Taylor Mertins

Jesus heals the blind man so that he can truly see. He sees the brokenness of the world but he also sees how beautiful the world can be because he sees Jesus. Whenever we look at the cross it’s like God is rubbing mud in our eyes. Grace is amazing but it’s also kind of grimy. The cross shows us the brokenness of the world and the beauty of the world to come. The cross is both a reminder of our sin, but also that Jesus is the Savior and friend of sinners.

There’s something that shimmers in the sludge that Jesus places on the eyes of those who cannot see. Today the grimy grace of the cross is getting sloshed over all of our faces so that we can see and receive the truth, the truth that will set us free.

Amazing grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see!

When we survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, we see the lengths to which God will go to forgive sin. The cross is both ugly and beautiful. The cross is as ugly as sin and is as beautiful as love. But in the end, love wins.

Which means the past isn’t prologue. The Gospel is the proclamation and the promise that God isn’t done with anyone. It doesn’t matter what you did ten years ago or yesterday or even right now. God rectifies the ungodly, God makes us righteous, God saves us.

God so loves you that God gives it all for you. God does not send Jesus into the world to condemn you, but to save you. Once you see it you can’t really see anything else. Or, to quote CS Lewis, once you see it, by it you begin to see everything else. It’s like being born. Again.

Some things never change. God has always used fools to shame the wise, has worked to lift up the lowly and knock down the mighty, and demonstrated strength through weakness.

And, oddly enough, even though Jesus refuses the temptations of the tempter in the wilderness, by the end of the gospel he will, in fact, do the things the devil suggests.

Instead of turning a boulder into a biscuit in the wilderness, Jesus will feed the 5,000 with little more than a bag of wonder bread and a handful of fish sticks.

Instead of pulling off a Houdini-esque magic trick that would make even the crowds in Vegas jump to their feet, Jesus dies and then refuses to stay dead.

Instead of getting caught up in all the internal machinations of Middle Eastern politics, Jesus reigns from the hard wood of the cross and then ascends to rule over the living and the dead at the right hand of the God the Father Almighty as King of kings and Lord of lords.

Jesus doesn’t change from the beginning of the Gospel to the end, he merely makes the changes necessary for us to be set free from the chains of sin and death.

Lent is, as Stanley Hauerwas notes, a dangerous time for Christians. With talk of ashes and repentance, renewal and sin, we can soon turn the Good News of the Gospel into the bad news of God’s dangling us over the fire pit of damnation. And, despite the fact that there are, indeed, scriptures that describe God’s wrath (particularly toward those who are responsible for injustice), the strange new world of the Bible as a whole paints a rather different picture.

From the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New, we encounter and are encountered by the God who simply refuses to give up on us, who goes to lengths beyond our comprehension to remain with us, and who is willing to die on our account because it means our salvation.

In other words, God has no damns to give because God is love.

'Seeing is believing,' we say. Implicit in this kind of affirmation is the presumption that if we were given enough information, enough data, enough instruction then our faith meters would be full to the brim. Except, when it comes to the disciples, they had already seen it all and it wasn’t enough.

Which means that with Jesus, it’s the opposite: Believing is seeing. And, if should we worry that we don’t have enough belief to believe, Jesus says we only need faith the size of a mustard seed and, better yet, the disciples are proof positive that Jesus never stops showing the Gospel even to those who barely believe.

Because faith, even faith as fractured as a glitched icon, faith as fearful as the disciples cowering on the ground, faith as fleeting as the breeze is all we need to have a whole new way of seeing...

I will confess that I did not know how to end this sermon. All week I worried about how to wrap it all up and I fear the art and text may leave us with more questions than answers.

But then I remembered a line from the theologian Chris Green. Basically, he says to preachers, if you don’t what to say, then tell the church what the text makes you want to pray - for them, for yourself, for your family and friends, for the world, for the church.

I pray that all shall be saved. Maybe that’s naive or beyond the scope of the Gospel, but it is my prayer. I pray for God to move among us so that we treat all people of having sacred worth, not matter what they’ve done or left undone. I pray that God won’t give up on us, even if we give up on God.

I pray that God’s power really is such that every broken thing will be mended, every tear will be wiped away, and that heaven will be crowded.

Whenever we plant seeds and harvest the fruit, whenever we break bread and share stories with our friends, whenever we are surprised by the impossible possibility of God, we practice resurrection.

Maybe the Mad Farmer of Wendell Berry’s poem is just that, a person committed to the earth who has grown bewildered by the wildness of it all. Or maybe the Mad Farmer is the divine gardener who insists on sowing seeds of grace all over the place.

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie in the shade. Rest you head

In their lap. Swear allegiance

To what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and politicos

Can predict the motions of your mind,

Lose it. Leave it as a sign

To mark the false trail, the way

You didn’t go. Be like the fox

Who makes more tracks than necessary,

Some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

There’s a deep pleasure in the gospel that we don’t talk about very much, and it’s the pleasure of being surrounded by others in such a safe, fun, and inviting way that we can learn to laugh. Laugh at the world, laugh at ourselves. There’s such a relief in being able to say, like Abraham and Sarah, “Oh what a fool I’ve been! I was so sure I knew how this was all going to shake out. I shaped my whole life around a bunch of assumptions and look where I wound up!”

When was the last time you laughed? Like belly laughed? Like laughed so hard it hurt? Maybe you were watching a show or a comedy special and it gave you the giggles, but some of the best laughter we ever share, we share with and because of other people.

Karl Barth once noted that laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God. Because when we laugh, we are sitting at that table with the Trinity. When we laugh we laugh at the wild absurdity of it all. That we exist in this world, that we have friends to share it with, that we have light and love and laughter is worth laughing about.

For some reason the Holy Spirit is pleased to let these words stand as they are before us in the beginning of all things and the beginning of the Bible. Perhaps its because the Spirit, like any good artist, knows that color and shape and shadow and light and images reveal the truth.

Importantly, the Word of God is both audible and visual. Artists, therefore, preach for the eye; for artists the medium is the message.

Artists help us see the Word.