“Wide-Eyed Christianity” Text: Mark 8:22-26
Elpis Christian Church
May 10, 2009
Well, today we come to the halfway point in our exploration of six great aspects of the full and healthy Christian life. We’ve looked at the PRAYER –FILLED or contemplative life. And we’ve considered the VIRTUOUS life – that is the one who daily asks “What would Jesus Do?” And to help us remember these aspects of the Christian walk – you might recall - I’ve labeled these, respectively, CLOSET CHRISTIANITY and EVERYDAY CHRISTIANITY. Now this morning I want to talk about what I’m going to call WIDE-EYED CHRISTIANITY. I want us to touch on the SACRAMENTAL aspect of our faith – or to come at it still another way – that which has been traditionally called the incarnational tradition.
Now we don’t want to get too bogged down in theological terms today – especially today, that’s the last thing I want to do. But we do need to understand at least the basic idea of the incarnation. And I would put it this way. To live an incarnational Christian life is to live one that sees God’s holy, miraculous, beautiful presence – in the most ordinary of places and things.
• It’s seeing God’s handiwork in a warm loaf of bread, placed lovingly on the supper table, by the one who has baked it.
• It’s seeing something holy in the eyes of your beloved old dog that looks at you with such trust and unconditional love.
• It’s hearing God’s laughter in the uncontrolled chortle of a two-year old.
• It’s seeing the wonders of the universe packaged in a blade of grass or even a persistent weed.
• It’s recognizing that the mud that is caked on your boots and tracked across your kitchen floor is the very stuff of life.
And most of all, it’s recognizing that God loves you and me and the universe so much that He stepped into it in the flesh, blood, and bones of a man named Jesus of Nazareth.
John put it this way:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”
And in those few sentences, he addresses the tragedy I want to confront today. That, as he says, the very light that is life “was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. “ How he “came to that which his own, but his own did not receive him.”
In many ways – they – WE – still don’t.
Just as He did in the past – so often God steps into our everyday lives now in ten-thousand different ways – and we just miss Him. We don’t see Him – we just keep on moving. And so, we look at that warm loaf of bread so lovingly prepared; the old dog lying at our feet; the laughing toddler; the grass that needs to be cut or the weeds that need to be sprayed; and the mud on our boots – and we miss it – we miss God.
The remedy to all of this is to live a life of wide-eyed faith and observation. It’s to be intentional about being thankful in not only the great, dramatic ways God intervenes in our lives – but in the small, seemingly insignificant ways too. And to realize that they may be the most miraculous ways of all.
But that takes vision.
Today’s scripture passage takes us back to the day when Jesus healed a blind man in the town of Bethsaida. It’s good to note that the account is sandwiched in the same chapter of Mark in which we are told of Christ’s miraculous feeding of the four thousand and we hear of Peter’s great confession of faith. It’s in the same chapter in which we hear Jesus also what he calls the “yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod” and where he first predicts his death and resurrection.
Sandwiched in with all of this tremendously important material – comes this story about a man being healed of his blindness.
What I love about this particular story is that, for whatever reason, when Jesus first touches the man - it results in only a partial healing. Though the man’s vision begins to return he only sees people that “look like trees walking around.” It is only when Jesus touches the man’s eyes again that he begins to see everything clearly.
Isn’t that a good metaphor for life? And for this truth we are exploring today – that seeing God’s presence clearly in all the miraculous things that surround us daily – this is a process. And it’s a process in which Christ is intimately involved not just once and for all – but again and again. It is a partnership of faith in which Christ touches our blinds eyes – and little by little – we begin to see God’s presence – in ever clearer and more powerful ways.
When we live a life of wide-eyed Christianity we see God everywhere – not just in the pages of our Bible or the worship service here on Sunday morning. When we live a life of wide-eyed Christianity – we notice the small things and recognize they’re not small at all. And we are healed of the spiritual darkness and blindness that has never understood the light.
There’s a bird here on the premises – I may have mentioned him to you before. He’s a cardinal to be exact – that drives me a little crazy. He’s bright red, beautiful, a wonderful work of nature. He also appears to be a rather stupid bird or at least a vision impaired one or by now even a brain damaged one. Because several times a week he flies into the window of the nursery – I suppose to get at the other cardinal he sees there – in what of course is only his own reflection.
He just can’t see reality – and comprehend it – and so in frustration he keeps bashing his head against the glass day after day after day.
We can become like that. We just can’t see reality – the reality that recognizes God’s sovereign, loving, holy presence – his incarnation. And so we frame reality in another way. We bash our heads, so to speak, against the mere reflection we think is real. And we grow more and more frustrated. We might even become a little brain damaged in the process.
But I believe that if we pray for God to open our eyes and help us really see – life takes on a whole and beautiful new meaning.
Instead of seeing people – and treating them – as if they are just “trees walking around” we recognize how every single human being has worth. Instead of seeing our work as merely a means to an end called a paycheck we recognize it can become something meaningful and worthwhile. And if it can’t – then maybe we can see new possibilities in other pursuits. We can see our families and friends in a new light – we can see our church life from a new perspective too. God can open our eyes to seeing that even the simplest, most mundane actions can be acts of celebration and growth and worship.
Poet Kathleen Norris talks about it this way:
“When confronting a sinkful of dirty dishes – something I do regularly, as my husband is the cook in our house and I am the dishwasher – I admit that I generally lose sight of the fact that God is inviting me to play. But I recall that as a college student I sometimes worked as a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten and was interested to note that one of the most popular play areas for both boys and girls was a sink in the corner of the room. After painting, the children washed their brushes there, but at other times, for the sheer joy of it the tickle of water on the skin and God knows what else – a few children at a time would be allowed what the teacher termed ‘water play.’ The children delighted in filling, emptying and refilling plastic bowls, cups and glasses, watching bubbles form as they pressed objects deeper into the sink or tried to get others to stay afloat.”
“It is difficult for adults to be so at play with daily tasks in the world. What we do of necessity can drag us down, and all too often the repetitive and familiar become not occasions for renewal, but dry, stale, lifeless activity. When washing dishes, I am no better than anyone else at converting the drudgery of the work into something better by means of playful abandon.”
“The contemplative in me recognizes the sacred potential in the mundane task, even as the terminally busy go-getter resents the necessity of repetition. But as Soren Kierkegaard reminds us, ‘Repetition is reality, and it is the seriousness of life . . . . repetition is the daily bread which satisfies with benediction. Repetition is both as ordinary and necessary as bread, and the very stuff of ecstasy.”
What are they talking about? Simply that even the repetitious acts of doing the dishes or other chores can nourish us if we look at them in a new and fresh light.
Does that make me want to rush home and do the dirty dishes? No – sorry, Elizabeth. But – it does remind me that every waking and sleeping moment of our lives – if viewed from an incarnational perspective – can open our eyes wide with appreciation.
Norris tells the story of a little girl she observed one day, who while out with her mother, found a penny on the floor of a post office. ‘Look, Momma, a penny,’ she said. Her mother, busy with the clerk at the window mumbled an acknowledgement. Norris said, “I was surprised to see the girl put the penny back on the floor, in a different location. ‘Look, Momma,’ she said again, ‘I found another one!’ She kept it up until she had found five pennies, each of them new.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful – if we could have just a bit of that young child’s playful vision and imagination? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if with wide-eyed expectation we could greet each day and see in both the grand and the mundane the handiwork of God? “Look, Momma, a penny. And another one…and another one…and another one.” Wouldn’t that be great?
Comments