

This is not a lecture, but a sermon. So my goal primarily today is not to explain every part of the story to you – it would take far too long to give you a lecture on it.

My goal today is very simply to show you how wonderful and amazing Jesus is and to encourage you to put your trust in Him.

Jesus speaks of himself in verse 6 as the light of the world. In a dark and difficult world, Jesus brings light and hope and healing. And our calling is to embrace that light and to share it wherever we can.

The power of listening

We had Janet Logue with us on Wednesday night at our Lent gathering in the small hall. Janet comes from the Listening Ear Project, which meets in a number of places including here each Thursday between 12 and 2.

She was sharing as part of the gathering how many people are being helped by the project in difficult times to see hope and to find hope through the offer of a listening ear. Someone who is simply prepared to give another person the gift of a listening ear, just to listen for what the other person wants to share.

The great German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred during the Second World War, said this about listening: ‘The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for one another is learning to listen to each other. It is God’s love for us that he not only gave us his word, but also lends us his ear.’

Just as Jesus spent a lot of time in our story last week listening to a woman at a well, so this week he spends time listening to his disciples and to this man who was born blind. And each time his listening leads to transformation and new hope. That’s what Jesus does. That’s the gospel. That’s the good news. The only thing that makes it worth gathering here today.

As the psalmist puts it in Psalm 116:

I love the Lord, for he heard my voice;
he heard my cry for mercy.
Because he turned his ear to me,
I will call on him as long as I live.  (Psalm 116:1-2)

Jesus sees our need

It’s the simple things which we can easily miss, which I think are the most striking and the most powerful to reflect on from this story.

For example, as Jesus went along, we read, he saw a blind man from birth. Jesus saw. The blind man couldn’t see him. But Jesus saw him. He noticed him. He was concerned for him. He had compassion upon him. And this is the good news about Jesus. He sees us. He notices us. He has compassion upon us.

And as if to highlight the extent of his care and vision, Jesus sees and notices a blind man, someone who is absolutely beyond the pale in terms of any standing in society, a beggar beside the road. Jesus’ love and compassion reaches to the very depth of human experience.

The story begins with Jesus rejecting any link between human behaviour and human illness or disability. But he stresses that even the toughest situations that we might be going through in our lives can be an opportunity for God to be seen and experienced.

That’s how the light gets in

That’s what the great songwriter Leonard Cohen was getting up when he sang the song ‘Hallelujah’. He wrote ‘Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in’.

Our brokenness, the cracks in our lives are an opportunity for God’s light to shine through these cracks. In our blindness, God’s light can help us to see.

I don’t know what help my friend Robert got in terms of helping him to see better. I imagine it was high-tech lasers. But for the blind man born blind from birth, a miracle takes place which looks pretty gross and unhygienic to our 21st century eyes, involving mud and saliva.

The symbolism of this miracle resulting from mud being put on the man’s eyes is linked to the Genesis story of creation. Humans were formed from the dust, from mud, and God breathed life into them. And here God is breathing a reality of new sight into this man’s eyes.

Our lives are a wonder and a miracle. We should never, ever lose that sense of the wonder at our human experience and life. And Jesus gives this man the miracle of new sight.

Responses to the miracle

But instead of widespread rejoicing – ‘What a miracle! A man born blind from birth sees again.’ –  an almighty argument ensues because Jesus has broken the establishment rules.

The blind man is thrown out of the synagogue for holding to his story that ‘I once was blind. but now I see’.

As we seek to draw the threads of the story together, one thing above all other things stands out for me. We have a multiplicity of players in this story.

We have the disciples, and their concern is a theological one, about whose sin caused the man to be blind. That’s what they saw when they looked at the man.

We have the Pharisees, who believed that the absolute priority in life was to keep the laws of God. And so all they could see in the midst of a miraculous experience was that Jesus had healed on the wrong day. So how could He possibly be from God?

We have the formerly blind man’s parents, and all they can see is the anger of the Pharisees and the potential trouble they can get into. They would have been thrown out of the temple for saying anything different. So they passed the buck by saying, ‘Ask him, ask our son, ask him. He’s of age. He can speak for himself.’

Except one……

Everyone sees Jesus and everyone sees the miracle. But no one truly sees Jesus as he is. Issues of position, of power, of religious orthodoxy and issues of fear come into play. Everyone is silenced by the fear of an establishment reality which is resisting change. Except one.

Except one. Again, and again, and again, it is the man who was formerly blind who sees. ‘One thing I do know, he says, I was blind, but now I see.’ Asked about Jesus a second time, he replies courageously and comically to the Pharisees, ‘I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?’

And finally, face to face with Jesus, the man who was formerly blind and now thrown out of the synagogue says, ‘Lord, I believe’, and he worshipped him. He once was blind, but now he saw.

Only the man who was formerly blind, amongst all the people that saw Jesus that day, saw Jesus for who he truly was. ‘The blind will see, and those who see will become blind’, Jesus said.

May God grant us sight

May God grant us sight, and may he also grant us courage to take our stand for him as Jesus leads us.

The good news today is that Jesus sees us and he is responsive to our cries for help in our lives.

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